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?
Support the work of your local Wildlife Trust by becoming a subscribed member or volunteering, and protect nature today.
How did Teesside’s little tern colony go from 3 successful fledglings in 2021, to 141 survivors in 2024?A case study in positive human intervention, dedication and persistence…
“That’s a nice lift” says Tony, as the adult slice upwards from their invisible nests among the sandy shingle at the southernmost end of Seaton Carew beach. A regular volunteer watching over the terns, he loves the way they barrel roll so their bellies catch the sun bright white, then suddenly flip their pale grey backs towards us so that against the blue-grey haze of the horizon the birds disappear.
They are a constant magic trick. Although I can hear their little raspy screeches before I even get out of the car, they are only easily visible when in motion, and they drop into rest on their nests like flipping the switch on a cloaking mechanism.
Today is a finer day than when I last came, bundled up against a sudden wind-harried drop in May’s temperature. On that day everything was grey, and the male terns were spending every ounce of their energy on constant forays to the tide for sand eels. For a courting tern, nothing says “have chicks with me” like a beakful of silvery sand eel. The warden that day, Emma, told me that the eel numbers seemed good and that mating was taking place all over the strand. Occasional flappings of raised wings like little white flares in all the grey showed me where breeding pairs were getting down to business. A month later and the same brief flashings of wing-white erupt where birds land and settle on their shallow scrapes – an estimated 80 nests – where both eggs and chicks are now present.
Colin volunteers to show me a chick through the huge tripod scope set up on the promenade for curious passers-by to learn more about this protected site. I’m looking at the fluffball for a good 20 seconds before I even see it, the speckled, sandy camouflage markings are so successful. More chicks hunker under one of the half-pipe ridge tiles laid out across the site as emergency shelters, looking like a clumpy sand-drift. Only movement gives them away; living as they do under a panopticon sky full of predatory larger gulls and hungry kestrels, their natural instinct is to stay very, very still.
The Tees Valley Wildlife Trust looks after this site, working together with Durham Wildlife Trust, which protected this tern colony when it was breeding north of here at Crimdon. Tony tells me how they migrate here in April from the Gambia, looking for shingle beaches and spits to inhabit. He waits for their arrival, and feel properly ’empty nest’ when they leave again.
Tidal activity being what it is, those shingles the terns seek can change their topography year on year, or disappear completely, and even during the course of a breeding season the colony can get washed out by high tides and storms – so the birds are flexible about where exactly they settle. When the colony started to fail in Crimdon, they moved south to Seaton. This year’s colony has been joined later in the season by birds believed to have been washed out of their first nests at Long Nanny near Beadnell.
The warden on duty today, Derek, tells me that in the six years this site has been active, the local people have taken it to heart. Teessiders have always pitched in to help protect the terns, whose eggs are so vulnerable to predators and accidental damage, and who will simply leave their nests to die if disturbed by humans. In volunteering to go on watch, I’m following in my mother’s footsteps – she watched them at weekends in the 1980s, when their breeding site was over the other side of the Tees mouth in South Gare.
Having a warden and volunteers is a huge part of the success story that has seen fledgings increase exponentially at Seaton. From 2021 to 2022, the jump in chick numbers surviving to migration stage was 3 to 89! What changed? The Trust got funding for a fence. A simple fence. Split cedar pales hammered into the sand to warn off dog-walkers, information signage, and paid wardens with the back up of dedicated and knowledgeable volunteers who can explain and engage. The global population of little terns is classified by the IUCN as ‘of least concern’, despite their acknowledgement of a 30% decrease in overall populations in the last decade – like every species, they definitely need protecting now, as rising sea levels and increased storm severity will undoubtedly make their survival difficult in the decades to come.
As I’m standing at the promenade wall, sketching the scene, a young lad jumps up onto the wall and is quickly warned down by Derek. But it’s not Derek’s style to be punitive, that gets you nowhere. Instead he always makes a point to talk with people encroaching on to the site, and in no time he has the whole family chatting, observing nests, and checking out the chicks through the scope. I talk to the mother and the younger sister, who are entranced by the fluffy babies and had no idea the birds came here every year. It’s excellent to pass on the little bit of information I’ve learned, tentatively trying to forge another link in the chain of connection between humans and nature. It’s a small start towards finding my own way to act as a custodian and a good ancestor.
If you’d like to do something positive, meaningful and sustainable about nature, biodiversity and climate, you should absolutely start by giving what you can (membership, donations, volunteering) to the organisations already on the ground, doing the work. That could be a global charity or your local wildlife trust.
For my fellow Teesside readers, please if you can, become a member of the Tees Valley Wildlife Trust and consider becoming a volunteer warden. If that’s not possible right now, check out other ways you can benefit from the Trust’s amazing work, for example by visiting one of their reserves or taking part in their 30 Days Wild challenge with the family.
This week I posted a photo of next doors’ cat, Ziggy, sitting on the recycled paper I was drying on my studio table in preparation for what I hope will be a piece of art. I labelled him ‘co-creator’, as a joke – and then of course my weekend sent me down a very enjoyable rabbit-hole of real artists making real collaborations with the non-human. So I thought I’d share some with you.
Losing Track, Holding Traces is a beautiful exhibition of works in mud, twig, felt, charcoal, paper, and fabric, created by three artist-friends out of their walks through the countryside of the Derwent river valley. Look at these altar-like displays of found objects and process notes that greet you as you enter! The swatches testing organic dyes, the photos of drawing in the rain, the treasures of lichened wigs and twisted grasses! Honestly, I think I love notebooks and the ephemera of creative practice more than the finished product sometimes; but in this case I also loved the finished works because the exhibition continued to be jointly-conceived, modular, free-flowing, and as full of playfulness as a mud pie.
I particularly loved the use of rain as a co-creator, which reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy’s rain shadows where he lies down when the rain starts and gets up when it stops, leaving his dry silhouette on the land. The willingness of it, to relinquish creative control to the weather.
Also, making by walking – yes please. Since reading Sonia Overall’s Heavy Timea couple of weeks ago, my intermittent habit of making poetry through walking has been given a boost, so it was gorgeous to see the same practice applied to visual and fibre arts too.
Finally, big shout out for modular installation! The piece I’m working on at the moment will take 200 squares of hand-made paper threaded together to make it complete. It’s astonishing how the act of repetition is enough to elevate a simple object or action to a greater level of significance. In poetry this happens in anaphora, when words of phrases are repeated to the point almost of incantation. In the Gateshead exhibition, the repeated mud and charcoal paper tiles achieve something similar – one simple act of painting, an infinite number of possible outcomes. Fingerprints of earth.
So now here I am, footling around in the internet to look for nature as co-creator projects. There are loads of course, but here are a few that I love the sound of:
Forest Is The Artist is an exhibition of canvases left in a Korean rainforest for a year so the forest could ‘paint’ them, which is awesome but not something we can all replicate; but we could do some painting with weather like conservation worker and artist Katherine Owen.
Bio-feedback music with plants is a vibe – check out work by Masterplants or Natural Symphony; and I’m pretty sure Newcastle-based poet Amelia Loulli has done spoken word/film-poetry using bio-feedback but I can’t find any links so maybe I hallucinated that!
There is a load of fascinating practice going on at the intersection of sculpture, textiles and fibre art, and fungi – mycelial sculpture is everywhere! Vases, gloriously weird animal head sculptures, mushroom book-shelves grown by our local fun-guys Threads in the Ground. You could spend a very long time finding out more about mycelial fabrics…
In April last year, Nature was added as a credited artist on Spotify, allowing musicians and sounds artists using field recordings to raise royalty income for climate initiatives. There are folks out there co-creating sculptures with bees. Folks, it’s wild times for re-thinking how to interact with the non-human!
So what might that mean for a poet? Not sure yet, but I wonder whether I can update my side-practice of erasure poetry and ditch the paint-and-ink blackout method in favour of a temporary composting methodology? Bury a page for 6 months and see which words remain un-rotted when I dig it up? It’s got to be worth a try, right?
Why declare climate emergency? Because of the absences I see everywhere.
The five sparrows on the wall when two years ago there were twenty .
The way the starling murmurations reduced from an abstract flash mob to sad little squiggles the year after their roosting site was knocked down for housing development.
How long it’s been since I cringed at an evening influx of daddy-long-legs, creepy-crawly bane of all childhood camping trips – I saw one on a bus stop this summer and stopped to take a photo, it had been so long. Bad luck for the bats, dunlins, plovers, choughs and crows and others that feed on them.
I’ve lived long enough and been watching, idly but enough to see baselines shift and biodiversity plummet, and I can’t even really look closely at the true numbers without wanting to scream. I’m taking a different road to my mum’s these days so I don’t have to look at the wrenched-up hedges and ravaged fields of another fucking housing estate going up. Hedgehog corridors gone, berries for the migrating flocks gone, everything gone, for brick-loads of mortgage debt and two-car driveways in an unwalkable development without amenities or green infrastructure, built with extractive materials we have no carbon budget for – my mind rants on and on!
Does anyone else get this clutching panic just looking at how many of us there are? And thinking about how much consumption and destruction we seem to find normal?
Does anyone else look out over the incredible skies of Teesside and imagine walking the marshes as a pre-historic hunter-gatherer, seeing not this era’s scratty gap-toothed off-cut skeins of geese but endless sashiko stitches of bird-flocks?
Lynn Pederson does something like this in her prose-poem ‘A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon’, and I’m so glad to find it. I hope you enjoy it too.
A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon
Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans?
Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over. Ectopistes migratorius.
And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?).
And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.
So maybe this is the point of poets and poetry in the context of declaring climate emergency. To imagine forward and backward through out own lifetimes and beyond, to paint a picture of biodiversity as it was and should be, to keep alerting new generations to the baseline shift so they don’t unthinkingly accept the new normal of silent dead-scape.
I’m going to share one of my own poems as well, this one published in Passerine (where all the poems are called Dear Sophie)
9 October
Dear Sophie,
The clouds today are the blue-black of eye bags. The trees blaze against them, rebels to a sapling. Pointillist berries transport the green shadows with scarlet. The haws are set, thumb-prick carmine, and the sloes are blue as ravens.
Along the old embankment, crowds of rosebay have withered to a froth of seed-split pods swaying on rattles of madder leaves.
The grey wind.
Long-vacated, you melt into the arms of the earth, sockets deep as inkwells. In twelve years, the scientists say, the damage will be irreversible. Your son’s lifespan, again.
A break in the clouds reveals the trees are full of fluttering shadow-puppets, telling folktales about the beginnings and ends of worlds.
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.
They are small, but contain vast spaces – like an atom.
They are a practice.
Last Saturday I led a workshop on writing them, in which we played with fridge magnet haikus to get that old 5-7-5 syllable counting thing off our chests before going out into the world for a walk to find our seasonal signifiers, our moments of subtle intersection with (urban) nature.
Here are some thoughts from that day…
Really do cut out words if they’re only there to make up the syllable count. Up to 17 syllables is fine – if you do this, you will find an expansive sense of ambiguity and open up the poem to reader interpretation. The space created when you cut an unnecessary ‘is’, ‘but’, or ‘that’ is much more haiku than finger-counting the dum-dum-dum.
Two things that don’t go together. Put them together. Do not try to build a bridge with words. Allow the reader to make the bridge for themselves, with resonance. Two things striking each other, like wind chimes. The poem is the note; the note is the white space.
Of all poetics, haiku care the least about what you mean. Stop meaning. Start looking and feeling simultaneously. In a glass building, having a complicated conversation, watching pigeons fly through their own reflection.
I say feeling, but this is not about getting it all out on paper. How Western! Stay still a little longer, the ivy may have something to say about that.
My next workshop on 13th April is going to be a mutual exploration space looking at how to bring haiku into film, using Reels. I’ve been trying and I have no firm conclusions!
This was my favourite out of the 5 haiku I wrote myself that day – why?
Kirsten Luckins 