Blog
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Nature Notes
Athene noctua. 10pm and a joyful revelation. A pair of little owls sit side-by-side on the whitened, papery branch of the stag-headed oak overhanging the field; then fly in opposite directions to resume hunting. As I creep past their oak, with its hidden hollow and ancient girth, I hear the insistent psssssht, psssssht of chicks. […]
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Nature Notes
Full Hawthorn; a Rook’s Wedding. Full hawthorn, and they are carting silage down the lanes. Against a sky blue-black as swallows, the thorn blossom is late and lovely. I love its strange, washday scent; all sweetness and ammonia – though Nan used to say it smelt of death and cat-piss and wouldn’t have it in […]
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Nature Notes
Thunderlight on the Plough. Heavy downpours cause the winterbourne, sunk since January, to rise and flow wide and fast through the pasture and across the road, ignoring the culverts built for it. I stop the car. Skylarks row vertically upwards through the rain, but they are not singing; I wonder that their nests may be drowned. […]
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Nature Notes
Rooks and White Violets. Each springtime, I slow past greening banks, searching for the first white violets. I mistake them for the smallest things: ‘The shell of a little snail bleached/ In the grass; chip of flint, and mite/ Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung/ In splashes of purest white’. These are the poet […]
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Nature Notes
Birds of the High Arctic. There are swallows on the wires on the Coldharbour Road. Their blue-black glossiness burnished by the African sun. A slow moving galleon of cumulous cloud pulses with distant lightening: a mobile silent disco sailing by. The weather is classically April; bright, silly, unpredictable. Though it is late and the sloe […]
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Nature Notes
On Speen Moor, Part II: The Library and the Starlings. An hour before sunset, we walk to Speen Moors, stopping at the Ladywell. The ancient stone predates the Romans and covets a sacred spring. The path to it is damp and full of a chill, green, mysterious brightness the colour of duckweed and moss. Wild […]
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Nature Notes
On Speen Moors, Part I Just past sunset, on the trail of a locally made You Tube film tweeted 2 days earlier, I park the car somewhat irresponsibly off the A4. And walk down a footpath familiar to me 20 years ago, shouldering my binoculars. I am wrong footed, immediately. There are lights moving and […]
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Nature Notes
Chalk Percolated Rain, and Rain Birds There is, at last, a hardening; a crust to the mud of landrover tracks, to the pocks of hoof and boot prints. There is still a thigh burning pull through gateways and wetter places. But suddenly, we are talking about harrowing and rolling. The winter rain’s pond in the […]
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Nature Notes
Wild Crocuses. There is a small, tussocky, 8-acre meadow that might appear unremarkable. Yet this is one reason, having been left alone, unploughed and uncultivated, that makes it scarce and special. The other is because it is mysteriously dotted with 400,000 ‘wild’ spring crocuses. Bordered on one side by gardens, the meadow slopes to a […]
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Nature Notes
A Springing of Birds. In the last week, and in a whirl of birds, the season has shifted subtly, but importantly. At dusk, between Red Hill Woods and Enborne Street, the evening roost of hundreds of thousands of birds is underway, as it has been all winter. A bat fresh out of hibernation flits along the […]