With much of the floodwater having drained away, far less use was made of the Marshes by birds, with just four black-headed gulls and 15 mallard on the 5th. A dead swan, still in its beige juvenile plumage, was found on the 8th, having evidently collided with the low tension electricity cables that cross Tonford Field. Small metal balls are slung beneath the cables where they cross the marsh, but this is evidently inadequate, as this is the third time that a swan has crashed into the lines and died. Previous communication with UK Power Networks failed to elicit any action.
The pattering of little feet – no, not grandchildren – alerted me to the presence ofmy first little grebe for over seven weeks. These birds run across the water, making a characteristic splattering sound as they go. Sadly, this is only my second record this winter of our smallest grebe, yet until six years ago I regularly saw three or four, occasionally as many as seven, on the river, usually in the vicinity of the Canterbury East railway bridge. The graph on the right shows how their fortunes have varied over the past eleven years, but we are now in the sixth year of a fairly consistent downward trend. This is a cause for deep regret, as so many other species are also seen less frequently and in lower numbers than just a few years ago, a random selection of other examples being stonechat, moorhen, swift, swallow, house martin, snipe and meadow pipit, the last two being featured in the next paragraph.
Thanks to the thick thatch of grass in the ungrazed Tonford Field,the poor snipe winter continued, with no more than three seen on any of my visits this month. The first four meadow pipits of the winter were seen on the 20th. This is yet another species that is in decline, as shown clearly on the graph opposite. Until recently flocks of up to 18 were fairly regular from September through to March.
A water rail was squealing beside Tonford lake on the 5th and the 28th.
Up to ten blackbirds were present on the embankment, and a jay was seen there twice, while a hunched little egret perched high up in one of the embankment trees resembled an outsized snowball.
In the previous two winters a kestrel was regularly hunting over the Marshes, but the habit seems to have been lost this year, so it was good to see one this month, the first since August.
Perhaps most remarkable of all my sightings this month was of a group of four squirrels clambering around in a small hawthorn bush on the embankment to eat the berries. It was highly unusual for two reasons: previously I had only occasionally seen a single squirrel on the embankment, so four was totally unprecedented, and it was decidely odd to see four of these normally belligerent animals feeding peacefully so close to each other; and secondly, I had never before seen squirrels eating fleshy fruit, their usual diet being dry seeds of conifers, acorns, hazelnuts and hornbeam seeds. The berries were dealt with very deftly, too quickly for me to make out exactly what was happening, but it appeared that individual fruits were held between the two front paws so that most of the flesh could be stripped off, as it was the small woody seed that was of interest.