Wednesday 20th May. This morning several members
of Shepperton Aurora joined me on an expedition to Chertsey Meads with the intention of listening to the
Dawn Chorus. Why, you may well ask, was
an important personage such as the Consort to the District Governor traipsing
across a meadow at such an unearthly hour? To explain fully, I need to go back
a few years, 34 of them in fact.
Chertsey Meads
When we were first married, more years ago than I care to
remember, the DG used to get up first in the morning (she wasn’t the DG then,
of course). Whilst I was showering and
getting ready for work, she would make us some tea and toast for breakfast.
However, she would invariably burn the toast, and proceed to scrape off the
black bits with a knife. I could hear
this scraping noise going on from upstairs, and it was such a regular
occurrence that I used to call it the dawn chorus.
Burnt toast
Obviously It wasn’t the real dawn chorus, which actually
begins before first light, and is really the sound of birdsong as our feathered
friends herald a new day of attracting a mate, nesting and defending territories.
I didn’t know much, or even care about birds as a young man growing up,
but this all changed after I became married and moved into our own home. As a
house warming present, someone gave us a
red plastic bag, containing peanuts, and suggested we hung it on a tree to feed
birds. Almost immediately, I was hooked.
I recognised common birds like sparrows and robins, but what were those
funny little yellow birds hanging upside down on the nuts? I also noticed
another bird, which looked a bit like a sparrow, but wasn’t.
Tits on feeder (picture from web)
The following Christmas, I was delighted to receive from
Santa a copy of the Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Birds of Britain. This
was fantastic. It not only had a
description of every native bird in Britain, but expertly drawn portraits of
them and photos as well. I spent hours looking at birds in the garden, and looking
them up in my Readers Digest Field Guide. I was amazed by the sheer variety of
birds to be seen. Blue tits, great tits, dunnocks, pied wagtails, greenfinches,
bullfinches and wrens all passed through regularly, and were duly noted. Then I
realised that in the field beyond my garden, and the lake beyond that, there
were a whole lot of different species, some of which were too far off to see
clearly.
So I invested in some binoculars, and a whole new world was
opened for me. I saw lapwings, snipe, woodpeckers, and on the water I could see
grebes, tufted ducks and herons. In the
winter, temporary visitors would appear, such as fieldfares, redwings and smew,
whilst in the summer there were swallows, swifts and house martins. All this I
could watch from the comfort of my living room.
Swift
I have been a keen birdwatcher ever since, and have
particularly studied birdsong, which can be a more reliable means of
recognising different species than visual identification. So many warblers, for instance, look similar
and it can be very difficult to separate them. In the birdwatching fraternity
they are called Little Brown Jobs (or LBJs). However, if you know that the
chiffchaff, one of our most widespread warblers, simply calls out his name all
day long, he can be very easy to identify.
I have done a few talks on bird
identification to groups of people, including the Rotary Club of Shepperton
Aurora a couple of weeks ago. Having enthused them (I hope) with the delights
of birdsong recognition, I thought it would be a good idea to take them out
into the field to put their new found skills to the test.
Chiffchaff
So that was how, at 5.30 this morning, I came to be leading a group of 10 on an
expedition to Chertsey Meads to listen to the dawn chorus (it actually begins
an hour earlier than that, but I doubted that I could persuade anybody to come
along at 4.30). We met at the Bridge Hotel on Chertsey Bridge, and the plan was
that we would be back at the Hotel by 7.00 for our usual breakfast meeting. Walking there was a simple matter of crossing
the road from the hotel, following the
river path past the new development of luxury flats, turning right at Bates
Marine, and there you are.
The intrepid explorers set off
Chertsey Meads is a hidden gem, unknown to most residents of
Shepperton. Even those who know about it tend not to go there. I fell into that
category until I became a dog owner, and
started to go there to add some variety to our daily walks. It is an
enormous area of meadow land, bounded on two sides by rivers (the Thames and
the Bourne) and with just one road crossing it leading to the Hamm Court
Estate. It may sound fanciful, but in May and early June, it would be easy to
kid yourself that you were in an alpine meadow, such is the abundance of
wildflowers carpeting the whole area.
You have to use a little imagination, and ignore the traffic noise from
busy local roads and the M3 Motorway. You also have to ignore aircraft
departing Heathrow Airport, which may pass directly overhead depending on the
wind direction. And of course you have to ignore the absence of any mountains.
But aside from those small points, it really could be Austria.
An alpine meadow
The Meads is a super place for birdwatching because it has
so many different habitats, which all attract different types of birds. It has
woodland, meadows, reedbeds and rivers, so there is great scope for a variety
of sightings. My objectives for the
morning were for my companions to hear and identify some of the birdsong I had
played to them on my tape recorder a couple of weeks previously. Number one on
my wish list was the skylark, a bird that is rapidly disappearing from our
area, and is rarely heard. However I know that there is a small population of
them on Chertsey Meads, so I was really hoping we would at least hear a skylark
even if we didn’t get to see one. I was also hoping for a sighting of a
kingfisher. I know they are present on this stretch of the Thames, but they can
be quite secretive and difficult to spot.
Believe it or not, this is a densely populated area
It was surprisingly cold as we set off, in fact there was
frost on the ground which is unusual for this time of year. We hadn’t even
reached the Meads when we heard our first wren singing. The wren is actually
the commonest bird in Britain, although it is not often seen, as it tends to
lurk in the undergrowth. On our walk this morning we would hear more wrens than
any other bird, which underlines this fact. Our party was in good spirits as we
headed diagonally across the Meads. It
wasn’t long before we heard the unmistakeable sound of a skylark singing above
us. We were to hear two skylarks this morning, and we all managed to see the
second one.
Skylark
Approaching the River
Bourne we came within 200 yards of a pair of roe deer. I have long known that
there were deer on Chertsey Meads, but I have only ever seen them on two
occasions before today. They seem to hide themselves very well. The river
Bourne generated some interest among those of us who knew it flowed through
Chertsey, but hadn’t seen it before. In fact there are two River Bournes, the
Addlestone Bourne and the Chertsey Bourne, and they meet at Chertsey Meads
before flowing into the Thames.
Where are the birds?
By now we were starting to run short of time, so after a
quick visit to the reedbeds (reed buntings and sedge warblers were heard) we
had to head back to Chertsey bridge, missing the stretch of the Thames where I
had hoped we might see kingfishers. We had walked a couple of miles in fine
countryside, and saw or heard a total of 21 species of birds. Everyone seemed
to enjoy themselves and we all got back safely, so I felt it had been a
successful expedition.
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