Memories of Pigeon Dock

I grew up in a  coastal area of Essex, UK with the closest water being a creek off the Blackwater River known locally as Pigeon Dock.  It is outlined in red in the image, with our house indicated by the yellow oval.
The habitat of Pigeon Dock was saltmarsh surrounding bare mud (at low tide) in the main body of the creek.  The marsh only flooded at spring tides (the highest recorded being 3.2m), but the Creek filled on every high tide (typically about 2.6m)  This meant the mud in the creek was pretty oozy. It could be crossed as long as you kept moving but you left deep footprints behind: stopping would probably teach lessons about quicksand although I don't recall anyone ever getting drowned there.

To my surprise it is a recognised name outside the area - this gives a view of the current appearance of the creek at mid-tide.  A bit more information about the site is in this.  One site said that the dock was still in use by the barges (collecting hay for sale in London) in 1950: we moved to the area in 1952.

While trudging down memory lane I decided to read about the 1953 floods, which we watched going over the sea wall from my bedroom window.  That article suggests the storm surge was 5.6m AMSL - compared with higher than usual spring tides of 3m.

So how it this relevant to Mallacoota?  It relates to an area of marsh opposite the end of Angophora Dive.  On Wednesday I happened to notice a lot of avian action at the Southern end of the area so put on my wellies and set off for a tour.
 This shows the vegetation on the terra (more or less) firma section of the marsh.
 Looking into the Inlet shows a mud bank exposed (this was at mid-tide) and a group of visiting swans.
There were lots of these bivalve shells washed up.  All empty, so I presume there are some fat fish out there!  It is proving a tad difficult to identify the bivalve (and there are many options for the little pointy job next to it).
A small group of ibis were cleaning things up a little.
When they took off I manged to get a flight shot one, noting with some surprise the black wing-tips.
The small vegetative matter - possibly some sort of samphire - is regenerating well after its recent immersion.
The water in the Inlet looked quite clean.  That left behind in puddles in the marsh, less so.    I recall a comment made by a hiker on Cradle Mountain "I don't like brown water.  Green water is fine as at least something is a;live in there."
Here is where the Pigeon Dock memories really happened.  I was wearing wellies as I was unsure about the supportive qualities of the mud.  It was in fact quite good until about 650m from the end, where an innocent looking bank of shell-grit turned out to be rather colloidal in nature: fortunately strategy 1 from Essex kicked in and swift movement got me out of there.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more