One last log from the little tern nesting site at Seaton Carew…
“It just took a skitter-flight!”
I wasn’t surprised that it was Tony who saw the fledgling’s first meaningful attempt at flight. A daily presence on the volunteer warden team, his deep affection for these birds and his hundreds of hours of experience have heightened his attention to their shapes, movements and behaviours. He and warden Emma had been conducting one the the regular sector-by-sector counts of adults and chicks, moving methodically from marker post to marker post, surveying the intervening ground in both directions to cover all angles. I had been tagging along beside them, observing, and had still barely noticed the fledgling testing its wings.
All three of us immediately searched it out; and found it, wings spread, catching the edge of the wind like a child’s kite seeking uplift from the sand. A raise, a rise, and suddenly – a full lift! In just one second it was airborne, angling a low slicing flight over the top of the protective fence and away to the shore beyond. The definitive change from vulnerable fledgling to self-sufficient juvenile adult had happened right before our eyes, a moment that felt so miraculous that tears came to us all. In this difficult breeding season, plagued by kestrel predation, every one of these flights becomes more precious than ever…and to see a first flight happen is an unbelievable moment of grace.
Juvenile little tern in flight by Matthew Livesey
I wrote that journal entry just over two weeks ago, after a visit to touch base with the terns before I went away for a week. I was scheduled to volunteer three more times this month and was looking forward to seeing more juveniles take to the skies, but by the time I returned the entire colony had fledged and begun its beach-hopping journey back to Africa. Accelerated by the kestrel attacks, chicks had gained their independence as quickly as possible, some exiting the breeding ground to take their chances further along the shingle outside what had become something of a raptor buffet. By the end of the season, a hungry and entitled kestrel had taken to walking through the half-pipes intended as chick shelters, looking confused when their ready-meals proved absent.
“Clever girl…” – velociraptor levels of cunning from the (male) kestrel, captured by Matthew Livesey
But although the predation was persistent, it did not continue at the same shocking levels seen by the team in those first few dreadful days. After the initial terrified paralysis had worn off the flock, the little terns rallied their defenses and once again took after their attacker in huge shrieking mobs. Attempts by the kestrel became less frequent, and less certain of a result, thanks to the heroic and exhausting efforts of these tiny birds. Where once there seemed a possibility of total chick loss, there now is the probability that around 70 new fledglings are out there in the world.
I say probability because exact numbers, never 100% certain, were harder to come by this year than usual. Ringing chicks involves entering the breeding ground and disturbing the brooding mothers, and although it doesn’t physically harm them it does cause alarm, stress, and defensive flying. With stress levels already so high among the birds because of the continued predation, ringing was kept to a minimum this year. Numbers were taken through heat-camera spot counts at night, and daytime observation with numbers extrapolated across sectors. These extrapolated numbers suggest 211 chicks hatched, with only 67 achieving adulthood. We know that one of ‘our’ ringed juveniles was spotted at Spurn Head, a shingle peninsula and nature reserve at the mouth of the Humber, but there are a good few birds that can’t be tracked and are now flying ringless into their precarious futures.
Ringing a little tern chick by Chris Brown
By the time I returned, the only bird visible on site was one ringed plover on her fifth week brooding evidently dead eggs. I watched her fuss and shuffle around her scrape, and by the following day she too was gone. The cedar fence now squares off nothing, the air above it is still and silent. Their departure has come even sooner than it did last year, which was also counted as an early farewell. The fence will remain until early August, but for now all that remains is to litter-pick the site, celebrate seventy beautiful new birds in the world, and wait for April to come again so we can see – will the terns return for a seventh year?
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I saw this post and thought of Elon and all the tech-bro would-be-kings of the next frontier, spending all the wealth they’ve harvested from environmental death here on earth on big little boy rockets zoom-zoom-zooming them away from us whining plebs to all the new, empty planets they’d like to fuck…
I have a pamphlet coming out on 20th February with The Braag. It’s called Offworld and it’s full of weird little sci-fi flash fic poems that came out of a 2019 residency at MIMA.
All the titles are deliberate mistranslations of Portuguese exhibition and artwork titles I found in the archive folder for Brazilian artist Brigida Baltar, whose large photographic piece Cloud Collecting is in the Middlesbrough Collection. From this starting point, I prompted myself to create writing that embraced experimentation and narrative – a story of sorts emerged, about a girl and her friend Sai, and how they ended up drifting through the dustbowl dregs of a collapsing galactic empire, witnessing the slow degradation of endeavour and intention from utopian to authoritarian…
Wherever we go, there we are.
It should be available for pre-order soon, and there will be a launch at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle on 20th February, followed I hope by a Teesside launch, and online launch, and a bunch of readings around the country if I can get my shit together. I’ll keep you posted.
Christmas blinking manically all around me, polyester charity-shop Shein-retrieval billowing brightly on my back, pen pausing in my hand mid-migration to its landfill destiny, clingy flutter of the Lotus wrapper tipping my thumb, toothed hoop holding my hair back like a best mate in the late-night ladies’ loos, keyboard carrying my mind to yours, boot soles carrying my body past window-gluts of tat in all shades of desperation and desire, blister-packs of ease for my symptoms, fugitive molecules circulate in my plumbing and the beading of my blood vessels, micro, macro, plastic, factual.
Plastic is oil. The international treaty on reducing plastic waste has failed to reach an agreement, with oil-producing nations pushing against the most stringent restrictions. It figures.
Figures. 400 million tonnes of plastic waste per year, 109 million in rivers, 30 million in the oceans. Predicted to treble by 2060 if we don’t stop now.
Trying to find a decent poem out there (finding lots of bad ones). Somewhere there’s Cindy Botha’s prize-winning poem about a hermit crab in a doll’s head. Somewhere in me there must be things to say, but what is there unsaid?
Teesside has the world’s first recycling facility capable of turning formerly end-of-life and unrecyclable plastics into liquid hydrocarbons. They employ 50 people. Teesside is a major manufacturing hub for Sabic, a global firm who produce over a third of all the polyethylene needed to make single-use plastics. They employ 800+ and bring £400m into our local economy. Some staff occasionally do voluntary beach cleans. The UK wanted the plastics treaty to work at it’s strongest; Saudi Arabia not so much. Sabic is a Saudi-owned company.
I can’t make the pieces fit. I’m a shucked crab, calling a dolls-head ‘home’. A pair of ragged claws.
The World Counts plastic ocean dump figures – real-time counter.
Stories of Stuff – watch and share feature length and animated shorts showing the lifecycles of plastics, recycling, microfibres, microbeads
Plastic Count – see how much the UK wastes and take part in this annual citizen-science project monitoring plastic use and waste in UK households and schools
PlanetCare – install a microfibre filter on your washing machine outlet and reduce micro-plastic pollution in the water cycle
Last week I was joined in my climate emergency drop-in by my wonderful friend and fellow poet Jo Colley. Together we explored Portrack Marshes managed by the Tees Wildlife Trust, an area of crucial reedbeds and open water just the other side of the embankment from the manicured whitewater runs and jogging paths of the Tees Barrage.
Reedbeds and marshes, along with salt creeks like the one that has been restored at Greatham, are essential to the flood resilience of the Tees riverway as extreme weather events become the norm and sea levels push upwards from Teesmouth. I was conference poet at the launch of the Tidelands partnership last year, a multi-agency project to protect and restore habitats like these which provide a place for flooding to run off safely, to be reabsorbed into the river system with minimal damage to human infrastructure – and preserve biodiversity in the meantime.
Susurrating marsh soughs seed-head rush-hush shiver-silver the open pannes of water standing shining among the signing stems of Portrack’s sun-struck panoply with its scattering of warblers.
You can read my full conference poem at the end of this blog…
Jo and I have spoken before about climate collapse and our feelings around it, which are often feelings of grief, panic, anger and impotence. As poets we realised we have something of a tendency to elegy! We’ve both lived long enough to notice the absences, the gaps where the birds should be flitting, the silences where the insects should be humming. People growing up now won’t notice there’s anything out of the ordinary, they have nothing to compare it with, any more that we can fully credit C19th accounts of the mouth of the Tees literally boiling with the abundance of fish. It’s called a shifting baseline, and its one way in which we collectively forget, deny, or protect ourselves from the truth of ecological erosion.
Because the truth of it is overwhelming, and extremely hard to handle without sinking under the weight of it or else disconnecting into distraction and denial. As Jo and I walked, our conversation ranged from thoughts about how genocide and ecocide are dark twins born from the worst human drives; how political systems are stacked against urgent, rapid, change; how the free market will kill us all; how Trump really is The Last Trump for all kinds of hopes.
We also saw white egrets and serene herons, families of long-tailed tits and winter sun backlighting frothy reed-heads and exploded bullrushes. We saw pollution, but praised the “ugly” edgelands where we leave nature alone rather than spend effort and money on “improving” it. We tried to imagine what the genius loci of this place would look and sound like, and what it would take for us to be motivated for the fight by a sacred relationship with our land the way indigenous land-defenders are. We moved in the sunlight, enjoying the rightness of the chill in the November air, and as we moved our thoughts and emotions flowed with us.
Helpful thoughts and commitments to ourselves:
When we think deeply about nature, we will walk in nature – movement helps us process, and being outside gives us a floodplain to contain unexpectedly big emotions.
We will notice beauty – anywhere it appears, in however small a detail or embattled a location, and we will praise it.
We will take strength from what we’ve already done – when looking for more ways to help the planet and adapt to climate change, we will not start by berating ourselves and nagging ourselves and others into despair; instead we will acknowledge and share the choices we’ve made to green our lives, in the hopes it will inspire others and lend energy to our resolve. A low-consumption lifestyle is not actually a hardship!
We will practice hopefulness – and we will persist in making sustainable changes to behaviours and choices that are within our gift.
Some things we and our loved ones already do – how about you? Give me more ideas in the comments!
Eating veggie/vegan – all the time, or increasing to most of the time
Only buying second-hand clothes
Only buying reconditioned electronic devices
Buying dry groceries from refill shops whenever possible
Repairing rather than replacing laptops – I use Kingfisher in Hartlepool
A common thread in my last two drop-ins have been conversations around the environmental impact of server farms, AI, and the ecological weight of the internet generally. We don’t want to use fossil-fuel-generated electricity and precious water just to keep a bunch of random photos alive on the Cloud. So our next small, sustainable change is:
Setting a monthly standing appointment to download and/or delete our videos, photos, and old emails.
I’ll be spending some of my time at this Thursday’s drop-in doing a digital clear-out, and if you’d like to join me for a chat while we clean the Cloud please do! I’ll be downstairs in ARC Stockton cafe from 2-4pm.
Tidelands Written for the launch of the Tees Tidelands Partnership, 9/11/23
Prologue
Those of us who live at the edge, we know how water breathes, hour to hour and moon to moon, how the sea drags her swollen belly around the clock, around the planet, how she presses it into the river’s mouth. Season to season, we watch as placid sapphire is chased away by furious greys, and we say those are winter waves as storms spit the wrack line up on to the coast road and take another chomp out of the Prom. We know the sea will come.
Humans, when we feel a push, our instinct is – resist! Blockade, force, and dominate whatever suits itself ahead of us. (The shadow of bold conquerors hides fear and disgust - unruly nature! Disobedient water!) 200 years, we’ve broken these “waste-lands” to industry’s bridle. Drain, constrain, reclaim; always a tussle for territory, a concept so entrenched that barricades once seemed common sense - build high and hard the flood defense! What we can’t control must be a threat, lace tight the river’s corset, never let loose the tourniquet!
Stand your ground – but estuarine grounds should not stay still. Better that silts should shift than baselines - our new normals, denatured and denuded, squeezing memories of abundance back in time until true tales of delta waters boiling with fish appear to us as fantastical myths.
200 years under carbonized, tatterdemalion smokestack skies, fingers deep in money pies, and pride, and livelihoods prospering without heed for the need of carbon sequestering snugly in the mud of Greatham’s meanders… Well, we raised that Lazarus creek. We’ve turned back toxic tides before. We can and must do more…
1. Restore
From the Amoco pipeline to Majuba Road Wildflowers grow in their poor, perfect homes restharrow, black medick Their names a natural poem spike rush, milkwort, melitot Enough forgotten to sound now arcane creeping thistle, biting stonecrop, Tenacity. Vulnerability, What’s in a name?
We call them for their colours red clover, white campion yellow rattle, that root-starves the bullying grass holds space for even smaller jewels sea mouse-ear – miniscule!
So many speak of animals cats-ear, toadflax, fleabane
So many speak of niche marsh orchid, hedge bedstraw
Flora-fauna-habitat a tangle of vivid nomenclature given when we knew their characters, observed affinities.
We must restore ourselves to patient knowledge passed on in a chain un-sundered forged in fresh air, away from desk and test sun, wind, rain a schooling spoken shown and known as children’s stories are heart-known We must restore paths connect our unhindered spaces, and walk green corridors with our eyes open together
2. Reconnect
Susurrating marsh soughs seed-head rush-hush shiver-silver the open pannes of water standing shining among the signing stems of Portrack’s sun-struck panoply with its scattering of warblers.
White flames the egret, scarlet flares the dragonfly,
and shhhhh – shhhhhh
Underneath the reed-roots sleep, holding fast to the memory of sea, like a dream they once had of their mother.
part salt part sweet part water part land
This is an orphaned place.
When century storms surge and inundate the surface rises, a spectacular drowning, becomes a kettled lake, denied egress –
Long ago, we cut the umbilicus.
And so it saturates under circumstances that can only keep repeating, until all becomes brackish beyond the bounds of life, but for we who can see where withered tributaries may be honoured into revival may be connected to our own survival.
3. Realign
We’re all trying for a win-win Tide goes out, tide comes in
Is welcomed into arms of marsh The wash, the swash, the back and forth
Resistance is – pretty useless To be soft is true resilience
Praise the hawthorn saplings, they promise rebalance But please don’t nick our coir rolls, thanks
We’re going for 20:80 effort to result – smart! Looks like 80% science, 20% weird land art
I’m here for it! Never too late to breed breakwaters that self-replicate
It’s polytunnels now for future forests of seagrass It’s threading more salmon through a better fish-pass
It’s keyhole surgery, it’s controlled breaches It’s a river running freely to its natural reaches
On haul-outs grey seals dream of more eels Ghost islands lurk inside our fields
Stand now, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder This project’s new – the flood plain’s older…
Epilogue
And we know, those of us here at the edge, we know the sea is coming, and climate change won’t listen to a cabinet of Canutes. But we will not stand mute. We are not a lone voice, and this is not wilderness but treasure – the tidelands are our lands. It will be the work of our hands to bring them back to fullness, together.
Kirsten Luckins 