spring
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Nature Notes
Thunderlight on the Plough. Heavy downpours cause the winterbourne, sunk since January, to rise and flow wide and fast through the pasture and across the road, ignoring the culverts built for it. I stop the car. Skylarks row vertically upwards through the rain, but they are not singing; I wonder that their nests may be drowned. […]
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Nature Notes
Rooks and White Violets. Each springtime, I slow past greening banks, searching for the first white violets. I mistake them for the smallest things: ‘The shell of a little snail bleached/ In the grass; chip of flint, and mite/ Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung/ In splashes of purest white’. These are the poet […]
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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 […]