Autumn and the Moon

The last time I posted it was August – I was off on an island adventure and the days were still long, if not especially sunny. If I hadn’t realised that that’s been a long time, the trees on the streets are reminding me – it’s been the most beautiful autumn, the indifferent summer mellowing gently into it, then, Bam! Cool, foggy mornings, crisp nights, short days and the trees igniting in a shower of gold, amber and crimson. We had our annual samhain party, and after the dancing and debauchery and fireworks and fun came the morning and the hangover. One of the best ways to blow away the cobwebs the morning after is to go for a walk, so three of us made our way to Hampstead Heath to admire the autumn colours.

Up past the kite flying crowds on Parliament Hill, down into the gentle sweep of valley below Kenwood House the panorama of of London falls behind us, winks, vanishes and reappears framed between gentle hills then vanishes again as we enter a grove of beech trees. The light is fading, without a tripod I cannot capture this on camera but photography is not the point – this is a special place to all of us and we just come here to stand among the giants and drink in the eerie, glimmering light. The biggest tree in the grove which three people together cannot reach around has already shed its oval leaves and the woodland floor is carpeted three inch thick with them; the other trees are only just beginning to turn. A carpet of beech leaves in the dimness of an autumn or winter twilight takes on an eerie orange pink which the individual leaves, as you can see below,  do not possess.

The giant stood bare at the head of the grove, drifts of its own leaves burying its roots and swathing the clefts and fissures of its trunk.  Clusters of plump fungi nestled in its bark.

The strengthening wind stirred its upper branches and whipped the smaller trees into fierce motion.  The sky darkened. It was time to walk back. Twilight is one of my favourite times of day in the city, especially during the shorter days of the year. The cosy warm glow of shop and cafe windows and the weird artificiality of streetlights against a deep indigo sky are a perennial delight to me. Maybe you are surprised that a nature lover like me can take such pleasure in what is essentially light pollution but I cannot help myself; I do love the darkening autumn and winter nights and their cheerful illumination, and there are reasons why I live in a big city, after all. The gorgeous sight of the whole of London spread out and twinkling before us was as ever breathtaking. If you are ever in London on a clear autumn or winter evening there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING so heart stoppingly lovely to be found anywhere else in the city as the view from Parliament Hill. But on this particular night the city and it’s gaudy beauty was upstaged as the racing clouds parted and a brilliant moon, just a little short of full but as big as I’ve ever seen it lit up the deepening sky. It was bright as a spotlight, shining through clouds still faintly tinged with colour from the setting sun, and it cast a glamour over the ponds fringing the heath. A silver glittering path bloomed on the waters surface and faded as the clouds massed, then came brighter than before.  All the lights of the city cannot compete or compare to this unearthly beauty.

Jewels in the dirt

A couple of weekends ago I was walking along a muddy, tyre churned track looking at nothing much other than where to put my feet first so as not to slip over, when a chunk of dirt began to move. An iridescent pebble with legs was struggling faintly in the sticky mud. I stooped over to find a dor beetle, relative of the scarabs of ancient Egypt looking feeble and disorientated, legs flailing ineffectively.

A few metres further along I found a whole clump of them, royal purple glinting on their backs as they floundered together in the watery mud. I looked up along the track and saw to my astonishment that the ground for quite a considerable distance was strewn with living jewels and glittering carcasses where previous walkers had ploughed through unnoticing.

These hapless creatures had chosen the soft earth of the track as an ideal hibernating ground, and dug themselves in. Now weekend walkers and off road motorbike riders were churning them up again in their thousands. I stood aghast as I watched these simple animals attempting to re-bury themselves in the very same place that they’d just been dug out from, essentially a busy weekend road. How many will be left by the end of winter? These things are a dime a dozen but still…

I’ve been flabbergasted by this spectacle ever since, and although I don’t subscribe to the old chestnut of natures kindness (spend under 30 seconds watching a hunting wasp or spider and you will lose your illusions pretty damn fast) the profligate wastefulness and apparent stupidity of the natural world often troubles my peace of mind. Those dor beetles would diligently re bury themselves in their chosen “ideal” hibernating ground until not a single one was left.

If those beetles learned nothing, they taught me something. The old adage “keep doing what you always did and you’ll keep getting what you always got” suddenly seems a bit more important than I ever imagined.

Brighton Birthday

It was R’s birthday this week and we set off for Brighton beach with a bottle of pink Champagne to celebrate. It was bright and cold and the shingle beach was dry enough to recline on, which we did while picnicking and quaffing our heady pink drink. Brighton fascinates me – known affectionately as “London on sea” for it’s urbane sensitivities, you would think that beyond the occasional gang of feral kids there is little wild about the place. However anywhere coastal cannot ever be completely tame, and there are some wildlife marvels to be had there by anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. I’m saving my favourite wonder for a later post, and for now I hope you like my picture diary of what we got up to.

We stayed on the beach till dusk, watching the seagulls and surfers (not much surf, they were using paddles to get around!) and dogs and little kids. It had been an empty blue sky till the sun started to go down, when obligingly lots of dramatic clouds appeared. It was beautiful, especially as living in such a built up area I rarely get to see such an open sky.

Two fabulous things happen at dusk, and you want to be actually standing on the pier to get the most out of them. One is that the lights on the funfair come on, and in the half light once the sun’s gone down it looks its garish and trashy best.

The other is actually far more beautiful and exciting, and that is when the resident, many thousands strong flocks of starlings arrive to roost. I’ve tried several times to capture this in photographs and on film but it is impossible to do it justice. I’ve seen people run out of buildings in astonishment to watch as the screeching wheeling flocks descend like a tornado. Have no doubt that when I have enough material to even try and capture this I will be covering it properly.

I love Brighton Pier because it seems to have the best and worst of humanity written in big bright gaudy lights but the natural world has just as big a slice of the action, and the movements of those tiny birds upstages anything we mere humans could ever dream up.

Once the birds have installed themselves chattering and whistling beneath our feet on the structure below, what could be better than a ride on the carousel.  Those brightly painted horses might be made of wood but with the lights twinkling and the swirling movements of the ride they seem just as alive as any of us.

As I say I’ll be writing more about the starlings soon, so keep reading!

Autumn Weekend Walk

Last weekends visit to Morestead was a great chance for a city dweller like myself to get a proper dose of Autumn. The weather was dull but kind enough – a brooding, leaden sky showed off the smouldering colours to the full. Apart from the more picturesque aspects of this time of year I was astonished to find a mass hibernation being prepared for on the woodland floor – but if you want to know more about that you’ll have to visit at a later date. For now I’m just serving up a Hampshire autumn day in pictures.

The trees had just started to colour up; the starkness of the bare fields with their fine pelt of new winter crops were a good foil to the glowing colours in the copses.

The colours were delicious – shades of toffee apple, barley sugar, caramel and cinder toffee competing with the brilliant various reds of ripe berries and fruits, under the trees it smelt and looked good enough to eat.

Under a cathedral of Beech, ash, hazel and oak the light streams through an ephemeral, shimmering stained glass of leaves.

The weather was still pretty mild last weekend, unlike the sudden chill we are having right now – snow in London in October! But on this day I certainly felt overdressed as the sun (what we saw of it) was still hot, the angled light giving depth and throwing long shadows whenever it appeared. The vast rolling chalky fields appeared colourless until the light hit them, then the brilliant emerald of new crops flared in the dun earth. Colour flashes and winks, turns on and off, changes it’s hue or gathers in intensity on a whim at this time of year.  A single tree can in an instant be spangled like a mirrorball, it’s shivering leaves spotlit in a beam of light as gaudy as anything humans could manufacture, then be extinguished – poof! as the light moves on.

Once we were home again I couldn’t resist slipping out one last time to drink in this view. I’ve been photographing the above scene for over a year now and in every season, and the colours in the fields have never been more startling. On the way I stopped to admire these cooking apples, so heavy that the tiny tree they grow upon seems incapable of bearing their weight. Windfalls are a bonanza for unidentified wildlife as the gnaw marks on the scattered fallen fruit testify.

Night comes quickly now that the clocks have changed, and dusk came when it was barely 5pm.

I don’t mind the change though; I love the cosiness of autumn and winter.

Restless

This time of year gets me nostalgic for my childhood home which lay smack bang on the autumn migratory path of vast numbers of Pink Footed Geese. Flocks numbering many thousands of birds would fly over our house, and by the time they had reached us they could already see their final destination – the wetlands of Martin Mere. So those birds would be honking excitedly, silhouetted against the sky from early morning and they’d keep coming throughout the day and all through the night, and in a dismal suburban town it was one of the most thrilling evocations of wildness I’ve ever seen. The birds in the picture above are not Pink Foot but Barnacle Geese, and as they are exceptionally tame and find their home in the London Wetland Centre, it isn’t quite the same. But an Autumn without geese is a sorry thought, so here to welcome in the true sights sounds and smells of Autumn are the very best geese I could find. I’ll write more about the wetland centre some other day, but in the meantime I hope you are enjoying your autumn and all that it evokes for you.

Next Page »