YORKSHIRE’S NATURE TRIANGLE
Some may say rhubarb to marketing a wildlife destination based on a shape, but there’s nothing crumbly about this area of East Yorkshire, says James Fair.
“So,” I asked Andrew Mason, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s heritage officer for Spurn Point, not quite having to shout to make myself heard over the 25-knot wind, “what’s it like to work at the end of the world?” “Bloody good fun,” he replied with a grin. End of the world might seem like an exaggeration, but Spurn Point is like nowhere I’ve ever been before. Heading south through East Yorkshire, the land is squished and squeezed by the North Sea on one side and the Humber River on the other until you reach this bizarre spit of land that juts some 5km into the river like the long, third digit of an aye-aye. From here there’s nowhere to go, unless you fancy a dip in the estuary’s turbid waters.
Add to that the frigid north-easterly that was whipping up white horses on the seaward side of the spit, and it really did feel like a point of no return.
THREE DEGREES
I’d been lured up to this forgotten corner of Britain by a novel marketing hook – the so-called Yorkshire Nature Triangle, which roughly encompasses Hull at one point, Flamborough Head at the notional apex and Spurn at the bottom right. It may notn have the name recognition of its cousin, thee Rhubarb Triangle, but it held the promise of creatures more charismatic than slugs and snails. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s business development manager Tom Marshall, who despite his job title is just an old-fashioned birder and naturalist, had said a jaunt around the three sides of the triangle would yield avocets, otters, puffins and other seabirds, marsh harriers, little terns and – at the southern extremity of Spurn – migrant songbirds in their thousands.
So far, despite the Arctic temperatures borne by that unseasonal north-easterly, Tom had largely kept his word, but Spurn Head proved his undoing. In spring and autumn, migrants drop in here to refuel on their way into or out of the British Isles, but in the late April of 2016 they were coming from the south and into an impossible headwind.
“Normally, you’d have redstarts, chiffchaffs and willow warblers on every bush,” Tom said apologetically, as if it was all his fault because he’d forgotten to ask the Met Office for a nice, gentle southerly.
It didn’t matter. Spurn is a remarkable landscape, and as Andrew Mason said, practically alive in its own right. Tides and winds take sand off the spit and then dump it back on again on a daily basis, and historical charts show how it has shifted its position over the centuries.
History also shows how it’s not just today’s migrants for whom Spurn Head has strategic importance. The port of Ravenspurgh – long since swallowed by the North Sea – is mentioned in some of Shakespeare’s plays as the landing
point for Henry Bolingbroke, later to become Henry IV, who was on his way to topple Richard II.
And at the end of the spit, you’ll find placements for the guns that guarded the narrow entrance to the estuary during World War II. Whoever controlled Spurn Head controlled access to the Humber and the ports upriver. Perhaps chiffchaffs are cleverer than we give them credit for.
AID FOR AVOCETS
I’d arrived at York two days earlier to be whisked off to North Cave Wetlands, a name that, to me, conjures up images of small, blind invertebrates crawling around on slimy, mouldencrusted rocks in semi-permanent darkness.
In fact, it’s a collection of lakes created by sand and gravel quarrying which have been turned into a nature reserve ( just outside the village of North Cave, hence its name), with the guiding hand of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and the zeal of local volunteers. It’s a breeding ground for ringed and little ringed plovers, lapwings, redshanks, common terns, and perhaps best of all, avocets.
With their fine monochrome plumage and delicate, upturned bills, avocets are one of Britain’s most beautiful waders, and they have staged a stunning comeback since the end of the 19th century when they were extinct here.
In the past 25 years alone, numbers have increased by a whopping 470 per cent to more than 1,700 pairs, and that’s down to sites like North Cave providing breeding habitat. Since they first arrived here in 2003, numbers have increased to more than 40 pairs in a good year.
But they need a lot of TLC, said warden Tony Martin. “Avocet chicks have a huge mortality rate,” he told me. “Adults are fairly long-lived, but they are shockingly bad parents. If there’s a predator around they’ll fly into the air squawking, and the chick will just get picked up.” As a result, Martin spends a lot of time devising new ways to give them a helping hand – electric fences that must be at least 1m high and atolls in the middle of the lakes with at least 20m of deep water between them and the shore. Both measures are necessary to keep marauding foxes out.
It merits repeating that this wetland would be lifeless fields had it not been for the aggregates business, though not everybody sees it that way. “You’ve got a great reserve here,” a visitor remarked to Tony one day. But pointing at the quarrying operations, he added, “But what the bloody hell were you thinking when you allowed them to do that?”
OF AMUR FALCONS AND ALBATROSSES
From North Cave we headed north-east via Nunburnholme – for its red kites – to Tophill Low Nature Reserve, which started life as a treatment works for Yorkshire Water but has slowly become important for the birds and other wildlife, such as otters, it attracts. Tophill hit the ‘birding’ headlines when a red-footed falcon with a rather ragged appearance stayed for a month in the early autumn of 2008.
Now, red-footed falcons, while not common in Britain, do turn up here most years, so the vagrant was left alone by hard core twitchers. But then a photo appeared on birding websites showing it had been misidentified and it was in fact an Amur falcon – a first record for the UK and a species normally not found any closer to our shores than Ethiopia.
“IN THE PAST 25 YEARS ALONE, AVOCET NUMBERS HAVE INCREASED BY A WHOPPING 470 PER CENT.”
“When that became public, everyone turned up, but by then the bird had shuffled off,” site manager Richard Hampshire told me, perhaps rather too gleefully.
The next morning we set off for Flamborough Head where we met Craig Thomas, chair of the local bird observatory. Overnight, wind speeds had picked up to something in excess of 25 knots, and hunkering down out of the worst of the weather – as best we could – we stared out at the broiling waters of the North Sea in the faint hope we might see something notable passing.
“The irony of sea-watching,” Craig bellowed between gusts, “is that the worse the weather, the more likely something interesting will turn up.” On that basis, there was a whole flock of great auks cruising past that morning!
Flamborough Head, Craig told me, is a hotspot for migrating birds because it sticks out some 13km into the North Sea, thus catching passing migrants in need of rest and refuelling. It’s great for watching seabirds such as gannets, puffins and guillemots, all of which nest at various sites on the headland, most notably the RSPB’s Bempton Cliffs reserve on the northern side.
Over the years the observatory has also recorded some less likely birds, including a black-browed albatross on three separate occasions. The first record dates back to October 1974 and was assumed to be the same albatross that spent every summer at Hermaness, in Shetland, from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, presumably on the misapprehension it was 60˚ south, not 60˚ north.
“Then an immature black-browed albatross flew past Flamborough on 5 October,” Craig told me laterl in an email, “the only day in the whole of October that I wasn’t here!” After an hour of seeing the odd gannet be eing swept along like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel l, we decided to call it a day before we needed treatment for frostbite, and in any case we were expected at RSPB Bempton Cliffs, on the north side of the headland. “Only a lunatic would go to Bempton today,” Craig remarked as we said goodbye. He wasn’t entire rely joking.
As anticipated, Bempton was blowy, so we didn’t linger. On any normal day, this is the best place in England to see nesting seabirds, and later in the season you can take a boat trip under the cliffs to watch the gannets plunge-diving for their dinner. But this wasn’t any normal day.
Tom had, rather rashly, arranged a snorkel safari for me at South Landing on Flamborough Head, but everyone was probably relieved as it became evident that not even a lunatic would go snorkelling in the North Sea on a day like this.
Instead, with the help of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s marine officer Bex Lynam, we carefully upturned rocks and stones to reveal the foreshore’s hidden jewels, including a five-bearded rockling, a dragon-like butterfish, beaded anemones, tiny ‘pie-crust’ brown crabs the size of vol-auvents and a 40cm-long paddleworm, an extraordinary beast I’d never even heard of, let alone seen before.
HORNSEA HARRIERS
From Flamborough, we headed south to Hornsea Mere, a large freshwater lake that is a popular birding site. But it’s real speciality, revealed to us by George Bennett, the warden of the Wassand Estate, is its breeding marsh harriers.
George took us down to the hide on the lake at the west end and we were soon watching one of its resident males. “The female has a nest just there,” said George pointing to a tree behind the male’s perch. “And I think he’s got another female over there,” he added pointing north.
We were hoping to see the fabled marsh harrier food pass. A male catches an unwary coot or moorhen (or frankly any bird or small mammal – they have a catholic diet of more than 30 species) and, while in flight, drops the prey item into the talons of the female who may be upside down, like a pair of avian trapeze artists on invisible wires. But there was no sign of the male rousing himself for a hunt, let alone catching something and performing mid-air stunts.
We left Hornsea and continued down the triangle to its southern extremity of Spurn Point and those non-existent migrants, before I was dropped off at England’s City of Culture 2017 to catch a train. I’d love to be able to say that I’d been to Hull and back, but in truth it was a total blast.
JAMES FAIR is environment editor of BBC Wildlife and loves all things connected with Yorkshire (the Dales, rhubarb and cricket especially) except for one thing – tea.