Nature Notes
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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. […]
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Nature Notes
Prosperous & Starveall: Old Pots & Old Gods. It’s been a week of climbing shining chalk tracks into china blue skies. High on the downs, the views open up to Pilot Hill and Siddown Warren, then Ladle Hill, Watership and White Hill. At Granny’s Lane, a weasel shoots across gleaming flints, as if someone pulled […]
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Nature Notes
Lamplight, Wessex Heights. Ours is a literary landscape, like much of Britain. The land has a pull on us and often, the most enduring way to express that is through words, conserving or farming it; planting woods, naming fields, woods and recording it on maps. I spoke recently at The Museum of English Rural Life […]