Life of a Chalkstream: Spring news from the Nether Wallop wildlife park .......

Greetings!

However excited I might be at the advent of spring, I am nothing compared to the wildlife at The Mill. It is cacophony season here.

The day starts well before dawn with mother otter leaving her pup for one last feeding foray, the pup eeking (it is just a single offspring this time) with the regularity and volume of a car alarm. I promise you it is as intense as it is noisy as the young otter seeks to reassure his or herself that they will not be abandoned by mum.

By the way we had a unusual visitation by a mink in broad daylight, the first one in some years, otters usually being a good deterrent for mink. As you will see from the video it was more fascinated by me than scared, popping its head out from a water vole burrow. What you do not see in the video was the warm up act. The mink had been on the island, checking out the goose nest, it being the honking of that pair that drew me outside to witness the aforesaid mink being chased off the island, across the lake and then along the bank.

Watch goose egg thieving mink chased by geese

Next up are the ducks, fewer in number again this year, but every bit as vocal, quacking as they relocate at dawn from river to lake, then back again. Then back again, again. Then back again, again, again. Why? I have no idea. The native mallards have been joined by a very odd looking, solitary, Indian runner duck. He is now part of their duck tribe, but as a non-flying member of the community, he is a bit of a waddling fool. As the mallards fly from one point to the next he follows like a cripple in callipers as fast as his hips will allow, apparently about to tumble at any moment, before lunging gratefully into the water where he does at least look half graceful. As yet our Indian arrival has not twigged the value of fish pellets looking on with some bemusement as the others compete with the trout for our daily offering. Into this mix, until a few days ago, you had to add two competing pairs of geese but they seem to have disappeared, perhaps discouraged by the mink.

The rising of the sun naturally impels the numerous songbirds to add their tuppence worth to the growing bird orchestra which I would say reaches a crescendo about an hour after sunrise, at which point things calm down a bit during the day, though it will all kick off again at dusk. In between it is the high-pitched chirrup of the kingfisher, strangely not dissimilar to the otter eek, that will punctuate the passage of the day at regular intervals as they zip like flaming blue Exocets from one feeding perch to the next, to both seek food and mark territory.

As I say, come dusk the morning chorus hits a sort of repeat but more restrained and less intense as everyone goes about their business in seeking safe refuge for the night ahead. Once it is almost dark the first out will be the bats who, in contrast to just about all the others, are mercifully silent, weaving in the air to capture their daily diet of insects until the chill drives all the bugs to bed and the bats follow to their tree roosts favouring, just now, the many holes and cracks of the ash trees on their final throes of dieback life.

For a while it will be silent but the nighttime crew will not be long coming. Maybe some fighting foxes, who scream at each other like wounded infants, will kick things off. If not, the eeking with percolate up from down the valley, drawing ever closer until it is right beneath my window. The next, and eternal, cycle at the wildlife park will have begun.

Dawn at Nether Wallop Mill - not as silent as it looks

The cost of river water

You may have seen the articles in the papers earlier in the week that reported the quandary the Canals & Rivers Trust finds itself in with regard to the River Usk and the Monmouth and Brecon Canal. The latter relies on the former for water which has essentially been free and unregulated since the canal opened in the early 1800’s. Clearly, at times, this abstraction has been to the detriment of the Usk, once a great Atlantic salmon river. However, new laws that protect rivers will force the Trust to pay for the water at a potential cost of a £100,000 a week in dry periods.

I, like I suspect you, am having a hard time feeling sorry for the canal users. Why should one party benefit from a resource taken from another to the detriment of that other? My other question is the destination of that £100,000. Not the River Usk but rather Welsh Water! In what mad universe is the Usk water the property of Welsh Water to sell for a profit? Of course, I am sure there is some cost to the physical transfer of the water from river to canal but I would confidently bet a pound to a penny that most of the infrastructure that Welsh Water inherited for free at the time of privatisation was built by the canal engineers in the 18th century.

River Usk

The other thing that struck me was the grant the Canals & Rivers Trust, one of the UK’s largest charities led by a CEO who pockets £215,000 a year, receives from the government each year which is an impressive £53 million to maintain 2,000 miles of canals and associated structures. Would that our rivers be treated so generously. The Environment Agency spend on rivers in 2023/24, aside from flood defence, was a paltry £22.3m of which you contributed £20.9m in fishing licences fees with the government chipping in an additional £1.4m. Whoopee! And just so you know, at least half of that £22.3m went on overhead and administration, with no more than £10m actually spent on what most of us would regard as worthwhile boots-on-the ground effort.

As ever, fishing, fishers and rivers find themselves at the unpleasant end of the dirty stick.

In slightly better news

It did not get the coverage it deserved but the long running David vs. Goliath legal battle between the Pickering Fishing Association and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) came to an end last week when the Court of Appeal handed victory to the Association, throwing out the appeal by the Department to overturn a previous High Court judgment.

In a nutshell, the previous judgment had concluded that, following many years of sewage pollution to the Costa Beck in North Yorkshire, the measures put in place by the Environment Agency (EA) on behalf of Defra to protect and restore the Beck were essentially window dressing that failed to fulfil the duties of care required under the Water Framework Directive.

Costa Beck

This rather dry ruling may be one of the most significant in decades forcing government to put real measures in place through its agencies such as the EA and Defra, to properly restore rivers damaged by pollution rather the than the box ticking, nothing-more-to-see-here actions that so inflamed the Pickering Association to take the legal action supported by Fish Legal.

Some wondered why Defra battled this to the grim and bitter end, spending what is now wasted money running to hundreds of thousands of pounds, by going to the Court of Appeal. My guess is that the mandarins in Whitehall saw this as one last roll of the dice for, very soon, a Defra file will land on the desk of Rachel Reeves detailing the billions required to fulfil the letter of the law. And high time to.