Dingyness

The day started beautifully and after a bit we decided to go to Dungeness bird reserve. By the time I'd made coffee and sliced up some bread the fog was rolling in. Nonchalantly did I say it would soon 'blow off'.

It's an hour's drive to Dungy and the road gets flatter and bleaker as it heads out over Romney Marsh in its 'restrained palette' of winter colours. And what had seemed calm back at base camp was now a moderate to strong breeze blowing dreich from the foggy low cloud.

It was thoroughly miserable but this Dickensian weather suited Dungeness with its desert of shingle, nuclear power plant and weird wooden houses and decaying boats all planted on a stone carpet that ends suddenly in a fierce sea and lonely sky.

We yomped around the reserve stopping in the cold hides.  Hundreds of cormorants hung in the bushes that poke up above the aquifer-fed gravel ponds, teal and wigeon whistled like so many kettles, shovellers grouped tight and then flew on as the marsh harriers gnawed their way into the wind, quartering reed beds for the sick and dying.

The highlight was a male Smew that flew into view and splashed down. A wondrous concoction of puffy and brilliant whites he dived vigourously and disappeared into the water beneath overhanging blackthorns. We think we saw hit mate earlier on one of those 'It-doesn't-look-like-anything-else' identifications that sets us well towards the bottom of the harsh birder hierarchy.

The wind was cold and damp and it looked a miserable day to be a duck. Many people had been drawn by a sighting of a long-eared-owl -'by the dipping pond', if you will - but we couldn't make it out in the tangle of willow and bobbing heads of gorse. The reeds were lovely - two different sizes of bullrush/mace and the Norfolks in their finery. It was too windy and cold for the Bearded Tits which we have seen before, with their strange pinging call.

We got back in the car and bought six plaice for five quid and smoked haddock and herrings at the fish shop and took the long road for home.

(A couple of extras of the road to the reserve and the water tower rising up from the shingle and blackthorn in the last brightness we saw.)