This article first appeared in the Autumn 2025 Edition of Birdwatching Magazine
As spring stuttered to a close, I had an overdue outing, just a couple of morning hours birding. I chose an area of land accessed via the bottom of a village, across a level crossing and down a single-track, dead-end road. Farmland surrounds a water treatment plant. The unused land attached to the waterworks is thick, almost impenetrable scrub. A farm track down one side of the scrub goes on to follow hedges and ditches down to the river. The fields are planted with wheat this year, and across the landscape runs a line of pylons. One field becomes waterlogged in Autumn creating an elongated puddle that seems magnetised, if the waders are anything to go by. Greenshank and Ruff, Godwits and assorted pipers can’t pass by without a wander through the water and a probe of the mud.
My wander down the track pushing my trusty ‘rollator’ in the May sunshine was a delight. Orange-tips and Large Whites, Red Admirals and Spotted Woods danced in the gentle heat. Bees bumbled over, and hoverflies zipped around, an early spread of ox-eyed daisies to a spot, inches from my forehead, breaking off as I passed by. Everything smelt of coming summer and the sun welcomed nature to absorb its life-giving rays.
Even my imperfect auditory equipment was bathed in bird song. Luckily, I am mechanically enhanced enough to be able to hear the Chiffchaffs and Wrens, Goldfinches and Robins lining the path. Hawkeye, or in this case ‘hawkear’ alerted me to the presence of a Turtle Dove and while the purr was unobtainable to my ear, the subtle patterned wings and jay-wing neck smudge was visible through my bins. It was a good day for a walk, and a good day for my arthritic legs empowered and balanced by my wheeled walking frame.
At the end of the scrub, I could sit on the ‘rollator’ and drink it all in. A cuckoo called closer and closer but managed to stay out of sight. A Blackcap chorus, so close and loud, almost drowned the Cetti’s call. The Turtle Dove had moved with us and I got better views. Whitethroats leapt into the air for flies and settled to sing. The ditch was a chatter box of Reed and Sedge Warblers. Merlin identified a touch of Blackbird, Blackcap and Songthrush mash-up as a Garden Warbler and a Willow Warbler hawked from a wire. A Stock Dove sat atop an owl box in front of the flat fields of drained marshland, wings spread to the sun.
No mega rarities, no fellow birders, not an interpretation board in sight. Just pure birding joy.
But here’s the thing… Minster Marshes is threatened by development, part of the Sea Link project, involves a massive converter station and substation being built over the very spot where I sat. It’s to facilitate the transfer of power from offshore wind farms in the North Sea to the mainland and is part of a 90-mile undersea cable linking Suffolk to Kent, with a landfall in Pegwell Bay National Nature Reserve, where mudflats feed many thousands of waders, gull, terns and wildfowl.
As an ‘infrastructure’ project, it’s not bound by planning laws, even before the madness of the proposed planning bill makes nature nothing to be considered at all. In the most nature depleted country in Europe, every barrier to destruction will be removed.
So, I’ve a question for parliament… how can energy be green and clean if the most important corners where nature clings on are destroyed, even when the case for its ‘need’ has not been publicly discussed!
