Week 1 (OK, week 2, but let’s pretend it’s week 1)
Consistency has always been my problem; my spirit animal ought to be a butterfly. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do once I was retired, I would have said, “I want to write more”. So, now that I am retired I determined that I was going to do just that. Every writing podcast that I have listened to states that to be a writer you need discipline, a system, a routine. Whether it be Ernest Hemingway, starting at the crack of dawn; Roald Dahl, religiously dusting off the pencil shavings from his writing board before he started his four hour stint, or Dan Brown hanging upside down to get the creative juices flowing, each had their inalienable ritual. So I resolved that each week I would write a wildlife journal. Not a journal about going round trying to see every one of some form of wildlife or another, or of flitting off to exotic places like the Farnes or Flamborough Head to write about what I saw there, much as I like the idea of a bit of a quest. Instead I was just going to write about whatever my path crossed, be it animal, vegetable or mineral (except probably not mineral and almost certainly not fungi). So here I am, in the second week of the year, still not having written anything.
I blamed the weather. I blamed my annual Christmas week respiratory virus, which is as traditional for me as Christmas cake and Wensleydale. I blamed the time spent attacking the odds and ends list that had been accumulating in anticipation of me retiring but which now just keeps growing from the other end, like shark’s teeth. I wasn’t breaking my New Year’s resolution, I hadn’t even started it. I don’t imagine Hemingway took a day off because he had insurance renewals to sort out.
I can, however, blame the above for the lack of notable wildlife. Our trip to Saltholme got turned round at Teesside Park as the snow blowing hard from the east made trying to see things a little pointless; there just weren’t enough paper hankies in the world for me to risk venturing on the New Year plant hunt; and ticking things off in my notebook did seem more attractive than ticking things off outside. Happily there is always some wildlife even through a window on a winter garden and when all else is shrivelled and slumbering there will be birds to be seen and tallied.
Consistency has always been my problem (yes it does merit repeating). Each year, ever since the Halcyon-less days when I joined Darlington Bird Club in 1988 (I saw quite a lot of new birds but can’t recall any of them being a Kingfisher) I have kept a list of all the birds that I have seen each year. Not that I am a twitcher; in fact I regard myself as the detwitchinated version of a birder (less frenetic energy but better sleep). Even counting the time I nipped across the road to see the escaped Eagle Owl in Middlesbrough town centre while I was picking my wife up from her works Christmas party, I have twitched less than 10 times. The first time was around the turn of the millennium when I went for a Bittern that had taken up residence at Low Barnes and I convinced myself that the brown pointy thing I was looking at was a Bittern and not a clump of reeds. The furthest was down to Flamborough Head to see the Black-browed Albatross only to find out that it habitually left to go fishing around 7am each morning. The most disappointing was the Scops Owl at Seaham. It wasn’t just because it is the bird that I most want to see; that would be disappointing enough. No, I couldn’t even find the woodland that it was in, let alone the owl. The best was that star of “Carry on Birding” the Brown Booby, which was flaunting its exotic charms at South Gare. Now that was a bird worth going to see and I wish it well in whatever part of the world it ended up, in preference to staying in Redcar.
A twitcher I might not be but a bit obsessive I might still be. You see, I don’t just list the birds that I see each year. I take great pains to list them in the order that I see them. So when I replenish the bird feeders as the light appears on New Year’s Day I play “Aunt Sally went to market” with the birds that I see so that I can note them down in order when I get back inside to my note book (I know, but I bet I’m not the only one). Most years the first bird on the list is the Blackbird. Bolder and better at getting the worm than all but the Robin, but just that bit more brash and obvious than that dawn skulker. This year I’d left it a bit later in the morning and the first birds were a couple of gulls overhead, which flashed me their wing stripe just to make sure I knew they were Black-headed. Then a Blue Tit churred for my attention to make sure of its place on the list, before another gull flew over, this one much larger, so a Herring Gull. The Blackbird only made fourth place this year.
I start my annual bird list with great enthusiasm intending to get to 150 different birds by the end of the year but it always tails off to dribs and drabs once I have seen my first Swift, which I can confidently predict will be on May Bank Holiday. Only once have I made it to 150 but that did include a chicken that someone had liberated at South Gare. New Year’s Day usually involves a trip to Saltholme to see if I can launch my bid with a half century, but this year we had family for the day so I was confined to scanning the garden periodically and maxing my peripheral vision on a trip to pick up a relative. I ended Day One on 24 birds, not even half a half century, but one of those was a Fieldfare. I didn’t see a Fieldfare in the whole of 2025, so maybe that bodes well for the year.
Week 2
The deep, white layer of frost on the 10th January covered almost everything that I might see and write about, but it couldn’t help revealing something. In a narrow line along the shelf at the back of our conservatory were some small, delicate canine prints. I can’t always distinguish a fox print from a dog print, but there was no mistaking these; narrow pads with the side toes set well back and the registration blurred from the hair between the toes. What a fox was doing round there I don’t know but round there it had most definitely been.
I still haven’t worked out the foxes in our garden. I’d always assumed that they commute in from out of town, taking their chances on crossing Salters Lane, but 2025 turned into the year of the fox, which had me questioning that. In January a pair of them spent the afternoon basking in the sunshine on the allotments at the back of our house. They disappeared after that until April when just the vixen appeared. She was grey and tatty with paps that appeared large enough to require the services of a milkmaid. She was there every day, at all times of the day and we would often look at each other in a rather blasé way from opposite ends of the allotment. For a couple of months she was carrying a very nasty limp, so I figured that her cubs must be hidden somewhere nearby but I never did find the earth, despite checking under all the sheds on the allotments. We never saw any cubs either and as her paps shrunk we assumed that she had lost them. Then, in June, a fox appeared that I casually assumed from its size was her, until I noticed the slightly more rounded muzzle and the shiny, freshly unwrapped coat. The next morning the female was asleep in the sun in the next garden, “the cheek of it”, as my neighbour put it. I rattled the cat biscuit box but she was in no hurry to stir, though a little later both mother and cub were in our garden eating peanuts and cat biscuits. Or at least the mother was; the cub was trying its best to eat the garden gnome.
Despite having recovered from its limp, the female disappeared a month later. The cub still came round and graduated from gnomes to cat biscuits but it no longer came in the day and soon I couldn’t tell if the fox on the trail camera was it or some other. I have no idea what happened to the vixen; there was never any tell-tale red fur on nearby roads and if she had died on the allotments or nearby gardens then the smell could hardly have gone unnoticed. Even so, a fox that lives beyond its second birthday is a lucky fox so I don’t imagine that I will see her again, but she had brought up at least one heir. I’m no wiser then as to whether we have resident foxes or just visitors or how many of either, but the plant pot with the defrosted Walls’ sausage underneath gets turned over every night, so I know we still have foxes.
Week 3
Thursday was our first day out this year and so the first of my retirement. Saltholme was the obvious choice but we didn’t want the obvious, so we had a little walk out in Richmond instead. We’ve walked into Billy Bank Woods before but not since our courting days, when we finished the stroll with blackcurrant cheesecake (yes, life really can be measured in cheesecakes). We’ve also walked from Round Howe a couple of times but despite the two woods being little over a mile apart we’ve never walked between them. This proved a very good choice, albeit a little trickier than imagined. It would appear that Fin McCool and Benandonner continued their spat into Richmond. At least that is the only explanation I can think of for how the causeway of giant stones along the river bank was put in place then bits of it ripped up (Ok the river might just have done the latter, but only Fin McCool could have put them there in the first place). Add to that an abundance of algae and a dressing of moss (a bit of which I still have in a bag to try and identify) and we did wonder if it might not end well. End well it did though. A Kingfisher flashed ahead of us and sat on a branch for a good 30 seconds, which is almost like being turned to stone for a Kingfisher. It was some way ahead but it still gave Janet her best ever view of one. Then, on an Alder tree, overhanging some rocks that were set at the angle of a rat trap, not one but three Marsh Tits were flitting about. (Kingfishers flashing and Tits flitting are of course clichés to be avoided, but it could have been worse). Marsh Tit numbers in the UK are now only half what they were 30 years ago and I often don’t see one from one year to the next, so I wasn’t completely confident that they weren’t the extremely similar Willow Tit, but then one called its Marsh Tit call to allow me to tick it off.
On almost any day these would be the wildlife highlights of a day out but then I’m not any wildlife enthusiast. Out of the woods we passed into some meadows owned by the National Trust and managed, according to the sign, by letting Highland Cattle eat them. No such cattle were to be seen and I assured Janet that the cow pats were quite old. She disagreed and it is with no small measure of embarrassment that I have to admit that my wife is better at ageing cow pats than I am. Shambling towards us, head to tail in single file were the bovine equivalent of mammoths. I suspect they were singing that song that the elephants in the “Jungle Book” cartoon sing but maybe in infrasound so that we couldn’t hear it. Now I know they are technically just cows but in this setting they seem as natural as Aurochs and their presence was enough to give the scene a touch of the Mesolithic. They do however have some big advantages over Aurochs in that they are smaller, slower and less likely to gore you to death. This latter point came in quite handy as they decided to park themselves on the path we were walking along. I didn’t think I was nervous, but I did feel the need to talk to them as we passed within a metre of a horn tip. Not a good idea according to Janet (I suspect she was right again).
Week 4
We have a few annual traditions; a bat walk for the family in September; a local carol service on Christmas Eve; a visit to some form of Wildlife Park for my birthday, but none are as regular as a visit to Saltholme at the start of the year to give my annual bird list a boost. I’m never quite sure what to make of Saltholme. I wouldn’t recommend it just for a walk or a day out; it’s a bit flat and samey. On the other hand it is a unique setting, a series of concentric circles that seem to defy the natural order. Beyond the nucleus of grass and water and mud, the first orbit is wrapped with the metal and concrete of industry, a sort of Great Expectations meets Blade Runner landscape. The next is the outskirts of Middlesbrough, signified by the Riverside stadium; not easy to see but on match days sounding like someone has set up a tannoy in the Saltholme visitor centre. It seems no distance at all from there to the third orbit of the Eston Hills, then finally, occupying the outer perimeter of the visible world, stands Cleveland’s Matterhorn.
The merits of the aesthetics will no doubt divide opinion, but there is no arguing about the wildlife. Almost 500 species of moth have been recorded there, which suggests that the many other types of insect that are much harder to identify than moths are similarly diverse. It almost certainly has a wider range of small mammals than any other place in the north east, lacking only the recent intruder, the Greater White-toothed Shrew. But it was birds that attracted the RSPB here, along with me and pretty much everyone else who visits.
In the visitor centre there is a big menu board, listing the birds that have been seen that day at the various hides. Mostly this is standard fare, the birding equivalent of pub grub. Like everyone else, I’m looking at the specials board; the birds that you might not otherwise see without a special effort. Today there is just one, the Water Pipit. I don’t know that I have ever seen a Water Pipit. Until recently it was just considered a form of the Rock Pipit, which I am familiar with. I figured that I would be able to identify it because it was be dotting around on the water’s edge rather than on rocks and failing that all the other birdwatchers in the hide would be looking at it (watch the birders not the birds is the motto for seeing rare things). It wasn’t and they weren’t. Instead, I had to content myself with looking at Lapwings. The collective name for Lapwings is a deceit; I am proposing that we get that changed to a contentment of Lapwings. Here were a thousand of them; quite possibly two thousand, in two flocks either side of the lake. They took it in turns to lift into the air, enough of them to resemble a Starling murmuration only on big rounded wings, like acrobatic owls. If there is one bird spectacle in this country that you must see, it is probably that.
We had also come for a bit of gentle exercise so suitably content we headed off to the south west of the reserve to Haverton Pools, which I had only visited once before. There is never anything of note on the list for Haverton Pools, so we were only doing it to get the steps in. Which is just as well as, other than a few Tufted Ducks, the only birds were Coots. There are roughly 11,000 bird species in the world and I am struggling to think of one that I find less exciting than Coots. They do have a collective noun, a covert of Coots, which apparently refers to them hiding in the reeds. This wasn’t a covert; this was an epidemic of Coots. They were dotted all over the water like a chickenpox rash. I counted 167 in front of me, with another couple of dozen around the corner and who knows how many under the water at any one time. Why was it that most of the Coots for miles around were here on this pond and not on the others we’d looked at? It was all very interesting, though still not exciting.
I thought this was as far as we could go but it turned out there was more. We saw a sign for a Wilderness Trail, which I had no idea existed. We climbed over the stile into the wilderness but the sign also said; don’t try this without wellies; beware of the cows and be back for 3pm, so we only braved 100m. Nevertheless we will be back to explore it, at least when it’s drier, earlier and the cows are on their holidays. Surely there is no better example of an oxymoron than Wilderness and Teesside.
Week 5
I knew in advance what I was going to write about this week. Tommy Pybus had told me that an owl had been regurgitating pellets outside the visitor centre at Billingham Beck Country Park. I was excited because it would represent a new location in the hunt for the Sunderland Shrew. Alright, you need to be a certain type of person to find that exciting but then I am, so this was. The Sunderland Shrew, if you are not familiar with it, is the Greater White-toothed Shrew, a recent colonist of the British mainland. There has been a photo or dead specimen of it turn up in Nottinghamshire, Newquay and North Hampshire (specifically Andover but that would ruin the alliteration) but so far the only place where it is known to have spread its metaphorical wings is across some 70 square miles south and east of the River Wear.
There are several ways you can go searching for shrews. The traditional way is to lay out a series of live traps; small metal boxes packed with some bedding material and shrew sustenance. It’s a popular method, I suspect because you get to see the live animal, something you would virtually never do otherwise. On the other hand it’s a very labour intensive method. Shrews are mice on Ozempic and burn through their own weight in invertebrates in a day; leave it too long between checks and it might not be a live animal that you are looking at.
The live trap can only catch one thing at a time; the camera trap on the other hand can be left out for days and potentially record hundreds of animals. A lens from a cheap pair of glasses from the supermarket, blu-tacked to a trail camera and strapped to a box that has been baited with dried mealworms is all that it takes. People are posting photos of shrews they’ve taken this way all over Facebook (if that’s not the algorithm underlying your Facebook account I’m sure it can be rectified). Sadly I haven’t joined their ranks yet. In my latest attempt I searched through 500 images of Wood Mice. There were Wood Mice looking rather nervous; Wood Mice who had brought their friends; Wood Mice which were definitely posing for the camera, at least one of which appeared to be mooning, but not a single shrew.
The fact is, when it comes to looking for small mammals, nothing beats an owl. We are doing it out of curiosity; the owl is doing it out of compulsion. Each owl might have its favourite prey species but they won’t pass up on anything furry that they can swallow whole, so given enough pellets you should be able to find the skulls of everything rat-sized and downwards. Owl pellets have been checked from dozens of locations west of the River Wear but so far the Sunderland Shrew hasn’t crossed the Rubicon. It hasn’t turned up as far south as RSPB Saltholme yet either. I have examined almost 150 owl pellets from there and to date the tally stands at 124 Common Shrews, 28 Pygmy Shrews and 22 Water Shrews, but not a single one of them had white teeth. However it has spread as far south as Hart village and the A19 road verge between there and Billingham Beck would make a very handy corridor for it to continue its conquest towards Yorkshire.
I collected the pellets at the weekend, which turned out to be from a Kestrel. Kestrel pellets are very user friendly; they are small and the prey’s fur is so lightly compressed that you can tease them apart with your fingers. The Kestrel digestive system on the other hand, is not so helpful. Kestrel digestive juices are much more acidic than those of owls and usually dissolve the bones. In roughly a dozen pellets, I found only two identifiable fragments, both single jaws from Field Voles. Next week I think I shall go back to seeing what takes me by surprise.
Week 6
I said that I didn’t intend going off to exotic places to see wildlife so that I could write about it. I think we can all agree that Middlesbrough doesn’t count; except perhaps just lately. For a couple of weeks or so an otter, or is that two, or three, or even four otters, have decided to make the lake in Albert Park their home. Albert Park is in the most urban part of that most urban of boroughs. I used to wander around it on my lunch break when I was on day release at Longlands College back in 1978. I haven’t looked round it since but my recollection was that the lake was small and artificial with scarcely any vegetation. How on earth had otters made it into the centre of Middlesbrough and what on earth was this shy, elusive species doing, making a living in full view on a boating lake. Technically it’s not even a lake. The ecologist’s definition of a lake is a body of water 2 hectares or more in size and Google Earth would suggest that this is a mere 1.5 hectares (or should that be a 1.5 hectare mere?)
There was just the one otter when we visited but that was enough. If you need more than one otter then you are probably due a dopamine detox. It was swimming in the middle of the lake at first, spending much more time under the water than on the surface. Judging by the way its jaws were moving it was having a reasonable success rate. The ecologist in me should have calculated what proportion of its hunts had been successful but instead I just joined the chorus of oohs and aahs. Someone had previously sent me a series of photos of it and in one on them a stickleback was gazing out from beside the otter’s tongue. Fish don’t normally do expressions but there was no mistaking the, “what the …” expression on that stickleback’s face. The otter then moved to within just a few metres from its adoring fans; presumably to bask in the coos of adulation. There was the odd person there with a telescopic lens that looked like it had been built to retaliate against invading gunships, but mostly the audience were armed with mobile phones; probably everyday park-goers whose social media celebrity today was a mustelid. We were the only ones with binoculars; I felt a bit overdressed and tucked mine away discretely. Otters are of course a highly protected species such that it is an offence to disturb one, but I think we need to give the otter some agency in this. An otter that swaps the secretive and typically crepuscular habits of its species for a midday swim in the busiest park in the area is clearly not of a particularly nervous disposition. Its biggest risk seemed to be of getting hit on the head by one of the many bread buns that were thrown for the ducks.
It turns out that Albert Park isn’t as isolated as I thought. Marton West Beck forms the eastern perimeter of the park. It might be a concrete canal where it runs through the park with a culvert either side, but it emerges near the Riverside stadium as Ormesby Beck and from there it’s just a couple of short dog otter legs to the River Tees. Otters might be hard to beat for the “wow” factor, but it’s in the other direction that the more important wildlife action is happening. A little further upstream there is a colony of Water Voles. This fact would have been unremarkable 30 years ago; they were up pretty much every stream. Thirty years of being on the “all you can eat” buffet of the American Mink has changed that. Apart from the Pennine fringes, where mink are actively “discouraged”, it might now be the case that Middlesbrough is the only place in the North East where Water Voles still exist. I don’t imagine anyone would be going to see them; we didn’t go to try and see them. Water Voles could really do with taking some tips from the otters on being a social media influencer.
Raven on the Wing 