Thank goodness for a bit of sun recently and how the natural world around us is responding to the extra daylight with plenty of spring bulbs in flower, hazel trees laden with catkins and a good number of buds on the trees sprouting young green leaves. Some of the young hazels are looking particularly stunning at the moment, their golden yellow catkins almost glowing against the golden brown of their young stems and twigs. Not wishing to tempt fate but at last, even the relentless mud along most unsurfaced footpaths is starting to dry out a little.

I’ve not looked at any data for this winter’s weather, but it’s certainly felt like another very wet and dull one. Several storms with really intense showers, all too thoroughly washed the land clean of our litter, soil and more … you just had to look at the colour of our streams, rivers and estuary creeks to figure where all that was ending up! Of course, this is part of the natural process that supports our incredibly productive coastal sealife community but the rainstorms of the last couple of winters have been excessive and have led to an over fertilising of our waters and localised harmful algal blooms.

Last year, we had blankets of green seaweeds growing over some of the mudflats of our estuaries, very visible at low tide. Being so green, it can look healthy enough, but we have to remind ourselves that it should really be brown – a thriving community of mudflat organisms from ragworms to shrimps and crabs to clams that live below the surface and feed from the surface through vacuum cleaner like tubes. But this thriving community is easily smothered by the blanket of seaweed, even preventing the wading birds from probing down into the mud for whatever their length and shape of beak is adapted to reach down to.

Last year, I was very concerned what impact the seaweed might be having on the dwarf seagrass meadow it was hiding across the Kingsbridge mudflat. I could see some seagrass poking through, but it never cleared enough to know what was going on below. Thankfully, deeper down the shore the seagrass seemed to be doing quite well – maybe deep enough down that the seaweed broke any link to the seabed and any wind or current helped move it away. I’m looking forward to seeing what will happen this year; the dwarf seagrass meadows have been doing so well the few years previously that it would be a great shame if it is knocked back again.

Our estuaries have adapted to being high nutrient ecosystems and many of the wildlife communities within estuaries do help to mop the nutrients up – the saltmarshes and the seagrasses all do a ‘polishing’ job on the water quality but, as we have seen, can be overwhelmed. Particularly with the Salcombe-Kingsbridge Estuary, with no river to help wash and flush the excess nutrients out, it is up to everyone of us within its rainwater catchment area to be conscious of limiting any nutrients we add to the system - whether that be from food waste down the kitchen sink, or the use of fertilisers on our gardens and fields. For those of us lucky enough to live close to a stream, we should also recognise that they too can be overwhelmed by green waste and we should never use them to dispose of any form of garden waste.

We are currently hearing a lot more about the health of our rivers and, if we can get them right, we will be getting a lot more right for our estuaries too. A large part of looking after our rivers though, and something that all too often seems to be forgotten, is how much our rivers depend upon the streams that feed them. And yet, our streams are such an important, if not vital, corridor network for a lot of wildlife that we do so treasure such as otters and kingfishers … keep watching, you never know!