Red Kite Soaring

Last weekend as I sat quietly reading a book in the garden at R’s family home, I glanced up to see a large raptor circling lazily in the hot summer sky. Buzzards are common in that part of Hampshire, but this most certainly was not a buzzard. The forked tail gave this spectacular bird away. It was a red kite.

I sat entranced as it approached, lower and lower, quartering the field below the garden. It made a couple of lazy passes over my head, enabling me to capture these images on my not so great little point ‘n’ shoot, then sailed languidly away. A better flyer than a red kite you will never see; swifts and swallows and falcons are spectacular, but a red kite seems to defy gravity. With the tiniest adjustment of those long wings they can swoop or hang as if suspended on a string, turning and gliding, a burst of acceleration followed by an eerie stillness, all lazily performed (it seems) with the minimum of effort. Watching these birds you almost believe that if you stepped off a high enough cliff with your arms raised just so…

The birds beauty and prowess are not the only reasons for feeling surprised joy when one just casually appears above you. It was at one point nearly extinct in the UK, with only five breeding pairs surviving. And yet in Tudor London these birds were common scavengers,  with a contemporary report stating that “the kites are so tame, that they often take out of the hands of little children, the bread smeared with butter given to them by their mothers“*. Although officially protected in London for their valuable scavenging services by which much putrefying material was removed from the streets, red kites were persecuted throughout the British Isles until they reached their final perilous decline. By the 1920′s, the red kite was all but wiped out.

It’s spectacular comeback means that while red kites are by no means common, you are more and more likely to get lucky and see one with every passing year, and indeed they can be locally common. They are moving outwards at last from their strongholds in Wales and The Chilterns, and this bird is one of a pair which arrived in the neighbourhood only this summer. The first time I ever saw one close up I will never forget; it exploded out of a farmers field on top of Winter Hill near Cookham, a flurry of rusty red and charcoal and so very obviously the rare bird of my dreams that I actually shouted it’s name out loud. A grinning local out walking his dog told me I that if I liked red kites, I was in for a treat. He was right; that afternoon was spent on Winter hill with a picnic, a bottle of wine and the spectacle of red kites in plenty riding the wind below us. I will never forget that first sighting.

*Source of quote:- Birds Brittanica

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Swallows and Swifts make the summer

I look forward to seeing my first swallow of the year.  Usually in the London area they arrive around the 15th April – an astonishing feat of punctuality when you consider the vast distance they travel. Some however get it wrong; I once saw a single bird hawking over Connaught Water in Epping Forest in thick March snow, and wondered if swallows mightn’t be better off if they had evolved the ability to hibernate as people once believed they did, in the mud at the bottom of lakes.

They’ve been around the south of England for over a month now, the screeching daredevil Swifts arriving not long after. In truth it is swifts we see most often in my part of London – exhilarating and rowdy they mob and scatter between the house roofs, impossible to catch on film, for me at least. And to tell the truth I don’t even try, the clue to the pleasure of watching swifts is in the name.

Once I was lucky enough to be doing a bit of work on a local nature reserve when a gigantic mixed flock of swallows and martins swooped in and wheeled and twittered in their thousands over the water – the site comprises grassland and a disused reservoir. It was exhilarating, beautiful and it was my first day there – in my eagerness, I’d turned up early. I thought that every day would start like this. When the ranger arrived he told me I’d been lucky, because I’d actually seen the birds arrival from Africa – it was indeed April 15th.

Last September when camped on the Isles of Scilly, we watched the swallows in their restless gathering as they prepare for the gruelling journey back to Africa. Sitting on a hot deserted beach on the tiny island of Gugh, we watched as twenty or more arrowed back and forth across the sand just a few inches above the ground, effortlessly changing course over stationary and moving obstacles as they hawked for sand flies. I aimed my camera at them as they flashed past and caught nothing but blurs, but then again, sharpness isn’t the point. Frozen perfection would never get across how it felt to watch these mercurial creatures.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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Town Fox, Country Fox

We’ve always had urban  foxes passing through and spending time in our garden, but there seems to be an excess of vulpine activity in these parts of late.  Their fine sense of just how long it’s safe to stare at the stupid human before flowing silkily under or over the fence to safety displays a magnificent comic insolence.  And now that their activities have taken on a destructive and faintly macabre air I feel like the slow witted butt of many a foxy joke. It’s almost like Wiley E Coyote is getting his own back in a small suburban English garden, and I am the one who’s playing the straight guy.

They’ve always dug the occasional hole in the grass, and they’ve always dumped bones in the flower beds. We have become blasé to their eerie nocturnal shrieking and if they eat an occasional bird… well, they are only making a living after all, and I bet they eat a good many rats, too. We rub along together pretty well. But last week I was astonished to find a whole sheep skull under the rosemary bush looking at me through empty eye sockets like a prop from a remake of Lord Of The Flies.  And yesterday our neighbour in the flat downstairs (who is a strict vegan) found two large meaty bones abandoned on her back doorstep. Presumably someone is feeding them, or they are raiding illegally dumped food waste. I’d love to know where this stuff is coming from, but the foxes aren’t telling.

They’ve dug up our carrots and they’ve strewn Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes around like a bunch of truanting kids. They pulled up a tomato plant, just for fun. There is nothing they like better than gnawing at and playing football with our flowerpots, and they especially love my old workboots which I planted with geraniums; I never know where I’m going to find them from one morning to the next. They treat our garden the way rock stars treat hotel bedrooms. And I would love to see them doing it.

But oddly, the best sighting I’ve had all this year was of a wild country fox, hunting voles in a lush spring meadow. Country foxes are warier beasts all together, so I guessed all we’d get was a brief glimpse before it saw us and vanished into the long grass. But we were screened by a thick hedgerow and the wind was in our favour – the fox had no idea we were there at all.

It combed the meadow, listening intently for a sound that might betray a rodent or bird.  It was a lesson to see how it went about it’s business, calm and patient yet utterly focussed, and it wasn’t long before we saw it pounce and eat some small unlucky thing.

It came closer and closer as it quartered the field, I still can’t quite believe it came so close that I could get these pictures with my humble point-and-shoot camera. I’ve hesitated to photograph wild animals before, out of respect and and a desire to not spoil a moment with the clattering of the shutter, but watching this creature go about it’s daily business did not feel intrusive. A lesson in methodical patience, it went about the chore of feeding itself with a relaxed unhurried alertness and I tried to do the same as I recorded it.

We must have watched it hunting in the sunshine and long grass for ten minutes or more and I would have gladly stayed longer, but we were only half way through our walk and needed to keep going if we were to make it home before dark.

As we continued to walk along the field edge the fox continued hunting, its beauty glowing bright in the sun. If I ever felt the slightest irritation with it’s city living cousins those feelings got melted utterly as I looked over my shoulder and watched it, still stalking the long grass, till it was out of sight.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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Beltane and Bluebells

For May eve we camped out in a little East Sussex wood; we wanted to be out in the fresh new green and jump over our own mini Beltane fire to bring in summer. Also, the area is renowned for its bluebells, of which I am something of a connoisseur.

The weather was cool and damp, the humidity intensifying the depth of the colours  and general sense of lushness and rampant growth. Birdsong seemed astonishingly loud, the only other sounds a constant dripping and the babble of running water.  I felt I could almost be in a high altitude cloud forest anywhere in the world if it were not for the familiarity of the trees and vegetation around me.

There are so many wildflowers all blooming together right now, the harsh winter having telescoped the seasons down until the first late winter flowers stand shoulder to shoulder with summer blooms. And everything is giving it’s best after that winter, including the bluebells.

If you are lucky enough to have been in a bluebell wood in full flower you will know well the extraordinary sensual overload that this can provoke.  You walk along thinking that you’ve already seen it all, it couldn’t possibly get any bluer. Then the trees open out a little more and they are swimming in an astonishing violet mist of overwhelming voluptuousness. This, I can tell you, you have to experience for yourself.

It’s not just the colour, the scent is vivid  too – heady and exotic for something so British, but with a coolness that makes it bearable, like lilies crossed with violets. Sometimes you can smell the flowers long before you see them.

I remember my first sighting of bluebells as a child, and the wonder I felt at their unexpected beauty. My mother wisely told me not to pick a single one, they could never look better in my hand than standing exactly where they were and I understood and did as I was told. Coming back from our walk we saw a family who had not been so wise; they had greedily picked as many as they could carry and were already making disappointed sounds at how swiftly they had wilted. They bore my mothers rage with baffled indifference, but if they learned nothing that day, I had learned plenty.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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Sunset and Moonrise

It’s hard to believe that spring is coming but it is – no, really. The birds are singing with renewed vigour and in the garden buds are fattening, the heads of hyacinths are poking through the waterlogged soil and every evening the sun sets a little later. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s still snowing in many places where it’s been snowing for months, but the return of the sun is inexorable.

At the beginning of the month we were in Hampshire where the scoured hills lay naked and shivering waiting for the first crop of the year to mantle them. The beginning of February is about as bleak as it gets in the UK, trees stand as bare as pylons and wind scourged hedgerows bleached by frost are choked with the dead straws of last summer.

Is it any wonder that people at this time of year are desperate to be reminded that summer will return? Ever since people have lived on these islands we have waited for the signs – any sign – that winter will soon be over. February 2nd is the day that many people tired of winter associate with the return of the sun and wether you call this date Imbolc, St Brigids day, Candlemass (or in the US and Canada, Groundhog day) I think we are all united in one simple desire – to see the start of spring.

Imbolc was a beautiful cold frosty day and as wintry as you can imagine, but it was the first time we’d seen the sun in a good long while.  I spent the day stalking through hedgerows (and I may write about what I saw there in another post), and as the sun sank low on the horizon a two minute miracle occurred. An ash tree in the hedgerow before me was struck golden by the falling rays of the sun, and it flamed against the brilliance of the deep blue winter sky.

As I approached I realised that the tree was full of Fieldfares, a shy migratory thrush we have seen in extraordinary numbers this winter. One by one they streamed from the tree as I got closer, their harsh alarm calls filling the air. I was distracted by sounds in the hedgerow – deer! and when I looked up again, the tree was grey and silent once more. But when I looked in the other direction, I saw this

And this

Later that evening as we knew that the moon would be full, we decided to go and watch it rise and light candles in thanks that the sun would be returning again tomorrow. The sky had clouded over and in truth we didn’t expect to see anything. Then with uncanny timing the clouds parted as we reached our vantage point and slowly a vast amber moon hoisted itself into the sky.

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