A bird releases the butterfly effect

Guest blog by Deborah Pitman

Autumn tones reveal themselves along the thinly wooded edge of Waterswallows Quarry, the wildlife haven just outside Buxton. The cliffs stand starkly majestic in the warm, mizzling air. We scan the water for a rarity.

A rare Arctic visitor...

The High Peak, it turns out, lies on the migratory path of a charming little bird: the Grey Phalarope. Just one paused its journey here at the beginning of October. The Grey Phalarope moves from nesting grounds in the high Arctic to winter warmth in the tropics. With only around 160 seen in the UK each year — most of them coastal — this inland stopover caused a stir.

Jason Adshead and I decided to go and take a look. At just 20cm long, it’s smaller than a blackbird. A beaming man passes us as we approach: “It’s tucked in on the far side.” Sure enough, we soon spot it scooting across the water, absorbed in its own world, almost exactly where he’d said.

Grey phalarope, picture from Ron Knight
CC BY 2.0 licence. via Wikimedia Commons

A birder from Matlock ambles over and smiles: “It’s my first visit since the seventies. I was a student on a field trip. There’s a volcano down there.” I’m used to shrugging off tall tales from strangers on walks — but he was right. Some 300 million years ago, molten basalt swept over the limestone; in the last century, we carved it back out of the earth.

Back to the Grey Phalarope. The Collins Guide to British Birds describes it as “often oblivious to human observers,” spinning on the water and delicately picking invertebrates from the surface. I can only hope it also remained oblivious to the wave of rubbish breaking around the quarry’s edge.

... prompts a marathon litter pick

Autumn’s levels of litter at Waterswallows are nothing compared with summer’s, but still too much. Nature is resurging after years of heavy industry. Wildlife has been coaxed back to the margins through tree planting and meadow creation — projects delivered by volunteers from the neighbouring Nestlé water-bottling plant. Fungi now cluster beneath the young woodland, mushrooms cheek by jowl with the litter that breaks down and disrupts the habitat.

The beautiful phalarope made the butterfly effect real — a single wingbeat inspiring something far larger. Chapel-en-le-Frith’s Biodiversity Group decided to act. This autumn’s clean-up follows the huge efforts of those who cleared the party debris left from summer nights. Around sixty volunteer hours, spread across four weekends, have seen bag after bag hauled from every corner of the site: car tyres, gas bottles, nitrous oxide canisters, plastic, glass, a whirligig washing line — everything, including a kitchen sink.

Deb, Jason and Nic at Waterswallows

Nic Callaghan paddle-boarded the perimeter, towing sack after sack of rubbish back to shore. The satisfaction is written across her beaming face. Making a mark on a natural space does that to you — it becomes a shared experience, a meditative act of rebellion. A quiet declaration that we don’t have to be passive in the face of rubbish when it stands in Mother Nature’s way.

Our paddle board champion litter picker Nic!

"Being part of the solution is a wonderful feeling"

Litter is a complex issue to solve, but being part of the solution is a wonderful feeling. Chapel-en-le-Frith Biodiversity Group carry out regular litter-picks around the parish — and occasionally further afield, when a passing rarity points us toward a problem.

Chapel Biodiversity Group volunteers with some of the litter from Waterswallows