Guest blog by Volunteer Hide Cleaner, Lou Goom
25 January 2024.
Litter Picking & Tidying the Hides
My first task of the day brings my first wild encounter. Collecting my kit from the wardens' store, I have a litter grabber to hand, so move to pick up a loose scrap of fabric circling in the low breeze. Luckily, I recognise it is the minuscule, purposeful scuttling of a velvet-coated shrew along the perimeter of the toolshed. Interrupting its foraging could have serious consequences, as it must feed voraciously to stay alive, so I back out with my tools quietly, leaving the shrew to its hunting of spiders and other little killings, and I head to the trails.
Common Shrew by Chris Shields (rspb-images.com)
In the Bittern Hide, a group share a relaxed celebration of a birthday. Home-baked pastries and spotting scopes line the window ledge. They're keen to show me their favourite photos of ice-skating Bitterns, taken the last time they were together here. Sweeping some old cobwebs, I miss the main event, but I do get to watch the wake of an Otter as it slips by the reedbeds.
In the second hide, a Marsh Harrier's wingtips dip toward the water, metres from the window as I clean it. "They will be sky dancing soon," I hear a guide say. It doesn't surprise me that the activities of such a majestic creature, at ease in this widescreen wilderness, would be so poetically described. Circus aeruginosus - even the Marsh Harrier's Latin name has a ring of enchantment to it.
Marsh Harrier by Steve Everett
Heading homeward, I meet a lady who's taking her camera for a walk in the woods. We peer together at the vivid micro-forest of a patch of waterlogged moss nearby, and the snakeskin bark of a branch. She tells me that she likes to focus her lens on the wonder of these little things, finding the challenge of capturing moving images intimidating sometimes.
Lichen and moss on a tree trunk by Ian Barthorpe
Later, I think of the Harrier and the shrew. So apparently different in scale, they are united by the precariousness of the fragile ecosystem that they share here. "Why give your time as a volunteer at the RSPB?" I was asked by a visitor. Trying to make a difference can seem an overwhelming struggle, against the pressures the natural world is competing with. I am a small person in a large landscape, completing simple tasks to make a little improvement. I am content to be, as Joni Mitchell sang, 'a cog in something turning' forward in the right direction for the mighty Harrier. But equally, I am happy to have been the person who stepped back, to let the diminutive shrew scurry by.
[This extract from Lou's diary will hopefully be the first of series of guest blogs by Minsmere's volunteers. For more information about volunteering with the RSPB, see https://www.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/support-the-rspb/volunteering/rspb-volunteering-opportunities - ed]
Lou could write everyday and fill our days with bright thoughts. Wonderful stuff, thank you.
Joni Mitchell - now, there's a channel to return to through a dozen old albums.....ignore the last one though.