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oyster catchers

CEMLYN BAY, YNYS MÔN

Across the bay – with its sweeping shingle beach –

is Wylfa nuclear power station,

outcome of ‘the white heat of technology’,

a Harold Wilson ’60s slogan, and now

in the process of being decommissioned.

Not for it the brutal elegance of

cooling towers. It looks like a motley

of allotment sheds some Gargantua

might have thrown together from discarded sheets

of asbestos and corrugated iron.

 

Beneath the headland path we are standing on

are petrified sediments laid down

perhaps five hundred million years ago.

On either side among the grasses

are thrift, bird’s foot trefoil, and sea kale,

and, crossing it, a fox moth caterpillar.

We can hear oyster catchers and terns

on the salt water lagoon behind a ridge

of shingle along one stretch of beach.

 

***

 

The lagoon was mud-flats, breeding ground

during summer’s low tides for mosquitoes

not seabirds, until one Captain Hewitt

RNVR Rtd. had a weir built

to keep the water levels high throughout the year –

and now as well as terns  and oyster catchers

there are mergansers and little grebes.

 

Vivian Hewitt – son of a brewery

magnate; plutocrat;  apprentice

railway engineer; Royal Navy test pilot;

collector of Great Auk skins and blown eggs;

first man to fly from Wales to Ireland,

to be exact from Kinmel Bay, Rhyl,

to Phoenix Park, Dublin, through dense fog,

in a Bleriot-type wood and wire bi-plane,

an event eclipsed by the Titanic’s

sinking some thirteen days earlier –

looked for somewhere deserted to live

on the ship wreck prone north coast of Anglesey.

 

He bought a seventeenth century farmhouse

a hundred yards from the bay, and a mile

and more from the nearest neighbours; lived there

for thirty five years with his housekeeper

and her two sons; constructed the bird reserve

and sanctuary. Around a large area

of land adjacent to the house he had

local craftsmen build a twenty foot high

brick wall to keep the non-native trees, shrubs

and flowers he planted and re-planted

safe from the prevailing and unstinting winds.

Each experiment died or failed to thrive.

 

***

 

We post some photos on social media.

A friend on Facebook tells us that, this spring,

walking to Cemlyn Bay on the coastal path

through the old wind-swept woodlands in full leaf

beside the power station, he could hear,

beneath the bird song that filled the green air,

the unrelenting hum of giant fans

cooling forever the reactor’s

redundant and myriad rods of fuel.

 

 

 

BENLLECH BAY LATE SPRING 2021

All the songbirds of North Wales this afternoon

it seems – in the old woodlands behind the beach –

are singing their undaunted polyphonies.

Three narrow streams trickle onto the strand.

Under the glinting grains of sand is water.

A flock of oyster catchers speeds squeaking

along the sea’s edge. On the horizon,

where there are always ships – sailing at high tide,

or anchored at low water – there are none

this late afternoon waiting to cross the bar,

only layers of cumulus catching

the last of the sun above the large island

beyond the empty skyline to the north.

An owl hoots in the woods. Perhaps there will be

dolphins out in the bay.

 

 

 

FROM A BALCONY

A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,

as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle

on the shore. In the early evening

the air about our balcony throngs

with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,

two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,

and a small flock of sparrows chattering

below – as the last sun shades the mountains

opposite. By night three fishermen

make their profaning way along the pier

with swaying torches. The seeming darkness

above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars

we cannot see, and their imagined,

and fabled harmonies.

 

 

CHUTZPAH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read443 views

A nor’ easterly blew – over Dutchman Bank –

on the front at Beaumaris, so we had

our chips, fish and mushy peas in the Vectra,

watching the ebb tide slowly, slowly expose

the furrowed gold of the Lavan Sands

and the cormorants and oyster catchers

skim the waves, when, suddenly, a herring gull,

that voracious omnivore, that frequenter

of rubbish tips and landfills – the colours

of its plumage pristine, as if painted –

landed on our bonnet and, not six feet

from a town council notice forbidding

the feeding of said beasts, watched us eat

each pea, chip, fish flake and morsel of batter –

meanwhile blocking the view – and then buggered off!

 

Note: this piece has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer.