I was woken at 4:30 a.m., which was more than a little annoying as I’d only gone to bed at 3 a.m. I’m naturally a night owl rather than a morning person, finding that my brain seems to fizz more with ideas when the stresses of the day have ebbed away. I’d spent a few hours before going to bed beating the bounds of my small garden, making sure that everything which could fly couldn’t. I put a large lump …
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Ok, fair enough, it’s not a bird, but rather a species of bird. It’s unusual in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it seems to like living near people. But it was particularly fond of World War Two, because Hitler’s bombs produced lots of rubble, and if there is one thing a Black Redstart likes, it’s rubble next to water and next to people. The Black Redstart is a very scarce bird. The British population …
I know that it can happen ay any time of year, the amorousness of males typically being a year-round kind of thing, but the sight of two boxing hares surrounded by a flock of lapwing at the end of January brought to focus the way in which the seasons are drifting like untethered dinghies on an ebb tide, losing their distinct and welcome identity. Once, the sharp edges of our seasons brought change and celebration, the high, sharp heat of …
glossy ibis in Somerset Glossy Ibis The glossy Ibis is another bird that seems to be travelling faster than headline writers and website producers do. It’s undoubtedly a rarity on these shores, a bird more normally associated with Africa than dreary old England. In fact the bird can be seen on every continent except Antarctica, but we tend to think of it (as I’ve seen it) clustered around lakes in the subtropical regions. Yet here was a glossy ibis, comfortably …
I didn’t find them: they found me. Driving across the Somerset levels, two black silhouettes crossed the road a dozen yards in front of me, a humped scurry like two small hump-backed bridges on legs that moved with power and purpose. The landscape here is scarred by water, open wounds criss-cross the landscape which seems forever as though it could at any moment hold its breath and sink slowly beneath the surface like a child at bath-time. I drove …
It is an odd relationship. You always find Golden Plover in the company of Lapwing, but you don’t always find Lapwing in the company of Golden Plover. It is as if the Golden Plover, a flighty, twitchy bird always living on its nerves, needs the reassurances of Lapwings around it, while Lapwing are quite relieved to spend a day away from them. At rest, the Plover surround themselves with Lapwing, living in the centre of the flock, as if the …
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