Boom and Bust

 

Fons et Origio by Carol Sinclair, copper and bog oak

Like someone blowing on a milk bottle. The words came back to me as the wind blew a low, deep sound at me across the reedbeds. There. Yes - a cross between someone blowing on a milk bottle and the distant bellowing of a bull. A rare and ancient sound, as precious as a prehistoric artefact that might be unearthed by a digger as big as a dinosaur by Hanson Aggregates next door.

Helen Taylor, owner of The Over Gallery in the Cambridgeshire fens told me she can hear the bittern booming from her bedroom. It was her words describing this strange sound that sent me to Ouse Fen, an RSPB nature reserve that is also a working gravel pit, and ten years into a thirty year project to develop the largest reed bed in the UK.

The current show at The Over Gallery is a solo show by sculptor Carol Sinclair. Like a paleontological fusion of industrial and natural materials, the work includes a piece made from fen bog oak, timber recently unearthed from peat, estimated to be around three thousand years old.

The Cambridgshire Bird Club 2012 Bird Report recorded eleven booming male bitterns in the county, with breeding at two sites. Breeding was confirmed in 2007 for the first time since 1938. My walk to the Ouse Fen, and to Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk later that week seemed like a tour of the British Library sound archives. But with the current idea conservation groups have of joining up and expanding isolated habitats, the boom of the bittern will hopefully be more than a fly trapped in amber.

Titchwell Marsh - photograph by Jo sinclair