In the days before little egrets in Norfolk a skinny boy stands on the boardwalk at the south edge of Cley Marshes with his biology teacher. What seems to the boy to be a giant white bird drops from the sky to the scrapes in the middle of the marsh. ‘Spoonbill’, says the teacher, setting the boy’s heart racing. To the boy, a spoonbill is a mythical beast, in part an inhabitant of his well-thumbed field guide, alongside such dreamed-of beauties as bee-eaters and hoopoes, in part an inhabitant of fantasy, alongside trolls, wyverns and unicorns. A spoonbill is not the sort of bird the boy sees at Cley.

The boy was me, the teacher still among my best friends. In the thirty years since I have seen innumerable Eurasian spoonbills, in France, in Spain, in Romania, in India (and several other spoonbill species around the world). At Cley I have seen many spoonbills, including flocks of over twenty, but my heart still skips at the thought of that first great bird dropping to the scrapes, that moment of childhood magic.

The spoonbill has been chosen as the 9 for 90 species to represent the Cley to Salthouse Living Landscape for two reasons. It is an absurdly magnificent beast: tall, stately, ice-white, apart from a yolk-gold collar in breeding and gold tips to its resplendent crest, and possessed of the most marvellous bill in Europe. It has also, with Cley enmeshed in the story, effected a miraculous return to the UK as a breeding bird.

Cley to Salthouse Living Landscape, photo by Richard Osbourne

In the early days of Cley Marshes as a Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve, the spoonbill was a scarce visitor in spring and summer. Birds seen in spring brought with them a frisson of hope that they might stay to breed. But for decades they did not. In the early years of the twenty-first century numbers of spoonbills along the North Norfolk coast in spring began to grow and in 2010 it happened: six pairs formed a colony on the Holkham National Nature Reserve, a few miles from Cley, the first UK breeding by more than one pair in three hundred years.

The Holkham spoonbills have now become a fixture, breeding successfully every year, and the Cley to Salthouse Living Landscape has become a favoured feeding and resting ground in late summer, once breeding is done. Where in the early years Billy Bishop might see one or two spoonbills each summer, it is now not uncommon for flocks of them to visit Cley in July and August, with twenty or even thirty birds recorded. Among the spoonbills at Cley each summer are Holkham-fledged juveniles, relentlessly chasing their parents across the scrapes, begging for food.

Plenty of other species might have been chosen to represent the amazing Cley to Salthouse Living Landscape. The avocet returned to breed in 1977, after a century of absence, and the first nests were famously protected round the clock by Billy Bishop and a team of local birdwatchers. Today it is a common breeding bird here and is seen year round. The marsh harrier would also have been a good choice. After a similar absence, it came back to breed at Cley in 1989. It too now breeds each year and is present year-round in growing numbers. Equally the yellow horned poppy, the brent goose, the starlet sea anemone or the brown hare would each have made a fine symbol for this diverse, remarkable landscape.

But, in a time of widespread wildlife decline, the spoonbill represents very current hope. It represents the capacity of wild landscapes and wild species to recover, recolonise, return against the odds. It is therefore the perfect symbol for the Cley to Salthouse Living Landscape, which likewise for 90 years has stood for hope for wildlife and wild landscape.

A spoonbill is a mythical beast, in part an inhabitant of his well-thumbed field guide, alongside such dreamed-of beauties as bee-eaters and hoopoes, in part an inhabitant of fantasy, alongside trolls, wyverns and unicorns.

In March 1926 a group of 12 men, led by Dr Sydney Long, united to buy Cley Marshes and declare it a nature reserve. The following week they met in the George Hotel in Cley and agreed to create a trust to manage the marshes and continue acquiring and protecting nature reserves. This was Norfolk Naturalists Trust, which is known today as Norfolk Wildlife Trust. In Dr Long’s prophetic words of the time, ‘[…] One is anxious to preserve for future generations areas of marsh, heath, woods and undrained fenland (of which there still remain a few acres in the county) with their natural wealth of flora and fauna.’

This was a revolutionary moment in UK nature conservation. At the time there were no other county Wildlife Trusts. Indeed there were hardly any nature reserves. Precious few were concerned that nature in the UK was declining, that the old, wild places in which it thrived were being lost apace. Yet in the minds of Dr Long and his fellows the threat was real and action urgently was needed. In the purchase of Cley Marshes and the foundation of Norfolk Naturalists Trust they began a movement which today cares for more than fifty nature reserves, which is supported by more than 35,000 members, which works in eight Living Landscapes across Norfolk to turn back the tide of wildlife loss. It has 46 partners across the UK, all engaged in the same work, all founded after this brilliant, game-changing decision by Sydney Long and his friends.

Yellow horned poppy

Today Norfolk Wildlife Trust, and its sister trusts across the country, are engaged in A Living Landscape, a recovery plan for nature in the UK. All over the UK rare habitat and species are protected in nature reserves, following the model of Cley Marshes in 1926 and other early nature reserves of its kind. This is far from enough. Now the plan is to roll the restoration of nature across whole landscapes, reconnecting isolated patches of habitat, reconnecting isolated populations of rare species, joining up habitat along rivers, along wooded lanes, through gardens and over farms.

In a way which would have been unimaginable to Sydney Long in 1926 today there is another grave disconnection facing wildlife: the disconnection of people from the wild places in which we too have always lived. This is bad for both people (hence Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s active People and Wildlife team) and for wildlife, as without members and supporters Norfolk Wildlife Trust can do nothing. The second string of A Living Landscape is to engage people with their wildlife, with their landscape, to capture their minds and hearts, for their own wellbeing and for the good of nature.

In this context the extraordinary spoonbill is not just a big white bird. It is the stuff of myth. It is a fantastical bird, straight from the mind of Dr. Seuss or the pen of Quentin Blake, and miraculously it has come back to the UK after a 300 year absence. It is a symbol, of a kind which comes along once in a generation, to grasp everyone’s imagination and show us what can happen when wild places are protected and restored, in just the way which Sydney Long envisioned 90 years ago at Cley.
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