Out & About Autumn 2021

Going with the flow T his summer has been a season of astonishing growth. River keeper for the Barton Court Estate near Kintbury, Nick Richards is responsible for two and a half miles of river bank. He plans his days based on the weather and, as we head into autumn, Nick reflects on the sights and sounds of the summer and what changes will come in the autumn season. The river is an important environmental resource and it is Nick’s role to maintain the ecological structure of the land around it.

The warmth and rain have meant that the bankside vegetation has been rampant and my mower and the brush and hedge cutters have done a lot of work. In the water, the weed has been equally prolific and I have had to put in some long and demanding hours of scythe work. This work is a positive pleasure in fast, shallow water while cutting water crowfoot, but it is more laborious when cutting ribbon weed in deeper water. I tend to work in a dry suit in the deeper stretches or will simply wear shorts and a T-shirt in really hot weather. There is enjoyment to be had even in this demanding work. I view swimming and willing human swimmers with suspicion and firmly believe that swimming is a survival swimming is to see a person who has just had, or is in the middle of having an accident. Although I am an unwilling skill and not a pastime and that to see a person

them and seen signs of their departure. I have had friends, colleagues and fishermen tell me about the otter they saw five minutes ago just where I am standing for the best part of a quarter of a century. Now I am one of that happy band who has seen one. Common terns are associated with the shallow coastal waters of the UK, but they are becoming a feature of my summer. Scarlet, dagger-billed and black-capped, these sea swallows have an ethereal quality that belies their marine heritage. While the power and pace of the hirundines enthral my imagination in the early summer, this bird that is all air and grace bewitches me in July and August. I do not know where my particular birds nest is, but it will be on a shingle bank on a gravel pit somewhere. I find it astonishing that excavating gravel to build motorways provides an inland sanctuary for a sea bird. Terns have learnt to hunt the River Kennet’s clear and shallow margins in the fly fisher’s ‘dog months’ when minnows and sticklebacks become visible to the airborne predator. The dabchicks have prospered this summer. A shrill but descending series of whistled notes signifies parents summoning the young. Father has caught a minnow of astonishing proportions and proposes to feed it to a very young chick.

swimmer, I do love to lie back in the flow and to allow the current and the buoyancy of my dry suit to carry me to my next scene of operations. What a passer-by might think when they see a black

and yellow humanoid with a scythe clutched across its chest drifting under the bridge can only be imagined. I mention this particular antic because the greatest pleasure of this early-morning task lies in the way in which the wildlife fails to recognise the human form as a potential threat while it drifts effigy-like down the river. Stoats and weasels, roe and muntjac, sandpipers and herons, foxes and voles – they have all had me drift clumsily but silently by, almost within touching distance. The otters have been present all summer and signs of their activity are a regular find in the forms of spraint, broken crayfish shells and fish remains. I had never seen an otter clearly on a chalkstream until last week. I have trail camera footage and have heard

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O&A AUTUM 2021