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.

Haiku: heron

It's almost ten o’clock, but still full daylight, when I walk home from the station. High above me swifts are wheeling and screaming. Not a crowd, but an ample covey.

As I unlock my front door a heron cronks its way over to Gorsey Hill Wood. The sun is easing down behind the hill and its afterglow gentles the heron’s underbelly to a pale gold.

You are old, Old Man

of the Woods, your take-off tired,

trailing legs stick-thin

C Sheila Wild

Poet's note: a posse of herons

In 2011 there were sixteen nests in the heronry. This year, the winter of 2017 having been so hard, there are only three.

The male birds arrive at the end of December to eye up the old nests and work out what needs fixing. The heronry is an old one, and so the nesting platforms are huge untidy affairs of branches and twigs fetched up from the surrounding trees. Once the females have arrived, courtship begins. It's a surprisingly graceful ceremony of neck stretching and beak snapping, and once it's over, the birds begin to rebuild their nest. Repairing the nest is a leisurely process - herons do everything slowly - the male flying in with building material, the female reweaving the platform. 

Herons begin incubating their eggs as early as February, and I know when incubation has begun, because I can see the females hunkered down on the nest platforms. The males fly in with food, their long necks outstretched and stuffed full of frogs and fish. The birds remind me of planes coming in to land. They're so ungainly I wonder if they're going to make it, but each heron carefully lines himself up and taxis slowly into his allotted docking space, within easy reach of his mate's hungry beak. 

The parent birds are so large I don't need binoculars to see them, and even the chicks are big enough to be seen peering over the edge of the nest. Heron chicks are scrawny and scruffy with the most fantastical punk hair-dos, spiky quiffs of off-white feathers. 

I wonder what its' like to be a chick growing up in a year with so few nests. Is the heronry uncannily quiet? Is the room service better than usual, or has the hard winter killed off the food supply too? Are the few remaining parents unduly anxious? Is three nests enough, I wonder. Will the heronry survive?

The house near Gorsey Hill Wood

My house stands above a busy road, but my writing desk looks across to Gorsey Hill Wood, where there's a heronry. At the foot of the hill is a large Victorian mansion, ornately gabled, which hosts a roost for pipistrelle bats. My own much newer and more modest home is a maternity roost, where bats come to give birth to and nurse their infants. Once I found a baby bat in my front porch; it had fallen from the gable end, and was seeking shadow.

The copse of sycamore on the north side of my drive is home to a tawny owl, and in winter the ivy that clambers up the trees is browsed by red deer. At the end of my small back garden is a water meadow rich in wild flowers, a soakaway field for the infant river Roch. Beyond the river is the Rochdale canal, and beyond the canal, a broad stretch of rough pasture leads steeply up to the millstone grit outcrop of Blackstone Edge. 

Not a wild landscape, but a landscape that offers much. It's full of interest: air that's never still, light that changes with the hour and with the season, trees, meadows full of buttercups, and a host of small creatures, asking of me only that I notice them going about their daily business.