Author: Alexi

This article appeared on Caught by the River on 12th September 2020.

At the fulcrum of summer, just before the unsettled weather and the slow decline into autumn, I am visiting Covehithe with my partner Kevin and a friend, Debbie, who I haven’t seen for 35 years. We are in search of fossils and interesting sights.

Covehithe is a few farms, houses and a church near an exposed stretch of North Sea coast. Taking a path through scrub and long grass, we come to the beach. It is an unspoilt place; there is no café, no toilets, not even a fence along the cliffs. Looking south you can just make out Southwold pier and lighthouse. A giant cruise ship and a sailing barge sit on the horizon. On a breezy day like this, the beach has only a few visitors — dog walkers and families huddled behind wind breaks or braving the sea for a swim. The place speaks of impermanence, change, the past — the cliff crumbles like dry, sugary ginger cake. Trees, roots and peat blocks have tumbled from above and lie strewn across the sands, some embedded, others scoured and bleached by sun and waves. The sea is hungry here. The whole Suffolk coast is eroding more than 2.5m a year and is one of the fastest disappearing coastlines in the British Isles.

Today the sea is milky jade, its mood moderately calm. The tide is out, the sky, promising. A few gulls twist the air overhead as we head south, stopping now and then to examine the cliffs and fallen debris. This stretch of coastline is supposed to be good for fossils such as bivalves and shark’s teeth. You could possibly even find a flint axe head. I am new to fossil hunting and pleased with any beachcombing find. The cliff has layers, deposits of white shells with sand and pebbles in between, all laid down 1 to 2 million years ago.

I first became interested in Covehithe through reading Time Song: In Search of Doggerland by Julia Blackburn. I wanted to come and see it for myself, but I didn’t hold out much hope of finding a fossil. I like to imagine myself back 8,000 years, to the end of the last ice age, just before the water spilled down from the retreating ice sheet to flood what we now call Doggerland and form the North Sea. Across the grey waves, beyond the cruise ship and the sailing barge, was land stretching as far as the eye could see. Marshes and mudflats, tundra and rivers, and no English Channel. In my mind I see lagoons, reedbeds, waders, mammoths and walruses. I see nomadic people travelling in small groups, people of shore, wetland and water.

A coast of flux and loss; the subtly shifting edge of one’s imagination — land into sea, sea into land.

The cliff top has a scruffy tuft of woodland. The trees look dark and grave, as if they know their fate. The coast here is also sinking very slowly as part of a rebalancing act with Scotland, which has shed its ice age burden and is in the process of rising. Sand, shell, rock, fossil, tree, root, peat — it is all shifting, succumbing, tumbling, exposing, transforming.

Sand martins peep out from little holes in the orange cliffs. Now and then a bird swoops out and chatters overhead with its neighbours, white-bellied and brown-backed. I approach the cliff to look closer. Hesitant white faces look back.

I become fascinated by the dishevelled tree remains on the shore. There is something undignified about these trees. Once robust and sturdy, they now lie bleached and skeletal in up-turned tangles as though caught mid-action in the last throes of life; a shape-shifting assemblage of contorted creatures. One tree reaches a green, algal arm out over the waves.

On the beach below Easton Wood, Debbie finds a large, white clam shell fallen from the crumbling cliff. She later tells me she identified it as an Ocean Quahog, Arctica icelandica, which is still found on coasts around the UK. Apparently individuals can live for over 500 years. I pick up a few shells from the base of the cliff; they disintegrate in my hands. Kevin holds a rock with an embedded sea urchin fossil. I take a photo. Then I find a belemnite, a grey, bullet shaped fossil about two inches long. It was the beak or rostrum of an archaic squid-like animal that swam in an ancient sea over 100 million years ago. It doesn’t belong here: it is the wrong age. It must have been brought down from elsewhere at some point.

Walking back towards Covehithe we decide to continue further north up the coast. More crumbling cliffs, more bone trees, more sand martins. Every so often a skein of barnacle geese passes over. A peeping from over the water and we notice a small flock of sanderlings. Like descending notes they drop to the shore and skitter beside the waves. The sun smoulders faintly from behind a thick film of grey.

When Debbie and I met up it was as though hardly a day had passed. As I said, it’s been about 35 years since we saw each other at university. But we’ve been writing to each other — snail mail, and now email since lockdown. We were zoology students and are both in the Bird Club. Recently she sent me a shark tooth she had found at Ramsholt and gave me a book about Cenozoic fossils. I keep the small black shiny tooth on a shelf in the printer’s tray I use for natural finds. I examine it as I write.

Over the years my interest in wildlife has changed; I no longer need to regard nature with a scientist’s eye, no longer need to impose order on it in that sort of — I do that more with writing now. I am free of the shackles of measuring, dissecting and labelling, but I don’t want to lose my interest in identifying and learning about the natural world.

Covehithe beach is a palimpsest of stories both old and recent. I have vague memories of sleeping out as a student on a beach similar to this. Debbie was there with us. I miss the free-spirited, wild student trips we took racing around the country, camping in hospital car parks and freezing cottages, all for the adventure and to see rare birds. There’s nothing quite like sleeping out beneath the stars, beside a murmuring sea and driftwood fire, snuggled into a sleeping bag and talking about the meaning of life.

I must ask Debbie about that time on the beach. Does she remember it? Was it Norfolk or Suffolk or some vague stretch of coast somewhere around there?

The cliffs peter out and we arrive at Benacre Nature Reserve, a lagoon, sand bar, bird hide and private woodland. The bird hide is closed due to Covid-19. The sand bar is fenced off as it’s a breeding ground for little terns. The terns have finished nesting and there is just an assortment of gulls beside the lagoon and a cormorant on a post in the water.

The sun has vanished, grey-bellied clouds congeal in the west. Another skein of geese appears and forks southwards. I feel rain in the air.

Returning to the hamlet of Covehithe, we decide to explore the church. St Andrew’s is a small, thatched church within the embrace of a much larger ruined church. The ruin is imposing. The towering flint walls have remnants of perpendicular arched windows. The church tower is still intact, solid and square like others I’ve seen in Suffolk that dominate the horizon from afar. The church ruins date from the 14th and 15th centuries. Later, in the 17th century, parishioners decided the church was too big to maintain, so they were granted permission to dismantle it and build a smaller church within its shell. I wonder about the congregation now — is it big enough to warrant the size of this small church, or will there be a yet smaller church? Churches within churches like Russian dolls. We cannot enter the newer church due to Covid-19, so we circumambulate the whole, taking photos and scrutinising the arches and columns from different angles.

A motley assortment of feral pigeons hunch on the lee side ledges in the ruins between tufts of wildflowers. Buddleias sprout from sheltered corners. I like the kingly stone heads with forked beards, the silent screaming faces of gargoyles. Walking into the ruin’s interior I notice a scattering of pigeon feathers, the sign of a scuffle or kill. Beside them is the soft, barred primary feather of a tawny owl. Are the feathers linked? Do owls go after pigeons?

The church was once much further inland. Looking at a 19th century map of the area, it is about a mile from the coast. A coastguard station marked between church and sea no longer exists and the road to it ends abruptly at the cliff edge.

I sometimes feel like those cliffs at Covehithe, weakened and weathered. Every so often, when life decides I haven’t suffered enough, it lands me a real blow and I end up in bed. So it is now I’m back home. I’m glad that this coastal stretch of Suffolk and Norfolk is allowed to be reclaimed by the sea. When I revisit it in years to come, perhaps the church ruin will perch on the cliff edge or lie in a romantic tumble of flinty rubble on the beach.

This piece appeared on the Landlines blog 24th August 2020.

Author’s Note
During an art and writing residency in a small cabin in King’s Wood, Kent, I wanted to see the nightjars that arrive in summer to breed. I was writing a book of wildlife encounters experienced during the hours of dusk, night and dawn. The nightjar’s haunting display has always been an event I try not to miss. One evening, my partner, Kevin, decided to join me.

***

A churring is audible from the birch trees at the edge of the wood. It is an uncanny sound, like the soft purr of an engine. My phone shows nine twenty, dusk. My partner and I follow in the direction of the sound.

It’s June on a still, mild evening in King’s Wood, Kent, and we are here looking for nightjars. The sky darkens from eggshell to powder blue. A small herd of fallow deer, grazing the forest track, slip away into the undergrowth when they see us. Keeping as quiet as we can we venture off the main track into an area of sweet chestnut coppice, the trees no more than two metres high. In a small clearing of birch saplings and grassy tussocks, we pause and wait, poised in anticipation, as white moths flitter between broom bush and rush stem like drunk angels.

It is not long before a dark shadow of a bird, scimitar-winged, like a giant swift, scythes the air above our heads. It is a glimpse, a moment of wonder. Then we hear the distinctive wing clap of the male as he performs to attract a female or ward off another male.

Nightjars emerge at dusk to feed on moths, mosquitoes and other flying insects, funnelling them into their wide mouths with the help of whiskers. As summer visitors, they arrive sometime in April from their wintering grounds south of the tropical rainforest in central Africa. For centuries they have attracted much superstition and folklore due to their strange call, unusual appearance and mysterious behaviour. They have been called by many names: dorhawk, nighthawk, puckeridge, puck bird, eve-jar, churr-owl, goatsucker. ‘Goatsucker’ stems from their ancient Greek name which meant ‘milker of goats’. It was believed that they sucked the milk from female goats; the birds often being found close to livestock, attracted to the insects around the animals.

The nightjar is a bird of the day’s edge, shear winged and shy, a bird of long summer evenings, of a world both familiar and surreal. Dream prophet, messenger, bristled-mouthed denizen sewing the remnants of day to the enfolding fabric of night.

In the chestnut coppice we wait and listen. The churring starts up again and the night purrs. We follow a narrow, overgrown path through the bushy trees into an opening with clear views of the now ink blue sky. We pause and look above the amorphous shapes of vegetation about us. Then, again a dark bird appears, flaps once or twice with long angular wings and circles over as though inspecting us before gliding out of sight. We have been gently lured into the nightjar’s realm.

Incongruous companions, the cracked pill of the moon and Jupiter stud the twilight sky.

The breeze picks up, swirling the froth of birch leaves; there is moisture in the air. Then the churring resumes, louder this time. Behind us on a dead branch high in a birch sits a solitary nightjar, black, steady and brooding. He’s a sentry of the night; a whiskered, feathered watchman; a night king who wants to be seen. A goatsucker. I watch him through binoculars while he churrs continuously for three minutes before flying off into the night.

On the way home I decide to return in daylight to check out the site.

The following day I’m out alone in nightjar territory. I wander the coppiced area dodging scrambling spiders with their white egg sacs in the grassy tussocks. Webs glisten and brambles snag at my trousers. Among birch saplings, I find burnt wood, heather, rushes. Below an overhanging sweet chestnut a dark patterned coil of canvas fabric shape-shifts into an adder, head up, languid, tongue tasting the air. I back away with care and watch where I tread.

Eyes to the ground now I wander further and am drawn to patches of bare ground in serrated shadow beneath some sweet chestnut bushes. With delight I find a broken eggshell in the earth and leaf litter. The eggshell is cream white flecked with grey and brown. Beneath more dry leaves I find another piece of shell. Two eggs! The young nightjars must have hatched in recent weeks and have probably fledged by now. I take photos and wrap the shells in a collecting box to take away and study later. I know that nightjars typically lay two eggs in a clutch and may have a couple of clutches a year. They are clearly still displaying here, holding territories and probably feeding young; I must make sure I don’t disturb them.

I wander back along the forest track, passing another coppiced area. I am brought to a halt when I see a brown mottled bird descend to the bare ground in front of me. It settles for a moment but then it sees me, hesitates and with a swift ascent flies up, a male with white wing and tail feathers visible. Silently he vanishes into the darkness of surrounding pines. From the trees I then hear a soft, continuous peeping sound. Could this be the young nightjars calling?

This piece of creative writing featured on RTE radio 1 Extra, an Irish radio station on 17th May 2020. You can hear it below on Soundcloud:

Transcript:

“Come,” she said and took my arm, her presence, a bristling beneath the skin. I had come a long way, stumbling among brambles, honeysuckle, white dead nettles. I had found myself here in her shade.

The light was fading, dancing leaf shadows on the trunks of the trees. The sun still oozed through the cracks and seams of the forest.

“Lie down”, she told me. The breeze was getting up, cold from the northern hills. I sighed and reached out my hands into the leaflitter. In the centipede, ant, woodlouse world beneath the fallen beech, I lay down, the trees floating about me.

“Let me dream, “ I said, “ Let me forget I am lost.”

A forest of archers came with dusk. They stood about me, dark silhouettes against the burgundy sky, ready to take me back. I wanted to forget, but my tangled dream enticed me down into oak and beech, hawthorn and hornbeam, spindle and hazel. And there it was, a hazel hand outstretched for me in the black earth, guiding me through the night.

She left as morning broke the yellow eggshell sky – and I sat alone beneath the fallen beech. The archers’ hoof prints in the damp earth led out of the forest. I followed. “There is no way if you are lost”, I heard the trees say blithely in the breeze. It will soon be over.

I had memories of the path before, memories of the river, but they were fading now.

And soon I stood in the sunlight in the middle of the field. I took the graft of hazel wand and held it to my heart. Leaves began to sprout and unfurl from my branches that now snagged the skudding clouds overhead. Tendrils twisted from my nose and mouth. “It is too late”, she’d said, “too late.” The archers would not return now.

Down into the earth my root toes lengthened, clutching at chalk nodules, clutching at flints one by one. Snails took shelter among them, violets sprung up in the soil between them. Then, in my branches, a blackbird began to build her heavenly nest, twig by twig while swallows wove the cerulean sky above my crown.

This piece first appeared on Caught by the River in May 2019.

It doesn’t take long to walk from the cottage up through the Turkey oaks and larch into Flaxley Wood. On the way I linger, and catch the papercut silhouette of a roe buck between the trees. Stock still, I wait and watch, hardly daring to breathe. He browses on leaves, strips some bark then moves slowly between the trunks. I can see his finely tined antlers, his slender head and neck, and can just about make out the dark oval of his right eye in the evergreen shadow. Then he looks in my direction. Unsure whether I am there or not, he hesitates, shifts his head a little, but he doesn’t flee. He just turns and gently makes off into the tangle of undergrowth.

Reaching Flaxley Wood I stride uphill as quietly as I can, periodically inspecting the mud beside the track for animal prints. My main hope is to see wild boar.

The wood is located on the edge of the Forest of Dean, well-known for its large wild boar population; estimated to be over a thousand. They were driven to extinction in the UK back in the middle ages. There followed various attempts at reintroducing them. Then, in the 1980s, a few boar escaped from boar farms. Some were deliberately introduced back into the wild and small populations became established in the south east and south west of the country.

My first introduction to wild boar was reading Asterix books as a child. Asterix and Obelix always seemed to be spit-roasting the ubiquitous boar of the forests of Gaul. It was much later, while on holiday in Portugal, that I had my first, brief, sighting of a boar – the back of a large rufous animal slinking off through the cane grass.

Where the track forks I find fresh boar prints in the mud – two bean-shaped cleaves about two inches long with dewclaw marks just visible. They have been here, but I don’t see any this evening. Tomorrow I will visit the main forest to see if I have any luck there.

*

It’s the following day and I’m with my partner Kevin in the Forest of Dean. We’re following a vague trail through an area of young birch, well away from the main tracks. There are signs of boar everywhere – churned up earth, scattered bluebells and wood spurge in disarray. Boar rummage in the earth looking for roots and worms in a similar way to badgers. They also eat young leaves, nuts, fruits and whatever they can find. In the Forest of Dean their presence is not always appreciated. Not everyone likes to find their lawn uprooted, their crops raided, the playing fields disturbed. Occasionally it happens.

The trail undulates and meanders through the trees. I notice heaps of brown scat, larger and lighter in colour than sheep or deer droppings. It looks fresh and I guess it belongs to boar. We tread carefully.

Up ahead is a lookout tower, a shooting platform. I ignore the unease I feel about this and we continue walking. Beyond the open birch woodland the terrain slopes down to the muddy trickle of a stream. We negotiate the stream and make our way up through a stand of stunted beech, deeper into the forest.

Dry bracken, bramble, gorse and scrub now surround us. It is quiet; no sound of people or the road. I enjoy feeling a little lost among the chaos of last year’s bracken. The scrub thickens as we proceed further, fresh scat and prints on the bare earth. Some of the vegetation has been fashioned into boar-shaped tunnels or flattened into boar ‘couches’. I’ve learned that they’re largely nocturnal, lying low during the day, and they could be anywhere.

I have often noticed, usually in retrospect, a hush, a subtle change in atmosphere, when a wild animal is close by. It’s the sudden quiet when a sparrowhawk is on the wing and the rest of the birds fall silent. Perhaps I catch a scent that I don’t immediately register as a scent. Or feel a sound almost below the threshold of hearing, like the ominous moment before a storm when the wind dips and there is a faint murmur of thunder. I need to become conscious of these subliminal signs to get into the mind of the tracker.

Suddenly there’s a crash, a scuffle from the gorse and a large boar explodes into the clearing. An image of a stocky build, head, shoulders and earthy thatch of coat – a rush of primal energy. Away it thunders into the trees. Kevin, quiet and alert just ahead of me, declines to continue; we should back off, not follow the boar. We pause, senses heightened, awestruck. Then a second adult boar violently erupts from the bushes and, like the first, charges off into the trees. It is powerful and unnerving; they could have rushed straight into us. Boars have good hearing and an acute sense of smell, but poor eyesight.

We double back, a little startled, away from the thick scrub. After a minute or so, two more boar decide to break cover and rush off out of sight; we realise we were in their midst. I don’t feel in any real danger, but they are wild animals, strong and unpredictable. I can’t help but feel a little euphoric.

It is far from ideal disturbing the boar in this way – in fact it is really quite clumsy. However, I am pleased to have seen them. Sightings are generally quite common, but not so common during the day. We retrace our steps, cross the stream again and find a forest track. A nonchalant family of cyclists passes us by, followed by a dog walker enjoying the warm spring afternoon.

There is a legend of an animal, The Beast of Dean, that lives or once lived in the Forest of Dean. The legend arose after boar became extinct in the UK, becoming better known in the early 19th century. The animal was supposed to resemble a very large wild boar – one capable of bringing down trees and wrecking havoc. Back in 1802, farmers set out to capture the beast, but found nothing. Large animal sightings have always been prevalent; we like to nourish our imaginations with tales of unidentified creatures and monsters. I believe the reason for this is our fear of the wild, the wild dark edge of things – or maybe our love of it. Boar are powerful animals, not to be messed with. Having now encountered them, I think it is no surprise that their presence and power has spurned all sorts of folklore and, perhaps, other, less fabricated stories.

Next time, we’ll go looking for boar at dusk, just when they are likely to emerge. It would feel better to observe them from distant cover, simply going about their business undisturbed – perhaps from that lookout tower.

This was originally published by TOAST magazine in December 2018.

We parked the car and started walking along the track in silence, save for the crunch of our boots on the granite-hard snow. When we came to a stop, Ramon explained what to do if we came across a bear. We should not fear unless it is crouched and ready to charge. A bear on its hind legs is just assessing the scene, deciding what to do. There is time. Back away slowly. He spoke softly, in a quiet manner, having spent many years studying bears alone. There was much of the forest in the man.

The park reserve was thick with snow. Yesterday a blizzard started when we set off in the four-wheel drive. Over the Piatra Craiului Park Reserve, sky and landscape blended seamlessly, like charcoal smudged white paper. I could not tell if dawn had broken. These were unusual April conditions; the week before in Romania the temperatures had reached 24° C, now the thermometer read -4° C and in the early hours with the chill of the wind, that felt more like -7° C. We were stopped by too much snow – despite our winter tyres – and by broken branches over the track.

Today, the scene was similar, but it was no longer snowing. It was still and quiet except for a few birds beginning to sing into the pre-dawn air. The landscape was blue tinged, forest and rock shapes still full of night. The sun had not yet crested the eastern ridge but the day was opening as though a lid was being drawn back, letting in light.

Ramon took us off the path into the trees through snow two foot deep in places. I stepped into the footprints ahead of me to make the going easier. It was tiring and hot work in my many layers of clothing – two coats, gloves and hat with gaiters over my boots.

Step by step through the snow. Sometimes a footprint revealed the stream, a mere dark trickle. The glassy clink of ice, the hollow suck of trapped water, a faint gurgle – give-away signs. We managed to cross without wetting our feet and, holding onto saplings, we continued further into the forest and started to ascend the valley side.

We climbed through Norway spruce, beech and fir trees laden with snow, pausing occasionally to catch our breath. A natural clearing opened up and the slope became steeper, the snow deeper. Ramon pointed out a track made by a bear, which had slid along on its belly. He showed us the two curved cleaves of a red deer track; a male red deer in walking gait. He could tell by the size and depth in the snow, the length of the stride, the alternate hind and fore prints.

It was still dim when we reached a flat view point from where we could look out over the valley and see the mountain ridge opposite, the tree line and meadows beneath. At first, a snowy landscape can appear like a simple scene especially in early light. A neutral scene. White, dark, grey. Then features start to appear: the snow-flurried tree trunks, logs and bushes, ermine meadows, the edges of the forest, cross-hatched.

We stood and surveyed the scene with binoculars and the naked eye. Eyes can play tricks in the half light. Logs take on new forms, become animals. I was convinced the incessant dancing and swaying of a branch in a draught of wind far off on the opposite side of the valley was a bear scratching itself. But it wasn’t. Dark dots in the snowfield became deer. And then I was seeing deer everywhere – deer bushes, deer shaped fallen trees, deer snow mounds. Dark, stick deer. The longer we looked the more the wood subtly seemed to shift into life. Obscure forms morphed from the forest edge, lynx-shaped, lichen textured, bear loping figments of my unreliable vision, my sleep deprived imagination. And we waited in hope, rubbing our hands, withdrawing fingers into gloves to keep them warm. Breath, smoke in the cold air.

I wanted to see an animal, I so wanted to see an animal.

The croak of two ravens sounded over the valley; there may have been a kill or carcass nearby.

Then I did see an animal, a real one at the edge of the wood, black on white, a dark, slender shape of grace. It was moving, pricking its way, ankle deep. A roe deer. Then there were three of them with sleek, long heads and large ears. Alert. On guard – or one of them was, the other two grazed.

The dark deer could easily have become a dark burrow, a hole in the snow, a silhouette, an absence. But they were real and good to see. Now I wanted to see a bear.

Ramon turned and gestured towards the hillside behind us. He wanted us to continue walking and following fresh bear tracks he’d found. He was convinced there was a bear close by. We trudged further on in the snow until we reached a tree covered rocky outcrop, a scoop out of the hillside. Ramon told us to stay back while he went on following the fresh line of tracks. He looked into the trees and backed away. Then he came back and told us that a bear was taking refuge in the trees, effectively cornered, and we needed to keep our distance.

Ramon clapped and the clap echoed around the chamber of rocks and bushes. The bear was in there waiting, listening, knowing we were there. Or was it? Had Ramon really seen a bear? The evidence was all around in the snow. I had to accept that it was there, although I struggled to believe.

Ramon hollered. His echo hung for a moment, but sound was muffled by snow on rock, snow on bush, on mountainside. Quiet, Stillness. Coldness. Waiting. In the after silence, hung a hollow absence, a could-have-been, might-have-been presence. He clapped again but the same: the after-silence in the encroaching dawn.

I looked down. The blue snow now sparkled like diamonds, crisp and clear – the air too was so clear. The mountainside had patches of rufus, purple and beige amongst the snow. Now the opposite slopes were sun-washed in pink light, fresh, vivid and new. It did not seem to matter that the bears weren’t to be seen.

We started going down. There were tracks everywhere, fresh tracks of bear, boar and deer. The bear tracks led into the trees across our own, bold, broad tracks, larger than my hand. Adult tracks and cub tracks. Ramon counted bears by the varying tracks – nine, ten bears had passed by recently, unobserved but leaving their mark so clearly in the snow. We were probably surrounded by bears.

Perhaps it is the wind carrying our scent, our voices or rustling clothing, the cold or heat which causes wildlife to retreat and hide. Sometimes elusive wildlife stays elusive.

The sky was now a clear, empty blue. The air was still and cold but the icicles on the branches dripped, the forest clicked and cracked as the ice and snow began to thaw. A chaffinch started singing and a chiffchaff chaffed and chiffed from a birch within the forest. The morning was under way and the valley and mountains shone in the magnificent light.

This article was first published in summer 2018 in Toast online magazine.

On a hillside in the old region of Quercy in southern France surrounded by oaks and maples stands our little cabin. It is handmade from rough hewn logs. There are two small solar panels for lighting and water comes from a tank and needs to be filtered for drinking. It’s rustic and simple and here it buzzes with sound; the forest is singing.

I have come here with my partner to spend a few weeks immersed in the natural world. From the top of the hill behind our cabin scrub and woodland stretch for mile upon mile with hardly a building in sight. We sit on a plateau between two rivers that snake through an undulating limestone landscape, carving steep-sided, honey-coloured cliffs and leaving broad meanders. If we walk south for a mile or two we’ll descend into the valley of the Lot. Walking north takes us to the Cele, one of its tributaries.

It’s mid-July, dry and hot, and the cicadas sing all day. At times it is deafening. To me the song sounds like a thousand maracas or, when they are just starting up, the winding rasp of an old-fashioned watch. By focussing on an individual song and searching carefully it is sometimes possible to spot one on a lichen and moss festooned branch, masquerading as the branch itself. Their pervasive, metronomic song is created by the contraction of a membrane in their stomachs that loses its elasticity below 22^°C. This is when the insects fall silent, as they do in the evening and when it rains. We have caught them at their summer peek. They spend most of their four-year life-cycle below ground, only coming to the surface for a few weeks to attract a mate with their song and reproduce. The landscape holds many secrets.

At first I was overwhelmed by a sort of synaesthsia; the sounds, textures and colours; the buzzing, humming, chirping and flashing of the myriad insects and other life swept me up and enveloped me.

This place is an entomologist’s dream; bush crickets, long-horn beetles and butterflies abound. Swallowtails float drowsily over the cabin glade. White admirals flit between dappled oak and sunlit woodland floor.

When evening comes its progress is marked by the emergence of various animals. First come dragonflies patrolling the glade on their late shift. Then, at about nine-thirty in the evening, stag beetles emerge. The males look comical as they fly upright, horns held aloft, wing cases spread, veering randomly though the air in search of a female. As night encroaches the bats take flight, then we hear nightjars and finally tawny owls.

“Here I have time to think, time to watch spiders build webs as I lie in my hammock”

Here I have time to think, time to watch spiders build webs as I lie in my hammock, time, simply, to be. I wander through the rough sun-bleached grasses and contemplate the changes the landscape has seen. There are layers of history, prehistory and deep time here.

Farming in these hills brings to mind an earlier time. Farmers work golden fields on tractors that were at their peek decades ago. The fields at home in England must once have been brimming with life as they are here, before agriculture became intensive, fields enlarged and pesticides widely used. In this part of France the fields are small and so are the villages. Some are perched on the cliffs overlooking the Lot, like the village of St. Cirq de Lapopie, once voted the most beautiful in France. It is a picturesque jumble of turrets, towers, pigeonaires and steep, winding lanes where cars cannot pass.

A deeper layer of prehistoric time lies hidden in caves beneath these limestone hills. It is a world of Palaeolithic art, images of wildlife captured by the hand of our ancestors long ago, painted on the smooth walls of caverns and passageways sculpted by underground rivers long since gone.

We take a journey to Pech Merle, near the village of Cabrerets, the site of some of the most spectacular Palaeolithic art in the area. We have booked on to an English speaking tour which starts with a 15 minute presentation about the caves. Then we are taken down into a cavern of stalactites and stalagmites.

It is spacious and awe-inspiring. Descending from the cavern roof into the floor is a long strand of roots massed together like hair; the roots of a single oak tree, solitary in its quest for water. It is like the world tree of creation myths, branches in the heavens and roots in the underworld; we have entered an ‘other’ world.

Down here it is cool, almost cold. Apart from the rustle of clothing, the muffled slap of shoe on damp floor and the muted voices of our group, all would be a silent black stillness, a velvet darkness punctuated only by the plip of water droplets off the stalactites.We follow our guide deeper, through tunnels full of geological formations mushrooming from ceiling and floor. What must the people of 14,000 to 25,000 years ago have made of these strange, alien shapes, glimmering and alive in the light of their simple lamps? In some of the calcite accretions I see seated Buddhas, faceless, wordless figures, family groups, silently waiting, contemplating, and suspended in time. For millennia. This could be a place of deities, rock gods, a realm sacred to our ancestors long ago. It would have taken a curiosity of mind and a strong spirit for those early people to venture here.They would have been brave and experimental, secreting themselves away to leave their mark, to create. Perhaps they were young, adolescents like the two boys who accidentally rediscovered the cave in the early twentieth century, while out walking their dog.

We move on to another chamber with a horse, mammoths, bison and aurochs outlined in black, manganese oxide on the walls. There is energy and movement in the sweep of the lines that bring the animals alive. A simple dark stroke becomes the unmistakable outline of a mammoth, another becomes the curve of its tusk. Animals overlay animals as though in a dreamlike, silent herd.

Another cavern, massive boulders. The ceiling has scratches in the soft clay, a sketched tangle of entwined bison and mammoths, a mammoth morphing into a woman with pendulous breasts, a ‘mammoth-woman’. It is easy to see how rock becomes animal and animal, human here; a realm of dream beings. Dots and sinuous lines – helped by the contours of the rock itself, glacial, river-worn and pock marked over time – become broad-bellied horses, a massive aurochs, the head of a stag. The animals stand or run, leap, collide and almost bellow silent roars from beyond the walls and across the millennia.

We come to the image of a cave bear scratched cleanly on the rock as though created yesterday. Through more dark tunnels and cool shadows we arrive in a long chamber with a smooth wall on which is painted a frieze of spotted horses. Their black heads are tiny, but where one of the horses is drawn the rock is shaped just like the head and neck of a horse making the creature life-like and almost life-size. These horses, we are told, were painted 24,600 years ago.

Dots and dashes, associated with some of the paintings, are perhaps symbolic of a shamanic consciousness, of a distant magical realm. Negative hand prints, created by blowing pigment on to the rock surface, were made by both a woman and a man. And there is a footprint crystallised in calcite, frozen in time from millennia ago, left when a young man walked across the cave through a wet patch of clay.

Emerging into the light the blanket warmth of the day hits us. Near the entrance we find the tree whose roots descend through to the cavern below. From its branches we hear cicadas singing.

Back at the cabin we cook a meal and sit out into the evening. The stag beetles emerge on cue, followed by the bats and the cicadas’ song is replaced by the soft chirp of crickets. Soon after ten, from the scrub, comes a churring sound like the rhythmic purr of an engine. A nightjar. We make our way up the hill where a few tall oaks stand silhouetted against the western sky. Sunset has been and gone; now it is dusk. A solitary male nightjar sits in one of the trees like a night watchman, a sentry. He sings his soliloquy as if just for us. Then he flies scimitar-winged, low over our heads and disappears into the night.

A Volery of Wagtails was first published on the City Creatures Blog in March 2018.

In the center of Brighton, beside the iconic nineteenth-century clock tower, stands a small solitary tree. It is an olive tree, an evergreen that retains small leathery leaves into the winter. The tree stands at a junction, especially busy during rush hour on a Friday evening in early January when the streets are lit up and lively with people returning home. Walking past, I pause and look up.

Above the traffic, telephone lines and Christmas lights crisscross the buildings and shops, and high above them in a darkening sky hangs a gibbous moon.

On the roof of Boots, our local health and beauty store, and on the ledges of the camera shop across the street, there’s a restlessness; it is as though the very buildings have become animated in sympathy with the street below. Dark dots of birds punctuate the outline of the buildings like notes on a stave. Above the human turmoil, an avian agitation starts up: the flutterings and hoverings of birds gathering at their winter roost.

I wait.

The illuminated clock on the tower marks 4:20 pm and I notice birds begin to descend to the olive tree. First just a few flutter between the rooftops and the tree. Then more and more birds come down. They dance about the tree like restless thoughts, chattering excitedly. Among snagged plastic bags in the branches, the birds congregate, a fluster of wings and tails. They are pied wagtails—small, sleek, black and white birds with a long tail that constantly flicks up and down as they move.

Amber-lit buses swing round the corner onto Queen’s Road, emptying their cargo of commuters, shoppers, buggies, and bags. Onto the street people flock, some momentarily distracted by the increasing commotion above them in the little tree. A group of girls pause and look up as they pass.

“Wow, how beautiful!” Someone exclaims. There’s talk of what the birds could be and what they’re doing. “Long tailed tits?” a woman asks.

Pied wagtails live their summer lives beside water, usually building nests among stones although they also nest in towns. In winter they often come into cities to roost in flocks of more than a hundred birds, sometimes many more. The birds in the olive tree may be from further north, having migrated south to where it’s milder. Roosting in numbers provides warmth and a degree of safety. As birds depart in the morning, they follow each other to find food. They usually feed on insects but they will seek out any edible morsel they can find in the concrete crevices of towns.

A small crowd gathers, clogging the flow of pedestrians intent on getting somewhere fast. Out come mobile phones. A Big Issue magazine seller, clad in a sheepskin trapper hat, meanders sinuously through the throng waving his magazine like a fan. The tree twitches and rustles, the white bellies of the birds are visible among the leaves.

Pied wagtails have many names, including Gypsy Bird, Penny Wagtail and Polly Dishwasher. Their association with “washer” may have arisen because they frequent rivers and water pumps where women once washed clothes, their white and black plumage suggestive of white aprons. Wagtails feature in the myths of many cultures. In Ancient Greece, they were a symbol of love and a gift from the Goddess Aphrodite. Some say they are harbingers of rain, beckoning it with their constantly wagging tails.

When the crowd disperses, I sit beneath the small tree and reflect for a while. The birds seem oblivious of me. I believe I could reach up and touch one and my boldness would not disturb the gathering. The center of the city can be an uncomfortable, harsh place for anybody, bird or mammal; a few rough sleepers have taken up residence on the steps of a nearby shop, huddled in their sleeping bags. As I gaze up into the branches and watch the birds jostling and chirping, I smile; this little tree has provided a safe haven in the midst of a hectic, noisy thoroughfare. And the birds don’t go uncared for either; someone from a nearby shop has hung a couple of birdseed fat balls in the tree.

In the city, surrounded by tarmac, concrete, glass, and steel, it is easy to feel cut off from nature. When I find wildlife thriving safely, in the most unlikely of places, I feel surprised and happy; all such encounters are wondrous. Recognizing and tuning into this life that dances and sings all around us is rewarding in itself and a joy to appreciate with strangers I meet on the street.

The half-baked moon looks down on the clock tower, a favorite perch for a tawdry selection of feral pigeons and herring gulls in the city. The enameled portrait of Queen Victoria on its north façade looks forever east from her arched recess. A few drops of icy rain fall, causing the marble steps to glisten; the air is chilled. A woman in a canvas jacket and rucksack stands against a shop front. She tries to take a photo of the tree and the birds as they chase about it. Darkness falls and the birds settle in, quieting. They all face in the same direction, southwest, like a collection of clay pipes in a curiosity cabinet. I follow their gaze. Between the buildings where the sky is a lighter blue, the sun has set over a dark winter sea.

This piece was first published on the Caught by the River website in March 2018.

On a cold February afternoon I stand with my partner in a ruin of crenellated walls, towers within towers and a gatehouse open to the sky. We wander the rubble fragments of centuries past and sit with the age of stones. No longer the home of landed gentry, Norfolk Horn sheep, the rhythm of loom, Baconsthorpe Castle in Norfolk is a square of crumbled walls with a moat and mere surrounded by fields, copses and damp hollows. Flint, mortar brick, ivy and nettle. Bones. Rooks and crows caw and congregate in its leafless trees. Against the fading light the gatehouse throws a solemn shadow over the grounds, a mist of teasel and dead fireweed all around.

Like a mirage on the eastern boundary of the ruins, the white shape of a barn owl appears. It’s dusk, a changing hour; barn owl time. The bird seems almost a figment of my imagination, moon powder white in the pastel landscape. It flies with such softness, each feather barbed to make no sound, to hold the air, fluid and weightless like a breath over the land. Perhaps it is companion to the phantom that haunts these ruins, the one who wanders the moat and betrays his presence by dropping stones that ripple the reflected sky of the waters. With its banshee screech echoing through the nocturnal hours it is not surprising that the barn owl was seen as a harbinger of death in earlier times.

The barn owl alights on a short wooden post – a white, twilight flame. Its head turns, listening; an alert attentive bird. It ruffles its feathers and I see clearly through binoculars its heart moon face, its understated beak, its dappled breast feathers.

I once found a dead barn owl. It lay between the cabins on Havergate Island off the Suffolk coast, a mass of sodden feathers on a hollow-eyed carcass. I felt a strong sense of loss for this fallen, lunar bird now leached of life. It must have succumbed to the harsh winter, a lack of food or the poison put down to keep the rats at bay. The out-building where it roosted was empty, with rounded, dark pellets strewn about the floor.

More recently I found a feather that looked like it belonged to a barn owl. Small, soft, fawn and teardrop-tipped, it lay in long grass beneath a ruminating autumn sky in the shadow of the South Downs, providing evidence of their presence there. I returned again and again to the site at dusk, but the owl proved elusive and I began to doubt myself. I began to search more widely. Look for rough, unimproved grasslands, look for farms with barns away from roads and be hopeful, I told myself.

I remember reading that barn owls need undisturbed places to breed – old barns are favoured but other buildings, tree hollows or cliffs holes will sometimes do. In some parts of their range, a lack of suitable nesting sites reduces their opportunity to breed. Elsewhere their habitat is in decline. They prefer to be away from roads in areas with rough grassland and a healthy vole population, although they will hunt and eat other small mammals, frogs and nestlings.

Now the owl lifts up off the post, flaps low along the edge beating the bounds. Perhaps it has a partner and potential nest site tucked away in a barn nearby. It may be winter and cold but it’s still and dry and voles will be active; the owl will probably not go hungry. We keep watch, hoping it will swoop down suddenly – talons out, head back – onto an unsuspecting prey. Silently. But it’s back on the post, waiting, its head cocked. It sits and listens, waits and listens, while we watch from a distance. With the evening encroaching it looks vulnerable in its solitude.

Now everything is amber. Between the flint walls in the fading light, there’s a new magic to the place. Shadows of the ruin elongate as the sun teeters on the tree-fringed horizon; it’s time for us to leave. We say goodbye to the ruins and the Baconsthorpe owl, wishing it success as it patrols its home among the stones beneath the enormous Norfolk skies.

Night Eyes was first published on The Real Story on 22nd January 2018.

He looked at me from high up in a canopy tree. The forest was tinged rose by the early evening light, but I could see the blue of his face quite clearly, like the sky’s reflection. Below him among the bare branches sat the rest of his family, eight Black Shanked Douc langurs of varying sizes, monkeys with striking faces and long, black agile legs. I was standing near the “Danger” sign on the road, looking into the forest where the monkeys were sometimes seen at dusk. Beyond, the road ascended through wilder forest where there were gaur – wild cattle – and even tigers.

The forest was shifting as I wandered back. It was like glimpsing performers in the wings of a stage, like the bustle of an event about to take place. Evening weavers stitching up fragments of forest, birds in pairs contact calling each other, frogs starting up in the swamp.

My memories are fragments of mauve and orange. Orange for the sunlight I saw when I closed my eyes, mauve for the shadows of huts silhouetted against the evening sky.

* * *

This was a few years ago. I was staying in Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area in Eastern Cambodia, helping a PhD student, Caroline, carry out research into slow lorises. Two species of these small nocturnal primates can be found in Cambodia and little is known about their ecology; Caroline’s first job was to see if there were any living in the conservation area. The plan was to search the forests, set live traps and eventually radio-collar any lorises caught.

I’d only ever seen them in a zoo, huddled in a dark corner to escape the light – endearing creatures with large, round, forward facing eyes and a body as fluffy as a cuddly toy. Sadly, slow lorises are in decline. They are traded illegally as exotic pets, their body parts increasingly used in traditional medicine, their habitat lost as Cambodia develops.

Feeding on insects, fruit, tree gum and small animals, lorises move deliberately through the trees. Their silence and slowness helps conceal them from predators, but they are not always so slow. The Vietnamese call them “monkeys that move with the wind” and in Indonesia they are “Malu malu” which means “shy one.”

Forests and their wildlife draw me – they always have. Many years ago I studied zoology at university. Now, at a crossroads in my life, I questioned whether I could work as a researcher, whether the scientific approach was right for me.

* * *

On the first night at the field station we walked out along the road looking for nocturnal life, lighting our way with red head lamps. Red light is invisible to many nocturnal animals but it picks up their eye shine, the light reflected off the tapetum lucidum layer at the back of their eyes that helps them see at night. In the darkness lorises’ eyes appear as two large round orange spots, set very close together.

We walked west, serenaded by the frogs in the ditches and the cicadas in the trees. The road was wet, it had rained a little, but the rainy season was yet to come. The sound of cars on the dark road had us hiding in shadows with our lamps turned off. Caroline was uneasy; there was still a lawlessness about the place.

The field station was a series of blue huts. When evening fell, the verandah of our hut would fill with insect life that fuzzed around the lights. There was a large rhinoceros beetle, with a protruding snout, that would hiss irritably if disturbed. The tockey gecko would appear from its corner, the same blue as the hut walls, flicking its tongue in and out while patrolling its patch.

Sometimes rats scuttled our room at night. In the toilet at the back of the huts lived a frog with her egg sac.

At the edge of the grounds stood a little wooden house on stilts like a bird table. It contained a jar and a stick of incense. I was told that it was a spirit house, put there by the local Bunong people who believe the forest is sacred and full of spirits.

* * *

Our days started early, 6am. We trekked into the bamboo forest to cut transects, hacking our way with machetes, marking our route with pink ribbons and clambering over occasional tree roots as we thrashed through the sharp, spiny undergrowth. Old bamboo trunks would splinter and break, spilling viscous black liquid over us. The forest crunched and oozed with decay. And there were leeches everywhere, keen for moisture and a taste of blood. Like everything else here they awaited the rains. Discomfort also came with minute stinging flies that tormented us as we carried out the tasks of the day; Caroline taking our GPS coordinates while I made notes and took compass readings.

The air was so humid it was like wading through honey. Afternoon and silence rolled out along the road ahead as I wandered back. Sometimes a bird of prey would perch on a twisted dead tree, waiting. It would launch itself languidly into the air as I drew nearer, the heat heavy on its shoulders. The road seemed to breathe out a haze, the forest to swell. There were few sounds, just the fumblings of a few birds in the undergrowth. Perhaps a kingfisher would flap across the road ahead in flashes of brown and white. Come evening the pools beside the road would come alive with croaking frogs, but by day the swamp just quivered with their subtle, hidden movements.

The forest looked so different from the outside, so dense when we were in it. I wanted to enter it quietly, to immerse myself in its complexity. But I was a visitor, laden with equipment, there to measure, map and record what I saw.

Later I would make lists of the wildlife I had seen – purple heron, green billed malkoba, white browed fantail…

Each evening Caroline and I would sit on the blue verandah and listen to the moaning forest, wondering when the rains would arrive. We would spray our boots and socks with cockroach repellent in the hope of warding off the leeches. Then our guide from the local Bunong tribe would appear, machete in hand.

“Sous-dey,” he would say awkwardly and then smile; he was learning Khmer too. We would set off in search of Dok gle, the Bunong word for loris.

Sometimes evidence of forest elephants halted progress. If we came upon dung, our guide would assess how fresh it was and which way the animal was travelling – fresh dung saw us turn back. Elephants would charge the white light of our hand torch.

One night we ventured out along a different trail. We had to hurry to keep up with the guide and when he stopped suddenly we ran into the back of him. A coiled snake lay on the path, fresh green as an apple. We set off again a little more vigilant, stopping once more beneath a tangle of branches. A sleeping bird the size of a pigeon, sat rock still, feet locked to a branch above our heads. I thought if I reached up I could pluck this little bird, so innocent, so vulnerable. We saw him the next night and the night after that in the same place, on the same branch.

On our night searches fire-flies lit up the vegetation like Christmas lights. I could just make out the silhouettes of the trees against the star-filled sky. The lorises were proving elusive, but we sometimes saw a forest civet high up in a tree, eyes gleaming gold, or the occasional mouse deer, a faint presence amongst the ground vegetation, eyes shining like the emerald blue-green of an inland sea, a forest in a cave.

Black drongo, greater coucal, common palm civet, fluorescent fungi…

Every morning I did my washing and hung it out to dry on a washing line that fenced an area of rough wasteland strewn with giant logs, relics of the days of logging in the area. Caroline decided that it would be interesting to carry out a small mammal survey there, a project we could undertake during daylight hours. So we baited traps and laid them out among the logs in a random arrangement and first the traps yielded a house mouse and then an unknown mouse. I was going to release it but Caroline decided to keep it as a specimen to be properly identified in case it was new for the area. She swung the bag containing the mouse around before hitting it on the stone step. The coldness of the act disturbed me and lingered in my mind.

Great spotted eagle owl, flying squirrel, unknown mouse, unease…

Our nocturnal searches continued. We ventured further out, to our guide’s village where he had seen Dok gle. Beside the forest on the way to the village I noticed another spirit house and wanted to check it out but feared being left behind. No one else seemed to notice it. I told myself to keep focused on the project and followed the others through the huts where the villagers were gathered around the flickering blue light of a television screen. I wanted to slip away from the throng, melt into the forest and tread by moonlight, firefly light.

* * *

As the days and nights passed we slipped further into a nocturnal rhythm. Night stirred me from my diurnal, mammal rest. The darkness was civet smooth, peopled with eyes, peopled with forest spirits. Caroline showed me photos of lorises on sale in the marketplace, dead lorises strapped to wooden crosses as though crucified, shrunken skin and bones, small fragments of forest sold as traditional remedies. In one photo a loris was hiding its face in its loris hands, too much the world. Somehow I felt I understood its need to hide.

Measuring tape, lamps, batteries, pink markers, GPS…

I was becoming weary. Every evening I took to wandering the road westward alone, beyond our pink markers, beyond where the road curved, and looking back I could no longer see the station.

One evening I walked further to the river and stood on the bridge. My mind swam with unwelcome thoughts about the research and the fate of the forest and its animals, about how we treat animals as objects to be studied, sold, toyed with, tortured or eaten.

The river said nothing. It stretched wide, a gaping mouth in a permanent yawn, speechless. Beige river, gently, silently shifting the world. A monkey of the same beige stood in amongst the shadows of a riverside tree like a sentry, a presence hardly there. He was a glimpse of another life so like my own, two eyes of the forest looking out from behind a screen of leaves. Who is behind the screen? Who belongs? He was a macaque, dull brown and unremarkable, not used to humans. Like the langurs he stood watching me before vanishing into the forest shadows.

I could have drunk the night through my eyes. Then, after three weeks of searching and out on a new trail, high up in the branches there was a glimpse of eyes like flickering coals. Then they vanished. Tapetum red? Orange? I stared with disbelief. Then we saw her, reaching out her soft limbs along the branch, first one limb and then another, moving swiftly as the night folded her into the darkness. We swung our head lamps across the canopy and picked out another loris in the dim red light. I felt a mixture of excitement, joy and relief; they were small and far off but we had found what we’d been searching for.

* * *

After finding the lorises I felt different. The scientific scaffolding and academic framework in my mind began to crumble. My mind jangled with technical words – transect, taxonomy, triangulation – that had distanced me from the forest. The measurements, the cataloguing, the lists – the dry scientific books and papers now seemed less important. Perhaps it was enough for me just to be there, to experience the forest and not worry about the research. Perhaps that was enough.

Thich Naht Han, the Buddhist monk, says there is no separate self, that we are all interconnected. “When we want to understand something, we cannot just stand outside and observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it to really understand.” I needed to connect, to relate to nature in a way beyond that of my analytical mind, to somehow lose myself in it. I wondered how the Bunong people felt about the forest that was sacred to them. They were in the forest and the forest was in them. Then I thought of the lorises and their plight. Would they become another species labelled, examined, monitored – all for their own good? I began to feel the weariness of failure. I realised that scientific research was not for me.

But it wasn’t failure, more a transitional moment, a crossing over.

The following evening I wandered the quiet cambered road that wound through the forest. An open truck hurried past full of people and plastic sheeting for the rain that was due. Overdue. I closed my eyes to the sun, orange gold.

* * *

The next day the rains came. Water thundered down on the metal roof of our hut and cascaded on to the dry earth below. Gazing up at the mauve shadows I filled my cup from the water that fell off the corrugated roof, drank, and looked out at the forest, vibrant, mysterious and steaming beneath a nebulous sky. Soon it would be time for me to leave. I made my way along the road hoping to catch a glimpse of the langurs one last time. About me I saw kingfishers, hawks, mushrooming canopies, layer behind layer, tier upon tier of greens in the after-rain glow of a setting sun. I walked past the danger sign and the dead gnarled tree to where the langurs often gathered. They were not to be seen and the tree was empty, but the forest sang with life and mystery. Things would have to be as they were for now.

A Seasonal Serenade was first published on the South Downs Farmland Bird Initiative blog on 18th January 2018.

There are highlights to every walk and my transect for the SDFBI is no exception. On a May morning I walk the path beside Lag Wood just south of Hassocks to reach the start point of my transect square at an old red bridge. At this time in spring the path is fringed with greater stitchwort, herb robert and a profusion of cow parsley while the wood rings with the songs of great tits and song thrushes. When I reach the bridge, I cross over it to the edge of Bonny’s Wood and Clayton Burial Ground. Each year, I linger here expectantly and I’m usually not disappointed. From deep in the vegetation at the edge of the wood a beautiful, melodic song bursts forth, the song of a nightingale. It is a delight to be serenaded.

Bonny’s Wood is private. From the footpath, I can see mature oaks, hazel and field maple along with plenty of hawthorn, holly and honeysuckle; vegetation cover that nightingales need. The wood is described as an ancient semi-natural woodland and has been managed sensitively and traditionally in a similar way to Butcher’s Wood – owned by The Woodland Trust – and Lag Wood nearby. Together they create a mosaic of woodland and fields that benefits wildlife.

A male nightingale will sing both at night – as its name suggests – and early in the day to proclaim a territory. He will sing at night to attract a female returning on her nocturnal migration from southern West Africa. When she arrives and has laid eggs he will continue to sing by day but no longer by night and he’ll reduce his whistle songs. Nightingales tend to return to the same nest site each year.

As I continue walking the transect, past the burial ground and into sheep fields and farmland, I often encounter a yellowhammer or two hearing their little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese song before I see the bright yellow of heads as they sit on top of the hawthorn hedges singing. I might glimpse a whitethroat flitting in and out of cover or hope to see a few swallows twittering over the farm buildings. Overhead a buzzard may circle on the rising thermals as the heat of the day increases. On into a pocket of woodland there is a strong chance I’ll hear or see chiff-chaffs, robins, treecreepers, nuthatches along with thrushes, tits, sparrows, corvids and tits. Out of the wood again there will always be gulls high over the fields and the odd pheasant strutting along a field boundary.

It is always a pleasure to walk the transect, but the highlight for me is hearing the nightingale song. I shall be sad if I fail to hear one on my SDFBI transect walk this year as I know they are in decline.