Four sticks

Jenny Brown's Point, Silverdale, Lancashire

Jenny Brown's Point has featured several times in this journal. There was once a small port here, and the ruins of wharves and bridges are scattered about. These 4 pieces of wood, deeply sunk in the mudflats, stand isolated from the other structures. A small platform perhaps once sat on them, but what was it for?

It was a bit of a colourless day today, the sun didn't peer out once from behind the curtain of cloud. But it was good for birds. The year list moved on two to 98. Avocets are back on the coastal lagoons at Leighton Moss, there were two pairs this morning, these are birds that will have wintered much further south and are now here to breed. Then this afternoon, I at last caught up with a great crested grebe on the freshwater pools at the Moss.

At Jenny Brown's there were larger numbers of pintails than I have ever seen, plus huge numbers of black-tailed godwits. In the late afternoon, I went to see if the starlings were still congregating to roost in the reedbeds, but nothing showed, so perhaps that's it for this winter. Compensation though was watching flights of tufted ducks and pochards, in groups of 8 to 12 birds erupting from the water and then flying low and rapidly in formation over the lagoons, the groups dodging each other at the last moment like dogfighting aircraft. Why they did this at dusk I don't know, spooked by an unseen predator perhaps, or maybe just a touch of joie de vivre before settling down to roost for the night?

Hopefully there will be a little sun tomorrow and I can photograph some wild daffodils.

I did look up the lyrics of Led Zeppelin's Four Sticks to see if I could make anything appropriate of them. I couldn't. But it's still one of my favourites of theirs, with John Bonham drumming with two sticks in each hand. I try not to do regrets...but I will allow myself the one of never seeing Zeppelin live.