As summer rolled on, I attended a second bird watching walk based around the Froize, Chillesford.
This walk followed on from one I took in the end of May (see post: Nightingales and the songs of nature) where I went on a guided walk in an area of Suffolk to look for nightingales. This time the emphasis is on nightjars a ghostly inhabitant of the Suffolk heaths.
The event started with a dinner held at the Froize, around seven in the evening. Of course the food was excellent, the best in the area. Even a veggie like myself was well catered for, and with three dishes to choose from, I took a portion from all three, thank you very much.
The evening was run by Steve Piotrowski and John Grant, two big names in Suffolk birding. It was interesting to talk to them about this past time, their combined knowledge makes for good dinner conversation.
As the evening wore on and we had finished our dinners our focus turned to looking for birds. The main target of the evening was the NIGHTJAR, which thanks the large areas of heath in the area are a speciality of the Suffolk coast. It is a bird which is nocturnal, but in a short space of time, in twilight, can be spotted.
In Suffolk we are lucky to have them as in the rest of the country there are huge expanses where nightjars don't exist. There are only a few places where they inhabit, that are like the Suffolk Sandlings, places like the New Forest. With so many good and well managed reserves in Suffolk, numbers are fairly stable here.
The place we went to walk to look for them was an area I know fairly well, Blaxhall Common, a nice jewel of heathland, surrounded by a mixture of pine and deciduous trees, managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. As we arrived twilight was forming and we followed a sandy path to an open area of heath.
It took a while to adjust to the peace of the area, where no unnatural sound was heard, no cars, no music, nothing. The peace itself was the only sound it felt like being in a church, this sense of reverence, and in many ways to me it is a church, a place to worship, for being nature.
Soon sounds could be heard, to begin with a singing SONG THRUSH, then a very loud TAWNY OWL, towit-tewooing, the bark of a MUNTJAC, and then on the edge of hearing the churring of a NIGHTJAR. This is like the nightjar's song, a single note, that is an extremely eerie sound so unexplainable in words, a sound that haunts the heaths.
And then one appeared, floating like a giant moth in the eerie gloom. It flew over us and disappeared over a pine tree. The churring continued. Then another one appeared, further away, that must have been a different bird. I saw those two, combined with the calling bird made for three nightjars in the area, a good total for such a rare bird.
Darkness shrouded us all and we had to leave the area in the last dying light. It was great seeing nightjars, they're such odd, charismatic birds, that almost feels like a luxury for such a nature hating world. All the weird and strange will be eliminated from the world to leave us with only plastic processed bland things, which is what we deserve. But maybe the nightjar can live on, if we can just fight for them, against everything, just maybe they might live on.
No comments:
Post a Comment