Roe deer

It was a mild morning so I went for a walk in the half-dark. Although it’s only mid-December the birds were tuning up for Valentine’s Day, and in the hedgerows cock blackbirds were practising their skirmishing tactics. I stopped off at a shop to buy a loaf of bread and came home along the partially cobbled track that leads past a school and then below the slopes of Gorsey Hill wood.

I sensed her before I saw her, a gentle, nervous presence at the periphery of my perception. She was standing at the edge of the school playing fields. She watched me for a moment or two, ears and nostrils twitching. She decided I was a threat, and bounded gracefully away towards the shelter of the wood. A roe deer.

Poem: Writing what is to hand

It’s been a dull, flat day and I was walking more for exercise than in the expectation of seeing any wildlife, but as I stepped onto the towpath I saw a group of a dozen or so ducks on the canal. They were too slender to be mallards, and they were behaving oddly, alternately diving down into the water, and swimming very fast along the surface. They were moving faster than I could walk, and it took me a while to come level with them.

Goosanders, the females’ top-knots as auburn as the dead bracken on the opposite bank of the canal, the males spic and span as piano keys. I’ve seen goosanders here before, but only as lone individuals, and never as active as these, their ducking and diving now interspersed with short bursts of flight. I watched them until they'd skittered out of sight.

The towpath was slippery and I turned off onto the main road. Above the hill next to Gorsey Hill Wood a kestrel hung on the wind.

Writing what is to hand

A winter of illness

and the days still dwindling,

not lasting as long as I would like;

the field I walk is sodden with last night’s rain,

but ah, above it, a kestrel,

holding still on the wind.

Alder, birch, apple

Storm Atiya has stripped the last of the leaves from the trees and I notice things I haven’t noticed before – but that’s the point of a walk, to notice things. Opposite the old lock-keeper’s cottage a line of trees separates the towpath from the railway line; I’d always thought the trees were alders, but now I see that they’re a mix of alder, birch, and apple, the birch trunks not silver, but a pale sunrise gold. I wish I’d brought my camera; the bare trunks with their subtle metallic hues are unexpectedly beautiful.

I can understand why, in times gone by, people thought of apples as having magical properties, for there is something wonderful about the sight of perfectly round red-gold fruits hanging from bare branches. As a girl I was told that if you peel an apple in one go and throw the peel over your shoulder, it will land in the shape of your future husband’s initials, but as I wasn’t very good at peeling apples I never found out if this were true. I don’t think anyone is going to peel today’s apples, they look drab and not at all appetising. I wonder how they came to be growing high up on a railway embankment; were the apple trees planted at the same time as the alder and birch or did they grow from discarded apple cores?

Reading about the fox

It’s too wet and windy for a walk – Storm Atiya is on its way – so I’m reading up on foxes. The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand is not, as the blurb on the cover says, a lyrical love letter to the fox, but it is full of facts about foxes. How small they are (sometimes weighing in at less than a domestic cat); how keen their hearing is (yesterday’s fox had his head down because he was listening for earthworms); and how well they fit into whichever of the many and varied landscapes they inhabit.

One such ecosystem, notes Brand,  is Białowieża, a tract of near primeval forest in Poland. White booted eagles fly overhead, and if you are lucky (I wasn't!) you may see elk and bison. Fallen tree-trunks, supposedly dead,  are alive with mosses and thronged with woodpeckers, squirrels and invertebrates. The colour green is all around you. Oak, hornbeam, beech, lichens, sphagnum, and grasses; each tree, each plant, has its own particular aura of green. Białowieża thrums with life. If I describe the forest as magical I mean that in the two or three hours I spent there I felt more alive than I have done anywhere else on earth. My senses were sharpened, my skin became alert to the texture of the air around me.

In Białowieża foxes feed on wild boar carrion, the boar brought down by wolves and scavenged by their smaller relatives. English foxes too are scavengers, but it's unlikely that they would feed on wild boar; their teeth are not strong enough to deliver a killer bite, and there are no wolves to do it for them. So, our wild boar are safe, and free to roam - a reason, perhaps, to bring back the wolf?

Fox

Hoar frost hangs in the air. A robin greets me. A clatter of woodpigeons flies too close for comfort. Two crows, their black plumage bigged up against the cold air, fight over a chunk of bread. 

In the field next to the farm a fox, the fog dulling down his russet coat, meanders slowly across the grass. Head down, tail down, he is rootling for earthworms. Foxes eat a lot of worms. Rain, such as we had last night, brings them to the surface, but now the ground is almost frozen and it will be a while before he can unearth his breakfast. I am glad to be well-wrapped up. I am glad to have made it out this early.

Following the sun

Where the canal broadens out, a large flock of Canada Geese float on the water. A heron, hunched on a low-hanging alder branch, turns his back on them. Cock robins, pert and handsome, stake out their territories in the hawthorn hedge. They count me out along the towpath, and count me back in again – I might be up to no good. Stealing crab apples, perhaps, or gathering in holly for a Christmas wreath.

As I turn for home the geese take off, in groups of twenty or more, yapping and barking. They are following the last of the day’s sunlight, heading for the mill lodge hidden behind the hill.