My partner Surya goes out but immediately comes back. There’s a fledgling Crow by the road. My heart leaps. Ever since I was a child, I’ve longed to have a tame corvid. I used to watch Magpies from my bedroom window and pretend I’d made friends with one of them, who I called Dock. In my imaginings, Dock would come and go as he pleased, flying to my bedroom window before heading off to the trees...
I’ve been holding off writing this blog because the land it focuses on is not my land. Therefore what happens to it is, according to convention, none of my business. But I still feel the need to tell its story, because every time I walk past it I remember what is now lost. You’ve probably heard this quote from Aldo Leopold: 'One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives...
She senses me before I sense her, of course, after all, this is a bird who hears worms. Both of us hunker, trying to disappear into earth she, a tessellation of feathers and I a tall shape in a woolly hat. Minutes pass but we stay rooted, the frosted grass cool on our toes. To her, this scene is familiar, she's lived it a hundred times or more crouching to avoid foxes and huntsmen, who delight...
As soon as we knew that our trip to Shetland was definitely happening, the first place Simon and I honed in on, independently, was the island of Unst. Unst is Shetland’s most northerly inhabited island. If you were to get in a boat and head directly north from its upper end, between the rocky outcrops of Muckle Flugga and Out Stack, you’d eventually reach the North Pole. Legend has it that the...
Recently, I’ve been fortunate. I have been in the company of Owls. The first, a Barn Owl, took me by surprise as I planted out courgettes. I have plans to write a longer piece about that encounter, so for now I’ll leave you with a photograph I took that evening. The second involves Owlets. A pair of Tawny Owlets which I stumbled upon just over a week ago at the edge of our garden. There have...
I wrote this piece in February, 2023. The original version was published on Mark Avery's website. I have edited it slightly since then, but the majority remains the same. Mark has also written a blog about Linnets, which can be read here. The sky is the colour of a Wood Pigeon’s back. The air fizzes with mizzle. After breakfast, I drop my car to our local garage to be fixed, then run the lanes...
I cannot settle. The low, heavy-bellied clouds that were here this morning have given way to a bright, sunny day. The wind has dropped, and I can’t shake the feeling that staying inside will mean I’ll miss something I’ve promised myself I’ll try to see. At midday, I throw in the towel and head out on my bike. I haven’t got too far to travel, but my old bike is rickety and makes cycling hard. It...
I have spent too much time on social media these past few weeks, eyes to a screen instead of the sky, my camera left by the front door as the hours passed, poorly. But this morning, in an attempt to see once more, I picked it up and went into the garden. There had been a hard frost overnight, each leaf and stem coated in thick, white ice. An icing sugar landscape. Fern frost, reminiscent of the...
I wake in the early hours to a faint green light on my ceiling, no bigger than the tip of a matchstick. Curious, I climb out of bed, inch my way across the bedroom and fumble for the light switch. In an instant the magic is extinguished. Now all I see is a cellar spider with something in her web, which I gingerly remove while balancing barefoot on a wooden chest. It’s a male glow-worm. With the...
I hear a scream. I look out, expecting to see the last breaths of a dying rabbit. But instead of a rabbit, I see a stoat. It is hanging from an antiquated drain cover in our front garden, head wedged between the metal bars so that its body dangles below them like a hooked fish. It is suspended by its neck and cannot touch the floor. I rush into the garden and grab the stoat by its open jaws,...