Yesterday I took my 20 month old grandaughter to Grain to collect some shells. The fog was thick and horns echoed across the estuary like forlorn moans of a lost soul.
As luck would have it a man turned up in the carpark and unloaded three mysterious boxes from his boot onto the gravel base, and proceeded to call on his phone, as a natural busy body, I was intrigued!
My GD is, to my delight fascinated by ber-bers as she calls them, saw the pigeons in their cages so I asked if we could witness their release.
In the fog and mist the captives were liberated in an instant, a flurry of feather and fluster, in a moment lost in the whiteness above and heading to London as their liberator explained. The lack of visibility certainly re-asked the question. " How were those birds going to find their way home in this pea-souper"?
It is still and remains one of the great mysteries of the natural world and many millions of words have been offered and theories expounded to solve the puzzle, as an example!
How does a cuckoo raised in a nest by parents not his own (who he will never see, he might think he's a warbler). leave the comfort of his nest and surregate parents, when his real parents have already left or are preparing to fly to Sub-Saharan Africa.
They leave in Julyt/August and he leaves on his inaugural journey a couple of months later.
The mind boggles!!!
It would be the equivalent of giving a one day old child to a neigbour then emigrating to South Africa, leaving no contact details or explanation, then when the child's old enough to be independant. somehow finds its' way to South Africa, spending the winter there. Then finds its' way back to Kent and mate with a female, when it doesnt even know what species it is! Let alone what an attractive mate would even look like!
Just think about it!
I wrote in a blog last year about how only a few hundred years ago people thought swallows hibernated at the bottom of ponds as that was the only way they could account for their sudden disappeance. They also thought cuckoos changed into sparrowhawks for the winter months, fantastic to us now, but the truth and reality of bird migration is even more fantastic
We know so much about the planet we inhabit and yet so little.
Visiting a nature reserve at any time is a brilliant way of getting in touch with nature and to begin to see the world away from our technological lives.
Somehere like Northward Hill RSPB reserve in Kent.
It is the school holidays next week and the ideal time and opportunity to visit this fabulous and local reserve.
Last year the first Nightingales arrived overnight of the 9th, 10th of April and the Cuckoos the next day.
Everyone knows what a cuckoo sounds like, try listening to a singing male nightingale online to get familiar with it and see if you can hear it first in the next week or two at Northward Hill or Cliffe Pools.
At leasrt three species of Butterfies are out now Small White, Red Admiral and Brimstone.
The North Kent Marshes are a very special area and worth preserving at all cost.