Monday, 27 January 2025

Biking Birder I January 27th 2010 Fore Wood RSPB Reserve and Football and Trawler Tales


27th January                     They call the wind Maria                               Paint Your Wagon

                My day was spent mostly cycling towards Fore Wood RSPB reserve, not that I was to get there easily!    Dungeness yesterday had left the year list on 119. Tree Sparrow [120] this morning as I passed the entrance to the reserve added another to that number. How did I miss them there yesterday? Here they were chirping away merrily atop the small house at the entrance to this magnificent RSPB reserve.

               The previous day at Dungeness had been the coldest day of the year so far, thanks to an east wind. Today though, now that I was heading west, the strong wind was from the west! Great, straight into my face. Maria is not what I was calling the wind.

               Cycling along Jury's Gap Road, west of Dungeness I came across large gravel pits with many duck and geese, Scotney Gravel Pits. I stopped to count them and noticed three Smew at the back. Now being a keen birder I had thought of Smew as one of my favourite birds. Indeed a drake being mostly white with a few black lines, a white crest and a black eye patch, is a very smart bird. Duty bound to phone Birdline and inform them to inform others, Steve Whitehouse, a Worcestershire birder of note, was on the other end of the line when I called to say there were three. Steve’s helpful comment was:

 “You are not looking hard enough. There are five!” 

              A male Smew achieved megastar status in the West Midlands when it took up residence back in the 80s at my old patch, Belvide Reservoir in Staffordshire. Arriving as a redhead, the supposed female showed itself at its first moult to be a male. It did not leave that first spring but stayed throughout the summer and all through the next year and the next. Indeed so famous was 'Sid the Smew', sweatshirts were made in his honour and sold to local birders. Sid eventually died and I remember finding his remains down a drain on the north shore.

              Into Rye and a warm hour spent in the library updating the blog. A beautiful small town with a castle like arched entrance, cobbled streets and attractive old houses.



              Onward towards Hastings, weather warming a little, I turned down a small country lane to avoid the town and go towards the next RSPB reserve on the itinerary to visit. Along this road, as the hills there got steeper, I stopped to ask for some water from a house. A wonderful gentleman answered the door. Invited in, John Short gave me a cup of tea and the much-needed water and then the story of his fascinating life. A trawler man from Rye, he had done National Service in the navy, going on HMS Sharpshooter and LCT0437 - a large landing craft, as well as having been a whaler in the Antarctic for a few years. His trawler was called Grace Emily [RX135] so many stories of sea fishing exploits from around the world. 




                A beautiful house with thirty-five acres of meadows and woodland looking towards Folkestone on a clear day, which today unfortunately was not. John gave me a photo of the trawler and showed me many more from his life. A really interesting man, lucky to meet him and yet another example of how wonderful people are.

               The bike had been all right up to now, yet the gale from the west had meant that I was cycling into the wind all day. North of Hastings now, I cycled down a long downhill section but on reaching the bottom there was nothing from the gears on the corresponding way up. The gear lever on the front right bike handlebar had broken and that meant that the bike was stuck in its highest gear. Great for downhill but impossible for me to cycle up a hill. Off I got and pushed, unable to get into the lower gears. The area I was cycling through now was hilly and so my time alternated between downhill rides and uphill walks.

               I got to Crowshurst late. Instead of being there at the expected one o'clock, it was now 4:20 p.m. and I eventually found Fore Wood RSPB reserve. A five-bar gate and a small RSPB sign denoting the entrance to a very muddy track through a quite large, mostly oak woodland.

Fore Wood RSPB Reserve



              A lovely couple, eighty six year old Jim Lawrence and his wife Kate, saw me arrive and asked who I was and what I was up to. They offered to look after the bike as I spent an hour in the descending gloom of the very muddy woods. No new birds for the year list but common birds such as Blue and Great Tits, Great Spotted and Green Woodpeckers.

              On returning to collect the bike, I was invited in by Jim and Kate for a bowl of rich veg' soup and toast. I did not refuse their kindness. I was frozen and very wet from the sweat of the cycling and pushing! It was then that this wonderful couple offered their settee for the night, also not refused. I had not been able to find a local B & B and, don't tell my mother but I had thought of sleeping on the railway platform at Battle, five miles or so up the road.

              It turned out that Jim had been an FA coach for a number of teams and had worked in the 1950's with the England team and other professionals at Lilleshall with Walter Winterbottom and Sir Stanley Rouse. Now luckily I knew something of the football of that time as I'd read about such things in my Dad's football annuals from the 1950s. Needless to say the four hours to bed time, luckily nice and early at 9:30 p.m. went quickly with chat, history lessons, brilliant photos and letters and even a World Cup Final ticket 1966 to hold! Kate and Jim went to bed and I stayed up a little longer to see the headlines on the news. A book on their bookshelf caught my eye - 'Soccer in the Blood' by Billy Walker. Now Billy Walker was a Villa player from 1920 to when he left nineteen years later to become manager of Sheffield Wednesday. Described by Eric Houghton as the greatest player he had ever played with, I just had to have a read. I finished reading it in the early morning, before Jim and Kate were up because I had fallen asleep with the book in my hand.















 


27.37 miles                                                             1197 feet elevation up   1039 feet down





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