Fine Time

We’ve just got home after a lovely 3-night break at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre, we managed to book ‘Chiffchaff’, the same shepherd’s hut where we stayed mid-heatwave in July. It’s such a cosy retreat. 

There’s Jamie in one of 13 hides available across the site. It was rather fun and because it was a rainy day we had a lot of the hides to ourselves. We like watching and listening to birds but aren’t very good at recognising them so tend to refer to most of them as ‘gull’, ‘goose’ or ‘duck’ - often just ‘bird’ which isn’t very helpful really! Here are a few photos ( I’ve added names mostly based on Google Lens so feel free to correct.)

Spoonbills

Northern Lapwing

I’d recognise a lapwing as my junior school’s playing field used to be covered in them - sad to think they’re now on the ‘red list’.

Pied Avocets

Tufted Duck

There wasn’t a lot of colour on show because it’s not mating season - I expect that’s why the tufted duck looks so grumpy 🤭

Here’s a bit of colour to cheer the page up. Flamingoes are odd-looking things but the colours are fabulous.

There are 6 different species at Slimbridge and can live to be 60 years old. This Lesser Flamingo is the smallest at less than 1metre tall and I really like the pale pink colouring.

Flamingo

But the cutest resident award goes to little Tilly, the otter. So sweet. She was quickly on the scene when her keeper arrived though initially had to be tempted into the water with food. Later we saw her happily playing on her own flipping a pebble around in her paws. Look at her lovely thick coat. I hope we see Hungerford’s wild otters one day.

We were very glad we took our Winter coats which we hadn’t needed on the first day. This is me in one of the hides. I opened the window and that’s the wind blasting in pushing my hair back. Brrr. 

We went up the Estuary Tower Hide which was really cold and the wet weather didn’t provide for great views over the Severn, but I like this view from one of the lower level hides.

We saw so many birds and heard even more. The Common Cranes were especially loud to wake up to each morning - they’re a success story for re-colonising in Britain. At 1.2m tall they’d be impressive to see in flight. I love the rhythmic sound of swans flying overhead and there were many, but this photo is Canada Geese, I think.

The early mornings and evenings sitting outside our shepherd’s hut were great for watching birds (note the generic term) fly overhead and using the Merlin app to try to identify some of the crazy pips, squawks, tweets and whistles coming from all directions! I miss those unusual sounds now we’re back home.

It was a cold and clear night after the wet day so we had an evening of star-gazing and yesterday morning there was the thinnest sliver of moon before sunrise. Beautiful.

We had a little trip out to the Sharpness Dockyard, Severn View Point to eat a pizza one evening. We went for the Sunset but enjoyed seeing two big ships manoeuvring to their moorings. This one (Misje Kandy) was ~90metres long. I was interested to see it’s a hybrid vessel built this year, you can look up all kinds of ship details through this link.

It was such a lovely break. I look forward to Hungerford’s Wetland scheme progressing over the next year. I want to suggest they follow the Slimbridge example for benches - aren’t these great?

The song title is courtesy of Cast, because we did have a mighty fine time ☺️