Gravy Poe
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...
A Thin Place
Silence falls as the sky contorts. Above my head, enormous beams reach upwards, stretching miles and miles. They are blue, and red, and pink, the reds and pinks so bright that I do not need my camera to see them. I do not need anything, because I’m floating. I’ve slipped, somehow, into another reality, where language fails, and tears take over. *** I arrived sometime after 10pm. That was,...
Goodbye to the Cuckoo Flowers
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...
The Woodcock
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...
Running
Running, I think, is my favourite way to pay attention. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes the muscles in my legs complain. But I keep going. Eventually, the discomfort eases. I find a rhythm, a pace which allows me to see. I like to run on the bookends of the day. I have tried it in the middle, but even in winter I find the light, and warmth, too harsh. I relish it best in the morning,...
Less is More
After dreaming of Ceps (Boletus edulis) and Fly Agarics (Amanita mascaria) I took myself to a well-walked woodland in the Blackdown Hills which seemed like a good place to search for fungi. I didn’t expect to find much, but the dream was so vivid that it felt remiss to ignore it. At the time, I had no idea that the two species frequently grow alongside one another, both having mycorrhizal...
Ghosts and Giants on Hermaness
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...
Storm Petrels in the Simmer Dim
The boat is already laden with people. We're not late, but perhaps this is one of those instances where arriving half an hour early was the correct thing to do. I dash down to the owners, who are standing at the land end of Sandsayre Pier, near Sandwick on Shetland, and tell them my name. Thankfully my booking, made online over a month ago, was recorded and my friend Simon and I are on the list...
Walnut and Ash
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...
Noctilucent Clouds
I have been watching an oak tree for over two hours. It’s gone midnight, and it’s now so dark that the tree is no more than a hazy silhouette. I’m meant to be recording bat activity in and around the tree, but by this point in the morning the whole thing seems pretty futile. The bat detector I’m holding might register their ultrasonic calls, but I can’t see if the bats are flying into the tree,...