John Linton ....always amazes me.
We checked out of our hotel after a marvelous English breakfast and drove the 40 or so miles to Slimbridge water bird sanctuary where they hatch and rear Cranes as the first part of the project to bring these 'extinct' (in Britain) birds back to being a part of the English country side (similar to the White Tailed Sea Eagle and Osprey projects I have alluded to before in these ramblings). The Crane project is 'housed' within the vast Slimbridge acreage of (325 hectares) salt marsh and other wetlands at the head of the Severn estuary:
http://www.wwt.org.uk/slimbridge
Easy to find and easy to navigate once you are there we spent 2 hours or so walking the paths surrounding dozens and dozens species of rare and not so rare seabirds. We eventually saw one of the cranes that were last seen by someone in the UK over 400 years ago until 3 years ago. Depending on your appreciation of the beauty of living creatures, or your appreciation of the miracles of conservation in the third millenium it is a breath taking sight. A bird standing over 110 centimetres tall with a long beak and what I would call a "regal bearing". All told we saw three different cranes while we were at Slimbridge and like the single Sea Eagle we saw late in the day on the extreme southern edge of Mull two years ago and the family of Ospreys we watched for over an hour last year it was a great experience.
We chatted with one of Slimbridge's volunteer rangers (the day was still blowing a gale with sporadic freezing showers so we didn't mind taking so much of her time - visitors were few and far between) for about 15 minutes before making a leisurely stroll back to our car. Annette took much pleasure in feeding the myriads of birds with the centre provided grain but picked the wrong birds to 'befriend' in four almost fully grown cygnets (completely light grey but about to go white). She was kind enough to offer one cygnet a small pile of grain and then tried to add the remainder of the bag only to have the cygnet rear back and give her a very loud and long 'hisssss'. No gratitude there.
We made our way to our selected hotel for the night (like every British hotel I have encountered you can get 50% or more off their 'rack rates' with only the slightest 'bargaining'). On the way we pulled in to a side road and within a few hundred metres we found yet another delightful looking pub with great food (hot roast beef with sliced gherkins on great bread) for lunch. The hotel was in the middle of its own giant park which in turn was in the middle of nowhere and, as advised by the nice lady who took our booking we used the A-Z to get there rather than the sat/nav which she said just took you through a maze of tiny lanes and got you lost.
So we will have a quiet night before attempting tomorrow to find the cranes already released over the past two years somewhere in Somerset.
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