Winter visitors arriving

I did a 'walk with the warden' this morning at Cley Marshes and it was lovely to see the geese arriving for the winter as in my photo. Bernard Bishop has been the warden for more than forty years and is the third generation of his family to work at Cley Marshes. He's currently in the process of handing over to a new warden and now works just two days a week. It was so interesting to hear the history of the site. The area was an estuary up to the 1600s and ships sailed right up to Cley, which was once one of the busiest ports in England. The estuary silted up and the land was reclaimed.

The Norfolk Wildlife Trust was established in order to purchase the marshes in 1926 to be held 'in perpetuity as a bird breeding sanctuary.'  NWT was the first county wildlife trust and Cley marshes provided a blueprint for nature conservation across the country. 

Bernard remembers taking small groups of about 10 people at a time onto the marshes at the start of his career. With the building of the visitor centre in 2007 with lottery money and local donations, visitor numbers have now soared to over 100,000 each year. It was also interesting to hear about the on-going battle with the sea - the marshes are part fresh water and part bracken and flooding has been occurring more frequently in recent years. It was also fascinating to hear how the bird population has changed over the years and how once frequent visitors are now rare and vice versa. Not so good was to hear how local houses are now often owned as holiday homes which means that locals can't live there, and there's few shops if they do. He is such an interesting man and I might well do the walk again next year.