Blog
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Nature Notes
Field Signs. I am scraping through wet leaf litter with some friends. We are looking for hazelnuts nibbled in the precise way a dormouse eats them. We know dormice are present locally and hope to make this wood a better habitat for them. Mooching about, our close-looking is rewarded – not by hazelnuts nibbled in
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Nature Notes
The Eyes Have It. On high ground, the wild wind and furious passing showers are exhilarating. We seem to be walking through a whirlwind that rooks and jackdaws are caught up in, or are purposefully pitching into, rising up through it like black sparks ejected from a chimney. The wind rips through, ravishing trees and
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Nature Notes
Fires in the Fall. Writing in my hut, I am distracted by a small, determined scraping. I suspect I know what it is, but I can’t be sure until I go outside and look: there, late on in the season, a magnificent hornet is methodically scraping the wood from the window, leaving tiny blonde stripes
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Nature Notes
Dusking. When the clocks fell back, I spent a day revelling in a gifted hour – and the surprise that I wasn’t late for everything. But it was a brief deceit that soon caught up and overtook me. In this twilight of the year it seems fitting that we go ‘dusking’ in the unspecified hour
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Nature Notes
Wild Writing On Freeman’s Marsh, for Hungerford Literary Festival, 14 children have come seeking literary inspiration from nature. We begin by tuning in our senses, discussing the smell of dogs’ paws and listening for the thin, needling call of redwings arriving from the frozen north. And then we are out with our new notebooks, collapsing
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Nature Notes
The Beautiful, Toxic Landscape. Spider webs net the dew, distilling it to clear drops. I could walk the width of this field and scoop up a whole glassful of water. The stubble begins to steam gently as the sun warms it, mist rising in curls and ringlets like the feathery plumes ghosting up from my
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Nature Notes
Margherita Pizzas and the Six Hundredth. I am compelled to come here each autumn. I never know quite when, only that it is misty and the woodpigeons are chorusing and the jays are screeching. For the rest of the year, I tend to avoid this particular footpath and its permanent, orange, sucking clay. It is mud
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Nature Notes
A Raven King. At the foot of the down, below the double gibbet that has stood in several incarnations since 1676, is a dead raven. Both wings are folded demurely across its breast and belly, crossing at the tips as if it were a dark angel, its head lowered on its breast in repose. The friend