Nature Notes
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Nature Notes
Wild Crocuses and Stubble Turnips. Blue skies flick a switch for spring. Bats and brimstone butterflies break hibernation, midges rise and fall in columns, blackbirds grow territorial and sparrows toy with (and squabble over) nesting material. The mud crusts and dries in ridges and tiny, young nettle and goosegrass leaves make a green flush under […]
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Nature Notes
Rime Frost, Hoar Frost, Thaw: How to Fall into Narnia. We have been held in the hug of a cold white fog for days now. Becalmed, anaesthetised at the white-blank windows. Like the uncertainty of sleet, fog is the weather of the moment. Shifty, unsure, blanketing, blurring, keeping us home. Out in it, we move […]
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Nature Notes
Sleeting. The snow begins to fall at daybreak and continues sporadically throughout the day. For the first two hours it comes down fast and settles thickly, then turns to sleet, then rain, then back to snow. The woods provide a brown-screen backdrop for varieties of wintry precipitation in a moving panorama: snow in small hard […]
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Nature Notes
A burr, pulled from a fleece. The iced planets of burdock looked like beautiful renditions of the spike-celled images that have haunted us all year. We squeeze past these plants at least twice daily, & carry their prickly mines around with us all winter, tenderly pulling them off one another’s clothes in brief moments of […]
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Nature Notes
Wild Light, Weather, Portals. In the last hour of light, I walk along the high chalk ridge to a spot where I’m hoping for closer views of fallow deer. I find I am walking between storms; the loose flint vertebrae of the whaleback rattle away from my boots. The hill’s spine soars clear of the […]
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Nature Notes
The Light, & the Dying of the Ash Trees. A poignant, devastating light is falling on the ash trees, illuminating their grey skeletons. The sheer scale of the loss of them, has become obvious and widespread this year. There are ghosts in the woods. Chalara ash dieback was officially identified in the UK in 2012. […]
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Nature Notes
Fallow Bucks, Chalk Scree. I haven’t been able to put my fieldcraft into action much in recent weeks. But I’m making up for it now. I’m off to the gap on the downs that lies between two blocks of woodland – where there are fallow deer. The high slope falls away steeply with far-reaching views […]
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Nature Notes
The University of Craneflies. The fast, busy pace of life seems to have returned, when I was determined not to let it. I wanted to keep some of the lockdown simplicity; the time to notice and not let time run on so quickly, like grain through my fingers. Yet, before we know it, we are […]
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Nature Notes
There is a Little of Spring in Autumn. On the last day of the strangest school holidays ever, the oats are being brought in from Home Field. Across the lane, fields of late-grown seed hay are being tedded; turned, woofed, floofed and dried before being teddered again into windrows and baled. The warm, biscuity scent […]
