A pale cerulean-blue sky – crisscrossed with misty white vapour trails of planes - a modern art canvas; paint casually, thrown from the artists brush; white clouds tinged salmon-pink hanging over the blue-grey mountains; just before sunrise – white wreaths of mist lingering over the fields and valley wood mirroring the vapour trails above. A lone Buzzard calls ...
I am currently reading 'Magpie Murders' by Anthony Horowitz and was reminded of the childhood rhyme ..... one for sorrow two for joy .... and so on. I wonder what it would be for 200! For this was the number of Magpie I counted, before it was too dark to see, coming to roost in willow scrub one winters evening near my home.
Continue reading Murder, Mischief and Murmurations – Magpie, Raven and Starling
The thing I notice most at the beginning of Autumn is that it is still dark when I get up in the mornings to let the dogs out. With mist over the meadows and dewy morns. Rowan berries aplenty; Blackberry too. Red hips and haws colour the hedges a rusty red. And Rosebay Willowherb their tall spikes lit by the evening sunshine, followed soon by clouds of gossamer-soft seeds, floating like fairies on the balmy wind: The end of summer.
Continue reading Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) …. Autumn
East Anglia is one of the best birding areas in the UK; in particular its coast, which is for the large part not greatly built-up and has a fantastic mix of interesting and rare habitats like dunes, reedbeds, lagoons, estuaries, sandy cliffs, shingle and sand spits, saltmarsh, grazing marsh, woodland, heath and broads. I was […]