Williamson's weekly nature notes

THE Great Deep on Thorney Island always seems to me the place where one might see an otter. It is so like the marshes in North Devon on the Taw estuary where my father set the great winter scene in Tarka the Otter.

If you have ever read chapter nine of that book you will recall Ramshorn Pond where Tarka and his elderly mate Greymuzzle have a hard time of it surviving the ice and starvation.

On the Hampshire/West Sussex border, the Deeps were once channels of the sea until an enclosing wall was built round the whole island in 1870. Today the sea is allowed in again but on a short leash. The tide gushes under the seawall for an hour or two, flushes the vast channel of all its clean outflow from the sewage works by the Little Deep, and then the gates are closed again until the next tide.

That outflow returns to the sea via Nutbourne Channel. In the pool which you see here in my photograph taken earlier in the autumn, little grebes love to gather for the winter to catch fish swept in off the mudflats. You will see half a dozen sometimes.

These are birds that have bred in ponds and lakes in the weald, which then come to the coast with the kingfishers and herons for safety from frost and ice. Many times I have tucked into the long grass on the bank, and waited for those dabchicks to show themselves.

At first they are a little timorous, but soon they gain confidence, and bob about like corks amid the froth, diving again to chase minnows, that is the fry of bass, herring, whiting, and a dozen assorted hatchling of the sea-going races of fish. Down the dabchicks go under the bubbles, arising again half a minute later, 30 yards away.

Williamson's weekly nature notes - Dec 9 2009