Obsessive Behaviour in Beckley Woods

Although I was quite relieved when it finished last summer, I miss the Bird Atlas. I miss the excuse it gives me to hurry off into the dark recesses of the Weald. I miss the maps, I miss the lists, I miss the codes and tallies.

I miss the requirement to empty my mind of everything else, to make way for total concentration, looking and listening for Just Everything. Last week, I even went on an Atlas Tribute Walk around my home tetrad of TQ81W. No hardship, for it’s one of those squares with just about everything from Nuthatches to Fulmars. Farms, woods, gardens, scrub, reeds, canal, a bit of marsh, cliffs, the open sea…

And then, help is at hand for me and the horde of similarly bereaved atlaseers in the guise of the Sussex Winter Bird Survey.

Long Sowden’s Wood, overlooking the valley was coppiced last year to provide habitat for Dormice. they’re widespread in this area but I’m ashamed to say I have never seen one.

My 1km Breeding Bird Survey square in the lovely Tillingham Valley can now be surveyed in winter too! An alibi for a tallies, frosty fingers poised self-importantly over a numbly-clasped notebook. And what’s more, I can add the adjacent square to include a lump of compare & contrast Beckley Woods.

A game-cover strip of maize like this one held c150 Chaffinches plus some Reed Buntings, Blackbirds, song Thrushes and a couple of hundred mixed corvids & Woodpigeons. Next year, they’re going to sow more varied bird food strips.

However, these quiet lanes which to you and me offer respite, refuge and recreation are seen in quite another way by sociopaths seeking some hidden site for their grubby secret dumping. These sacks contained compost as far as I could see! Further along, a roadside ditch was clogged with household junk while the nearby stream was half-dammed with a television. In rural Morocco, the infrastructure is lacking so every stream is polluted with plastic and tins, but here the idiots have no excuse.

So what was the profit from all this bird-gathering? Lots of Blue Tits (29 in one mostly farm & garden square, 32 in the next, entirely woodland), Great (20/14), Robins (22/9), Blackbird (23/9) – you can see the habitat preference in these two. There were loads, as I said of Rooks, Jackdaws & Woodpigeons but also Common Gulls in the pastures of the first square. Other bits & pieces too but no Showing-Well type scarce species or rarities. In the woods, fewer species overall, no Crossbills, hardly any Siskins & Redpolls but 17 Coal and 9 Marsh Tits.

Tired but hazy, Atlas Addicts discuss the day’s adventures over steaming mugs of opium.