Nature Notes
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Nature Notes
A Dip in the Water. It’s not perhaps the first wildlife-activity that springs to mind, mid-winter. But I’ve an article to write (for spring) and I need refreshing – so the girls and I go pond dipping. We take my youngest daughter’s ‘bugnoculars’ (a clever little watertight box with dual magnifying eyepieces on the top), […]
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Nature Notes
Bonfire of the Heart. 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Newbury Bypass protests. Yet it all still feels very raw. I am not going to use this opportunity to go over the whys and wherefores. Nor am I going to defend my point of view, my reasoning, on something that was both intensely local, but […]
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Nature Notes
Winter Song in a Minor Key Walking into the south wind in this mildest of New Years is like walking through a warm bath. I am in my shirt sleeves. A mistle thrush is singing from the very top of a larch; its plaintive, melancholy song delivered, my son tells me, in a minor key […]
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Nature Notes
Of Love and Stardust. Later on the hill at night, the children and I make the most of a rare clear night during the Geminid meteor shower. The children stand silhouetted on the edge of the curve, ditch and drop of the old grass hill fort. The stars brighten by the minute as our eyes […]
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Nature Notes
Red Kites for Christmas After school, we head for the hanging wood to wait for the kites, the light already bleeding away. My smallest daughter and I pick our way through brambles, disturbing a roebuck lying up under the weatherproofing of the laurel. We find a comfortably shaped tree to lean on. And then the […]
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Nature Notes
The darkness, being double the light. Between sunrise and sunset there are precious few hours now. The dark is double the available light. And in December there are other pressures so, for a while, I am indoors, or dashing about more than I would like to be. The stolen hours out become ever more intoxicating, […]
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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 […]