JUST after midsummer, sitting on a gravel “beach” by a shallow murmuring stream, dappled by sunlight through the alder canopy, we divided up our snacks and got down to serious eating. 

From the corner of my vision a flash of red and blue whizzed by just in front of our noses. I froze. Then a few seconds later a second jewel flashed across, followed by a familiar whistle … one of the two kingfishers calling to its companion.

That kingfisher pair told us something. Their presence confirmed that the stream still held a healthy population of fishlings — bullhead (“miller’s thumb” to us oldies), minnow, troutlings — and that the birds likely had a bank nest somewhere close by, though we failed to find it.

And the dancing irridescent “beautiful demoiselles” (sort of dainty dragonflies), mayfly and little caddis flies told the same story … that the stream was still holding on to its living plenty. 

Generally the chalk streams like that one, fed from the chalk aquifer under the Downs, have survived better than other streams.

And so far, this summer and its lovely rain is a welcome reprieve from the utter disaster of the previous two summers of drought. I’ve been whooping happy when “the rain it raineth every day!” 

By contrast, in 2021 I walked a forest head stream where I’d always found wriggling masses of springtime tadpoles and fat bullheads lurking among the stones. This time the bullheads were visible from way off, their white, dead, turned-up bellies exposed on the drying mud. The crowds of tadpoles were gasping and dying in shrinking puddles. The drought was relentless. The stream flows broke. 

In 2022 it was the same. Even the stream through the forest SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) was just dry mud and puddles. 

We needn’t have worried about the alien crayfish we’d found in numbers there in the spring. They’d be dead. But I did worry about the red speckled trout parr I’d scooped in my net. What chance did they have?

There was some small consolation, though it was a puzzling thing. A tiny few of the High Wealden forest streams still kept on flowing — right through the baking heat. All were tiny side streams topped by a spring. One was no bigger than a ditch, but with a gin-clear flow running fast to the main channel. 

The wildlife of the best of those drought-resistant streams was abundant, obvious and special. When I peered close to the surface I could see beautiful, waving, medusa-like fronds of “frogspawn algae,” Batrachospermum, just like its sea-weedy cousins in low-tide rock pools. 

Big leeches, so big that at first glance I thought they were brook lamprey, wiggled and writhed. One was trying hard to swallow a dead tadpole it’d found. 

They were in the right place for food, these carnivores that go by the name of “eight-eyed blood hedgehogs” (!) for there were basking newts and tadpoles in every spot where sunlight brightened the water. 

Caddis heaved their sandy, gravelly or leafy sleeping bags across the bottom at varying speeds, while golden-ringed dragonflies (the biggest we’ve got in Britain) patrolled back and forth.

I mustn’t make too much of these exceptional survivors. They are the product of the quirky, fractured layer cake of clays and sands which is our Wealden geology. 

It’s the same geology that attracts the frackers to this area.

Most head streams are drought dry. Brown tangles of pollution algae cover the gravels and stones of erstwhile pristine chalk streams. You can often tell by the “chemical” smell when you are below the sewage works that are a feature of most tributary streams. But not always. 

When he was little we took grandson Che swimming in what seemed a perfect, crystal clear woodland stream. He fell ill with tummy trouble for several days after. The cause? A sewage works some way upstream.

Everywhere you look these streams are threatened. The head streams retreat in the face of water extraction, ratchetted up by relentless housing development as the south east sucks up unsustainable levels of economic activity at the expense of other regions of Britain, Europe and the globe. 

In stream after wooded stream, in gills and across pastures, rich good-lifers build ornamental and commercial fishing ponds, sometimes in extensive chains, eliminating the temperate rainforest wildlife and introducing new invasive species. 

Walking up one tiny woodland stream we were startled by giant catfish darting round our wellies, washed down no doubt from the ornamental lake upstream.

One hot night in the worst part of the 2021 drought, while walking a riverbank on a hunt for Daubenton’s water bats, I followed the noise of a loud motor and discovered plastic piping leading across a field and into the grossly shrunken river, surreptitiously pumping water to large ornamental carp ponds at the edge of the flood plain in the grounds of a posh converted farmhouse. 

I reported them to the Environment Agency and the landowners got a visit. No penalties, just an advisory chat.  

From the 1950s giant reservoirs fill both steep valleys and flat claylands, breaking the path for migratory stream wildlife. 

Their existence, and that of the network of sewage works, can have the paradoxical effect of securing flows downstream in times of drought, but that is tainted consolation for their profound ecosystem modifications. 

Intermittent flooding threats to new housing developments and Gatwick Airport on the plain below the High Weald, part-caused by new climate change induced rainfall patterns, drove the creation of new flood controls upstream. 

An old ornamental lake on a Wealden stream was hugely expanded to halt flood events, increasing its capacity from 10,000 cubic metres to 400,000 cubic metres. 

Now a stretching flood pond tail can reach way back into the upstream forest, threatening bog and stream ecosystems packed with rare plants and small creatures, all lowly and poorly recognised but clinging on there since the rainforest days — wood horsetail, sphagnum greyling, handsome woollywort, delicate germanderwort, shining hookeria, rufous forklet moss — weird names for small and beautiful life forms.

It’s those small things that most easily get ignored. 

Notes from a Free Walker is a new monthly column, to appear on the second weekend of the month. Keep an eye out for the next one on October 7.