Fen Drayton on a mild January afternoon. Short-eared owls had been seen the previous evening quartering one of the marshes, and three bitterns had been jostling for position on Holywell lake.


I wasn't quite so lucky: but I had a stunning sighting of a male hen harrier hunting, flurrying a group of gulls on a spit of land in Ferry Lagoon, descending on its kill then disappearing from view, hovering up again and dropping down.

Distant as it was, I could see what a fabulous bird the hen harrier is: whitish underneath with a pale grey hawk-head and black wing-tips, wide-winged, as graceful as it is ferocious.

Lapwings gusted and swirled overhead, a short-eared owl flew in, and for a while I didn't know where to look, so much was happening.

Later, there were chevrons of geese flying, corvids gathering to roost, and scattered over the various lakes gadwall, tufted duck, grebes, goldeneye, wigeon, swan – and mallard drakes with brilliant emerald heads, in prime winter plumage. And, ubiquitously, coots: Fen Drayton attracts the largest population of coots anywhere in the UK, apparently.

I missed the bitterns. though: I stood and watched for three-quarters of an hour, with no luck. They probably emerged as soon as I'd gone: that's birdwatching.


Great peace is found in little busyness
Chaucer

winter woods

the beauty of a winter tree in silhouette – the lungs of the planet naked to the sky

leaf-litter on the woodland floor – and underwater on a stream bed – beautiful mulch – food and shelter for tiny creatures and microscopic activity

and the path home – to a pot of white hyacinths by the windowsill in front of my desk

The great German painter Gerhard Richter compels us to question the act of looking – he balances longing for something behind what is represented, with an insistence that we can never know what is there.

The last day of the year, and a kestrel flew out of 'my' oak tree as I came out of the wood to walk down the footpath. A superb sighting:  the salmon-rust back, the pointed wings, the slender tail, the hawk eye as it torpedoed across the field and up into a distant hedgerow.

It had been mild all day, one of those dull grey overcast, quiet days of the year's ending, and relatively birdless: yet I'd seen a great spotted woodpecker on my bird feeder, before it was outnumbered by a cluster of long-tailed tits (at one time I counted ten on the nuts and fatballs at one time). And as I walked back to my car, fieldfares flew out of the hedge chacking, fluttering nervously away for cover, tawny-winged, slate-backed, speckled-breasted, pale-fronted, these sturdy strong thrushes I love so much who keep me company on winter walks.

A post-Christmas thought:

We have a suffocating sense of luxury and no sense at all of liberty. All the pleasure-hunters seem to be themselves hunted. All the children of fortune seem to be chained to the wheel. There is very little that really even pretends to be happiness in all this sort of harassed hedonism.

G. K. Chesterton

Japanese white-eye

I spent a memorable couple of weeks in Japan in 2010, and my ambition was to see a Japanese white-eye, or Mejiro. I never did: plenty of black kites, but no Mejiro. It's a little song bird only about 4 inches long, it's often depicted in Japanese art, and used to be kept as a caged bird. Olive green back, a pale green underside, with a green forehead and yellow throat and the eponymous white eye-ring. This picture was taken by my English friend who's still living in Tokyo at the moment: as he opened his bedroom windows it was about a metre or two away on the tree outside and he managed to photograph it on his phone before it flew away moments later!

water and moonlight

The local pond, my 'Walden', in winter light and bitter cold one afternoon

and in Venice, whence I'd just returned, watery reflections and a full moon rising

and a sunset setting the waters of the lagoon near Torcello aflame 

Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient and ever new1 You called and shouted and broke through my deafness! behold, you were within me, while I was outside....

St Augustine, Confessions

in the suffolk woods: dunwich, westleton and snape

This pathway leads from Dunwich towards Eastbridge, into a network of open access walks across Dunwich and Westleton heaths: on this walk in late November, leaf-fall was late, the temperature mild, and reclining on a fallen pine tree as I took a break in the silver birch woods I listened to goldcrests and watched a  treecreeper.

What need to write of the low light, the late autumn colours? Bracken and silver birch create a special beauty. As I walked home, a single curlew flew over my head, low, surprisingly bulky of body with its downcurved beak, and lapwings called from a field where they had congregated with starlings and gulls, feeding before nightfall.




Endless forms most beautiful
Charles Darwin

funghi in the suffolk woods

 

The oldest living things in the countryside are the fungi inhabiting ancient woodlands. The mycelium that was there 10.000 years ago continues its winding way today, a tissue continuous in time and space stretching its unseen way underground around the roots of our forest trees and through minuscule cavities of the loam: a single co-operative organism. If we could weigh it it would weigh hundreds of tons.

above,  Fly Agaric, the poisonous Amanita muscaria












and left, Lepiota procera, the Parasol mushoom, thought to be useful as an umbrella by 5 year old Gus

I'm by no means an expert on identifying fungi, but is this on the right a species of Russula?

and this involuted specimen? ...

All the wonderful names of fungi in my field guide –  from Polyporus frondosus to Dryad's saddle – don't quite match these two beauties: but as an amateur I can revel in them without knowing what their names are....

I will lead the noble soul into a wilderness

and there I will speak unto her heart

Hosea