Free The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy Page B

Like the waders themselves, it was wholly wild and untamed, even though it was a mere six miles from my home, in a suburb on the edge of a major industrial city. The sheer size of it was its most imposing aspect, especially if the sort of open spaces you were used to in your suburban existence were football fields or slightly larger municipal parks with bandstands and railings, litter bins and stern notices about dogs. This estuary too was a defined open space, but it was about 13,000 hectares in extent, or 35,000 acres, or 10,000 football pitches, and from one shore to the other, it was entirely devoid of human artefacts, being simply saltmarsh, sandbanks, and mudflats.
    There was something more than its size, though, which added to the estuary’s appeal to me. It sat on the shoulder of Wales. From the Cheshire side you looked across to Flintshire, which was in a different country, a nation with its own language and history and mountainous bearing (in stark contrast to the horizontal tranquillity of the Cheshire plain) – a country ofotherness for which I had already conceived a deep attachment that has lasted all my life, and the fact that its slopes and summits were what you saw when you looked out over the Dee, for me, was spine-tingling: all the way down the estuary you could see the ramparts of the Flintshire hills, and behind them you could glimpse the tops of the Clwydians, the first mountain range; and if you went to the estuary’s mouth at West Kirby and Hoylake, on some days you could catch sight of Snowdonia itself, you could see the Carneddau, Carnedd Llewellyn and Carnedd Dafydd, shadowy peaks in a dim and distant land.
    I began to appreciate it all properly in September when I started exploring at the other end, at the head of the estuary, where it began, at a sandstone outcrop called Burton Point. Not far beyond it, at Shotton, was heavy industry, the giant steelworks of John Summers & Sons, but somehow this didn’t detract from the landscape, and in fact, surrounding the steelworks were Shotton pools, a group of man-made lakes which formed a major birding site. I wrote to John Summers and they sent me a birdwatching pass giving me access to the pools, and to reach them I rode to Burton Point, hid my bike among the rocks, and walked the length of a mile-long embankment.
    On one side of the embankment was an army rifle range; on the other, the estuary of the Dee. You were at its base, and you could turn outwards and view the whole of it, with Wales and its mountains on your left, the Wirral on your right, and the immensity of the estuary in between stretching to the level horizon, with its hint of infinity – that was the sea, more than ten miles away – and the great open skies. It was a very isolated and solitary spot (I never saw another soul there). I had gone looking for birds, and I had stumbled upon wilderness, as near as you will find it in the lowlands of England. I started to sense then the specialness of it all, it started to stir other parts of me; what brought it to a climax was music.
    It was the music of the waders. I had come to know theircalls and come to love them. The commonest was the piping of the oystercatchers, most often a forceful peep! , which had an anxious air about it. I was also strongly drawn to the triple call of the greenshanks, tew-tew-tew , and even more to the two different sounds of the curlews, the sharp, carrying cour-LEE call, and then the strange melancholy bubbling song, which Dylan Thomas evokes in the Prologue to his 1952 Collected Poems , apostrophising ‘the curlew herd’:
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks . . .
    It’s hard to remain unmoved when curlews are bubbling – it’s a sound which alters the landscape, especially in the spring – and I think the birds had an added mystique for me because when I was much younger, I had read and been captivated by Eleanor Farjeon’s fairy tale The Silver Curlew , her reworking of the