Sunday book review – Life Changing by David North – Mark Avery
This is a gorgeous book – the most gorgeous book that I have read this year. David North and the design team at Mascot Media are to be congratulated on the sheer beauty of what they have produced.
Cley and Salthouse marshes are on the north Norfolk Coast at its northernmost point and have long been famed as a site for seeing birds, including rare birds which have drifted across the North Sea in easterly winds. On a day like today in late August, after a period of easterly winds (especially with some rain overnight) the locals will wake to see Pied Flycatchers and Redstarts in their gardens and with them there will undoubtedly be a few Barred Warblers, Wrynecks, Scarlet Rosefinches and you never know what else unless you go out and look and listen. Out at sea you might see any or all of four skua species and maybe a Sooty Shearwater. The freshwater and brackish lagoons will have a wide range of migrating waders where Asian species may sometimes rub shoulders with North American ones. As autumn moves on, the species change and it may be Waxwings, Little Auks and Pallas’s Warblers on the menu.
But every day you will see birds here as the habitats, managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, are home to a variety of marshland species, ducks, Bittern, Bearded Tits, Marsh Harriers and an increasing range of egrets. Snow Buntings, and sometimes Shore Larks and Lapland Buntings, are found along the beach on cold winter days and, through the long winter, skeins of geese, most notably of Pink-footed Geese, cross the skies and their calls carry far and wide.
All these birds are found in a a beautiful setting. Walk the short distance from the coast road, along the East Bank, to the shingle beach and then turn to look inland and you look across the nature reserve to the rising ground with Blakeney Church to the west and Salthouse Church to the east with the village of Cley and its windmill in between. These are some of my favourite views but don’t look too long or you’ll miss something interesting flying past out at sea.
I’ve been a fan of the place since my first visit as a just pre-teenage birder over 50 years ago and having been based in and around Cambridge and Northamptonshire more or less ever since there have been frequent visits through that period. These marshes draw you back and they have drawn many an artist and many retired birders to this small stretch of coastal marsh.
This book is produced to celebrate this place of beauty and of birds as it enters its centenary year, in 1926, as a nature reserve. A galaxy of artists have donated their work to this book, the profits from which will support the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. The art is perfectly displayed in these pages – the design is of the highest quality.
David North’s text is a fine accompaniment to the art, or the art is a fine accompaniment to the text; they work well together. He takes us through the year with a diary-like series of observations and accounts with summaries of how each month fits into the annual cycle of this place and with short accounts of facts about the history and workings of this site. Read the text and you will find much beauty in it.
As you can tell, I have been long smitten by this site since my first visit when I saw my very first Avocets, Bearded Tits and Bitterns. If this book had short-changed this location I’d tell you, but it is a very fitting and gorgeous celebration, in words and pictures, of a very special place. It is a very special book.
The cover? The cover is by the late Robert Gillmor and is utterly lovely but perhaps it doesn’t bring the location to mind so I’ll ‘only’ give it 9/10.
Life Changing: Cley and Salthouse marshes by David North is published by Mascot Media.
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