Back To The Future

                                                                                                                                                                                        Image from morguefile.com

I saw a little egret today on my local patch as I walked along the River Granta. Last year there was a group of seven winter visitors standing about quite regularly. Because of 2012's high rainfall they've had a more widespread choice of wetland habitat this winter, which might be why I've seen them only occasionally.

The little egret is a small heron, startlingly white. When one first appeared in the Granta 'valley' it seemed an incredibly exotic and ethereal presence. The bird's exquisite plumes are one of the reasons the idea of the RSPB was established in 1889, when a group of lady campaigners decided that bird conservation was more important than fancy millinery.

The little egret started nesting in Southern Britain quite recently, in the 1990s. I glimpsed one from the train to Exeter once, and saw colonies perched in the mangrove-like trees along the Helford estuary in Cornwall while I was on a summer holiday.

In my diary last week was 'A Shag In Madingley'. Organised by Cambridge Natural History Society,  this was a talk by Tim Sparks, one of the editors of  the newly annotated The Fauna Cantabrigiensis. This previously unpublished work by the Rev Leonard Jenyns was compiled in the mid-19th century. The manuscript gives fascinating details of the wildlife in Cambridgeshire, exposing the lamentable loss of our biodiversity. With anecdotes of living specimens blithely snuffed out for Victorian collectors,  it is a litany of declines and extinctions of species and habitat. Tim Sparks cited the draining of Whittlesea Mere - the second largest body of water in England south of the Lake District - in 1852. Whittlesea Mere is now part of the Great Fen project, an ambitious fifty-year project to restore the original fen habitat between Peterborough and Huntingdon. Joining up existing nature reserves, acquiring new ones and influencing local land management, this will be one of the largest restoration projects in Europe.

About fifteen years ago, in deserted pasture tucked away in a corner of a North Norfolk village, I came across a bird that gave me a profound sense of 'going back in time'. With its four foot wingspan, the marsh harrier was a breathtaking sight as it glided undisturbed. It was the first time I'd seen one of these birds, which was hunted to extinction by 1878 and deprived of its reedbed habitat through drainage over the next century. The RSPB estimates that there are 360 female marsh harriers now known to be breeding in the UK. I remember seeing one in Ely at the site of the proposed new boathouse development for Cambridge University, as mentioned by Mark Avery the former Director Of Conservation at the RSPB who is still Fighting For Birds.

I recently attended an enlightening talk by David Jones of the Wildlife Trust, one of the Great Fen partners, and got the impression that experiences like my first marsh harrier encounter could be thought of as looking into the future rather than going back in time.