Biking Birder I 3rd February 2010
Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea Theme Paul
Sawtell
A brighter day and a cycle along the coastal road, which followed the long, extensive shingle beach west out of Brighton. A section of the shingle had a number of roosting waders at the top and scanning through them I found a number of Sanderling [123], seven of them, which were new for the Green Year list. Also there were three hundred plus Dunlin, fifty six Ringed Plover and thirty two Turnstone; quite a nice, tightly packed wader roost, always a delight to see.
Just before Worthing, I saw a
party of Primary aged school children armed with bin liners picking up all the
rubbish from off the beach in the harbour there. Going over I chatted with the
teachers and students. It turned out that they were year five children from
Shoreham College. They all wanted to have their photographs taken by their
teachers with the famous Barnaby Bear and my rainforest frog, Sid!
Sadly, they had filled over five large black bin bags over such a small stretch of beach! Plastic pollution to make a plastic soup of oceans in the future.
Now
I was not carrying Blue Peter badges, though they all deserved one for their
efforts. Instead I let them choose an RSPB bird badge each. Thirty badges
given, the possibility of thirty future birders if not ecologists and
conservationists.
Now speaking of the wonderful
RSPB enamel bird and wildlife badges, it amazes me that people now obsessively collect
them. Some rare badges can go for over £100 on eBay! I remembered as I gave
them to the children how, whilst shaking a RSPB robin collecting can on
Stourbridge High Street one day, a man in a wheelchair went through the whole
of my badge tray looking for certain bird species. He had with him a tick list
of the bird badges he required for his collection and was thrilled to find a Raven.
Nowadays, with my close friends,
The Birding Clams, we always buy Jason's (yes, he is back birding after those
years of lapsing due to my flushing of the Red-breasted Goose!) little son Jack
an RSPB badge whenever we see a tray of them. That may be in a cafe, a petrol
station or at a RSPB reserve. Jack loves them and I know of a growing number of
adult birders who obsess over their collection.
Into Shoreham I cycled to the next RSPB Reserve, the Adur Estuary. Now you would not know on initial views that this was a reserve. Well maybe you would as there was a small RSPB bird identifying board on the main road away from Shoreham. The reserve had an expanse of estuarine mud with fringes of saltmarsh.
What made the reserve really unusual was the number of exotically shaped houseboats of all unusual sizes along the south side. Beside one of them, beside an incredible houseboat, I met Hamish, a brilliantly creative owner of a few houseboats overlooking the reserve. Creative man? Well one houseboat of his was a mixture of an old fire engine and a wooden boat. Another was a converted coach atop a barge, with wonderful submarine - type windows (hence the reference to Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea) and a squircle roof - looks like a square one way, a circle the other. This houseboat had a rover car sticking out of one side and a porthole on the other side was an old washing machine!
Another boat of his had a Robin Reliant ‘Del-boy’
car and an old caravan side amongst the conglomeration of pieces on view within
the hull. Inside the nearest houseboat, Hamish having invited me aboard, I
found an amazing collection of skulls and mummified remains, including a cat
and a Fox. Numerous mummified pigeons were hanging from the ceiling. The reason
for such an odd collection was that Hamish had a friend who worked at a nearby
cement works and these creatures had fallen into the cement, died and become
mummified through desiccation.
Hamish was a fabulous man and great to talk too. One of the highlights of the trip so far indeed, fascinating to chat with as we shared a coffee and dunked biscuits.
Once outside once more, with the tide coming in, sizeable number of birds were coming into roost. I stood on the lovely wooden foot bridge and counted them as they arrived; one Little Egret, twenty seven Redshank, over sixty Teal, two Mallard, one Little Grebe, one Curlew, seven Grey Plover, eight Snipe, three Dunlin, five Bar-tailed Godwits and a number of gulls.
Into the local library I went next and found a fabulous collection of ornithological books. Shelf after shelf of incredible numbers of fantastic bird books, dozens of that most famous of bird book publisher books, Poyers, it turned out that a local birder had died and left his collection to the library. I spent a good couple of hours blogging and reading with heavy rain falling outside.
Back on the bike once more, after all the
blogging and reading, I found that it was raining hard and as I had spent so
long chatting with Hamish and inside the library it was by now getting quite
late in the afternoon and dusk was approaching fast. The ride to Arundel was
tough and wet as the rain persisted.
On reaching the final downhill stretch, with
the distant lights highlighting the famous Arundel Castle just visible in the
murk, I went into a police station to ask for directions for the local Arundel Youth
Hostel. Great to be told that it was about two miles out of town and back along
the road I had just cycled down. It did not help that the front tyre had a
puncture about a mile before the hostel and I had to walk along very dark
country lanes pushing the bike!
The
Youth Hostel though was a wonderful, warm, large old building in its own
grounds; well worth the effort of finding it. Almost empty too, with just a
family to chat away the evening with in an extremely comfortable lounge.
Sadly now closed as a youth hostel, as so many YHA hostels are! This website gives a few details of when it closed and of the building's history.
26.23 miles
662 feet elevation up 696 feet down
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