Nicola Chester

Nature Writer and Activist

Nature Notes

  • Nature Notes

    The Barley Bird and the Comet. Out on the Marlborough Downs, there was a song I’d strained to hear at home. It remained a possibility there, a trace echo in the white noise of grasshoppers or the tinnitus of distant meadow pipits; but here, this funny little key farmland bird was real and singing, and […]

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  • Nature Notes

    An Old Man of the Woods, and a Hare at Foot. Over the ridgeline of the barn roof, there is a confetti-cannon burst of house martins, that twinkle against a stormy, swallow-back, woodpigeon sky before dispersing like the Red Arrows. My neighbour’s birds have fledged. The horses have a new field to graze, and as […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Vessel of Song. Spring walks into summer and, confined to our very small radiuses, it feels like we are walking with it; noticing some advancement or small incremental change each day. We delve and settle deeper. On the longest day, the song thrush that has been singing as long as the daylight lasts, every day […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Proceed, With Caution. I’ve never seen such a volume and variety of fledgling birds coming to the bird feeders. It’s a joyous and engaging daily drama – and an expensive one. There could be many reasons for their being so many, if, indeed there are; we are spending much more time watching and feeding them; […]

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  • Nature Notes.

    A Tender Key of Place. We walk into the drying, sheep-scented wind and down the sheltered hollow lane. Light puddles on the dust and passing tractors mill the chalky mud-crust into a gritty flour. A pink, white and blue tangle of campion, stitchwort, bugle and speedwell thicken banks more than twice my height – something […]

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  • Nature Notes.

    A Change, Felt. The emotional rollercoaster we are all riding, has its calm spots. There is much about ‘the new normal’ I am at ease with: home, family, staying local. So much so, I wonder if I haven’t got off the rollercoaster entirely somedays and found a quiet field somewhere, behind a gate and through […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Windmill for Kites. On the last morning of my 49th year, I woke to the cuckoo calling loudly through the open window, from Nightingales Wood. I dreamt his first woodwind notes, before I realised they were real. The year before last, he didn’t come at all – and I feared that would be it. […]

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  • Nature Notes

    The Green Fuse. With what Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, Spring advances anyway. Two swallows zip through the farmyard and are gone, to some remembered beacon further north, snipping up the air as they go. A small dust-devil whips-up behind them, as if, for all the world, […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Lucozade-Brightness, and the Nature at Hand. Suddenly, our galloping lives, or even our quietly walking lives, have come up against a fence. We weave from foot to foot, like restless horses at a stable door. We feel at a loss, part-paralysed, cut off, anxious and adrift or, for many others, are working as if […]

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  • Nature Notes

    The Moon and the Goshawk. These are strange and unsettling times for us all. I head for the high tops, to clear my head with a clearing storm. I can see it coming; great grey brush strokes drawn down with a broad sweep over the wet page of a lemon-yellow sky. I decide to cross […]

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