As regular and long-time visitors to Shingle Street, many of you will be very aware of the significant changes we all saw last year in both the number and nature of visitors to the hamlet. Lockdown, increases in local housing and hot weather all contributed to this, and we noticed a marked shift away from the respectful leisure use of the beach towards much less considerate behaviour, with associated problems of littering, use of the natural area as toilets, damage to protected plants and landscape, and dangerous and thoughtless parking.
[Continue reading →]Bird ringing report
This is a report of the bird ringing that has been undertaken in Shingle Street over the last ten years by Mervyn Miller and his colleagues. Birds are trapped in specially designed ‘mist nets’, then examined, weighed and ringed with tiny metal rings, each of which has a unique, identifying code number.
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Spider records
Spider records for Shingle Street received from Suffolk Biological Records Centre.
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Moth trapping in Shingle Street
Here are the results of two moth trappings led by Nick Mason as part of the 2015 Shingle Street Survey, both held in Tricia Hazell’s garden at The Battery. The results tabulated here include just the larger ‘macro-moths’.
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Shingle Street flora survey 2015
Shingle Street is an exacting place for its flora, especially plants of the shingle, saltmarsh and ultra-arid concrete. They are all superbly adapted to their hard life, from plants with taproots that probe metres-deep into the shingle in search of water, to species daily submerged by the tides, and tiny, rare clovers flourishing in compacted soil that are grazed by rabbits right down to the ground. They are all specialists in their own way: finding them, photographing and recording them in 2015 helps create an important benchmark.
Laurie and Jonathan Forsyth
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The wild flowers of Shingle Street
Salty wind, sea and stones are what you get at Shingle Street, and lots of wild flowers. They are a hardy bunch of survivors, and superbly at home in the tough environment where land meets sea. Some live in the mud; others in shingle, grassland, on seawalls, in lagoons and some even manage to exist in the cracks in concrete. Summer at Shingle Street produces a palette of colours from seemingly impossible raw materials. Yellow, pink, white, red and deep blue: any gardener would be proud to have flowers as striking if they came from a garden centre, and a glance at the gardens of the cottages proves the point.
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Shingle Street bird song
I’ve been keeping records of which birds are singing in which weeks for the last dozen or so years at Shingle Street and a clear pattern has emerged. I’m attaching a little chart illustrating this, which you could check to see what you should be particularly listening out for at any time of the year. I’ve only included those birds that sing regularly here and their usual song-periods. There are lots of exceptions involving birds just passing through, rare visitors or residents occasionally singing at untypical times. I have notes on all these if anyone is interested, but for the sake of simplicity have not incorporated them into this table.
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Shingle Street Flowers
by Lydia Vulliamy.
Shingle Street is a magical place, right by the mouth of the River Ore. Typical shingle flora grow there in profusion. The great mounds of sea kale Crambe maritima predominate. The leaves die back in the winter; in spring the first shoots appear, very dark purple, crinkly and succulent. The plants fully grown are as big as shrubs, and their roots penetrate deep into the shingle.
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