Cathy Robinson discovers how Kent’s Elmley Nature Reser ve is offering a leg up to this rapidly declining wader
The bubbling of Curlew drifts through the open car window, mingling with the incessant ‘pip’ of Oystercatcher. A Buzzard ‘mews’ overhead, while a Marsh Harrier quarters, on the lookout for lunch. A herd of rufty-tufty cattle stand on the track ahead, chewing lazily, and they’re not about to move, so I slow to a stop. I may as well stay here a while.
Alongside, a Lapwing struts about, feathers sheening and topknot proud. I feel like I’m on my own private safari as I spot hundreds of Black-tailed Godwits up ahead, their soundtrack a conversational chuntering as they probe the mud with their dagger beaks.
The access road to Elmley Nature Reserve winds its way for two miles across the marshland of the Isle of Sheppey. Sitting just off the north Kent coast and overlooking the Swale estuary, across the water from Sittingbourne, it was the first privately owned and managed National Nature Reserve in the UK. It’s the only NNR where you can stay overnight in the heart of the reserve, and watching a dawn f ly-by of hundreds of Wigeon ignited my love affair with this place.
Elmley gets under your skin. The first time I visited, it was high summer, and England’s green and pleasant land was parched brown. Arriving at midday, the heat and torpor convinced me I’d see little in the way of wildlife. So, when within two minutes, guide Simon had pointed out a Long-eared Owl sitting close to the car park, looking like an extension of the branch it was perched on, I knew this was a special place.
On my next visit, two Short-eared Owls sat obligingly on a fence, so close I could see their kohl-rimmed eyes, before zig-zagging low over the tussocky grass, searching for voles. Elmley does owls well, with more than 30 Short-Eared Owls recorded on the reserve this winter, and one of the handful of Little Owls often spotted hunkered in the fork of a tree. The third time I was drawn back here, a Barn Owl slid silently past, a spectral being glimpsed one moment, vanished the next. These owls breed regularly on the reserve.
This 3,300-acre family-run farm has been managed for nature for more than 40 years, and a National Nature Reserve since 1994. And nature didn’t need to be asked twice, with biodiversity f lourishing under this stewardship.
“Each spring, the sheer number of f ledgling birds and quantity of emergent butterf lies shows us how healthy the reserve is,” reserve manager Gareth Fulton tells me. Last summer, a Large Tortoiseshell butterf ly, which became extinct in the UK in the 1960s, was proudly recorded.
