[Wildlifewriter]

N51º 57.747 E001º 18.020
2nd February 1999

Five-thirty in the morning is when my day starts. It's just a thing, and many insomniacs like me do it – pick a time when Last Night becomes Today. It's the time I stop reading whatever book I'm reading. It's the time when the first cigarette of the new day hits my chest with a shudder. Cigarette number 287154, give or take a few. If laid end-to-end – over forty-odd years – they'd stretch for twenty kilometres.

This is the sort of thing you work out in your head, when you can't sleep.

It's windy outside and bitterly, shatteringly cold. Just not the conditions for a ninety-k drive from Cambridge to the east coast, but what else is there to do?



The Port of Felixstowe lies at the mouth of the Stour and Orwell estuaries, in Suffolk. I worked in the shipping and container industry for most of my adult life, so I think of this as a familiar scene. For someone not used to such places, it must be very like a vision of Hell...

The scale of it is difficult to take in: There are twenty-four massive ship-to-shore gantry cranes, each standing sixty metres high and spanning fifty-six metres from the quayside. The quay itself is nearly 2500 metres long. Twenty freight container trains a day leave from the two on-site rail terminals – how many road trucks turn round in one day, no-one has ever counted. But none of this description conveys the worst thing about Felixstowe – even to me...

The noise.

Harwich pilots say that on a calm day, they can hear Felixstowe ten nautical miles out to sea. It's an ear-splitting cacophony of heavy steel crashing on even heavier steel, modulated by howling tugmaster engines and shunting rail wagons. Not the sort of place you'd expect to see many birds. And yet...



On the other side of the port's western perimeter fence, is Suffolk Wildlife Trust's small reserve at Trimley Marshes. It's not often visited, even by enthusiasts, mainly because of a no-option two-mile hike from the nearest car parking place. Normally, the access path is ankle-deep in mud, but today it's frozen solid. A biting wind off the North Sea flattens patches of reed and spartina grass.

For those of us used to Ireland's mild, equable climate, winter in East Anglia is a shock: the cold makes gloved fingers numb, stiffens shoulders, brings endless snatters to the nose. It's unrelenting. I take out my Minolta SLR, only to find that the powered motor drive won't work – low temperature has affected its battery pack. No pictures today.

In the angle formed by Trinity Dock and the reserve margin, is a tiny patch of muddy saltmarsh, only seventy-odd metres wide. It's half-shadowed by the bows of the 43000-tonne Maersk Toledo alongside, and the racket as her lading completes is fearful. This rather unpromising location is the chosen wintering ground of some small brown-and-white birds -which I've travelled all this way to see:

Snow Buntings.



Even in this area, they're rare. Snow Buntings typically breed in the far north, though one population occupies an area in the highest and most remote part of the Cairngorms. They like snow in summer you see, the lunatics. These frail-looking, stumpy little things are as tough as old boots – and they need to be.

But even Scotland's winters are too hostile, so they seek out the next-worst place they can think of – and it's here, in Felixstowe. What they find to eat, I can't say. Maybe spilled grain from open-topped bulk containers is the attraction – there's plenty of it about. Whatever the reason, they won't stay long: as soon as an early spring wind blows from the south, they'll return to the snowfields of their birth.

Two races of buntings winter in East Anglia: those from Scandinavia differ slightly from the Scottish/Icelandic group, which are darker in colour. For some reason, a significant majority (80-85%) of birds caught here for ringing are females.

A hunting sparrowhawk appears from nowhere, coming low and fast at the little flock. An extraordinary thing happens, that I've never seen before: Instead of scattering in panic like most small birds, the snow buntings flatten themselves against the ground. Motionless among the scrubby moss and lichen, they become almost invisible. The baffled hawk pulls up, does a stall-turn over the container park fence, and vanishes.

I can't stay much longer, or my legs will stop working. There's a decent-looking pub back there in the village of Trimley St Mary - I wonder if they're open, yet...

-Wlw

(c) Wildlifewriter 2006.
Images (c) Port of Felixstowe Ltd, RSPB Library

[Billy Twigger]

Absolutely fantastic!
Love to have been there.

I saw a sparrowhawk scatter a field of finches near Granton on Spey recently, so to see these Snow Buntings behave that way must have been astonishing.

[Wildlifewriter]

[Haggis Hunter]

When we all went up Ben Macdui in August, roolku and I got some really close pictures of a Snow Bunting on top of Cairngorm. I didn't realise that none of us uploaded the pictures, when I get back on my computer tomorrow, I'll upload a picture of it.
_________________
Let me know if I say anything that offends you
I might want to offend you again later

[Haggis Hunter]

Snow Bunting on Cairngorm, picture courtesy of roolku.



Downsized and re-linked to conserve bandwidth. Click on the image above for the full-size picture -Admin
_________________
Let me know if I say anything that offends you
I might want to offend you again later

[Billy Twigger]

Was that before they knocked down the cairn?

[Firth of Forth]

No, that's a proper cairn at the top of Cairngorm. It's on the map and was allowed to stay.
_________________
Utterly smitten by a Captain
And now Mrs Aubrey

[HighlandNick]