Monday, March 10, 2014
Dorney Wetlands
A drake Mandarin was asleep on a newly-emerged island on the Jubilee River this morning. A second before I took this snap, its head feathers were smooth; perhaps it was raising them in protest or warning at a passing coot.
East Marsh is looking more like its old self in terms of land above the surface of the water; otherwise it looks grey, its vegetation drowned and dead. But it will come back; meanwhile this and West Marsh offer loads of mud for waders, and I had a brief glimpse of a redshank as it called and flew from one island to another.
All along the reed beds and here, below the weir, a tide mark shows how deep the water was during "The Great Rains".
On Saturday, we were surprised when we drove through West Ilsley (West Berkshire) and saw damp sandbags lying everywhere, and pipes draining water from back gardens into the road. In East Ilsley, some of those pipes had been fed through windows so presumably, the water had got into the houses. The fields between the villages and on into Compton held shallow lakes along the valley bottom; and beyond Compton we had to detour to Pangbourne because the road ahead was still flooded.
The news bulletins have been so dominated by the Somerset Levels that we've missed what's been happening closer to home.
// posted by Christine @ 7:24 AM 
