Blog
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Nature Notes
The Time of the Singing of Birds. Dawn after a night of thunderless lightning, and the blackbird’s song breaks like an aural form of liquid honey. Thrushes join in after minutes, followed by robins, dunnocks, woodpigeons and then all the birds of the air, wood, earth and hedgerow until the gaps are filled to create […]
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Nature Notes
Swallows and Gold Days. There is an absence of Swallows. A solitary bird returned to the wires at Coldharbour Farm a month ago and has only just been joined by another. I’ve seen others passing through, a brief gloss of navy blue, the twitter of several birds issued from one red throat; but the mud […]
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Nature Notes
An Almost-Hoopoe. .My ten-year-old daughter described this reluctant spring perfectly as we passed a bank of wood anemones, their petals pursed tight, like lips withholding a secret: ‘it’s like the ground knows it’s spring, but the sky won’t have it’. There were patchy reports of spring migrant birds coming through – wheatear and ring ouzel. […]
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Nature Notes
Rain. Battles. White Violets. And so it rains. Mud becomes part of the fabric of living, washing off the fields with little to stop it and slewing into everything else. Hail the size of garden peas hammers down so hard one night, the spider in the corner of my writing hut roof trembles. Adrift from […]
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Nature Notes
The Blackthorn Winter & the Hawfinch. We are in the midst of a blackthorn winter. The sloe blossom on the low trees and hedges (that have not been flailed) is a frothy surf upon the damson-coloured thorns that pre-empts its leaves and often presages the lion’s roar and bite of March. I have been haunting […]
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Nature Notes
Blown Snow. In the hours and days before the snow, we barrow water round to the horses as tap, trough and water buckets freeze. The temperature falls to -9 at night. A prelude of snow falls hard and fast, turning the tarmac white in the time it takes to open Mum’s gate. We go out […]
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Nature Notes
Before the Snow. Winter-spring holds fast at each end and see-saws. One morning, rain strikes the cold plough at 45 degrees, whilst hail big as garden peas comes down straight as a plumb line: conjoined snowflakes fly up and down through it all. A demonstration of the weight of precipitation. The ditches are overflowing and the village […]
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Nature Notes
Mercurial, argent: winter chalkstream. Below the high chalk of the North Wessex Downs, rainwater that has percolated through the porous substrate, flows at a near-constant 10C into benign, gin-clear chalkstreams. For otters in winter, this is a good thing. And there is potentially a better chance of spotting these elusive, mercurial creatures now: with their […]