Comparing what has gone in the world since my last blog post at the end of 2019 feels like looking back at 1985. Which is odd considering I wasn’t born until 9 years later. Regardless, I had originally written this as another nature diary to tie in with the current season a couple of months, hit a block as sometimes happens with these things, and it got buried under a pile of ‘to-dos’ that only took a bloody global pandemic to blow the dust off. Anyhow, I hope this writing gives you some solace in this trying time, which has necessitated the additional conclusion to this piece I never would have thought I’d have to add back then.

Storm Dennis came through last week. Not exactly the most tremble-triggering name for a front that resulted in the highest number of flood alerts in England’s history, so Dennis was rather a menace as it turned out. Still, it had calmed down a fair bit since then, or so I thought. As I opened my car door on a small lane on the edge of the River Severn’s southern shore, my hair whipped into my face and reminded me no, I definitely do need a haircut. The inland cosiness of Bristol smothered the reality that out on the water, the remnants of Dennis were still hollering even if it wasn’t quite a gale.

If anything though, it gave me newfound appreciation for this liminal meeting place of river and ocean, as it tries to justify itself as sort-of-sea. There were proper waves and white horses cresting the wind-churned water, comforting to someone spoiled by dramatic coastlines after four years living in Cornwall. It was still as brown as Willy Wonka’s chocolate river though, flotsam of driftwood and debris ripped from roots far away along the Severn’s inland course buckling in the surf. This interface where it’s not quite the mouth of the Severn nor the Bristol Channel can’t recreate that true sense of the sea, even if you can just about get it if you stand on the promenade at Clevedon down the road. But it did a reasonable job that day, and if I could give the ‘sea’ a gold star without the worry of plastic pollution, I would’ve been happy to chuck one into it. Continue reading →

The small car park in the quarry is packed to capacity with sardine-tin precision, as unsurprisingly everyone else is using their Sunday afternoon for a bracing walk. But thankfully the site is big enough that between nodded greetings of “t’noon” as I cross walkers on the footpath more often or not with a dog, there are moments when I can stop and just absorb the overwhelming silence – a silence that is, paradoxically, very loud. The windless cold at the bottom of this gorge holds sound like an invisible clenched fist around me, such that small notes like a twittering long-tailed tit or ruffled leaves from a foraging squirrel break it in a pure, practically crystallised note. Meanwhile, much more notable noise rings like someone coughing in a cathedral, reverberated by the steep sides of the gorge. The sounds of a woman talking on her phone about rescheduling her meeting tomorrow can be heard long before she appears, the mundane conversation ringing through the trees like a bureaucratic monsoon.

Next comes a leashed Labrador clearly very excited by something encountered up ahead, wheezing and trying to skirt his way back to the opposite direction. His owner nods at me half-heartedly, his face red and flustered from working reasonably hard to keep him heeled. Carrying on, I naturally assume the white and brown form, partially obscured by a few adults and held round the collar by a boy of about 9 or 10, I was coming up to in the path is a bitch in heat, and that this family were quickly reassessing their decision to take her out to a public space on Sunday afternoon. When she bleated however, I adjusted my view to realise the bitch was a goat. Continue reading →

I’d been meaning to recce this site for harvest mice for a little while now, having moved to Bristol a couple of months ago. Keen to make new connections like an over-enthusiastic fresher, I’d suggested to a local nature group I’d be happy to run a nest search session for the species, without having a single clue on where I might find them with their rather specialist requirements for untidy grasslands. This place was first on my checklist – a stretch of meadow about 4 hectares in size beneath a wooded hill in the Avon gorge, bounded between a railway line on one side and the A4 on the other. While much of it is short turf beloved by picnickers and dog walkers, the edges are grizzled with large grassy tussocks. Exactly the sort of unkempt stubble where a harvest mouse might feel at home.

I trudge across to investigate, the slight ringing in my ears still inherited from last night being drowned out by the sound of the road. It’s a fair punishment. I had only intended to go for a couple of pints with a friend, and spend a decent day out and about afterwards. But by beer number 4, we seemed to realise that at this middle ground of young-professional life, spontaneous nights on the town were becoming increasingly rare and would only become more frowned upon, leading to decisions that resulted in the evening’s conclusion at about 4am. At least by dragging myself outside to ruffle through some vegetation I’ve not entirely wasted the day.

Despite that, the search for nests isn’t going particularly fruitfully. Despite appearances from afar, many of the grass species here don’t have the stem strength necessary to keep nests in place, and those that do are relatively few and absent of evidence. Obviously that does not imply evidence of absence from this casual search, but I did have doubts about this spot. I dig out my phone, swiping my way through google maps to check out the surrounding landscape to assess how well connected it is with potential habitat (such is ecology in the 21^st century). The answer is ‘not very’. Sandwiched between the city and the River Avon, there’s not much cover for harvest mice to move through, which has been shown to be a big predictor of where you find them. Continue reading →

It always astounds me just how exciting a soggy clump of dying grass can be. I saw it after a couple of minutes looking in a swathe of reed-canary grass, perusing through dripping fronds of the stuff as casually as you can make crouching down and searching foliage look. It’s a harvest mouse nest – more specifically, a former breeding nest that has been abandoned with the coming of winter.

The first one I’ve found here this year, in fact. I’m intrigued as to whether it will be a bit more difficult to find them this season. While I’ve no doubt the warm summer boosted food productivity, the breeding nests are woven from still-living stems of grasses or reeds, which in the formers case would have been desiccated and lacking in stability over the hottest days. Whatever the case, the harvest mice will have it tougher now as they descend to the ground layer over winter, and the young born in the dark comfort of these nests now face the greatest test of their lives.

Knowing that trying to see harvest mice in the wild is about as easy as getting a Glastonbury ticket (we tried and failed on both releases this October – we cling to the vain hope of March re-sales in the face of all odds), finding the old nest leaves me satisfied enough on this whistle-stop visit to Fishlake at the afternoon’s end. Close to sunset on a December evening is not exactly widely held as a prime time for nature watching, and I’ve already completed the end of the walk circuit. Above my head, more and more cormorants appear flying into roost, and even in the middle of a reedbed spanning almost the entire floodplain valley, the “chack-chack” of restless blackbirds echoing the end of the day can still be heard from the scrub around its edges. Continue reading →