Williamson's weekly nature notes - Dec 9 2009

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.

The edges of the channel is where I sometimes see little egrets standing in the shallows, beaks poised. Snipe shelter in the long grass on the right. Sometimes a dozen greenshank pipe prettily along the edges of the rithe, 500 wigeon shelter on the Great Deep, together with pintail, teal, shelduck, and a few gadwall.

Ospreys hang about here in September, filling up with mullet before the long haul down to Senegal. Peregrines often hunt the Deeps, and Brent geese make a wild chorus that speaks of ice flows and the midnight sun in far Spitsbergen.

Surely this should be the place where an otter would slip across the seawall in the darkness of a moonless night and set the whole estuary alight with the cries of wildfowl alarmed by the presence of their ancient enemy.

After all, a young fit dog otter was found dead on the main London railway line, electrocuted as it tried to enter West Sussex at Rowlands Castle last year. There may be more to come.