Busy bird life of salt marshes fulfils my great expectations

THE SALTMARSHES and mudflats on the north bank of the Humber always seem to be deserted when I visit.

It’s rare that I meet anyone on the path leading down from Patrington Haven to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve at Welwick, the most extensive saltmarsh in the region.

Sure enough, once more I had the place to myself, which was perhaps to be expected on a drizzly October afternoon when the marsh’s bleak atmosphere reminded me of that scene where Dickens’s fearful character Magwitch startles Pip in Great Expectations.

Thankfully the bird life I’d come for was still visible.

A marsh harrier seemed surprised to encounter a human, and circled round as if taking another look.

In the distance I could hear the familiar cries of curlews, something I never take for granted given their decline in numbers over the past 20 years. And a little egret jumped wraith- like from a marsh and disappeared in the direction of Winestead Drain.

I could hear the whistling of teals in the distance, some wigeon were feeding in a muddy creek, and a chevron of what I took to be pink footed geese flitted across the mudflats of Sunk Island Sands heading in the direction of Spurn.

It’s the ducks and geese that have given this area national fame, being the birthplace of Britain’s national wildfowling organisation.

In the autumn of 1907, a Hull railway worker called Stanley Duncan was out shooting with friends near Patrington Haven when they took shelter in a ramshackle black hut. As rain hammered on the roof they indulged in a spot of ‘ crystal ball gazing’, reasoning that because conservation had become a buzzword with Edwardians a new attitude was required by wildfowlers if their sport was to survive bird protection laws.

Out of the black hut emerged the Wildfowlers Association of Great Britain and Ireland, which changed its name in 1981 to the British Association for Shooting and Conservation ( BASC).

But for Duncan at least the new attitude was slow to take effect. His diaries record that his bag from two days shooting on the Humber in 1911included one barn owl, three moorhens, agreyp lover, two green shanks and a kestrel.

I could find no trace of Duncan’s black hut on my visit, but apparently this stretch of the Humber shore is still shot over.

The Hull and East Riding Wildfowler’s Association shoots there under permit, the quarry being mallard, wigeon, teal, greylag geese and migratory pink footed geese. These species are considered to have sustainable numbers, and in the case of the pink footed geese there are currently said to be over 500,000 in the population that breeds in Greenland and Iceland and spends winters in the UK.

The word “wildfowl” is going out of fashion as a collective term for ducks, geese and swans.

Whisperthis quietly, but a little bird tells me that even the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, whichhas nine bigreserves in England visited by a million people every year, isthinkingof dropping “Wildfowl” fromits name.