Here comes summer, hurtling around a bend in the river. A common sandpiper, all the way from Africa, announces its arrival with sharp twee-wee-wee calls, flying with stiff, shallow wingbeats, so close to the water that it seems to be chasing its mirrored reflection. It lands on a rock, midstream, fans and stretches each wing, then settles into an eager, alert crouch, teetering on its toes until a consort arrives and they set off together, upstream.
This is the bird I most associate with this shallow, fast-flowing reach of the Wear. The river is in subdued mood this morning, its voice just a murmur as it glides past and ripples around water-smoothed boulders. Alders, coming into leaf on the riverbank, tell a different tale, of exceptional rainfall and tumultuous winter spate: flood debris is still lodged in the lowest branches of some, 10ft above today’s water surface. The receding river deposited a thick carpet of sandy silt among the trees, fertilising luxuriant new growth of aniseed-scented sweet cicely and wild garlic.
The rapid fall in water level has exposed shingle shoals and bars, sediments sorted by size according to the strength of the winter torrent. Some large cobbles have fallen into the grip of butterbur rhizomes, which bind the stones together and provide some degree of stability. Smaller pebbles have settled as tailings of coarse gravel, downstream from rocky outcrops and fallen trees that slowed the water’s flow.
This rocky, sun-warmed expanse seems barren until you crouch and adopt a sandpiper’s perspective; it is crawling with spiders, tiny rove beetles, all manner of small dipterans, smoky-winged alder flies and larger, scurrying stoneflies; all items on a sandpiper’s menu. Easy prey too for grey wagtails, year-round residents of this rock-strewn reach, snatching insects out of the air with their balletic performances of flits, leaps, twists and pirouettes.
Every spring, when they return, sandpipers find elements of this riverine landscape rearranged by the winter’s roaring floodwater, but these stony margins, where they feed and sometimes nest perilously close to the water’s edge, call them back. An unstable habitat, tumbled, eroded and resorted by more than 10,000 winter floods since the last glaciers retreated.
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