Out & About Autumn 2021

Out&About environment

It is too large to be swallowed whole and the adult has no way to break it up so tries an utterly useless strategy. He moves upstream with the gargantuan tiny fish and offers it to the chick again. Half an hour of the chick’s young life is spent in this futile manner before mother arrives, swallows the minnow, dives, surfaces with a smaller minnow and gives it to the youngster. He is doing his utmost, but it appears that mother knows best on this occasion. As autumn approaches, I begin to feel an occasional fleeting melancholy knowing that so many of my summer companions in the river valley will be continuing on their nomadic ways. The terns will spend the winter on tropical shores, just as the swallows and swifts will hawk for insects under the African sun. The reed buntings, the stonechats and I will continue our work on the banks of the

River Kennet in all weathers and seasons. As I rue the passing of the summer, I embrace the arrival of autumnal abundance and the beauty of the season. The trout season ends as September gives way to October and my portion of this wonderful river becomes my own again for a few months. This is the time for the real enhancement work. This is why I am a river keeper. I hope that the fishermen will like what I do in the next few months, but the outcomes for the plants, invertebrates and fish are more important. At some point next season a fisherman will helpfully point at a job that I have done this winter and exclaim that ‘Someone has built a new bridge/created a new bank/ enhanced the habitat’. I wonder who they think that ‘someone’ might be? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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O&A AUTUMN 2021