Sheet 03ReedbedsKlaipėda
Reedbed dawns in the delta: bittern, Savi's warbler and the boat
The reedbeds behind the lagoon are loudest in the hour before it is properly light, and quiet enough by eight to make the early start feel ridiculous. Getting there involves a borrowed boat, a thermos and an argument with myself at half past one in the morning.
- Logged
- Typed up
- Reading
- 6 minutes
- Coast
- Klaipėda County
Half past one, and the argument
Midsummer this far north is a short night rather than a dark one, and the birds treat it accordingly. The first singing I can hear in the delta comes not long after two, which means leaving the flat at half past one and being on the water before there is any horizon to speak of. I have never once wanted to get up for it. I have also never once regretted it by four, and that ratio has turned out to be more reliable than anything I feel at half past one.
The boat is small, flat-bottomed and borrowed from somebody who wants it back with a full tank. I row the last few hundred metres, partly because an outboard in a channel that narrow clears everything within two hundred metres of it, and partly because rowing puts me at roughly the right speed. The channels run between walls of reed three metres high, and the light does not reach the water until long after it has reached the sky, so the first half hour is done entirely by ear.
What sings, and in what order
There is an order to it, and it has held well enough across three summers to be worth writing down. Savi's warbler starts first, a flat mechanical reel that carries a long way over water and sounds like an insect until you have heard it twice. Grasshopper warbler follows on the drier margins. The great reed warblers begin somewhere around three, and once a dozen of them are going the channel becomes a genuinely noisy place, all croak and grind, with no tune in it anywhere.
Water rail and spotted crake fill the gaps, and both are better heard than looked for. The crake is a metronome, a repeated whiplash note from the same clump of reed for an hour at a time, and in two summers out of three I have had one within fifty metres of the same bend. Bearded tits are the daylight bird of the reed, pinging along the tops once the sun is on them, and penduline tits give themselves away with a thin drawn-out call from the willows at the edge.
Noted on the sheet
- Savi's warbler from about two, before there is any horizon
- Great reed warblers from three, and then nothing is quiet
- Spotted crake from one clump all night, if it is there at all
- Bearded tits only once the sun reaches the tops of the reed
The bittern, and how far a boom carries
A booming bittern is what most people come out here at that hour for, and it is worth the trouble. The sound sits low enough that you feel it as much as hear it, three or four notes with a long gap between them, and it travels absurdly well across flat water. Working out where it is coming from is another matter entirely. In my first summer I logged four booming males in one morning and am now fairly sure there were two, heard from different parts of the same circuit.
What fixed it was taking bearings instead of impressions. I note the compass direction and the time for every boom, and if the next one arrives from a different channel I note that too. Plotting the lines on a map at home usually collapses my four birds back into two, and once or twice it has found a third that I had merged with another. It is slower than counting on my fingers, and it is the only reason the numbers from the last two summers are worth anything at all.
Leaving the reeds alone
There is a line in this kind of watching that I try to stay on the right side of. Everything nesting in the reed is nesting at water level, and a boat pushed into the wrong channel in June is not a neutral observer. I keep to the open channels, I do not go in after a calling bird, and I do not pass anybody the location of a nest, including here, which is why the place names in this entry stay general and always will.
The other half of it is time. An hour and a half on the water is plenty to answer the questions I came with, and staying longer mostly produces heat, mosquitoes and worse notes. I am usually tied up and driving home by six, which has the additional benefit of fitting the whole excursion inside the morning of an ordinary working day. The reeds go quiet on their own schedule, and there is nothing whatever to be gained by trying to outlast them.