Monday, 4 October, 2021, 10.52 am, Newmillerdam near main car park, sunny slight breeze: There’s a commotion amongst the black-headed gulls and a boisterous flock of 20 or 30 of them swoop and tumble over towards me from the outlet corner of the lake. At first I think that someone must be feeding the ducks and they’re falling out, as they do, over a snatched crust.
Then I notice that the pale brown ‘crust’ is moving about on its own account. My first thought is that for some reason the gulls have ganged up on a sparrow, but the manoeuvrability is un-sparrowlike and I wonder for a moment if it could be a late swallow or martin.
One of the gulls briefly captures it and it’s not until it escapes that I can see that it’s a small bat. It dodges around then escapes into the lakeside willows where the gulls can’t follow it and the gulls head off back towards the outlet.
Richard Brook, for many years our Conservation Officer, died, aged 74, a year ago on 20 April, 2017. I showed some of his slides of local wetland habitats on members’ night, including this surprisingly open view of the top end of Newmillerdam, as it was in 1973.
By coincidence in yesterday’s Gardener’s World, on BBC2, Nick Bailey did a piece on daffodil breeding, interviewing Johnny Walkers, Honorary Vice-President of the Daffodil Society at Hever Castle, Kent, so, as I’d been in touch with him via Twitter, I told him of the coincidence of it being the anniversary of Richard’s death.
