Blog
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Nature Notes
Lunch with an Otter. A text came from my son at college, whilst I was at work. ‘You’ll never guess what I’m having lunch with!’ There followed the most exquisite video clip, taken on his phone. An otter, hunting the shallow stream at one of the entrances to Andover College, rolling, roiling and revelling in […]
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Nature Notes
Running Wild Weeks like these, I get my wildlife fix on the run. Meeting my son off the bus fifteen minutes early, means quarter of an hour’s birdwatching on the hill inbetween. Or at school, helping students with their GCSE Speaking and Listening exams, I am delighted that some have chosen water vole conservation, plastic […]
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Nature Notes
Arcturus and the Foxes. For the first time since October, blackbird song woke me before my alarm; a bar had been crossed. The strange, unprecedented February heatwave triggered synapses alert to a season far more advanced than it actually was. It tripped a search, all senses primed, for joyful, familiar markers, a litany learnt and […]
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Nature Notes
An Extinction Rebellion. ‘We are bovvered, though’ read a placard above a picture of Catherine Tate’s apathetic teenager Lauren Cooper. ‘We can get an extension on our essays, but not on our planet’ read another, and ‘This pale blue dot is all we’ve got’, ‘Respect your Mother’ ‘There is no Planet B’ went others. Articulate, […]
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Nature Notes
Brown hares, snow hares. I never meant to go out that far, that high or for that long. At least, not before getting some chores done. But, when it stopped snowing after more than 24 hours, the world was so transformed, so breathtaking in its beauty, I was utterly taken; spellbound. The light coming through […]
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Nature Notes
Hedgebottom Foxes. A blank-window pallor gleams through the bottom of the bare hawthorn hedge on the hill above. Where protective tree tubes have been, the hedge bottom is open and spaced evenly by slender trunks, giving it a cloistered appearance. It is an unusual vantage point for me: a steamy kitchen on a Saturday-job afternoon. […]
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Nature Notes
Trespasses. The fog and its hiding, muffled property lends me a welcome, invisibility cloak that I wear in repudiation of some kind of exile. Walking alone and further to get to familiar places sharpens the senses. By the swing gate, the upturned aspect of ash twig-ends, ending in lamp black buds like deer’s feet, show […]
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Nature Notes
Rain birds, sun blushed. Pluvialis apricaria. On the highest hill we are under the rain. Exposed as we are, we can see it coming towards us, a wall of grey obliterating the landscape in its path. Later, there are spectacular rainbows. After sunset, I walk out onto the big arable fields on the highest hills. […]