One December night in 1998, Shaun suggested that we should list the different species of birds that we got on our Christmas cards and see who got the most. In the odd insecure moment I have counted my Christmas cards, but this competition created another perspective completely. We all started to be strategic. In an assorted box of RSPB cards, there are a few garden scenes with a Chaffinch, Blackbird, Wren etc. There are also many with one Robin on a spade, or a Barn Owl. Those judged more popular were only sent Robins, while garden scenes full of birds at a table were saved for those who had fewer friends.
CD1-06: Dark-bellied Brent Goose Branta bernicla Texel, Noord-Holland, Netherlands, 30 March 2002. A few rrrot calls at the start, then a growing murmur before the flock of about 100 takes off and heads out over a sea dyke towards tidal mudflats. Background: Pied Avocet Recurvirostra avosetta. 02.012.MR.12950.02
It became obvious that not many geese are featured on Christmas cards, at best a Greylag with a line inside about Christmas coming and the goose getting fat. Apart from Brent Geese (CD1-06), and the ubiquitous introduced Canada Goose, you don’t get many geese using Poole Harbour either, unless it is very cold. Snow and ice elsewhere is usually what brings them to our part of the country. With one exception, the only place you get snow in Poole in December is on Christmas cards. This Dickensian Christmas is also an illustration of climate change, and the prolonged period of cooler weather that was coming to an end during Dickens’ lifetime. In 1814 when Dickens was born, we were in the middle of this ‘little ice age’. Consequently, there were Brent Geese in their thousands feeding on eelgrass inside Poole Harbour.
Dark-bellied Brent Goose Branta bernicla, juvenile, Bramble Bush Bay, Studland, Dorset, 16 March 2010 (Nick Hopper). ‘The last brent?’
One night in the pub, the conversation turned to wintering Red-breasted Mergansers. For as long as we could all remember there had been a dawn movement of up to 300 birds into the harbour. We would often see them in pairs or loose groups, flying higher than the stream of cormorants, shags and the odd sea duck that accompanied them. Counting was easy if you stood at the harbour mouth, a method first used by veteran, duffle-coated Dr Godfrey, who would tuck himself into the shelter of the Sandbanks Hotel wall. At dusk you could count them out again.
Anyway, the commuting had now stopped. What was the reason? Assuming that they were roosting somewhere fairly close out to sea, we worried that the ferry might be disturbing their roost. Or had they been taking advantage of night fishing? Was climate change affecting their movements, or was it a combination of these things? The conjecture went on for years. Now, having researched this book, I wonder if the answer was simpler. Wildfowling.
Birds have been hunted in Poole Harbour for 11,000 years, and not just for human consumption. In 1762 Benjamin Lester, a local fishing fleet owner, could still pay an old man to knock down 300 Puffins a day with poles, to provide bait for his fishermen (Dyer & Darvill 2010). Today, Puffins in Poole are rarer than crocodile teeth.
By the time of Dickens, Poole’s transatlantic trade had declined. The men were back on dry land and struggling to find ways to put food on the table. If they were a good shot they could pot a goose for Christmas dinner. If they were a very good shot they could earn a living. Fowlers at the top of their game could earn the equivalent of £370 for a day and a night’s work. They worked areas where we now count the ducks, like Shotover Moor and Shotover Creek in between Fitzworth and Ower.
Colonel Hawker was a famous local wildfowler. In his diary (1893), he explains that by 1830 Poole Harbour was the place to come and shoot wildfowl. It had gunners’ punts lined up along the beach “in rows and rows” and was “one of the best grounds for wildfowl in the kingdom”.
These punts are still called Poole canoes. They had a shallow draught (had they been completely flat-bottomed, they would have been awkward to row and likely to throw you out when you took a shot), and had grooves in the hull so that they could be pulled off the cloying harbour mud. The fowlers often had a dog on board. A favourite was the big black fluffy ‘Newfoundland’ mastiff, a formidably strong swimmer. According to Wikipedia they even have webbed feet.
You needed skill to earn that money, but it didn’t take long for someone to come up with a gun that needed less skill and increased the catch. Called a punt gun, it could shoot up to 12,000 pellets in a single shot, while a normal shoulder shotgun fired 200. Swivel-mounted on the boat, the punt gun was prone to misfiring, occasionally taking the bottom out of a boat or knocking the shooter into the water.
Colonel Hawker described how one night he found himself staying with a band of Poole smugglers in the hostel on the end of South Haven. Leaving them to their trade, he got out before dawn into Brand’s Bay, rowing through the frosty moonlit night up one of the many creeks. To be successful with the punt gun, he had to be downwind of the ducks that he could hear, and see outlined in the half-light. He tried his best not to flush a Curlew, knowing its raucous call would spook all the other birds. Then as he got within three or four gunshots of the birds, he lay down and pushed along with a setting pole. Now being in the perfect position, he let loose and took out 50 wildfowl in one shot.
Not that he got to bring all 50 birds home: “Should you have been successful, you will, if at night, generally hear your cripples beating on the mud, before you can sufficiently recover your eyes, from being dazzled by the fire, to see them. Your man then puts on his mud boards, taking the setting pole to support him, and assists the dog in collecting the killed and wounded; taking care to secure first the outside birds, lest they should escape to a creek… The gunner generally calculates on bringing home the half only of what he shoots” (Hawker 1859).
I suggest that to avoid being shot, Red-breasted Mergansers developed the habit of roosting out at sea until it was light enough to work out just where the wildfowlers were. So it wasn’t that something was disturbing them now, but rather the opposite, and it had taken them 140 years to feel secure enough to return to their former habits. Apart from the odd one or two that still roost at sea, the majority have since been found to roost just to the west of Brownsea Island along with Great Crested and Black-necked Grebes, Goldeneye, and the odd Great Northern Diver.
Commercial wildfowling didn’t stop completely in Poole until the sale of wild geese was banned in the ‘60s. Wildfowling still goes on today but not to the same degree. In my early years birding the harbour, it wasn’t unusual to see injured birds. I remember being particularly upset by seeing a Razorbill crippled in this way. Despite the carnage, wildfowling brought people closer to nature and most of the early interest in birds came from hunting them to eat.
This mix is beautifully illustrated in the memoir Longshoreman by Benjamin Pond (2009). Known affectionately as ‘Lord Goathorn’, he was a supertramp living on Studland heath from 1914. He describes digging ragworm at Redhorn rocks to use as bait to catch flounders, which he would fry over a pinecone fire. He drank the water from Brand’s Ford and lived in a clay workers’ hut at Newton. He bartered his fish, rented out his boat, smuggled, and beach-combed. Most importantly, he had a Poole Harbour life list, recording “240 kinds of birds around the harbour”.
When I told Shaun this he panicked and counted his list. As usual with this game, it brought out his competitive side. “I bet he counted male and female Hen Harriers as separate species”. Maybe he did, but he probably didn’t know the difference between many of the birds we identify today like Marsh and Willow Tit, and certainly couldn’t have identified a Ring-billed Gull. Shaun’s list, when based on the BOU list rather than the more generous taxonomy used in this book, is 248 and Ian Lewis’s is 249, so they both get into Ben Pond’s Poole Harbour 240 club. Pond has a few ‘blockers’ though, having found “a Black Grouse nest with six eggs”, no doubt to the sound of the Corn Crakes that were still breeding on Newton heath at the time.
Studland heath, Dorset, 2 September 2010 (Nick Hopper). Seen from the viewpoint.
Another bird on Pond’s list that is no longer around is Red- billed Chough. Studland, as its name suggests, was originally a place where horses were kept, and choughs used to feed there, flicking over the horse dung in search of insects and flakes of undigested food. There were a lot of horses then, used for pulling anything from a plough to a hearse. And a lot of horses produce a lot of dung! Roughly 12 kilos per horse per day. At that time in Britain there was a horse for every 21 people. Around the harbour, this meant 1,156 horses producing nearly 14,000 kilos of dung a day, and goodness knows how many flies this attracted. In the 1900s tractors began to replace the horse and were in widespread use by 1927 when the final choughs disappeared from Ballard.
Shooting had by now descended into a ‘sport’, and a contemporary of Pond, C J Cornisch (1895), describes sailing into Poole on 1 August, the first day of shooting: “bare-legged fisherman were standing on one or two shingle-banks just left by the tide, firing at flocks of ring-dotterels [Ringed Plovers] which were shifting about the harbour.”
At that time on the Sandbanks side there were only 12 small houses, although the tourists that would flush the breeding plovers from the Sandbanks beaches were already crossing the harbour mouth on Scott’s Ferry to sunbathe, sometimes naked, on the Studland side.
It can never have been much fun for Ringed Plovers trying to nest on Poole Harbour’s beaches. Pond describes one three‑day sand storm burying a bungalow up to the eaves, the sand coming from a high dune to the rear. It took him four days to dig it out. With the ‘sand banks’ moving enough to cover a house, the scraped plovers’ nests can hardly have remained unscathed. According to Pond, one November storm widened the harbour mouth by 13 m, which must have surprised at least one pair of returning Ringed Plovers the next spring. On the other hand, the drifting sands also widened the beach further along, with the high water mark advancing 10 m in some years, right up until 1960.
Despite the widening of the beach, by 1963 Ringed Plovers were down to two pairs on Studland, which according to the Bird Report “successfully raised young despite the presence of holiday makers”. A more spectacular end for the plovers was this: “three birds blown up by the Bomb Disposal Unit along Studland beach on the 29th Oct 1976. Another three were found dead and one concussed the next day” (Morrison 1991), after a missile had been exploded near Pilot’s Point. During the Second World War, Studland beach was used for rehearsing the Normandy landings, and although over 84,000 missiles and 200 unexploded bombs were later removed from the beach, the odd one or two were inevitably left behind. By 1981 the Ringed Plovers had lost the battle, and the only pair left breeding in the harbour was in Holes Bay. When a new road was built there, this pair also disappeared.
Another species followed by Pond was Black-headed Gull. It is thought that the colony on Little Sea started when the lake was first formed. Back then, Little Sea was twice the size it is now, and full of gulls. “2,500 pairs of Black-headed Gulls had nested there, the nests being so close together that a small triangular depression existed between every three nests; each nest contained three eggs, or at least it should do. But the birds squabbled among themselves so much that odd eggs rolled out of some of the nests into the triangular depressions. I never had to rob a nest, as I could always fill a basket of eggs by collecting those which had rolled out of the nest instead.”
As with all good things, Pond’s supply of free eggs finally came to an end. “It was now 1925, which saw the coming of a new road that was built across the heath from South Haven Point to Studland… Part of this road passed the north end of Littlesea Lake and the noise of the passing cars caused the gulls to desert the area.”