You'd be forgiven for not noticing a change in the temperature so far this year, but it is in fact winter here in the Solent and our wintering assemblage of wildlife are here in force. At low tide in the eastern Solent Harbours now, great carpets of waders move through the rich mud in search of morsels to eat, whilst at high tide, the same species can be seen taking up roosting points on the highest areas of shingle to rest until the waters subside once again. On our fields and sports pitches, a spectacular invasion of Dark Bellied Brent Geese are keeping the grass short and the air filled with social 'honking'.
(Above: Brent Geese feeding in Portsmouth. Photo by Louise MacCallum)
This annual winter scene is the end of an amazing journey which starts high up in the Siberian arctic, over 3000 miles away in all, at their summer breeding grounds. Leaving as the arctic summer ends, they fly down along the Eurasian coast in their family groups, forming large arrows (or skeins), stopping off here and there before finally reaching our own rich coast.
This year, the arctic breeding season appears to have been a very poor one as the number of young returning with the adult geese is very small. Although this is bad news for them, annual productivity rates do fluctuate wildly and last year for example, around 20% of the geese present were less than a year old. They will be busily feeding here until around March/April, building up their energy for the long flight ahead and another go at raising a family.
Please do give them a little space whilst they're here if you can, they've definitely earned it. If you fancy combining your coastal walks with a little citizen science, please do check out http://www.solentbirds.org.uk, a brilliant new scheme to record our coastal bird life in order to ensure our new coastal defences take their needs in to account.
Although our wintering birds have arrived from the east and north, we also have visitors arriving from the west, carried not on wings, but by the ocean currents that move through the channel from the Atlantic. Starting in Cornwall in mid November before gradually appearing further east along the channel, our beaches have seen a host of Velella or 'By-the-wind-sailors' wash ashore this winter.
They look like a small piece of flexible plastic when you first see them on the shoreline, but they're an amazing little life form. Rather than being one distinct animal, Velella are actually a colony of polyps living together. In life, they float upon the oceans surface, with their 'sail' catching the breeze, propelling them along. Underneath the 'deck', individual tentacles hang down to feed on plankton (these are often missing from beached Velella).
Locally, the first I noticed this year were in Chichester Harbour on December 12th near Emsworth. There have been reports of them near Medmerry and Selsey from December 8th though. Interestingly, all of the strandings I've seen so far are on west facing shores, giving further evidence to their origin. We can't be sure of their exact provenance, but mass strandings like this are regular along the European Atlantic coasts and it's likely they've traveled from warmer waters to the south and west. I've only ever seen them in their strand line afterlife, but ocean going vessels sometimes encounter armadas with thousands of little 'sailors' making there way across the sea.
Not all of our visitors are natural however. Whilst carrying out some surveying on the shoreline earlier this week, I noticed a plastic tie/tag that appeared to come from a lobster or crabbing pot and a short bit of research traced it back to a company in Texas. Although virtually all of the plastic on our shorelines is much more local than this, it does illustrate quite succinctly that once plastic is in the ocean, it stays there for a long time and can travel great distances. With some estimates predicting that by 2025 there'll be 1 kilogram of plastic present in the ocean for every 3 kilograms of fish, it's a growing problem that we need to address urgently on a wide scale.