My binoculars languished elsewhere

December the 23rd already. It was a mild and blustery Friday, heavy rain overnight had moved north, leaving the landscape saturated but with little rain in the air. Dramatic clouds too. Mrs Wessex Reiver attempts to do a walk a day, today then I thought I'd join her. Given the rain overnight, I suggested Cheddar Reservoir.  If nothing else we'd return from the walk looking less like we'd been dragged through a ploughed field by abluting bovines. 

Created in the 1930s to supply Bristol with clean drinking water, I often think it is oddly named as the dam-contained 135 million gallons of water sits between 'cheesy' Cheddar and the 'Medieval' town of Axbridge.  It was from the latter town we accessed the reservoir this morning. Parking in the free car-park we walked up through the square and along the gently climbing High Street. The houses on each side were bedecked with Christmas trees set at a jaunty 45 degree angle rammed into first floor flag pole tubes bolted to the house wall exteriors. In the summer these flag tubes are used to display flags during the Medieval Pageant.  Today though is all about a festive walk.

In the commotion to set off I'd forgotten my binoculars, which had been a secondary reason for coming here as the reservoir is a designated SSSI for its birdlife, especially in winter. I'm not sure if it still is but it used to be the top place in southern England for wintering coot [Fulica atra], with a few thousand having been recorded here, though numbers have dropped in recent years. Their presence, as a dark raft of activity,  is a boon for birdwatchers as rarer passage migrants will flop down into this melee of coot for safety in numbers.  Great northern diver, Slavonian grebe and green winged teal have all been spotted here along with red crested pochard. It simply takes patience to scan across the coot flotilla looking for an aberration in shape using binoculars. Not today however, not with with my binoculars languishing elsewhere. The reservoir has a shallower edge on the Cheddar side by the Boat Club and can lead to some gems of the wader and wetland variety. I saw three glossy ibis one year, and at a different time a grey phalarope which I viewed only feet away from me completely unfazed by the attending crowd. For what is simply a circular reservoir in a flat Somerset landscape it has a lot of birdlife to offer. Partly due to it being the nearest body, indeed the largest body of freshwater, close by the Bristol Channel, a well known bird migration highway. An ideal stop-off then.

Today the generalists of this area were in evidence, grey wagtail, pied wagtail, meadow pipit, carrion crow, mallard, jackdaw, great tit, cormorant, coot of course, tufted duck, magpie, great crested grebe and a myriad of gulls were easy to spot with the naked eye (my ability restricted as my binoculars languishing elsewhere - you get the idea of my ineptitude)

What I love about Cheddar though is that while you walk its near 3 km circular route, to one side of you is open water, to the other marginal grassland with standing mature trees and hedges. During previous visits I've come with a scope and scanned these features with a birds eye view. Great spotted and green woodpecker, snipe, bullfinch, nuthatch, treecreeper, linnet, winter thrushes and members of the titmouse family are quite regular. The vantage point on the reservoir path is at tree canopy height thus  looking across into the top most branches gives a perfect view into these mature oaks, sycamore and ash. Better in many ways than walking along the lane down below and looking up.

What struck me today however was that most of these trees still had their leaves, albeit in senescence colours. Despite a recent prolonged cold spell, followed by wind and rain, those leaves cling on with a certain tenacity, giving an odd autumnal feel to this midwinter walk, and a splash of much needed colour it has to be said.

It was monochrome and dark even at 11am with grey clouds scudding over to the Mendip Hills in the distance. It remained mild and dry however, that is until we'd reached the furthest point from shelter. And then it rained. An odd rain that reduced us to quite damp ramblers in a few minutes but rain that didn't seem to be falling. It brought me to mind of being in the hills of  Northumberland - heavier than drizzle, but lighter than rain, it cloaks everything in dreek saturation at an alarming speed.

That mizzly-rain remained with us for the rest of the walk, that is until we arrived back at the entrance to the reservoir.  This entrance from the Axbridge side is flanked by an avenue of very mature, and lovely, birch trees. Some are old enough to be putting out buttress trunks and roots to stabilise them which is not often seen in the short lived betula genus.  These wonderfully gnarled trunks are very tactile and worthy of a few moments to wonder at and caress the deeply fissured bark, as presumably treecreeper and tits do on a regular basis, foraging for spiders and insects making their own homes here.

Having walked 3.37 miles according to the phone app, it was time to retrace our steps back to 'Medieval' Axbridge and a light refreshment in the Lamb Inn (dating back to 1480). A friendly little place now run by the Butcombe brewery. Already in-situ locals warned me of the wobbly stool I found myself perched on, with an air of 'he's not from around these parts'. Luckily I didn't provide the luncheon entertainment of falling hither and yon across the floor as it collapsed beneath me. Mushroom soup consumed, I'd hoped to finish this walk by visiting the church close by. I've been visiting Axbridge for nearly 30 years and never made it into the church, a tradition which was not going to be broken today as a Seasonal wedding was taking place, signposted by a white Royce parked outside sporting white ribbons. Another time then. 

Just time to retrace our steps to the car, but not before a quick image of King John's Hunting Lodge in the Market Square. Owned by the National Trust, the Lodge now houses a local history museum. This 15th Century wool merchant's house has nothing to do with either a hunting lodge or for that matter King John (who died in 1216 nearly three centuries before this building was constructed). A fine looking building, and if nothing else this walk revealed a pattern in Axbridge of naming things, such as the reservoir, that have nothing to do with their location or origin. 

So that's a pre-Christmas walk completed, though no doubt there'll be more over the Festive Season, maybe even with my binoculars. Home then to sit next to my 'twiggy' tree. This tradition of 'twiggy' trees began in the 1960's when my father, a production artist, realised the real fir tree they had put up was dying rapidly and would drop all its needles by Christmas Eve. Wandering out into the nearby countryside he felled a handsome shrub, painted it white and applied decorations. Most years after that we had a real Christmas tree and a twiggy tree in the house. And I am keeping the tradition going. 

This year I've used a number of smaller branches, mostly brought in by Julie while out walking, and bound them to a willow branch using cotton rope. It looked quite effective unpainted (like a silver birch), but I decided to paint it white as is tradition. I have to say, painting twigs and branches with white paint is not for the faint hearted. Two hours it took this year. I'm pleased with it and as with most things at this time of the year, it is all about tradition, though sadly having lost my mum in November Christmas may be a strange, and not traditional event. 

That said, if you are reading this, may I wish you a Very Happy Christmas.

Mixed corvid roosts

 

A couple of days ago I was entertained by what can loosely be described as 'a murmuration' of corvids. Of course that noun is mostly used in reference to starlings, yet on that morning what I witnessed was perfectly summed up by the word murmuration.

Corvid roosts are well known for providing spectacular displays overhead. I was once invited to view the famous Maddingly roost in Cambridgeshire with scientists from that University. On that wonderful day it was breath-taking to watch thousands of rook and jackdaw not only alight en-masse at dawn, but provide unbelievable aerial displays in the evening as they came into the roost site. What a privilege to be in amongst them, and what a noise!

And it was the noise earlier this week which caught my attention as to what on earth was going on. It was a few minutes before dawn, and in that half light a cacophony of rook and jackdaw calls drifted to me from the fields behind the house. I watched from the bedroom window. This mixed flock of around two hundred was moving swiftly and acrobatically over the fields. Some birds alighting on trees, others simply playing with the wind. Repeatedly they grouped together like black snow, twisting and turning before moving out over the landscape only to then return moments later and repeat this acrobatic show. On the side-lines carrion crow joined in and at one point a raven flew through the melee cronking loudly. I've seen these mixed flocks many times before, as I mentioned above, but always at or near to the roost site. This more recent event was across flat fields and over 2 miles from the nearest roost site on Worlebury Hill just to the south. It was all very much part of the normal behaviour of corvids at dawn as they reaffirm social bonds, however in the 20 years I've lived here I've never seen this over these particular fields. Had this flock been disturbed in the roost site and amassed over fields awaiting dawn? I wasn't sure but it was a wonderful fifteen or so minutes as the light improved.

I mentioned what I'd seen on Facebook and my friend Chris Sperring came back with an open invite to come and see his roosting corvids. These are 15 miles north of me (as the crow flies) and he mentioned that he has observed a number of ravens 'herding' jackdaw as they arrive over the woods, herding them to a specific area of the wood and therefore presumably the right part of the wood, in raven terms, to roost in. Raven have increased dramatically in this area and so later he posted a Facebook Live where indeed a dozen or so raven seemed intent on chaperoning the jackdaw to the part of the woodland the ravens wanted the smaller corvid to use that night. Time and time again watching that video, raven rose up from their perch in trees and flew with and around the jackdaw until the latter settled, with the raven then returning to their tree and waiting the next influx of jackdaw. I'll have to visit and see this for myself.

I'd not heard of this ravens providing a guard or a herding behaviour with jackdaw, or rook for that matter, so later in the evening I did a little research. Mentioned within Raven in Winter by Bernd Heinrich is an intriguing mention of Raven in Wales by W. A Cadman. In this observation from 1947 mixed flocks of corvids were observed coming to a roost with the ravens at the periphery of roost activity. This led me to another article by H. G Hurrell, A Raven Roost in Devon from 1955-56.  This was fascinating. A raven pair held a 5 acre wood as territory. While they did, they had the wood to themselves. Eventually they disappeared and a number of raven began using the wood as a winter roost, eventually over 80. However once the number of raven at the roost increased jackdaw then came to the wood and roosted there too. The summary therefore suggests that ravens provided security and support for the smaller jackdaw, both benefitting through collective feeding and roosting behaviour.

All very intriguing and leaving me wanting to know more. Are corvid roosting patterns, and indeed behaviour changing as the number of raven in lowland Britain increases? Certainly in the raven roost north of me, when I lived up that way in the mid 1990's you'd never see a raven, or maybe once a year as it flew by. Now Chris tells me 20, 30, 40 are not uncommon at night, every night.  Do these intelligent birds have a threshold number after which their influence to smaller corvids is triggered. I have read studies of ravens at a roost and there seems to be information intelligence happening, with some observations suggesting as one raven arrives one raven departs to prevent overcrowding, in other words they, the collective ravens at the roost maintain the numbers there at any one time through observation and communication amongst themselves. Society in fact. 

Whilst persecuted in the past, ravens were often describes as solitary pairs, driven to upland and wild areas. In fact throughout history ravens have been gregarious, lowland inhabiting birds, and who knows, the catalyst for extraordinary mixed corvid flocks, and behaviour as seen recently at the roost site? I simply don't know nor have the answers yet, but I have a feeling this question is going to return to me over and over again this winter, and so, I must visit that roost in the Gordano Valley and see for myself.