Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes June 3 2009

One of my most treasured moments in life was waking up at dawn on the Norfolk Broads and hearing all the sedge warblers, reed warblers; and grasshopper warblers chattering and churring away through the open port-hole of the Medina sailing boat moored up on Wroxham Broad.

Today since I live in Sussex I just go along to the banks of the Arun and have the same experience. The Arun loops at South Stoke or even here in my photo at Greatham Bridge I sometimes hear the reed warbler.

More convenient is to go along to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust collection at Arundel or the RSPB centre at Pulbrough Brooks. At both places you can enjoy hard paths and cups of tea if you have given up sliding about in the mud of the river banks.

You'll also find reed warblers in practically any of the Sussex reedbeds some of which are quite narrow strips along ditches through farmland draining the Sussex Plain around Barnham and Pagham.

If there are any cuckoos about these days, and precious few there are in the past ten years, they may well decide to entrust their plump and hungry youngsters to the care of a motherly reed warbler in her delicate nest slung between two or three reed stems.

There the young cuckoo will cling for dear life as the July gales rock its shrinking platform like the crow's nest on the Bounty. Sussex foIk of long ago used to call the reed warbler the reed-wren because of the way it would creep about half seen in the manner of Troglodytes.

That is their charm it seems to me. You do not always see the singer. You just hear this endless chatter coming mysteriously from out of nowhere. Even more strange is the explosively loud gabbling whistles that emanate from the Cetti's warbler, a diminutive swamp warbler which only recently has moved into England from the Continent.

More than 30 species of warblers have been recorded in Sussex. They are probably the most exciting to birders and twitchers of all bird

families, because they are only here a short time and are fiendishly difficult to track down. At least when they breed here they do make a lot of noise so we can hear them for just a few weeks as they warble down by the waterside.