Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  I’m not sure quite what it is with river birds and bobbing. The grey wagtails — grey on their backs only, their breasts being a beautiful citrus yellow — would be wagging their tails relentlessly as they scampered along the shale beaches; and the sandpipers would race low above the surface of the water, their wings stiff and hooded like a miniature umbrella, making their piercing triple calls, and then would alight on a midstream rock and begin to teeter, bouncing as if their knees were spring-loaded, as if they were trying to keep time with the dipper bobbing on a rock near by. Perhaps living in this watery light, this world in constant motion, made them this way. Maybe by matching their movements to the roll of the waters they were camouflaging themselves, making themselves invisible to predators above, or prey below. To my eyes, their restlessness — especially that of the wagtails and sandpipers, whose backs were the precise colour of shale — rendered them far more visible than if they remained still for a moment. But to a hawk soaring above, maybe a still point in a shifting world would be more likely to draw its hunter’s eye.

  The sandpipers were migrants, and many of the wagtails would move to lower ground in the hard weather too, but the dippers were always there — the totem bird of these fast-moving waters. If you were first to see one isolated from its environment you wouldn’t think it a bird of the water at all; they are stumpy birds, reminiscent of an outsize robin, though a rich chestnut and mahogany, and with a white bib instead of an orange one. But in situ they could not look more at home, as they bob on the rocks by the rapids and dive repeatedly into the water to feed from the riverbed. I once took advantage of being with a friend who had a watch to time a dipper that was busily feeding. In half an hour it dived just over a hundred times, more than three times a minute. Not only was it catching invertebrate prey, such as caddis-fly larvae, but it was also regularly hopping out of the water with small fish in its beak, which it would then beat on its rock before swallowing whole. They had the river divided up between them and where territories met there would be constant skirmishes. I listened out for when they began to sing each year, and without fail they would begin just before New Year’s Day. It would have been optimistic to think of it as an early sign of spring, but it lifted the heart nonetheless.

  They were among the very first birds to nest, building in February and sitting before the end of March. I could see the reasons why the ravens nested early, even the long-tailed tits, but with the dippers I had no clue, and I could only assume it was something to do with the inscrutable life cycles of their underwater prey. At least they built dome nests, like the tits, that would help protect eggs and young from frosts. The dippers liked their nests to be directly over the water; their favourite sites, occupied year after year, were under the bridges, or rather culverts, where streams met the river, but there were not quite enough of these to go round. One winter I was able to watch from the footbridge as the resident pair collected moss and began to build their nest at the very tip of an overhanging beech bough that stretched far out across the river. They completed the nest and had begun to line it, but I could see that they had made an error of judgement: the nest was only about five feet or so above the water’s surface, and the thaw in the mountains had not yet come. A few days later when I returned, the nest was underwater, and when the waters fell, the nest had been washed away. They were determined, though; as soon as the flood waters had abated, they started over in exactly the same place.

  The stream came racing down the bank and into the river over ten or fifteen yards of bare rock, not quite steeply enough to be a waterfall. Wading into the culvert was like entering a tunnel, or a cave. It was a concrete pipe about three yards across and ten yards long, perfectly round save for a ledge halfway up both sides that stretched for its full length. Midway along this ledge were the dipper nests. There were four or five on each side, the newly built one a still-green mossy football, the older ones faded brown and progressively more and more disintegrated. On the remains of one of the old nests the wagtails had built a home of their own. As I reached the new nest I slipped my fingers in through the entrance hole to feel if laying had begun, and as I did so something dark and massive came hurtling through the tunnel towards me. In the confined space its head seemed as broad as a shovel, its whiskers like the bristles of a broom, and its tail as thick as my arm. Its back rippled and rolled, as if a wave ran through it. It splashed through the water by me, just a foot away, then slithered down the rocks to disappear into the river. A dog otter, far bigger than any of those I had seen in Scotland. I don’t know what induced this animal to run towards me rather than away from me; if it had turned and slipped upstream I would probably never have seen it, much as I will undoubtedly have missed other otters that have seen or heard or scented me first. I can only assume that we had surprised each other equally, at exactly the same moment, and it had to get past me to reach the ultimate safety of the deep water that lay beyond me.

  This was a different experience to seeing otters on an island beach in Scotland; river otters are supremely secretive, and their territories cover a huge range. The habitat here was certainly right for them, and the population of my river was probably as good as anywhere. If there was a protracted dry spell in the summer I would always head down to my nearest stretch of the river. This was a perfect territory for otters, very secluded and heavily wooded on both banks. On my side of the river the bank was vertical for the first eight or ten feet, and it was only when the water levels were at their very lowest that I could get below this. The shrunken river at this time would expose little coves of grey sand, a highway for anything making its way along the riverside. Without fail I would find otter prints in every stretch of sand, rounded pads compared to the more spidery trail of the mink. In fact, there would always be the trail of more than one otter: a bitch and her accompanying young. Like the snow in winter, the drought gave me a momentary glimpse into a hidden world. There was a conservation officer for otters responsible for the river here; he tried to monitor numbers by recording signs such as spraints, droppings left on prominent boulders as territorial markers, and advising landowners on how to make an otter-friendly habitat on the bankside. After three years in post he had decided to take a busman’s holiday to Scotland, for he had yet to see an otter in the wild. I mentioned my sighting of the dog otter to the doctor at the field centre the next time I saw him, and he told me that seeing otters on the river here was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I asked him how many times he had seen one here. Twice, he said.

  My landlord told me an extraordinary story about otters living on this river, dating back around a hundred years. One of the tenant farmers had apparently turned up at the door of the big house in a state of some agitation. Come quick, m’lud, he had said when he had caught his breath, and you’d better bring your gun. The otters are killing my sheep. And it was true: the otters were indeed killing his sheep, in a fashion. A pair of cubs had constructed themselves a mudslide on the riverbank, and they were evidently having such fun chasing each other down the slide and splashing into the water that they decided to spread the joy. They began to bound around the riverside field and round up the sheep as though they were sheepdog puppies, and drive them one by one on to the slide and into the river. It is hard not to laugh at the thought of a long line of sodden, bleating sheep, bobbing downriver towards the sea, but I can understand that the farmer might not have found it quite so entertaining. History does not relate whether the landowner did in fact bring his gun, or use it, but something tells me this was not a scenario that led to a happy ending for the otter cubs.

  In the same way that I surveyed nesting birds in the woods each spring, I conducted an annual survey of the river birds too. This was no gentle stroll along a riverside path — as there was no path. It entailed scrambling along vertiginous banks, clambering over fallen tree trunks, leaping over gullies or sometimes from boulder to boulder at the water’s edge, climbing barbed-wire fences and picking a way through banks of nettles. The section of river I cov
ered was only four miles or so long but it took me all day to traverse. The first mile was the heaviest going of all, the banks an overgrown jumble of boulders, the river rocky and racing. Then the river twisted and turned for a mile or two, all shifting shoals and islands in pale grey. After that it became heavily wooded to both sides; this was the part of the river closest to my cottage, which I might visit briefly on an idle day, and was one of its most secluded parts, an area never troubled by grazing sheep or cattle. The final stretch was more open and easy to negotiate; this was familiar ground, a part of the route I would always take when walking to the village, and I would finish the survey at the same spot where I always paused when on a shopping trip: a big shingly island, wide and sunny and the perfect place to end the day with a swim if the weather allowed.

  Of all the birds on the river, the most visible was the goosander. It is hard to imagine now that these were relatively recent arrivals; they took over the rivers of Wales only in the 1970s, their range spreading rapidly from the north. These are sawbill ducks; their long red bills are serrated for catching hold of slippery fish and look as if they are toothed, and with their long flexible necks they have an almost reptilian appearance. In theory they would come to the river to breed, and in the winter head to the lakes and estuaries of the lowlands, but in my experience a few would stay on until October or even November, and the first arrivals for the new season would turn up as early as December, so they were never really absent. There were far fewer in the late autumn and early winter, though, their place as the main threat to the fish supply being taken by the most prominent winter visitor, the cormorant. Here were birds that looked even more like reptiles than the goosanders, especially when actively fishing with their whole bodies submerged and just their black necks and yellow bills protruding from the flood water. It was strange to see birds that I had always thought of as seabirds so far inland, but of course to them, seawater or freshwater, a fish is a fish. Herons lurked on the banks too, patiently awaiting the unwary. A walk to the river at any time of year would always turn up at least a couple of herons. They would yelp and flush awkwardly when surprised, apparently struggling to get aloft on their huge wings. They looked too heavy to fly with ease, but it was an illusion; they were always there fishing in summer, even though the nearest heronry that I knew of was at least fifteen miles away. Sawbills, cormorants and herons: the most antediluvian of birds. Seeing them all together through the mists that clung to the river in winter felt like stepping back in time, like watching dinosaurs.

  The male and female goosanders could be different species; they look totally dissimilar, and have quite different life cycles. The males were brief visitors to the river; they would arrive in the winter or early spring, remaining only for the period of courtship and mating, and then they would be gone again, leaving the females to do all the work alone. The males seemed to just vanish from the river, and indeed from the whole country. For a long time it remained a mystery where they hid themselves all summer long, until they were finally discovered far, far away on the northern coasts of Norway, hiding out the moult in the deep fjords. They were much larger than the females, with big metallic-green heads and their bodies a white so pristine it was almost startling, like a shelduck out on an estuary amid the hordes of dun-coloured winter waders.

  The little redheads, as the females are known, are much more finely built, their heads rufous and shaggy-crested, their bodies a delicate grey rather than white. They are shy birds, and would hear me coming along the riverbank and flush long before the mallards, flying fast on whistling wings. But once their eggs had hatched in their hidden tree-hole nests, the young would leave almost at once and follow their mother to the river, and then of course they couldn’t flush without abandoning their young. The mother bird would be perpetually alert; as soon as she saw or heard me coming down the riverbank she would start swimming downstream repeatedly glancing back over her shoulder. The chicks would jump on to her back to hitch a free ride, or at least as many of them as could fit, for she would often have over ten chicks in tow. If she was not managing to increase the distance between me and her young she would suddenly switch to a new gear, flapping her wings and running through the water, churning up the river behind her like she had an outboard motor. And her brood of ducklings would race along behind her, trying to keep up, all leaving their own miniature wake in their trail, all vying to get a chance to hop up on to the safety of her back. Their tiny bodies would rise from the water as they ran, like miniature hovercraft.

  Family parties would sometimes team up, and goosanders are known for having crèches, where one adult female will look after the young of another. A single female has been seen with as many as sixty young alongside her. The most I ever saw together on the river here was thirty, and that was impressive enough. As the young grew and lost their infant down, they would all take on the appearance of females, and they would remain with their mother, or their carer, until they were the same size as her and effectively indistinguishable in appearance. Only the behaviour of the female in charge would give her away. She would still be the one who led the escape downriver as soon as she heard me coming along the riverbank. It may seem odd that the quite different-looking male goosanders should start their lives resembling the females, but for waterfowl this made sense, as it made the vulnerable flightless young less visible to predators. Many of them, in their summer moult, pass through an eclipse plumage where the drakes look just like the ducks. It is as if the female’s plumage is the default setting, and the male’s finery a bolt-on extra.

  Late spring, and the young birds were all leaving their nests. On a stone at the water’s edge a kingfisher was perched, its head tipped back and its beak pointing upwards like a bittern hiding in the reeds, as if it were trying to look inconspicuous, something it was signally failing to achieve. As I drew nearer I kept expecting it to fly, but it never did; instead it fell off its stone face first into the water. It spread out its wings and sculled itself around in a semicircle until it reached its stone again, then clambered up and stood there dripping. Although I couldn’t tell from the plumage, I knew this was a juvenile; the adults have red legs, while the young birds’ legs are still black. I presumed that it had left the nesting burrow before it could fly and was waiting to be fed, which meant the burrow must be close indeed. Below the fringe of trees the bank dropped vertically the last few feet down to the water, which made it difficult to inspect without wading out into the river and looking back.

  The kingfisher is really a bird of slow-moving lowland waterways, and by rights should have been on a list of absent friends, alongside birds such as swans and moorhens, conspicuous by their total absence. There was a long-established nesting site down by the village, where the river widened considerably and so had a more consistent depth, and this was supposedly as far upriver as the kingfishers came. But they were always to be seen on my stretch of the river too. They would return in February, and I would hear them before I saw them; that characteristic chikeee call. Then the bird would flash by in a jolt of impossible neon: cobalt blue and aquamarine, with an amber breast, the jewel of the river. The village birds would always nest on the same stretch of bank, for year after year, but it became clear to me that on my stretch of river the local birds would try different locations from one year to the next. It was surprisingly hard to locate their burrows on such heavily vegetated banks, though, and often they would elude me entirely.

  The river kept its secrets well; it took time to unravel its mysteries. Over the course of my annual surveys I found two new breeding species for the county. It seemed unlikely that things could be overlooked in a country where every storm-driven Siberian warbler, every obscure wind-blown American sandpiper, seems to have been logged and photographed almost before it has made landfall, but perhaps it was not really so extraordinary. Perhaps it was just the nature of the place in which I had found myself: an obscure corner of the least densely populated region in Britain apart from the Scottish Highlands. />
  I was surprised the first time I flushed a pair of mandarin ducks from the river. These are not native birds; I knew that escapees from wildfowl collections had gone feral and set up successful colonies in the Home Counties, but it was a long, long way from there to the Cambrian Mountains. The male bird is extravagantly, almost implausibly, exotic-looking, with multicoloured plumes and crests and whiskers and sails. They are native to China, and they look it, but in fact they are under threat there, and their hope now lies in feral colonies in Europe. There had only been a handful of stray sightings in Wales, and I assumed that mine had been a one-off — a couple of wanderers passing through — but not at all. I began to see them every time I visited the same short stretch of the river. I couldn’t understand why they had chosen that specific location; these are forest ducks, and this was certainly not the most heavily wooded part of the river. There was not just the one pair either; I would often see five or six birds together on the bank, or racing through the trees. They were small, agile ducks, adept at twisting and turning as they flew at speed between the tree trunks.

  It was right at the same place on the river where I had come across the flightless kingfisher that I flushed a female mandarin. They are overshadowed by their garish mates but are actually rather pretty in an understated way, marbled with a pale blue-grey, and with a distinctive white spectacle around each eye. The bird didn’t take to the air but started calling in distress and splashing in circles midstream as if injured, making a tremendous din, trying to draw me on — a river bird’s version of the plover’s distraction display. It had to mean there were newborn young with her, but they were hiding. The bottom of the bank here had been undercut by the waters, and I lay down and peered over the edge. I clung to a branch and leaned out as far as I could, but the chicks must have been tucked right under the overhang. The mother bird was getting more and more distressed, so eventually I left her and carried on downriver, frustrated.