Learning a foreign language (I’ve always fancied Spanish), taking up water colour painting (I’ve bought the paints), bird and wildlife watching, exploring the Northumbrian coast, even a little bit of voluntarily work (just to feel useful). Well it’s true. Gone are the days of looking out of the window on a clear day and wishing that I could be anywhere but at work. Now I can please myself! More often than not, grab my camera, binoculars and a flask and head for the coast.
But it was during a conversation with someone from Northumberland Centre for Voluntary Service that it was suggested that I could ‘kill two birds with one stone’, so to speak. Coast Care were looking for volunteers to ‘adopt’ a stretch of coast and regularly walk the coastal path noting any damage or erosion, clear any litter and to report wildlife seen (alive or dead). Perfect. So now I walk from Howick to Craster and back a 2 hour gentle stroll including a bit of ‘sea watching’ from Cullernose Point.
Now some would ask ‘Doesn’t it get boring walking the same stretch of coast?’ and my answer to this is ‘quite the opposite’. By walking the same path one begins to ‘tune into’ to the changes that occur throughout the year on this one part of our coast. In spring the arrival of the Kittiwakes, amassing together just off shore and then establishing their nests on the cliff below the path, endlessly squabbling with their neighbours as they come and go, by summer I seeing them feeding their young and before too long they have left for the open sea again, gone until next spring when they’ll return and the cycle starts again. Gannets circling high before diving arrow like into shoals of mackerel. Willow Warblers, Chiffchaffs and White Throats singing from the tops of the shrubs and our residents - the Robin, Meadow Pipit, Linnet and Dunnock flitting in and out of the gorse bushes. Fulmars gliding up and down the cliff face beside the path almost close enough to reach out and touch. They look you in the eye to check you out as if to say ‘Who are you and what are you up to?’
Autumn, when you can spot Wheatears getting ready for their long migration and wonder if they might be the same birds you saw arrive in spring who paused to get their breath back before making their way inland to find mates and rear their own offspring. By early winter Golden Plover 100 strong appear on the foreshore rocks each shuffling around on one leg unsure where they want to be within the flock. Oystercatchers, Red Shank and Turnstone allow you to get just so close before taking flight and wheeling out over the sea loudly piping and alerting any other birds who have not notice me approach. Red-Throated Divers make their way to the coast at this time, most having lost the summer plumage which gives them their name and the occasional Grey Seal taking a break from the Farne Islands, popping its head above the swell to see who’s there.
But one sighting I have become obsessed with is Porpoise. I have seen porpoise many times when walking the
Northumberland coast, they can be spotted anywhere from Snab Point just south of Cresswell to Goswick south of Berwick but the ones I see at Cullernose Point have become ‘my porpoise’. It’s true I don’t see them every time I do my walk but they are seen regularly. These shy mammals are smaller than the dolphin that are occasionally seen fishing off our coast and unlike the Bottlenose and Whitebeaked Dolphin which will usually advertise their presence by ‘tail slapping’ and leaping clear of the water, porpoise are secretive and almost never show more than their back and fin when surfacing to breath. The problem with porpoise is that they rarely have any distinguishing markings appearing to be uniformly black on top and white underneath. Researchers studying our Bottlenose Dolphins have begun the identify individuals by the nicks and notches on the dorsal fin and sometimes the colour variation on the fin/ back but this has not been the case for porpoise for obvious reasons.
So as I sat on Cullernose Point watching ‘my porpoise’ I couldn’t be sure if they were the same individuals or different ones passing through. Until I managed to get a photograph of one of them and on closer inspection saw that it had a ‘bend’ at the top of its fin. This means that it may be possible to identify this individual again and establish if this is a regular feed area. So I now have yet another good reason to walk the same stretch of coast. Oh, and by the way, the Spanish for ‘I’m retired’ is ‘Soy Jubilado’ – sounds good to me.