Two years ago ‘Birds of the Salcombe and Kingsbridge Estuary’ was published. A year later the first print-run had sold out, raising £5,000 for the maintenance of the Charleton Marsh Hide. The amazing photographs and artists’ illustrations added hugely to the attraction of the book. It also gave an account of the changes in the bird population of the estuary over the last fifty years.

There are still some of the second print-run available in local shops but the book is already out of date! The wonderful photographers, Geoff Foale, Bruce Church, Michael Brooking and Lloyd Gray are still busy taking photos of the natural world, one of them has just written last month’s nature diary and another has been travelling the world. Sadly, both Tony Soper, who wrote the Foreword and Hilary Soper who drew the maps have died. Mick Loates, who drew the exquisite pen and ink drawings, is not well and Tony Tabb, who wrote the description of the nesting Little Egrets from 2003 has died. The book reminds us of the contributions they made to the study of wildlife in their different ways.

Things have also changed in the estuary bird world since the book was written. In the book, there is no mention of Cetti’s Warblers at Charleton Marsh but a pair or two of these noisy but secretive brown warblers now have territories there. Shelduck were recorded as no longer nesting but in the last two years they have been bringing their ducklings pit-pat-paddling again down to the creeks from their nest sites in old rabbit holes. Chris Klee had reported for the book the sad news that Egrets seemed to be no longer nesting at the heronry. This year he was over-joyed to find they are back there at their nests and Rosemary Speed has seen an Egret much closer to Kingsbridge, showing every sign of nesting behaviour. Here is a photo that Bruce Church took of the nesting Egrets a few years ago.

I love visiting the Salcombe-Kingsbridge Estuary and I love visiting Andrew’s Wood nature reserve north of Loddiswell. In the 1980s our volunteers’ group that looked after Andrew’s Wood, put up bird nest-boxes around the wood and in 1986, for the first time, we involved local school children in making a visit (only one so that we did not disturb them too much) to record how many were occupied by birds and details of what kinds of birds and how many eggs or youg there were. Often we could not see the eggs or young, for the parent bird stayed sitting on her precious nest, protecting her family.

We continued with different groups of children doing this nearly every year until 2018, when one thing or another called a halt. Geoff Foale kept up caring for the boxes and adding more when they reached the end of their days. This year it has been wonderful to have the Kindling Forest School, that is based at Cuckoo Farm, close to Andrew’s Wood, continuing the recording, forty

years after we began. The children were amazed that one of their young teachers was born in the year that the nest box counts began! They found 22 of the 42 boxes they checked were occupied, the second highest count ever.