Estuary

When weather conditions are right, we are favoured with stunning tangerine sunsets up on the Fylde coast, facing due west as we do across the expanse of Irish Sea, roughly in the direction of that other Blackpool (you didn't know that Dublin - or Dubhlinn in Gaelic - also means black pool?) 135 miles away as the sandpiper flies, which is just far enough as to be over the curve of the horizon, meaning that, at its going down, the sun appears to dip shimmering into the waters in between.

We also have an  estuary  just to the north of Blackpool, where the Wyre flows into the Irish sea, and where from its banks one can watch the river at sunset become a flaming ribbon under those same tangerine skies, as little sandpipers pitch their evening cries.

estuary at sunset

I've posted pieces about the Wyre Estuary on a few previous occasions and so I don't plan to cover that estuarine ground again. Here's a link to the earliest, from almost eight years ago, when I was relatively new to both the North West and the blogging game: Saltmarsh Blues Blog 

 

Instead I want to say a few words about those afore-mentioned sandpipers, and to leave you with a new poem. My big book of birds instructs me that there are twenty different varieties of sandpiper inhabiting the shorelines of estuaries, lakes and seas worldwide. What they all have in common is long legs for wading at the water's edge and long bills for probing into mud or sand for food, both sets of features allowing them to keep their compact bodies from getting wet. They are part of a larger group of shoreline birds known as 'waders' for obvious reasons (which comprises oystercatchers, plovers, snipe, curlews, godwits, knots, redshanks, dotterels, dunlins, phalaropes, ruffs, turnstones and whimbrels). 

Of the twenty varieties of sandpiper, whose adjectival qualifications include buff-breasted, green, marsh, pectoral, purple, semi-palmated, sharp-tailed, solitary, spotted, white-rumped and wood, it is the unpretentiously named common sandpiper that inhabits our north-western shorelines, and fittingly so.

solitary sandpiper?

Designated actitis hypoleucos, from the ancient Greek aktites (meaning coast-dweller) plus hupo (beneath) and leukos (white), it should come as no surprise that what distinguishes the common sandpiper is the pure white breast  beneath its brownish-grey upper body. It's a relatively small bird, only about eight inches long, and it spends its days in gregarious flocks combing the tideline for insects, molluscs, crustacea or worms. As it walks, its hind parts and tail bob up and down much like a wagtail's do. When it takes to the air (often in a flock) it flies low over the water on stiff, bowed and rapidly beating wings, almost skidding across the surface. In summer, flocks of common sandpipers often put on flying displays. When it calls, it pipes with a shrill, twee series of four or five notes. All in all, a rather lovely little bird.

I'll leave you with the poem, the title of which makes them sound like a notable local family, don't you think? Fylde gentry. Hambleton is on the shore of the Wyre estuary. The emission of raw sewage into Britain's rivers has increased by 87.6% in the last year and a half. Water companies have "transgressed with impunity" on no fewer than 375,000 occasions over that period. How long can this go on without causing irreparable harm to wildlife?

The Sandpipers of Hambleton

One with the mottling dusk they pipe in the creeping tide

that cools their feet while washing out those hieroglyphs 

which told the story of their foraging. Almost unseen now

the ceremonious bobbing in time with that kittywiper call.

Do they have souls? They seem to rejoice in the returning

of the waves which bring tomorrow's feed. Or might it be

relief that salt tang and seawater will dilute the offence of

raw sewage leaked into their estuary? If they suffer from

emotional wounds, don't let the trauma dull their whistled

shrill incantations to a higher avian power (for God surely

is made in bird's image). As dark brings silence once more

to Hambleton's shore, I reflect it is a thin line we all tread. 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Direction Seawards

Oh time out of joint! This week’s Saturday Blog appears on a Sunday. Blame chaos at Euston yesterday evening [trains delayed for three hours by a fatality on the line] and then No-Fi at the Inn…

 

“The river flows, it flows to the sea” as the Byrds’ Ballad [of Easy Rider] told it; “And wherever the river flows, that’s where I want to be.”

Rivers – givers of life, nurseries of civilisation and possibly the first great human highways; and if one went with the flow rather than beating against the tide, the direction was invariably downhill and seawards.

Millions have chosen to travel so, through the millennia: to migrate by water as a means of escape, as a search for a better life, in response to a spirit of adventure. Whether prompted by necessity or curiosity, this launching of oneself into the unknown was in many cases a brave and dangerous undertaking, an alliance of frailty with powerful natural forces, an act of faith, a pioneering sortie with wholly unpredictable results.

In the 18^th and early 19^th centuries migration was predominantly westwards. Impoverished farming families struggling to make a living from poor soil would risk everything for a new start in a better land. Thus it was that hundreds of men, women and children from Lancashire’s hills and dales would sell all they had to book passage by boat to the fabled New World. At a time when the Wyre River was still navigable by quite large boats, they would embark with a few belongings and provisions for a hazardous voyage and set sail from the banks of the Wyre – next stop the eastern seaboard of America if they were lucky.  

Today’s poem is my favourite from the half-dozen or so I wrote as part of the Walking On Wyre creative writing project last summer. It was prompted by seeing a stretch of the Wyre River at Garstang than put me in mind of Millais’ famous painting of drowned Ophelia - and the idea of transposing and transforming Hamlet and Ophelia from royal Denmark to rural Lancashire with a back-drop of unrequited love and emigration fell into place.

Garstang's Ophelia
In a twisting of the tumbling Wyre
inspirited by April showers,
between steep banks of cicely
smelling of aniseed and myrrh,
lies swollen Ophelia tangled in willow,
the river her bed, its ripples her pillow.

Romance brought low by poverty,
her melancholy prince, sad suitor,
set sail on Wyre tide, New Worlds to discover.
She wove forget-me-nots into a lover's favour
and cried hot tears to see him go,
quick with the child he'd never know.

Swallows skim now across her liquid grave,
wild ramson bows its head above the flow.
Her honeyed tresses look almost alive
in this rolling rinse of rusty peat water,
swirling in eddies - as if she's trying to break free
to follow her Hamlet down Wyre to the sea.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week, S :-)

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