golden plover
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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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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
Winter Gold. The ninety-acre field could be a bleak prospect. High and exposed, it can appear a vast expanse of tilled mud: six-inch high rape leaves, little else. Squally showers come on biting gusts, shaking the new leaves to silver with a loud pattering. The mud is heavy on our boots. It seems an incredible, […]
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Nature Notes
A Springing of Birds. In the last week, and in a whirl of birds, the season has shifted subtly, but importantly. At dusk, between Red Hill Woods and Enborne Street, the evening roost of hundreds of thousands of birds is underway, as it has been all winter. A bat fresh out of hibernation flits along the […]
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Birds of the Night Hill
As another storm comes through, we shelter in the woods. The laurel leaves are shining with wet and the tree trunks dark with it. We are not alone. A hare is backed up in the bay between roots of an ash. Its rump pushed against the trunk, a kohl rimmed, lunar-eclipse of a haunted eye […]
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Nature Notes
Dusking. When the clocks fell back, I spent a day revelling in a gifted hour – and the surprise that I wasn’t late for everything. But it was a brief deceit that soon caught up and overtook me. In this twilight of the year it seems fitting that we go ‘dusking’ in the unspecified hour […]