“You can tell barnie poo from pinks’ poo because the pinks’ is greenish,” Frank bends down and points to the soft cylinders of pinkfoot goose poo that are scattered on the cropped turf. “Barnies’ are brownish. But they all have white at one end” (a white ‘paste’ of uric acid crystals, formed from excess nitrogen excreted from the caecum).

I’ve joined Frank Mawby for his WeBS count – the national Wetland Bird Survey – which he carries out every month, irrespective of the weather, on his ‘patch’ of Border, Calvo and Skinburness saltmarshes at the edge of Moricambe Bay.

When I arrived, three wildfowlers, dressed in camo jackets and caps and waterproof trousers were coming off the marsh, accompanied by their muddy dogs. It was the final day of the wildfowl shooting season [2]: one man had a couple of geese in his bag, but the others carried only their shotguns; they stood around, chatting cheerfully, before climbing into pickups and four-wheel drives. One of them stayed to chat to me while I waited – he knew all about the WeBS counts, he knew Frank (everyone knows Frank!); he was glad, but possibly also rather sad, that for the next six months he wouldn’t be getting up early to be out on the marsh at dawn …

We watched a kestrel swoop down into the marsh grasses then swerve up again to hover, a flicker of russet, by the gate. It was mid-February and still cold, but larks were singing, and there were trilling calls of redshank; a small murmurration of starlings took off from the field behind us, the flock shape-shifting before they dropped and settled once more.

Frank arrived, unloaded his telescope and tripod from the car, and we set off over the marsh. Frank is several years older than I am, and spry. For many years he was Site Manager of the North Cumbria NNRs for English Nature (now Natural England), and his knowledge and understanding of peatlands, birds and marshes is both practical and encyclopedic. He has been a driving force at Watchtree Nature Reserve since its inception after the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, is President of the Carlisle Natural History Society, and over the years he has helped me with projects, blog-posts and my book [1]. I am rather in awe of Frank! Now, I’m trying not to seem wimp-ish as I look for easier spots to jump across the ditches; Frank meanwhile is carrying a bag, and the tripod on his shoulder (but he does have the assistance of two walking-poles).

Geese are grazers, partial to young sweet grass (and also, to the disgust of local farmers, young winter wheat and barley). Frank shows me the short, brighter spikes of Pulcinellia (Common Saltmarsh Grass) that are starting to push through the thin brown deposit of mud on the surface of the marsh. “It’s just shooting now, it’s a pioneer species. But fescue grass outcompetes it, and needs to be grazed down – I keep telling NE [Natural England] the marsh could hold 500 cattle instead of the 250 permitted.” In places the fescue has formed a dense thatch, which the cattle will ignore, and which smothers any Pulcinellia that would provide food for the geese.

Our first stop to set up the ‘scope is Border Marsh. We’ve squished through mud, jumped creeks, avoided tussocks and reached the short green sward. There is a slight breeze; the tide is already rising but the mudbanks are still exposed each side of the Waver estuary.

Frank provides a constant commentary; he points out a little flock of dunlin lifting off and swirling about. “Can’t quite count the little beggars yet!” They settle again on the mud and potter about, and I do a quick count – but I’m way off the expert’s estimate of 300. “There’s 40-50 grey plover among them too. Dumpy little birds – distinctive in flight by that black area under the wing.” I count again, “in fives, then again in twos – they’re nicely spread out”. Both species are scurrying on the mud. This time my estimate is closer to Frank’s. He writes the numbers in his notebook.

The wildfowler had mentioned ‘pricked’ geese, not a term I had heard during my previous visits to the marsh [2]. I spot a couple of geese on their own, not feeding or resting but wandering around.  Frank says they have probably been pricked –shot at, and hit by a few pieces of steel shot; damaged but not killed. It’s good to know that the use of lead shot has been banned on the estuaries, and over the wetlands for several years (but I was surprised because I thought lead shot had been banned everywhere – apparently not, and it is still causing deaths by poisoning of wild birds and other animals). A lone pink-footed goose flies over us, circling, calling as it flies: “Possibly its mate was killed or pricked, and it’s come back to look for it.” From tomorrow they will be safe, and before long they will fly back to the Arctic to breed.

The creeks are still dry-bottomed, with cracks in the mud; some are decorated with goose footprints. But the tide is now coming in, brown and scummy-edged, flowing fast, and we need to keep an eye on those creeks.

There are shelduck on the far side of the estuary and I look through the ‘scope for a clearer picture. They are handsome ducks, striking in their black and white and brown livery. Thirty barnacle geese come flying over from further inland, calling, ‘yapping’ – unlike the ‘wink, wink, wink’ of the pink-footed geese.

Now there are 300-400 dunlin on a far spit that projects from the Newton Arlosh marsh, a spit which has extended and grassed over in the past 10 years, Frank tells me. He laughs: “The things I thought might be birds over there are just clumps of samphire”.

To the North-West, across the Solway, the top of Criffel is hidden, decapitated by grey, flat-bottomed cloud. A band of lemon-yellow light is sandwiched between grey above the Scottish coast. Oyster catchers are probing, and redshanks are foraging along the edge of the incoming tide. They are all duly counted and noted. A patch of sunlight is moving towards us like a spotlight, lighting the scummy foam; the pale grass shines, and the white-painted houses at Anthorn emerge from the greyness. A lark burst into song above us. A rock pipit – a first for me – flits along the side of a creek. Where it is difficult to see the details of distant birds, Frank says he often relies on “their jizz” – their behaviour, as well as their outline and shape – to make a good guess at the species; he has had plenty of experience, as he’s been doing these WeBS counts on the Solway for 36 years.

The flow of the tide has stemmed, the estuary is in stasis; water slops softly in the creeks, waiting for the Bay to start to empty. We move on, heading West towards Grune Point and the next observation point at the boundary of Calvo and Skinburness marshes. There’s a fast-moving orange shape in the Bay beyond Grune: it’s one of the RNLI ribs, its bow raised as it speeds and turns, crew standing upright in their yellow suits. Sunday is their day for practising rescues.

There are more creeks to jump, a barbed-wire fence to squeeze through, more rushes, more tussocks, and then we reach an extensive area where the gorse has been flailed and cut according to a conservation management-plan – to Frank’s annoyance as it was an important area for stonechats and linnets. We set up the ‘scope again on slightly raised ground, sheltered from the keen wind by the remaining gorse. “There are usually 60-70 curlews in this area,” he says, and at first we seen none, but later 24 are counted. Their trilling always thrills. Unusually, no cormorants are drying their wings on the posts of the WW2 target out in the Bay. Soon, they will return to breed and there will likely be a nest on every one of the posts.

Since the tide has stopped rising, and we’re no longer in danger of being cut off by over-topping creeks, we head down to the post-and-wire fence that edges the water – dropping down two tiers of the marsh [3] to spy on any birds that may have been out of sight on the lower tier. We find ducks, including pintails, and a half-dozen pinkfeet geese are wandering around. “They might have got a bit of shot in the wrong place, I can see some feathers scattered around”. There is the ongoing worry of the highly-transmissible avian ‘flu [6]. “With the amount of shooting in the last few days, it’s difficult to know whether the dead birds are from ‘flu or if they’ve been shot.”

A small flock of dunlin and grey plover are resting at the edge of the marsh, but it seems likely that they are the same as the ones we saw earlier. We don’t want to count them twice. Over on Grune Point, ‘Spike’ will be doing the WeBS counts for the peninsula. And “there’s a couple who do the count on the other side of Moricambe Bay at Anthorn. But nobody does Newton Arlosh marsh – it’s a very long walk to the edge, and you can get in trouble there on the big tides.”

All around the British coast, once a month and whatever the weather, there are more than 3000 birders, with their telescopes and binoculars, counting the numbers of the wetland birds on their patch. These data are entered on a dedicated section of the BTO website, and the record goes goes back to 1947 (and was digitised in 1969).

According to the WeBS information [4], the term waterbirds ‘includes wildfowl (ducks, geese and swans), waders, rails, divers, grebes, cormorants and herons. Gulls and terns are optionally included.’ The data show ‘populations and trends in abundance and distribution. The network of sites legally protected for their importance to wintering waterbirds depends fundamentally on the WeBS counts.’

Annual summaries and newsletters can be downloaded from the BTO website [5]. For example, the newsletter for Autumn 2022 has an article on the effect of avian flu on the geese that migrate to the Solway during the autumn and winter (even now, in March 2023, dead geese are being washed up – thankfully in small numbers compared with a year ago). A map in the Annual Report for 2019/20 shows that the Solway Estuary has the seventh highest annual number of non-breeding waterbirds in the UK.

We’ve been out on the marshes for a couple of hours, and coffee-time is long overdue. I’m surprised to see how far we have wandered, and the walk back, with repeated detours to find narrower crossing-points of creeks, seems lengthy. Frank admits that he’s not sure how much longer he will carry on doing the surveys – the tripod and kit are heavy, the terrain is rough – and he wants to find someone else to train. We see a Little Egret in the distance, startlingly white against the drab late-winter colours of the marsh, and the kestrel is still hovering and hunting near the gate. Then we’re back at the cars and peeling off layers of waterproofs and fleeces, and finding our thermoses. WeBS count done for another month.

Notes and weblinks

[1] Watchtree Nature Reserve – see https://watchtree.co.uk/  and, for background,  https://solwayshorewalker.co.uk/2016/02/17/from-killing-field-to-wetland-and-woods-watchtree-nature-reserve-cumbria/

A historical perspective of the Solway Mosses, by Francis J. Mawby, Chapter 6 in History and Heritage of the Bogs and Peatlands of Cumbria, ed. Ian Rotherham & Christine Handley (2021), Wildtrack Publishing. Note: free download of PDF of the book here.  

Crossing the Moss project about Bowness Moss and the Solway Junction Railway: Frank’s help in the Restoring the Moss’ section https://crossingthemoss.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/11-restoring-the-moss/

[2] See section on Wildfowling in Chapter 9 of The Fresh and the Salt https://thefreshandthesalt.co.uk/chapter-nine/. I’ve been out twice on the marshes with a wildfowler, talked to others, and also talked to people who ‘oversee’ it on the Scottish and English sides. Note that wildfowling is closely regulated, through the issuing of licences, in England; less so in Scotland. Whatever your own views, it is a subject that is not ‘black or white’ – there are nuances, and my own opinion was better-informed, and altered, after my conversations. The final chapter of The Fresh and the Salt goes into some detail…

[3] https://solwayshorewalker.co.uk/2017/08/29/the-solway-saltmarshes-1/ – for saltmarsh structure

[4] WeBS on the web https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/wetland-bird-survey .

[5] Link to WeBS reports and newsletters https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/wetland-bird-survey/publications

[6] Report by BTO and JNCC on highly pathogenic avian flu, 2022  https://www.bto.org/about-bto/press-releases/bird-flu-report-spotlights-impact-disease-uk-wild-birds