As a tribute to my father I show below an example of his writing, as you will see he was both an excellent writer and keen observer of wildlife. This essay was extracted from an article written ten years ago for the Parkgate Society titled An Outsider's View.

"The Dee Estuary, including it's marshes, is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Within the huge SSSI, the RSPB owns a reserve of 5040 acres, known as Gayton Sands. The whole SSSI is also what is known as a Ramsar site, so named after the place where an international convention was held about the threats to the World's wetlands and their remarkable wildlife.

"There are still lots of people - perhaps even in Parkgate - who haven't a clue what all this is about. They are blind to the attraction of wetlands, although artists for generations have been enchanted by their wide skies and water reflected lights, and they are deaf to the astonishing beauty of the calls of the wading birds, often heard against the roar of the sea on distant banks and the hiss of the approaching or withdrawing tide over the nearer shore.

"On a grey winter's day, with no light to turn the wet mudflats into silver, the estuary may seem dreary, until you hear the sweetly haunting call of a redshank across the wilderness or the more solemn call of the curlew, both so evocative of the spirit of these wild places. Equally evocative in their more gentle way are the calls of ringed plover and grey plover. If you have the ears to hear, the effect is sheer magic.

"Sheer magic, too, is the massed flight of knot, dunlin or sanderling, in a vast 'corps de ballet' having a precision of movement unknown to a human one.

"On New Year's Day this year I walked at low tide from Caldy, along the inner shore, towards Parkgate. The wintering knot - which, I think, move around between here and the Ribble - were on this day present in great number. In what must have been a communal urge to change feeding places, at least ten thousand of them, at a modest estimate, rose in the air together. With occasional flashes of light when their white under-wings caught the low winter sun, their close packed clouds split and united, suddenly changing direction, soared and swooped to the accompaniment of the wild piping of oystercatchers.

"Several of us watching gasped at the wonder of the spectacle. A party on an organised walk came by, chattering hard with thir heads down, and were quite unaware that there was one.

"Past Thurstaston I reached the expanding marsh and the gutter, or tidal creek, which runs along the inner side close to the Heswall shore, a fascinating place both for its boats and its birds - much of it within the RSPB reserve. There are commonly shelduck near the mouth of the gutter and curlews and redshank all along it. The thousands of pintail and wigeon, for which the estuary is famous, tend to distance themselves on the far side of the marsh, but the gutter is frequented, whether or not the tide is in. by hundreds of that charming little duck, the teal - almost as far as Parkgate."

My father went on to discuss the disagreement between the RSPB and the Nature Conservancy at the time. The RSPB wanted to improve the marsh by digging out a series of scrapes on the marsh in front of Parkgate, and the Nature Conservancy didn't want them to. My father was firmly on the side of the RSPB!