Look!!!

It is amazing what things can turn in the most incongruous of places. This is statement which I am often given to ponder, something which I have done more than once on the pages of this blog. The prompt on this occasion was a bird, silhouetted against a softly glowing dusk clouds. Some context. The place was Leigh Community Centre this evening, as I waited outside to collect my better half and her plethora of boxes from a craft fayre she was selling at (as Lola Swain Designs). The bird, in long-billed, distinctly heavy-chested, head up profile, was a woodcock, flying arrow straight over the roof, by chance as I happened to look up. Some further context. Leigh-on-Sea is town comprising part of the sprawling conurbation of Southend-on-Sea that smothers so much of the northern bank of the widening Thames Estuary. The woodcock is a wading bird, but one of the woods, rather than the marsh and one which is elusive in its crepuscular habits and cryptic plumage. Leigh town on a Sunday afternoon and this bird of the woods definitely do not normally go together.

It is about now that UK woodcock numbers increase from breeding pairs to potently more than a million individuals with migrant arriving for the winter from continental Europe. These birds have previous. A few years back during a late-winter cold-snap one pitched up in my parents, snow-laden back garden, not two-miles from the above and within the same urban sprawl. It stayed there all day, if not huddled among the shrubs by the fence, then happily venturing into the open, probing for worms beneath the white. My brother Chris was on hand to capture the occasion for prosperity.

A Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) in a snowy suburban garden. Picture – Chris Gardner.

This was in a place called Hadleigh, my childhood home. Thoughts of unexpected woodcock sightings put me in mind of other oddities, a stone’s throw, as it happens from that once snowy backyard. Walking across the car park of the local library the buzz of a passing insect caught my geeky eye on its way to dinking itself onto a parking bay beside me. It was a water-scorpion, a true bug whose raptorial forelimbs, adept for the grasping of aquatic prey, and needle-straight breathing tube on the tip of its abdomen are distinctly better suited to life as an ambush predator in some weedy pond than a piece of concrete in the middle of town. It was hasitly collected and taken back for the picture you now see below.

The most bizarre encounter however, took place once, as I drove along the busy A13, just a few hundred metres along the road from by library and home. The eye of a naturalist is always alert to the anomalous. Thus the bird flying parallel with the road as I pulled away from lights was soon identified as something other than the expected pigeon or starling. I was definitely not expecting it to be that super-secretive, squealer of reed-bed, a water rail!

A Water-scorpion (Nepa cinerea) collected in a library car park.