SHOOTING SEAGULLS

From The Exmouth Journal, Saturday February 8th, 1930:

"FAIR PLAY FOR GULLS

To The Editor of The Exmouth Journal.

Sir,

In your paper you always seem to encourage kindness to dumb creatures, so I send you the following.

Kindly residents at the bungalows throw food to the birds and a week ago two sportsmen (!) with their guns were seen to hide behind a boat on the sand in order to get shots at the birds as they hungrily fluttered in crowds on the beach.

I wonder if all the youths who are continually shooting at birds round the Point have paid for their gun licences.

Yours truly,

A TEMPORARY RESIDENT

The Point, Exmouth, February 3rd."

I think this letter well defines the unbridgeable gulf between those of us who love and those who hate seagulls. Myself, as readers of this blog might know, I tend to side with the former. As for those Exmouth 'youths', they will be at least in their nineties by now but they know who they are, I hope they are still thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

MUD FOR MARTINS

It was a grey morning last Monday. There was a cold breeze and I was standing once again at the end of the boat shelter wall at Lympstone and leaning on the rail. It was low water. The mud banks stretched away for a mile in front of me, a depressing sight to see. There was a dearth of birdlife.

Then I found myself watching a lone house martin. She, I had the impression she was a she, was the first martin I am conscious of seeing this spring although the birds must have been hereabouts for a few weeks. She was coming and going and landing twenty yards in front of me, collecting mud for nest building.

I had never thought of it before but estuarial mud must be a blessed convenience for house martins especially when, as now, there has been very little rain.

I imagined a conversation between two martlettes:

“The trouble these days, my dear, the mud just isn’t as wet as it used to be.”

“That's so, ma'am, everybody says so. My Martin thinks 'tis all this global warming. It makes things so difficult for first time home builders like us.”

“Well, my dear, if you’ll take my advice, don’t you even bother to go mud hunting inland. There’s plenty of wet mud out there on the Estuary, enough for everybody and for ever. 'Tis a bit salty mind, but…”

A SAIL UPRIVER

My first sail of the new season was, as tradition demands, on April 1st, the day I launched 'Poppy'. She was glad to escape from the gravel patch in front of my house. This first sail was an uneventful spin barring the inevitable (for me) wrinkles which needed to be unwrinkled.

My second sail was last night. I planned to take one of my sons in law for a quiet float up river to the Turf Hotel, there to drink a beer, as in my beautiful verses, and so to drift happy home. I 'phoned the Turf to make sure they were open and was told, from the mouth of the landlord himself, that they would be serving beer until ten, no food though!

We set off with a lively breeze blowing on our nose. With some difficulty we inched up towards Turf as best we could but our thirst made us impatient with sail so we took to the oars and rowed turn and turn about to the Turf against the wind.

It was an unsatisfactory landing. The moment we landed, the breeze which would have taken us trimly home died the death. Moreover the landing stage had disappeared and the path was littered with engineering plant over which I nearly broke my ancient neck. The promontory was deserted. The pub had closed. This was at half past eight!

We rowed home as sober as Mormons and by now the tide had started to ebb so we had an easy enough time of it. We made 'Poppy' fast to her mooring and paddled to Lympstone's Green.

As we went ashore lights flashed and a voice from the dark informed us that the coastguard had been called out to search for us. Why? you might well ask. Because an imaginative neighbour had thought we MIGHT have got into trouble. Why should he have thought that? Because it WAS DARK. I shall not describe the ensuing nonsense of having to dismiss zealous inshore lifeboatmen and coastguards.

You might think that, what with contrary winds, equivocating landlords, over imaginative neighbours and lack of beer, this expedition is to be classed as a failure but that would be to take too narrow a view . It was a wonderful spring tide. Our outward voyage was under one of those glorious Exe sunsets, not of the obvious blood dripping kind but of the subtler golden kind. For a while, for some reason unknown, the sky above us was full of swirling arabesques of shrieking gulls. Then the curlew flew South high overhead and a lone heron flapped from Topsham to Powderham. Our return was under the most brilliant starlight. We sailed beneath Charles's Wain, surely the loveliest name of the many for that constellation, and Orion stood to his post nobly in the West. Apart from the rumble of traffic over the motorway bridge at Topsham the Estuary was silent. Such evenings are rare and to be treasured.

THE REDSHANK

There are some birds that are easily recognised from their names. The wheatear is one because of his white arse and the redshank is another because of his bright orange legs. Well , there are no whitearses on the Estuary at the moment but there is an abundance of orangelegs. I have just been watching many of them, not in a flock you understand but spread out along the mudbanks. They stride about pecking at sandhoppers and seaweed hardly slackening their pace. They turn out in large numbers for the month of March.

Shank for leg has an ancient Middle English ring to it. In the Thirteenth Century it was standard English. Edward I had the nickname Longshanks and the word has persisted to describe the 'leg' of an anchor, a fish hook, a wine glass and so on.

The "noisy, restless, redshank" is the master of silly walks. He makes John Cleese look as though he needs some practice. His flight is pretty crazy too, "swift and erratic," says Mr T A Coward. He makes a lot of noise which the birders consistently write as tewk. In some localities, not here I think, he is said to answer to the echoic name of Tewk or Tewkie but Redshank is such a good name he hardly needs another.

VICTORIAN BIRDS

In the British Library the other day, waiting for my books to turn up, I reached for a Devonshire volume of the Victorian County Studies published in 1906 and found therein a wonderful account of the birds of Victorian South Devon. (Yes, I know the volume was published in Edwardian times.) Most fascinating of all is the attention given there to the local names for birds.

For example the Herring Gull is said to have been known on the Exe as the Ladram Gull because it nests or nested on the stacks in Ladram Cove.

The Fulmar was called in South Devon the Mollymew or the Mollymauk and the Great Shearwater was called the Hackbolt .

The local name for the Great Northern Diver was, interestingly I thought, the Loon which, as every schoolboy knows, is how it is called in Canada and New England . Presumably the North American name was the gift of Westcountrymen.

The Great Skua was for some reason known locally as Tom Harry.

The Knot, on the Exe had the name Silver Plover and the Cormorant, so says the good book, was once known here as the Topsham Pilot.

One day I mean to go back and make a complete list.

What is sad is that the list makes it clear that the Victorians' attitude to birds was to hunt them and kill them. Killing was the only way they knew to make scientific observations of the birds. A typical reading is this about the Fulmar: "One killed with an oar on the Exe had a calcereous concretion in the vent. Very interesting but what a shame! And how on earth does anyone get close enough to a Fulmar to kill it with an oar?

There are some comprehensive lists of the old North Devon names for birds here.

THE MILLENNIUM CURLEW

It is
the last day
of the last year
of the last century
of the last millennium
and I am on the beach at Lympstone.

The tide is swinging.
The mussel-beds are tapping.
The white birds are queueing and calling.

Enter an ancient curlew,
just about two thousand years old.
Hello old bird! What’s new?

He tugs his long, curved bill out from the soft mud,
cocks his head,
gives me the eye.
Before he pushes his long, curved bill back into the soft mud again,
Not a lot! he says




(And can it really be ten years since I wrote this Millennium Curlew? Why, Yes it can. You can’t beat the mathematics of it.)

ROCK PIPITS

I like the Rock Pipit. He’s another bird that stands still long enough for you to admire him. Despite his essential pipitiness he is well qualified as a bird of the Estuary. He, in his habits, as T. A. Coward tells us, “more nearly approaches the shore-haunting waders than any ‘land bird’.” At this time of the year I see him or his mate or both of them every time I walk beneath the red cliffs and along the shingle from Lympstone’s Green to Sowden End.

The Rock Pipit gives me the impression that he likes my company. I think I’ve seen the last of him and then he flutters past me and perches on the cliffs ahead and waits. He is a fearless climber on the cliff face but then I suppose we would all be pretty fearless climbers if we had wings to our backs! Nevertheless the way he keeps his balance without a flutter and hops about and shuffles sideways on the stormsculpted sandstone is remarkable. He is a very chamois among birds.

How he can skip it
that pretty Rock Pipit!

When the tide is falling he ventures out onto the mud flats and finds good things to eat in the rock crevices and in the seaweed. The cold breeze ruffles his Royal Marine olive plumage but like a bold booty he feels not a thing. There are plenty of birds scuttling about on the mud pecking at things but the Rock Pipit more or less has the whole length of the cliff wall to himself. The kestrel that used to hover and hunt there I haven’t seen for a couple of years. He is probably hovering above a motorway these days. There have been winter days when I have glimpsed a kingfisher along these cliffs but not lately. Most days there are fat woodpigeons perched high in the bushes but they don’t do a lot.

SHELDUCK

I am no twitcher and in puckish moments have even been known gently to mock the more fanatic godwit seeking nitwits/ nitwits seeking godwits that haunt the Estuary but I do like to watch birds in the wild. I best like those birds who don't themselves twitch, who sometimes stand still and won’t allow themselves to be mistaken. The shelduck qualifies.

All this last week I have been watching the shelducks and drakes of the Estuary at Sowden End. There are four couples of them. At the start of the ebb they feed right under my nose, some swimming, some paddling at the water’s edge. Towards low water they spread out in their pairs along Lympstone Lake, two hundred feet away. When they swim they swim proudly, high in the water so that you can get a proper look at their glory. Like many birds I have met they don’t stop feeding for a minute. Their heads are down more often than they are up. At high water I see a pair of them flying down river low over the water.

The name, properly it is sheld duck, has nothing to do with shells and everything to do with the amazing black, white, chestnut colours of the plumage of both duck and drake. They are wonderfully ‘paint by numbers’. ‘Sheld’ is said somewhere in England to be a dialect word and derives from Low German and might mean pied or variegated or speckled or shimmering. Take your pick! The shelduck has beautifully defined patches of colour, you could quilt it, and a fiery red bill. The drake has a somewhat discomforting fiery red knob on his fiery red bill. The Germans call the shelduck Brandente, fire duck.

They are the most handsome of birds and well worth a watch or two.

THE CLEVER GULLS AT ORCOMBE POINT

I have long been acquainted with the story of Pliny, truth or legend, that the Greek playwright, Aeschylus, was killed, two and a half millennia ago, by an eagle who mistook his big bald head for the kind of rock upon which , if one happens to be such an eagle, one can drop tortoises from a great height. Lammergeiers, which look a lot like eagles, are reported to be dropping tortoises onto rocks every day of the week and thereby they smash the shells and get at the flesh.


So I was not in the least surprised a couple of years ago to see that the clever gulls at Orcombe Point had learned the same game. They were dropping mussels and other shellfish onto the road from a great height and immediately zooming down to bag the flesh. It is a sight worth seeing. Stan Davies remarked on this phenomenon in his 1987 book, Wildlife of the Exe Estuary .

There are quite a few gulls around here and they sometimes use the road and footpath to drop crabs and razor shells in order to break them open. Surprisingly, even turnstones have discovered the behaviour of the gulls and can be found on the footpath of Queen's Drive pecking morsels from the shells

I have never noticed the turnstones but the gulls are always at it. I too am beginning to bald in an interesting sort of way. When I walk that way I put on my hat.

THE HERONS ARE DANCING

This, the patient heron.
I thought once I knew him.
so straightfaced and solemn,
upstanding, almost grim,

stilted, yes, and studied,
a good mind: set on fish,
as stately and as formal
as any stick might wish

or if walking, stalking,
high stepping, sure and slow,
placing those great splayfeet
just where they need to go.

So I thought I knew him.
Yet see, where now he flings
legs high in abandon
and plays tag with his wings;

he romps with his fellows,
and teases until they
catch from this one prankster
the madness of the day.

The heavens are falling;
the sun has rolled aside;
the herons are dancing
at the edge of the tide.

HERONS

When William E H Pidsley's book The Birds of Devonshire was published 1n 1891 he reported that:

"Several fine Heronries exist in the county. At Powderham Park, the seat of the Earl of Devon, the herons nest in some ancient oak trees close to the castle."

The heronry is still there and is said to be the largest in the county. So the herons have been nesting there for at least one century . They may well have been there as long as the Earls of Devon. The Powderham herons regularly fish the channels at low water but at high tide they fly far afield often flapping across the wide Estuary to travel East and eat rats and toads and whatever they can find in the fields and ditches. They regularly pass over my house and, when we had them, would drop in for a goldfish by way of antipasto.

When, in the early years of the last century, Richard Jefferies was sojourning on the higher reaches of the Exe he found the local people calling the herons "cranes" and heronries "craneries". And Coward writing of the heron in 1920 tells us "In many parts it is still called the 'Crane'." Of course they look like cranes when they are jerking up and down on the mud flats. They also look like siege engines. The collective term for them is 'a siege of heron.'

KNOT

Every now and again I see a cluster of the birds called knot. They zoom up and down the Estuary swarming past like a cloud of gnats. Knot, gnat! Could there be a verbal connection? They put on a magnificent air display. They never stand still long enough for me to identify them as knot. Like an old man's days and hours they fly too fast. As they fly they turn in perfect harmony and the colour of their passing changes from dark to light, light to dark.

The popular notion that their name derives from King Canute who, like the knot, settled himself at the edge of the tide, is apparently false. Linnaeus fell for it and labelled them as canutus canutus but he was misled.

The name is somewhat wonderland:

"But what if they are not knot?" asked that heroine of our nation, Alice, of the Dormouse .

"Not knot, not knot, not knot, not knot." said the Dormouse, without opening its eyes, and fell asleep immediately. "

"You might have stayed awake, you know, at least long enough to answer my question" said Alice "Now I shall never know."

"The answer ," said the Mad Hatter, "is that if they are not knot they must be something else."

But, believe me! The birds I mean are not not knot. They are the real McCoy.

AN UNFLAPPABLE TERN

One sunny day last June I sailed within a yard of a pretty tern, a juvenile, as smart as paint, who was sitting on a buoy in the moorings. She was so confident and happy there that she did not so much as flutter a feather when I sailed past her and I was so pleased to find so unperturbed a wild thing that I put "Poppy" about and sailed past her again. The unflappable tern stood to her buoy as firm as a sentry and I sailed away and left her in her unruffled peace.

One expects a bird to flap but one is happy when the flapping doesn't happen. O you beautiful unflappable tern!. I hope some day to see your like again. After all, one good tern deserves another.

A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS

‘Lovers’, decreed the melancholy Austrian poet, Nikolaus Lenau, ‘should never venture farther apart than the westwind can carry the sweet song of the nightingale.’ But of course these days lone lovers venture to the very ends of the earth.

In the late summer of 1964 I was alone and melancholy and lodging in the attic of the Passage Inn at Topsham. To cheer myself up, I, who had never sailed before, bought, for thirty pounds and at the Cherry and Cherry, Shaldon boat auction, a little boat without a name. I called the boat ‘Bärbel’ after my distant beloved. She was a lovely little sprucebuilt, twelvefoot, lugsail dinghy, straight out of Arthur Ransome.

Anyway the first outing I made with ‘Bärbel, the boat’ was to that part of the river where now the motorway crosses the Exe. I rowed, I did not attempt to sail, among the reed beds and and was enchanted by what I found there. On every reed, or so it seemed, sat a starling. The reeds were bending beneath their weight and there was a noise of chatter and singing everywhere. A few birds, but only a few, allowed me to disturb them but they soon settled again as I passed among them like a Pharoah.

The reed beds are still there and, despite the motorway, the starlings still visit. In that neck of the Estuary I have seen murmurations of starlings since. Sometimes they fly so as to darken the skies. But that first progress of mine, paddling among the reeds nearly fifty years ago to be welcomed to the Estuary by happy starlings, is still one of the most cherished of my memories.

ON THE PROVERBIAL GREED OF SEAGULLS

All gulls are omniverous and will eat the living with the dead but it is the great blackbacked who has the worst reputation for tearing apart the live young of other birds. A local name for the great blackbacked was the much more expressive “saddleback”. Here on the Estuary these murders are hidden from us and the lesser gulls do not seem at all shy of the great blackbacked who strides about among them and is so much bigger than they. All the voracity of all the gulls seems to be directed towards gobbling up the little green crabs and whatever else it is that they find in the estuarial mud.

Gulls are certainly greedy but there is something refreshingly honest about their greed. I used to much enjoy the cloud of herring gulls and black backed gulls, the lesser saddlebacks, that would follow the little trawler when we came home into the Estuary with the tide after we had been catching skate. Skate is the one fish that was filleted on board. Two crescent cuts and the bits went overboard to the savage delight of the gulls. What a brightness in the sunlight! What a diving and swooping was there! What a plunging and pouncing! What a howling and shrieking! The gulls were singing their hymn to life in the raw and one had to be a fearful hypocrite not sometimes to join in the chorus.

Tomorrow: A pretty poem entitled 'The Skate'.

MORE SEAGULLS

Here on the Estuary the gulls are sane and law abiding enough and only quarrel among themselves. The one thing one can criticise them for is the methodical way in which they bespatter the boats on the moorings with their viscous guano. At certain times of the year around high water, rows of juvenile gulls can be seen sitting along the gunwales of small boats comfortably perched, facing outboard and cheerfully discharging inboard. They put me in mind of the German recruits on their Gemeinschaftslatrine that Erich Maria Remarque describes in All Quiet on the Western Front.

I think the authorities that make war on seagulls would miss them more than something. They are certainly more enthusiastic scavengers than , for example, Plymouth’s streetcleaners. I have watched gulls cleaning up Union Street in the early hours, after the jolly sailors and royals have found their tripashore beds. They gobble up the abandoned fish and chips, the burgers, the fried chicken, the kebabs and even the naval vomit from the paving. Wherever the people fill the land with their uncleanness the seagulls descend like pure white miniseraphs to make good.

Tomorrow: The essential greed of gulls.

SEAGULLS

There was once a facetious car sticker, I haven’t seen it for a long while, that was popular with our insular peninsular rednecks. It bore the motto GROCKLES GO HOME AND TAKE A SEAGULL WITH YOU.

The word grockle, which means first and foremost a tourist or holidaymaker visiting glorious Devon, is a word that originated here but which has now gone on to wider usage. This car sticker always seemed to me not only to have a problem with number but also to be doubly offensive. After all are we not all somebody’s grockles somewhere, sometime? And would we want to be being asked to go home? As for seagulls, in my book they are glorious birds. If they were rare they would be treasured. I do not believe the official propaganda that urges fifty reasons why I should not feed them and I don’t believe they deserve to be treated as public enemies.

It is true that I was once fiercely attacked by a divebombing herring gull and momentarily feared for my life but that was an over reaction on both our parts and the attack took place not on the Estuary but in Chancery Lane, London and no doubt it was the stress of city life that had crazed the poor bird. In any case there are many species of gull in the British Isles, Coward lists fifteen not counting the Terns and Skuas, and surely they are not all to be brushed with the same tar.

Tomorrow: More Seagulls.

THE SWAN

The swan in her power and her pride
passes by on the top of the tide
on a clear, calm and starstippled night.

and as she rides, silent and white,
her head, in a long lissom arc,
dips low to that sorcerous dark mirror,
the untroubled tide.

The swan in her power and her pride
pecks once at a tremulous flame
and somewhere a sun with no name
is swallowed and lost to the sky

and the swan in her power passes by.

Tomorrow: Going Aground.

YET MORE CORMORANT

Fishermen, seeing the bird in a high place holding up his wings to dry, gave it the name Isle of Wight Parson. They were remembering their black cassocked priest high on his pulpit gesturing in his preaching or his prayer. I have somewhere heard the outspread wings called a crucifixion. Henry Williamson seemed to think that by so raising its wings the cormorant was able ‘to ease its tight crop’.

In ‘Redcliff’ Eden Phillpott’s gives us this lively exchange between clever Mary Honeywill and honest Joe Parable:

Mary. Look at the shags sitting on that mud-bank with their wings stretched out.’

Joe. Why do birds do that? I’ve often wondered. ’Tis as if they were going to start on a dance almost.’

Mary. They spread their wings out to dry them I expect.

Joe. The cleverness! Fancy a sea-fowl being so peart as that!

(‘Peart’ is an endangered Devon dialect word meaning wise, clever, able.)

There is often a muster of perhaps a dozen cormorant on the shingle beneath the Royal Marine barracks at Exton together with a siege of patient herons. The cormorant wait in line like so many jollies on jankers or perhaps more like so many bottles of Guinness. They wait for a full tide of little fishes and now and again they are lucky.

The old estuary fishermen used to grumble into their beers about the voracious nature of the cormorant and the dire effect he has on fish stocks. Their grievance has a long history. For Shakespeare cormorant was an adjective meaning greedy, insatiable, all devouring and William Congreve’s skirtchasing Old Batchelor has the splendid line: “Why what a Cormorant in Love am I!” Perhaps he knew the reputation of the cormorant who once were trained to take fish from the royal London fish ponds. In England the training of cormorant to catch fish has been known since the fourteenth century and in the seventeenth century it became a fashionable amusement. What hawks were to fowl cormorant were to fish. The Master of the Cormorant was one of the officers of James the First’s and of Charles the First’s households. I wonder if ever the cavalier Earls of Devon at Powderham dabbled in shagging for fish here on the Estuary. As for the common folk, our ancestors were wonderfully resourceful and, although I know of no evidence for it, there might once have been baseborn cormorant keepers. In a fanciful moment I can imagine cottagers here in the estuary villages keeping cormorant in cages at the backs of their cottages much as they used to keep ferrets when I first came to the village. Were there ever such cages with disconsolate cormorant standing on big webbed feet, hooded like falcon and nervously waiting to see a bit of action? Okay! Probably not!

The bird’s defenders make the argument that the bird’s voraciousness is overstated. Like most predators, the cormorant picks off the small and unhealthy fish and thus might be said to perform a service to the fisheries. Nevertheless there is a queue of people whom they have not convinced wanting gun licences so that they may find a few cormorant and kill them.

When cormorant choose they can swim along the surface with their bodies submerged and only their heads and necks periscoping above the water. From the boat it is fun to watch them diving for fish and to try to guess where they will surface. This is a bit like playing Spot the Ball, and just as difficult. There are times when the peart sea-fowl swim backwards under the water just to amaze and confound.

It is a pity that neither cormorant nor shag ever seem to find the right conditions to breed here on the Estuary. Their squabs are said to make good eating and a line in shagsquab pies and puddings in the village shops would be a better way to cull them than shooting the uneatable adult birds. Perhaps all that is needed to encourage them to breed is a goodly supply of paper bags.


Tomorrow: A Topography

MORE CORMORANT

“The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag..”

A keen bird watcher might take exception to these fine, unforgettable lines from Christopher Isherwood’s poem, Common Cormorant, pointing out that Cormorant and Shag are separate species: Phalacrocorax carbo and Phalacrocorax aristotelis and what is more that they have very different nesting habits. To the Old English, however, both these shaggy birds, the one greenish black and the other blackish green, were shag and to the Normans they were both cormoran, the latter lovely word deriving from corvus marinus, the ‘sea raven’. The old Saxon speaking fishermen of the Estuary mostly called them shag. The fine distinction between the species perhaps came into being after the Conquest in much the same way as the distinction was made between sheep and mutton. It is easy to tell your cormorant from your shag but I have to admit that, although both carbo and aristotelis abound on the Estuary, I have seldom felt I needed to do so.

Here, opposite Starcross, we have the Shaggles Sand, a sandy island at low water to the northern end of which the cormorant still gather. How much nicer if the birds were generally called shaggles. It would put an end to all those tired jokes.

The birds who gather on the Shaggles Sand, like cormorant everywhere, enjoy spreading out their wings to the sun and the wind, so to dry them and in the act looking much more like heraldic eagles than any eagle I have ever met. Some say the cormorant is an ugly bird. True there is something truly primeval about him but I love to see him. He pleases the eye. The designer of today’s German eagle certainly seems to have taken a cormorant for his model. I think I know which one.



Next: Even more cormorant.