AFON
Advent Calendar: Minsmere by Alexandra Hoadley
Welcome to our AFON Advent Calendar! Each day leading up to Christmas you will find a wonderful new post by a different member. This years theme is your favourite nature reserve; where do you go to escape from the world and connect with nature? Enjoy!
One day a week I volunteer at the RSPB reserve of Minsmere. Early mornings spent amongst swaying reeds with bearded tits pinging overhead or walking just ten minutes to reach the East Anglian coast have somehow become normal. The majority of my most memorable wildlife encounters have been here: starling murmurations over 40,000 strong – I had seen the pictures but wasn’t prepared for the noise as they glide and swoop as one overhead, the breeze in my face generated by over 80,000 wings. Otters, sadly as yet my one and only encounter, but still there were three – a mother and two full-grown cubs gambolling in the water. If I were to mention all I have seen at Minsmere this blog would become a list, but the thing for me about being anywhere wild is that even if I do not see what I hoped to, a day with nature is still a better day than that spent anywhere else: and Minsmere was where I first connected with nature. I have been coming here since I was two years old. My family regularly holidayed to Suffolk from London, and growing up I could more easily identify an avocet than most garden birds!
© Alexandra Hoadley
The number of different habitats is what makes Minsmere so unique for me. From the coast where whales have been sighted (not by me!) to deciduous woodland inhabited by treecreepers and woodpeckers, and acid grasslands developed specially for stone curlews. Dartford warblers appear suddenly out of moors of heath and heather where nightjars fly moth-like as light fades; and the sand banks burrowed into each year by breeding sand martins. Of course there is also the scrape and the reedbeds, which support perhaps the most famous of Minsmere’s cast: the avocets, marsh harriers, otters and bitterns.
© Alexandra Hoadley
I’m now coming up to a year of volunteering. For the first time I have been been able to see Minsmere intimately in all its seasons and moods, and as winter returns and brings with it the winter migrants of teal, wigeon and the occasional smew that were the first birds I became familiar with, I feel as if I am seeing old friends again.