Hollesley Heath - 9/12/2020

The heaths around Hollesley and Sutton are a vast stretch of the Sandlings, second in size only to the Minsmere- - Westleton Heath - Dunwich Heath complex. The land covers a sea of heather, punctured by the odd tree, before being chewed up by pine plantations, and then being regurgitated back into heath. Somewhere like this is great, but by being so vast it can be difficult to connect with the birds there. My visit today was to search for an unusual bird, a Great Grey Shrike, a bird that had been reported for a month on the heath, but one that hadn't been reported this week, so I wasn't too sure I'd find it. I haven't been to the heaths for a while so it was good to reconnect with the area and the many birds present.

The shrike is a very distinctive bird, being monochrome, but in such the large area it ranges its difficult to pin down a bird the size of a blackbird. The first place I tried was the MOD compound, which has been the most reliable site for the bird over the past month. This is a place of a couple of old army silos overgrown with heather but still fenced off from curious birders. I stayed for an hour here but in the end didn't see the bird and after a failed search I decided to call it off. Such are the cautious optimism and eventual defeats of birding and life. Of a couple of other birders I met, none had seen the bird either, so it has either left the place or is hiding, fed up of being gawked at by men with telescopes.

From the MOD complex I went off for a walk around parts of the large area of heath. Birdwise, the heaths can be bleak and lifeless in winter, but today some of the residents of the heath were showing with a DARTFORD WARBLER and several STONECHAT about. The most interesting of sightings, today, was a flock of six CROSSBILLS, which I saw fly into some single pines when I was out in the thick of the heath. Despite knowing where they landed it was still difficult finding them in the thick pine cover. There were also plenty of smaller COAL TITS about just to confuse things. Eventually I was able to catch a glimpse, this time of a red male. Another bird seemed to carrying a pine cone in its beak, which must have been heavy, probably weighing half as much as the bird. This is one of those birds that conforms to it name, as the ends of the bird's bill doesn't meet but cross over each other, making them able to feed on pine cones. They are a finch, so a mid size song bird, and if you get your ear in have a distinctive call, and handily are a bird of conifers. 

As well as the birds there was a herd of ten FALLOW DEER, resting below a pine tree. This included three bucks with their large antlers. They were fairly wary and ran away as soon as they noticed me, deciding to change directions when they realised they were running into my path, these animals are not the most intelligent. The period we live in is a boom time for deer, with numbers at their highest for a millennium at least. Unfortunately with no active predators other than man, their numbers have become unsustainable, like man's, causing massive damage to the habitats they live in through over grazing. There is no real way to deal with this except by culling, which is unpopular, and is not really the deer's fault, more the fault of man's for messing so destructively with nature.

So in the end a no-show. I would have loved to have seen the shrike, but it in the end it was nice to see a place I have not been to in a while. Hollesley heaths are well off the beaten track, being a huge area it takes a long time to really explore even a small part it. Its a place to get away from people, a place to breath in the fresh air, to escape the noise of traffic and find yourself in somewhere truly wild. Not a lot of places can offer that in our congested country.