17th March 2010
Messing About on The River [Josh Macrae]
In the morning I cycled to the nearby village of Blue Anchor and studied the rocks along the beach there.
Fossils & Geology of Blue Anchor
The cliff had a fascinating major change in colour and rock bedding direction, from a clay-like brown, soft rock to a harder grey cliff with peachy quartzite streaks. The latter were outcrops of Pink Gypsum, Calcium sulphate.
Eventually I arrived at the next spot where a year tick has been reported, Surf Scoter. Out from the shoreline at Stolford, with the Hinckley Point Nuclear Power Station to my left, I searched for a flock of scoter. Far out I could see a row of black dots. The dots in question probably included the Surf Scoter. Only a few ducks were out there. One at least was definitely a Common Scoter. I saw it rise in the water to give itself a shake and so it revealed its wings. The other ducks maybe were other scoter species but without a telescope I could not get the detail on them that I needed to get in order to be able to count the rare duck.
As I bird here, I watched a canoeist approaching from across the expansive bay. He calls out to me and I slosh through the mud to ask what he wants. Looking a sort of interesting character, with long dreadlocks and beads, he tells me his name, Patrick and tells me that he is lost. It turned out that Patrick had canoed down from Chepstow, from the other side of The Severn, using just a road atlas for navigation, which was resting on his lap and was heading for Taunton but he had missed the entrance to the River Parrot. I pointed him in the right direction for Burnham; a place he had canoed past hours ago to get to where he was. I do so hope that Patrick from Bridport made it!
I spent the night camped up in a wood beside a busy main road. The dawn chorus, lovely at 5:00 a.m. gave up as the traffic numbers rose as the morning progressed.
27.6 miles
1,161 feet up 1,404 feet down
I did here from Patrick, the canoeist, almost a month later with a comment left on my blog . . .
stayed that night at Burnham-on-Sea. Got stuck most of the next day surround by ducks on the mud estuary- following tide rocketed the craft up the parrot... got picked up near Taunton as it started to rain. phew!
will b getting myself a pair of binoculars
regards Patrick xxx
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