With the easy grace of a circus trapeze artist the reed bunting delivers his five-note scratchy song with gusto from the top of his swaying reed stem, issuing a confident challenge to any who doubt that this is his territory.
This Phragmites reed bed, with its raised wooden walkway, is at the Low Barns nature reserve, a few miles west of Bishop Auckland. The walkway was created by the Durham Wildlife Trust, in 2003, and gives dry-shod visitors an opportunity to explore the wetland habitat.
It’s an immersive experience. Today the enclosing vegetation towers above my head and I only have to reach up to touch the horizon between land and sky. In this green tunnel the air is still, except for the faintest of breezes rustling the topmost leaves. Warmed by the midday sun I close my eyes and listen.
I can hear two reed warblers, on either side of the walkway, delivering their incessant, rambling songs, like gossips switching from one item of hot news to another without drawing breath. They halt momentarily when grunts, pig-like squeals and violent splashing from warring moorhens interrupt, then resume their conversation.
The scents and sounds bring back childhood memories, of long days in school holidays playing in a place like this, following winding trails and making camps in a reed bed.
I recall the lacustrine smell of decaying vegetation, the crackle of dry stems underfoot, the sounds of water flowing beyond a wall of stems, plumed flower heads of reeds swaying like banners high overhead.
Most vividly, I recollect the dark shape of a raptor gliding across the path, glancing at me with a fierce glare as I wandered home one summer evening. It was a marsh harrier, much scarcer then than now.
Sceptical adults would not believe an excited, rarity obsessed, child naturalist, but I knew what I’d seen. Like many of my most vivid wildlife experiences it was a revelation that only lasted a few seconds but a memory that’s lasted a lifetime.
Today, the patch of recreated habitat that I’m standing in isn’t merely authentic enough to be accepted by breeding reed warblers and buntings; it rekindles thoughts of another time and place, over half a century ago.
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