A Calendar of Haiku - August
We are bang in the middle of what’s called the ‘Dog Days’. Many birds now in moult, hide away, and very little bird song can be heard. But occasionally on a hot puthery sort of day we may get to hear a Whitethroat ...
a whitethroat bursting from the hedge the only sound
[...] Suddenly he crosses to the tops of the hawthorn and immediately flings himself up into the air a yard or two, his wings and ruffled crest making a ragged outline; jerk, jerk, jerk, as if it were with the utmost difficulty he could keep even at that height. He scolds, and twitters, and chirps, and all at once sinks like a stone into the hedge and out of sight as a stone into a pond.[...] The Life of the Fields - Richard Jefferies 1887
He so nailed it!
The haiku is another from my eChapbook Feathered Skies published by Proletaria.
Artist Credit
The featured image is from a postcard of a Whitethroat by Roland Green (1890 – 1972).
Roland Green (1890 – 1972)
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The recording in this post is used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This and many more can be found at - Xeno-Canto
I don’t think I have ever seen a Whitethroat, so I have just looked it up, only to find it is a summer visitor. What a delightful song! I note that today is Lammas, the beginning of autumn, so another chapter of the year begins.
A very pretty little bird with almost a dual personality – one minute skulking in the nettles and the next bursting from the hedge as if to say ‘look at me here I am’.
While out and about on Lammas Day …
lammas day …
dabchick dive among
mackerel skies
Beautiful art!
It’s a lovely framed postcard – sorry it’s a bit out of focus!
If I’ve heard a whitethroat I’m not aware of it! Little birdsong today, just some gentle calls in the undergrowth.
His song can easily be overlooked, especially if it’s sung from deep within a nettle patch, but you can’t fail to notice him as he ‘bursts from the hedge’.
We have heard more Whitethroat than usual, this year. Jefferies describes them so well! ‘Puthery’! Wonderful!
It’s a brilliant description isn’t it, of the Whitethroat I mean! I don’t know if ‘puthery’ is a proper word – I’ll have to look it up – but we’ve always used it to describe those hot airless heavy thundery sort of days. Apparently it’s a Stoke word. How I’ve grown up with it I don’t know, as my family had never ventured further north than Bristol!
This is so beautiful and you clearly have talent in you.
Thank you Kally, for the lovely comment and all the likes
Thanks for using that word “puthery”! Many words are a combination of two, but I can’t figure where puthery comes from!
Not sure of its roots either, Cynthia. It’s a word local to the ‘Potteries’ in the UK. Part of their unique dialect. Yet I grew up knowing and using it – and my roots are strongly embedded in the West Country – what used to be called Wessex. It has the same meaning – hot humid and thundery. I can make a guess – a made up word from ‘oppressive’ and ‘thundery’ – ‘Puthery’!