136 In search of Hen Harriers at Wicken Fen - with Ajay Tegala
Suzy takes a late afternoon walk with conservationist and author Ajay Tegala at Wicken Fen Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire.
As they sit in a hide waiting to see Marsh and Hen Harriers coming in to roost, Ajay shares the awesome wildlife found there, from graceful dragonflies to the elusive bitterns and the enchanting dawn chorus of late spring.
He also explains the significance of this undrained prime fenland and the delicate balance of water management, habitat restoration, and wildlife monitoring required to sustain this exceptional habitat.
#136: Ajay Tegala
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Transcript
Suzy [introduction accompanied by music]: Welcome to The Casual Birder Podcast. I'm Suzy Buttress. As a Casual Birder, I take pleasure in watching the wild birds around me, wherever I am.
In my show, I share the joy of birding.
I tell you about the birds I've seen, speak with experts and enthusiasts, go on bird outings, and I share stories from birders around the world.
Suzy: Ajay Tegala is a wildlife presenter, author and conservationist. He worked as a ranger on Blakeney Point, the renowned bird reserve on the Norfolk coast, also famous for its seals, and is now at the national Trust's oldest nature reserve, Wicken Fen, near Cambridge. His role is in engagement and communication, promoting the important peatland restoration and nature recovery projects on this internationally important wetland.
Ajay has also appeared on television, including the BBC documentary Inside the Batcave and Springwatch.
On 1st January 2024, the start of a brand new birding year, I was returning home from a vacation in Norfolk with my husband.
We'd started our day at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Welney Wetlands Centre, and we stopped off at Wickhen Fen in Cambridgeshire in the early afternoon. Ajay had invited us to join him for a late afternoon watch in the hopes of seeing Hen Harriers roosting at the end of the day.
We started off our chat as we walked along the boardwalk through the reed beds and then settled in a hide to see what birds might appear.
[short music interlude]
[Location recording]
Suzy: Thanks ever so much for suggesting we come for this evening walk with you, our late afternoon walk with you at Wicken Fen. You've been working here for a while. Can you tell me a bit about it?
Ajay: Absolutely. So this is actually one of the oldest nature reserves in the country.
It's been protected since 1899 because of its unique species. And a lot of them are kind of small flies, beetles, those sorts of things tucked away. But we're a wetland, an important undrained fen, so there's very little undrained prime fenland left. So we're a fragment of that. We sort of call it a lost landscape, really.
And you can come here and experience this lovely quiet place and if you're lucky, might see some wetland birds as well.
Suzy: You're saying it's nice and quiet and I'm here and fully kitted out with my waterproof trousers and my parka. There's a lot of rustling going on, so apologies if you can hear that in the background, but we've had a very wet week and I've just come prepared.
When I was walking along here earlier, I saw possibly a Muntjac? I'm not sure.
It was quite a dark deer and quite low down. Oh, it's still there, I think.
Ajay: Oh, yes. It is a muntjac, I think.
Suzy: Yeah. So I can just see a back through the reeds. So you obviously have some sort of deer. Do you have the Chinese water deer here as well?
Ajay: Do you know, funnily enough, we don't.
We have lots of muntjacs, lots of roe deer, but strangely enough, I certainly haven't seen a Chinese water deer. They're not far away. I mean, you know, the Ouze wash isn't far, so I imagine it's only a matter of time before we see them. That's my prediction.
Suzy: Would they likely be damaging to the environment here?
Ajay: It's an interesting one because we have grazing livestock here and grazing is what we need to stop it getting overgrown and drying out. So things nibbling are good things. But that balance of too many deer and how that affects the rest of the ecosystem and whether it affects habitat of some of the nesting birds is something of concern. So it's something we're keeping an eye on. And data is important, if we can find out if there is an impact that's being had.
Suzy: After you. We're just going over a small bridge over the river or the drainage. What would you call that sort of rivulet?
Ajay: There's different names. We have drains, dikes and ditches. And loads of the big canals.
I would call that a drain, that one we've just crossed.
Suzy: So a drain would be something that was artificially created?
Ajay: Yes, yeah. So there are. There are lots and lots of long, straight waterways in the fens.
And although this is sort of undrained fen in the main, around the edge, there are some of these ditches and some of the old tracks as well are long and straight.
And the people in the village would have had little bits of land, little plots of land, that they would have come and cut the sedge and the reed and I suppose, hunted for eels and wildfowl living off the land. And that kind of rotational cutting of some of the reeds and the sedge sort of accidentally created an important diverse mosaic of habitats. And so now in our management, we kind of mimic that and we cut areas on rotation so it's never all cut at once, but it's not all left to go overgrown.
And that kind of difference of different subtle heights of vegetation attracts different wildlife and biodiversity. So that's how we look after the fen.
It's sort of a wild place, but actually there's a lot of management that goes on to keep it as a fen and not drying out or becoming a woodland.
Suzy: What is a fen?
Ajay: So it's groundwater fed wetland that's sort of generally wetter in the winter, might dry out in the summer.
So it's that sort of seasonal, differing level of wetness. But yeah, we've got peat here, so the sedge and the reed that sort of almost decays in the wet conditions, creates that peat underneath here. We're on this boardwalk, nice and dry, but you can see there you've got the dark peaty soil beneath us.
Suzy: Yeah, no, this boardwalk is fantastic to be able to just come and walk through the reeds and hear the birds. And I guess during the spring and summer you have many more insects around.
Ajay: Yeah, Dragonflies are probably our most famous insect because we've got perfect conditions. We've got over 20 different species of dragonflies recorded here and damselflies, so we're special for those. We were special in the past for more butterflies, but swallowtails have been extinct here for many years. So that's kind of one of those things that although we're special and unique, we're an island really.
And so we're trying to expand. Over the last 25 years we've grown the reserve in size and sort of restored some farmland back to natural landscape or as close as we can get to try and give more space to these species.
But yeah, certainly it's the place to come for dragonflies in the summer and lizards. Yeah, actually on these boards in the summer they bask in the sun, so you can often get really good views in July, August of lizards.
Suzy: And what would be your best bird species that you get here? I think one of the things we're most popular for is cuckoos because obviously cuckoos are declining species, but we have a stronghold here. They're very audible here, but often they're quite visible as well.
So Wicken’s a good place to come to listen and look for cuckoos. And it's always lovely when you see them wonderful birds.
And that's because obviously we have a large number of reed warblers nesting in the reeds alongside the ditches and the drains here.
Suzy: And reed warblers are the kind of host birds for cuckoos. They lay their eggs in the reed warblers nests.
Ajay: That's right, yes. Yeah. The ones here specialise in reed warbler egg parasitisation and a lot of studies have Been done here by a wonderful man, Professor Nick Davis, since, I think back in the 70s, for many decades. He studied cuckoos here and we've learned a lot about their behaviour and their playing of eggs in the reed warbler nests for. From studies done by Nick from the University of Cambridge here at Wickhen.
Suzy: Do you get bittens?
Ajay: Yes, they are one of my favourite birds, actually. A very elusive species.
(We'll head to the hive this way. Yeah.)
Ajay: We do have bittens in the winter and booming in the spring and breeding through the summer.
Suzy: Oh, fantastic. Definitely a bird that we've rarely heard, but gives you such a thrill when you do hear it.
And I've never seen one, so sounds like we need to come back during the spring or summer. Is the spring best time to see them?
Ajay: Yeah, to hear them. Kind of April and then see them when they're feeding young, actually. So a little bit later in the summer, maybe July. At Lakenheath Fen actually, they have a lot more bitterns than us. They're the place to go to see them.
Suzy: All right, excellent. So I'm going to stop now because we don't know if anyone else is. In the hide, so we don't disturb. Anyone, but I'll speak to you again in a little while.
[Inside the hide]
Suzy: So we've come into the boardwalk hide. It's quite late in the afternoon. Ajay has very kindly invited us out to see the hen harriers coming to roost. Can you tell us a little bit about hen harriers?
Ajay: Yeah, I say, you know, we're going to see them. We're hopefully going to see them. There's no guarantees.
But they're a bird that breeds in the uplands. Obviously they've faced a lot of persecution, so they're one of our rarer raptors. But for many years we've had a roosting population through the winter here. So in the winter, when they're not breeding, they come to places like Wicken and right in front of us here in these wet, reedy areas, it's the perfect place for them to hunker down for the night because they're protected from predators to a certain extent, because it's wet here, they'll roost on the ground, hidden in the vegetation.
So it's a great place for them to do that. But they're very picky about it being quiet and undisturbed, as you can understand, so they'll look for quiet places. And about this time they sometimes appear and sort of look for a spot to roost for the night and that's what we're hoping to spot.
Suzy: Will there be both male and female or do you tend to get males congregating in an area?
Ajay: We get both here. So every month we do a coordinated hen harrier roost count which is done in various places across the uk.
We've got some great volunteers that help us with that and I think we had, I think it was three males and two ringtails, which is either females or juveniles. It's hard to tell the difference between the two. So they're obviously grouped as ringtails and yeah, we've had both of them recorded here in the last few weeks.
Suzy: So we'll sit quietly, look out across this big field of grasses.
I thought I heard an owl in some crows in the background, which you're probably not picking up. Couple of black headed gulls flying over their white forewings, really showing up against the grey sky there.
Ajay: Often you do get the lovely colourful sunsets here. Not particularly colourful tonight, but even in these grey conditions, like you say, you see the white that bit clearer. Yeah.
Suzy: So I can imagine if there's a male hen harrier, which is a white bird with black wingtips. Is there black elsewhere on the bird?
Ajay: Sort of slate grey with white.
Suzy: Oh, that's right, yeah, yeah. And I noticed there's these white marker posts along the middle and around the edge.
Is that just to mark a trail or are they for any other reasons?
Ajay: The reason they're there is they mark the little plots that this fen is divided into and so they're strips of land and they're cut on a three year rotation. So you can see just in front of us there's some piles of cut vegetation that's come from one of the strips and the one beyond it will have been cut last year, the one beyond that two years ago. So they're for our management.
So we know where to cut each year. But sometimes they're perching posts for owls and even harriers have been known.
Suzy: I can imagine it being. Well, third post out.
Ajay: Yes, yeah. Indeed.
00:11:14
Suzy: [narration] The first raptors started to arrive. We were joined by another birder, Steve, who was also hoping to watch the harriers come into roost. As I was concerned about disturbing his evening watch, I explained that I was interviewing Ajay and Steve very kindly agreed to me continuing to record my chat.
Suzy: So is that it's dark bird that.
Ajay: Looks like a female Marsh?
Suzy: That's what I was going to ask you to get marsh harriers roosting here as well.
Ajay: Yeah, we get probably More marsh harriers than hen harriers. Yeah, we have marsh harriers all year round. They nest here and then in the winter we have hen harriers alongside them, basically.
Suzy: So there's a marsh harrier flying low over the field. It's got a dark body and white head or a pale head. So that would be female, maybe?
Ajay: Yeah, that looks like female type. Yeah. Chocolate brown colour.
Suzy: Yeah. I think there's three cormorants in the distance at the end of the field.
Ajay: Oh, yes.
Suzy: [narration] While we waited for more birds to appear, I asked Ajay about his book that was due to be published.
Ajay: So I've worked as a ranger at Wicken for five years, but I volunteered here as a teenager and I've spent a lot of time here over the years. It's a very, very special place to me.
And it's a place that's perhaps underrated, the fens, you know, sometimes people haven't even heard of them in other parts of the UK or they think they're flat and boring. But I've got a real passion for the beautiful landscapes and the birds and the other wildlife we have here.
So I've written this book which coincides with the 125th anniversary of the reserve in 2024. So it's a nice opportunity to talk about the last 125 years, but also my experiences here and my colleagues of the life of the rangers here, because we do a lot of the practical work, we do a lot of the monitoring, watching the wildlife, but also we've got the livestock as well, the Highland cattle and the Koniks.
So we've been sort of rewilding in some ways for 20 plus years. And all these years later, it's fascinating to see the impact they've had on the landscape. They've helped create fantastic habitat. Things have recolonised. We've got cranes nesting here now, which came back because we restored some land, made it suitable.
We're not prescriptive in what we do. We just kind of create the habitat and we'll let things come of their own accord as things move around and the cranes have colonised.
So, yeah, it's a place that I love and I'm basically sharing that love and a sort of an insight into what we do to look after the fen and why it's special throughout the different seasons.
Suzy: Is Wicken Fen unusual in the National Trust properties for the types of conservation that goes on here.
Ajay: Obviously, we're known for houses and gardens and the stately homes that side of things.
But the Trust has got a whole diversity of different nature reserves, from bits of coastline through to uplands, and, of course, here in the fen. But, yeah, we were the first nature reserve the National Trust acquired back in 1899. And, yeah, we're very special because we're less than 0.1% of the fens remain in their natural state before being drained or cultivated. And so this is one of just four fens in Cambridgeshire. So, yeah, it is unique in that respect.
And, yeah, it's just a wonderful place for people to come. Even if you don't like wildlife. I think people come here sometimes just to relax and unwind, to listen to the sound of the wind in the reeds. And I think that's really special.
Suzy: Absolutely. And it does make you appreciate the sky, strangely, because you can see a lot of the sky.
What's the purpose of the cutting that you do?
Ajay: Essentially, it's to stop the process of succession. We're no longer part of a vast wetland, we're a tiny fragment. And so, because the peat holds so much water, all of the drain land surrounding Wicken is much lower.
It's two metres lower. So we're a wetland, but we're on an island. We're higher than the surrounding land. So there's two things we need to do to keep it a wetland, and that's to add water in the winter to keep it wet, and also to stop that process of succession, because more woodland, more trees sucking water out. Although obviously woodland's an important habitat.
Fenland is really important, and wet peat sequesters carbon, so stopping it from becoming too vegetated, it’s disturbing that process of succession. It's intervening, but it's keeping it a fen, basically. It's artificially managing it to maintain that habitat, to therefore attract that diversity of wildlife.
Suzy: So in the old. In the olden days, that would have happened naturally, but because of, I guess, the growth of population around, the needs of the sort of developments needing water, that's more likely to drain the fen is it? Because of taking water away?
Ajay: Yeah, that's right. And we're one of the most rich areas for farming in the country because the. The soils are really good at growing a whole manner of crops, from potatoes to sand, salads and beetroot and a lot of leeks. You can smell those when they're being harvested.
So it's a really important agricultural area and water is very important for irrigating crops. And it's becoming scarcer, of course, in the summer. So it's funny, really. We're kind of two extremes. You know, you get really dry in the summer, but then in the winter, places like you've just been at Welney, and the washes there, you know, attract a lot of water that drains through.
So we're trying to bring that water on in the winter when it's plentiful, to keep the fen as wet as possible, to then last as long into the summer as we can, so that the wetland birds have that wet areas that they need.
Suzy: Do you have to liaise with, for example, the Environment Agency or the water management companies in terms of maintaining the water levels here?
Ajay: Absolutely, yeah. We liaise a lot with the Environment Agency and we have a license to abstract water from them because we take water out of the system between November and March and they give us a license to take that water out of. Essentially, it drains from the river Cam through the various waterways onto the fen.
And that's always an exciting time in the year when we turn the tap on, literally, and the water fills up and then you get the widgeon flocking in literally overnight. And really, it's a wonderful feeling because you're creating that habitat and you're seeing the birds come literally straight away, and it just shows how important water is.
Suzy: So is that managed by sort of sluice gates or something like that? There's obviously some control there that you can literally turn on and off.
Ajay: That's right. We've got a whole network of sluices to control flow of water through the reserve.
But because the land around has dropped through drainage, gravity does the job. And literally we're turning a tap with a key, and then it flows downhill out of the waterway into the land below.
And so some of this fluid former farmland that was potatoes, sugar beet, wheat, 20, 30 years ago is now becoming reed bed, really. And we've got bittens and cranes and Marsh Harriers using this land that may have been a field of daffodils at one point, turning it back to nature.
Suzy: And as part of your role, do you do a lot of outreach to sort of local schools?
Ajay: Absolutely, yeah. Outreach is a big part of what we do, but got a wonderful learning team, the education team, that have lots of retired teachers that volunteer their time and wonderful people from different backgrounds. And, yeah, it's so important. We have a lot of school groups come and we do things like pond dipping, which is always great fun, especially for people coming from perhaps urban environments that have not spent much time looking at pond life and some of the weird and wonderful creatures you get in there.
You kind of see these young minds and their eyes widen and that fascination and that's just so important that we give people those connections with nature and you can, you know, create future interests there. You know, naturalists are born at places like this.
Suzy: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned that you'd volunteered here many years ago. What started your interest in, in the natural world?
Ajay: Well, I grew up not so far from here, so another part of the fens of South Lincolnshire. And I think it started with feeding ducks on the river as a kid. And I loved identifying the different ducks and the grebes and the swans and the herons, seeing all these wetland birds. And I just loved spending time in wet places, you know, by water, watching birds primarily.
And then as I got a bit older, I realized that you can make a career out of working in conservation and doing that. You know, spending time in beautiful places, seeing beautiful wildlife, but also help you make a difference, because as a child you soon learn about the vulnerability and all the depressing things that we're so aware of.
And so to be able to do something, to, you know, play your own little part in doing something positive, helping manage land for nature is something that really appealed and that set me off on a journey. I did a degree in countryside management, lots of volunteering, seasonal jobs, and then eventually ended up being a full time ranger. Living the dream, essentially.
Suzy: And you've also done quite a lot of television work. How did you break into that?
Ajay: Well, we spoke just now about outreach and the importance of sharing connections with nature. And I think when you're a ranger, sometimes there's that tendency to almost resent people being around because you think, oh, you don't want to disturb any wildlife, you want to do the best you can for it.
But you soon realise that in order to get that support to help fund and to help look after these places, we need people to care about them. And you can't care about them if you haven't necessarily experienced them.
And that's, I think, where television came in, because we, I was working at Blakeney Point at the time and we had seal pups being born. It was a wildlife success story the growing population. And being cute and furry, TV wanted to come and film them.
And I was put up in front of the camera to talk about them. And yeah, I got into it and I realized it's a way of reaching a wider audience.
It’s wonderful. I love showing people around the fen when they come here, but not everybody can necessarily be here. But if you can reach them in other ways.
Podcasts, of course, is a wonderful way people can work it into their, you know, into their lives, into their busy urban lives. They can switch on this and hopefully then want to support it and get involved. And that's so important.
Suzy: So what time is the fen open till? Because there's still people walking around the reeds.
Ajay: It's dawn till dusk, really. Yeah. So the visitor center closes about half past four, but yeah, you can still walk out carefully if there's still a bit of light.
Suzy: Well, that's very good to know for future visits, especially for the early spring.
Ajay: You've got to come here May, June, probably May, for the dawn chorus. We spoke about cuckoos, the reed warblers, grasshopper warblers. We've got so many birds that sing at dawn and yeah, it's just a wonderful time of year. Everything becomes green and lush and full of birdsong.
Suzy: All right, Hope you're noting that down. Telling that to my husband.
So I heard earlier as I was walking around, I didn't actually see them, but I heard some water rail. I could hear widging and I think I could hear grey leg geese. Then you've also got like a big wader area, haven't you? We didn't make it down that far because I think it's a couple of miles there and back.
And I didn't really have time this visit. But what kind of waders do you get here?
Ajay: So we've got, we call it the Mere. We've got a wet area, sort of lots of standing water, lots of scrapes that we've put in over the years and have naturally formed as well. So wader wise, we sometimes get hundreds of lapwing.
You get big flocks lapwing and also golden plover. So they're the big ones in big numbers that you can see here. And as you mentioned, widgeon and shoveler, a whole lot of wildfowl, lots of quelad geese.
But one of the things I've been excited about lately is really only in the last five or six years, whooper swans have started roosting here. Now we've got more standing water and I did a count just before Christmas and we had well over 300, something like 370 whooper swans roosting just a mile away on some of our newer parts of land.
Suzy: And I think there was a reported sighting of Bewick swan as well.
Ajay: Yeah, there's a few around, there's not so many and they take a bit of searching for. But yeah, they have been been seen here.
Suzy: We were just at Welney and they were explaining how, you know, maybe 10, 11 years ago the Bewick swans were outnumbering the whooper swans and there's been such a massive change that now they've got almost nothing but whooper swans and that the Bewicks are...
Have we got something?
Ajay: Oh, got male hen harrier. Nice. You got it flying low from left to right.
Suzy: What a beautiful bird. It's black wingtips and sort of silver grey above and when it banks it just looks quite ghostly, doesn't it?
Ajay: Yeah, it does.
Suzy: Really low over the reeds, actually dipped down. I don't know whether it's still flying or if it landed. Oh, what a beautiful sight to see for first day of the new year.
But yeah, they were talking about the Bewick swans and how they're doing something they call short-stopping where they used to come across the North Sea to us but now because of global warming, they're finding what they need in Northern Europe.
00:24:11
Suzy [narration]: The other birders in the hide let us know that another male hen harrier had appeared.
Ajay: Oh, a ringtail next to it.
Suzy: It's interesting that you actually called it a ringtail there because the white rump really, really stands out, especially in this lighting with the bird itself being quite dark.
Ajay: The male hen harrier has got that sort of ghostliness to it and you almost don't see the white rump because the rest of it's silvery and pale. But then, yeah, you see the contrast of the ringtail and the white rump just stands out so much.
Suzy: As it banked round then and you could see the white rump again of the one that's possibly a female or maybe a first year male.
Ajay: Yeah, a juvenile slash female.
Suzy: Yeah. You have to be very confident and I guess have a good look up close to know exactly whether it's a young male or a female. So ringtail's the sort of catch all phrase.
And that one is that one a tricolour marsh harrier that was just coming in?
Ajay: Oh yes.
It's interesting that the sensitivity the harriers have to people being around, being New Year's Day. Lots of people here today and so there's been people walking around the boardwalk we've just seen and I think that's causing the harriers to focus more further away from us in the distance.
Suzy: Oh, so sometimes they would be closer.
Ajay: Sometimes they come right up towards the visitor center. Yeah, or right in front of us.
But you know, like I mentioned earlier, they're very sensitive to disturbance. They want to pick a quiet safe spot to roost. So they'll go for where there's least noise and least people around.
Nice lot of starlings. A few hundred there.
Suzy: Oh yeah. Wow.
Ajay: So that's another thing we're sort of known for as well as the harriers roosting.
There's not so much certainty and reliability but starling murmurations come and go here and often the reeds is the place where they roost overnight.
Suzy: These reeds in front of us aren't terribly high are they? What are they? Maybe a couple of feet? Is it a similar height all the way through?
Ajay: It's taller in denser areas of reed. There's a lot of sedge right in front of us. This is mostly sedge with a bit of reed poking through. And then the other side of the, you can just see the Tower hide there, we've got a large artificially created reed bed put in in the 90s and that's a lot thicker and denser reed.
And in there is where marsh harriers nest and the bitterns as well.
There's another group of starlings very distant leaves just about to see them very far away. Quite a lot of them. Shame they're so far. There's a few thousand there.
Suzy: I wonder if they're heading for that area you just spoke about.
Ajay: Yeah, I think they probably are. Yeah. They're going right towards the reed bed. Yeah.
Suzy: Do you get owls here?
Ajay: We do. We get a lot of people coming to see the short eared owls. That's over on Burwell Fen, that sort of rough grassland, relatively recently reclaimed land. But it's got a great population of voles and small mammals so varies year to year.
But this year we've had five or six short eared owls hunting there and it's wonderful when you see five or six in the air at the same time.
Suzy: So there's more and more little groups of starlings coming across. They're all flying is this. Which way are we facing here?
Ajay: We're sort of facing almost to the west.
Yeah. So we're probably facing into what would be the sunset then if there wasn't full cloud cover.
Suzy: Do you get tawny owls around here?
Ajay: Yes we do, yeah. On some of the higher land at the back of the reserve.
Yeah we get tawny owls, barn owls, often hunting alongside the roads or alongside the waterways and there's a couple of little owls that are often seen not far away.
Suzy: Oh really?
Ajay: So we do well for owl species. There's even the rarest of course and the hardest to see is the long eared owls. I don't think there's been any confirmed sightings for a couple of years, but I've got a wonderful memory about four years ago of just sort of running into one by accident.
It just appeared and it sort of looked me in the eye and yeah, they're one of my favourites. I've not seen many long eared owls.
Suzy: I've never seen one. That would be amazing.
Ajay: I think that's the nice thing about being a ranger.
You're just out and about and you're not necessarily looking for birds a lot of the time, but you sometimes just being in the right place for enough time, you just run into things. And yet I've had the odd water vole suddenly appear in front of me and you could go out and spend days looking for them, but it just, you know, sometimes you get those magic moments.
Suzy: Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned that you worked at Blakeney Point, you wrote a book. Was that about your year there?
Ajay: It was about multiple years there, but yeah, sort of the life again of a ranger in a remote place on the end of Blakeney Point. Because we lived out there, three of us, each summer in the old lifeboat house on the end of the shingle spit, surrounded by the harbour and the North Sea and sand dunes, salt marsh and shingle, various seabirds nesting, the sandwich terns, the little terns and then the seals, grey seals breeding in the winter.
And that was, yeah, something I did for five or six years and then a few years later it was locked down and you kind of think back and it was like, it was like a dream, you know, working and living this life, but so hard to explain the emotions and the. Just the lifestyle, the daily routine of living away from the mainland, having to do your shopping and make sure you don't forget anything because you can't get off for another week to get that milk that you forgot or whatever.
So, yeah, it was all about the life of rangers of many years, like Wicken Fen.
Blakeney's been a reserve, nature reserve for over a century, so there's sort of a long history, a long history of recording and migrant birds being seen. So there's always that excitement of what rarities are going to blow in when the winds are right in spring or autumn. And seeing a bluethroat for the first time was, yeah, definitely a birding highlight for me.
Suzy: Yes. There's another marsh harrier coming in.
Ajay: Yeah, that's a male, isn't it?
Suzy: Yeah, it's got the sort of coppery or bronzy colors on the wing.
Oh, yeah. When he's low down, you can really see the sort of different patches on it.
Ajay: Some of the males here are particularly pale. There's one that gets mistaken for a hen harrier in the spring quite often and it's interesting that you do get slightly different markings and it's nice when you can identify individuals and see them year on year. See they're on their territory again and you sort of get an insight into their life stories and of individual birds.
Suzy: So do marsh harriers stay here year round?
Ajay: They're here year round, but there's a greater number in the winter. We've had double figures roosting in the reed beds, so there'll be birds from elsewhere.
Suzy: So they're not territorial during the winter, then?
Ajay: There's certainly a larger number in a smaller area here in the winter. But then, yeah, as you get into the spring, the territories are held.
Suzy: And how do marsh harriers hold their territories? Is that sort of like aerial battles?
Ajay: Yeah, you see. And quite often you see the food passing, of course, when they're displaying. So it's about attracting the females and some of the males have two females, so you get a territory that might have two nests and of course you've got the two females incubating, but also one male. And I've seen that in other places as well.
Suzy: A lot of hard work for bringing the food in.
Ajay: Yeah, it is, yeah. But it's magic when you see those food passes, those aerial displays, interlocking talons and going upside down in the air.
Suzy: Oh, wow.
Ajay: Is that another harrier? Yes, male hen.
Suzy: I guess that might be a female with it. They're flying quite close together at times.
Ajay: Yeah, there's definitely some interaction between them going on.
Suzy: This one because it's closer, I think, on the male, it's a little bit easier to see the white rump.
Well, this has been absolutely magical, being able to see the male hen harriers coming into roost and wow, what a way to finish our first day of 2024.
What else have you got planned for this year, Ajay?
Ajay: I suppose the biggest thing is the. The book, the Wicken Fen book coming out in May. So that'll be a time of celebrating the fen's anniversary and celebrating Wicken Fen to as many people as will listen.
So that's my big plan for this year alongside just continuing to enjoy bird watching, rangering and talking to anybody who'll listen about the wonders of wildlife, really.
Suzy: I asked Ajay whether there were any aspects of the birding calendar that he looks forward to.
Ajay: Yeah, we get quite competitive, the rangers, to see the first swallow, to hear the first chiffchaff, the first reed warblers. So every bird as it arrives. We got blessed with so many migrants.
The cuckoo, I think hearing the first cuckoo, if you're the first one to hear a cuckoo, then that's always great.
And grasshopper warblers, snipe drumming, hobbies coming back, seeing those, catching dragonflies over the fen. Yeah, so there's always this wish list of all the things you want to hear and then pretty much one by one, they all happen. So, yeah, spring and summer is just wonderful for birds here.
Suzy: Well, thank you so much for bringing us out here.
It's been a fantastic way to start 2024.
[Back in the studio]
Suzy: What an absolutely wonderful first day of the year. Check out the episode notes for links to Ajay's books and website and you can hear more from Ajay on the upcoming podcast the Wild World of a new nature show from the National Trust Podcast Crew, launching in spring 2025, with the goal of being inspiring, intelligent and accessible. It will provide deep dives into topics featuring interesting collaborators who connect us emotionally with stories. So keep a watch out for that on your podcast app.
[Musical interlude]
Suzy: Friend of the show, Mel Shepherd Wells, who has appeared in a previous episode, recently mentioned on Blue sky that he'd seen a large number of marsh harriers coming in to roost at Wicken Fen. Over 30. He said it was probably his best ever harrier roost, sometimes as many as nine birds in the air together. And he also saw hen harriers, both male, although distant views and ringtails up close.
It's worth checking out Mel's feed on bluesky @corvidcrazychap. There's always a lot to learn.
Have you ever seen a marsh harrier or hen harrier?
Here's a few facts about both birds.
In the uk, the Marsh Harrier range is limited mostly to the south and east of England. They became extinct in the UK at the end of the 1800s and, after recolonising in the early part of the 20th century, numbers unfortunately fell again drastically in the early 70s, likely due to the use of the insecticide DDT, which causes eggshells to be too thin, reducing the chance of chick survival.
Over the past 50 years, since the banning of DDT, the population and their range has increased.
Marsh harriers have a distinctive long winged, long tail shape. Males often appear three- or four-coloured, being largely brown but with a pale cream head and breast, blue grey tail and outer wing and black wingtips. Females are predominantly brown but their plumage can be highly variable.
They can be seen hunting low over reed beds, their wings often held in a shallow V and flying so slowly they almost appear to be on the verge of stalling.
They often dip down to the reeds and fly up again as they hunt small birds, mammals, frogs and insects.
We've been lucky to see Marsh Harriers at quite a few of our favourite birding sites in Hampshire, Dorset, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.
The Hen Harrier is resident in much of the north of the uk. They prefer large open areas with low vegetation and nest on upland heather moorlands. As a winter visitor in the south they can be seen in coastal marshes and fenland as we saw at Wicken Fen.
They're much rarer than the marsh harrier and unfortunately are subject to persecution in their breeding areas.
Hen Harriers have a beautiful aerial courtship display which has earned it the nickname of Sky Dancer. As Ajay described to us. Male Hen harriers are predominantly silver grey, appearing very pale and have black wing tips. Females and juveniles are mainly brown but have a white rump leading to the catch-all term of ringtail, to describe birds seen at a distance when the age and sex cannot easily be distinguished.
Hen Harriers have some owl like characteristics such as having a good sense of hearing to help locate prey and soft-edged feathers to make them more quiet in flight.
My personal best sightings of Hen Harriers have been when we've taken winter holidays along the Norfolk Broads, but I've only ever seen them a handful of times so any sighting is absolutely thrilling.
[Musical interlude]
00:36:54
Suzy: The Casual Birder Podcast has a new online community away from the noise of other social media platforms. Many of the most active members from our Facebook group have joined and it's become a lovely space to share our bird experiences, get tips on all aspects of birding and engage with other supportive members who are excited to hear our stories.
But don't just take my word for it. Tim is a new member who sent this voicemail in to encourage you to join us.
Tim: Just a quick voice note to let you know what I love about the new The Casual Birder community on Circle.
It's a friendly place. Everyone obviously shares the same interest in casual birding and there like a lot of online forums you'll find a variety of spaces to discuss many different topics, all related to casual birding.
I recently posted some anecdotal observations on the interactions between red kites and buzzards and this prompted some other thoughts, observations and ideas from other members. A friendly and thoughtful discussion, all positive.
A few examples of the spaces open to members include the Joy of Birding, trip reports and travel and share your photos.
One of the big advantages of using this community on the Circle platform is that the posts are not subject to the social media algorithms that we've all become so familiar with. Your feed remains in the same order each time you log in, with new posts simply appearing at the top. So why don't you come and join us? There's plenty to read, discuss and look at. We're a friendly bunch and we'd love to see you there.
Suzy: Thanks so much Tim.
See the sign up link in the episode notes and enjoy a 7 day free trial of the community. I look forward to meeting you there.
[Blackbird trill]
Suzy: What birds have brought you joy recently? Tell me about your favourite ones by leaving me a voicemail or an email on my website casualbirder.com. You'll find the links in the episode notes.
My thanks to Randy Braun for designing. The artwork for the show.
The theme music is Short Sleeved Shirt by the Drones. Thanks to them for letting me use it. Check out their website@dronesmusic.net.
Thank you all for listening and I hope you'll join me again for another episode of The Casual Birder Podcast.