An unusual calm

Thanks to the Covid 19 pandemic, there's much less traffic around, and I hear sounds I don't usually hear. 

This morning, out doing a spot of gardening before rain sets in for the day, I realise that the odd scratchy, burbling sounds I had thought were magpies, are in fact heron chicks begging for food. The heronry is close enough for me to see the youngsters without using binoculars, but I've never before been able to hear them. 

And, bubbling up through a moment of silence - a curlew. Sheer magic!

Heronry

Simon Barnes, in his fascinating book The Meaning of Birds, informs me that 'heron' is one of the words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make space for terms such as 'voicemail' and 'database'. A pity. I think the heron has a particular appeal to children. They are easy to see – you couldn’t possibly miss a heron. They are also undeniably weird – and children love weirdness. 

My herons (they’re not mine of course, but because I can see them from my desk, I think of them as mine) are few in number this year. Before 'the beast from the east' there were as many as seventeen nests in the wood opposite but now there are only three, and they're smaller than usual. Perhaps the big old platforms blew down in this year's winter gales, and new ones have had to be built.

The very wet February we have just had, with its fierce winds and squalls of torrential rain, will not have helped, and the field at the back of my house, which provided the herons with a plentiful supply of frogs, has recently been partially built over and a dozen or so aviaries installed. 

There are plenty more frogs in the valley - up at Summit the ditches are oozing with spawn - and I often see solitary herons fishing in the Roch, so these great birds will not go short of food, but the field was a sort of corner shop, convenient for a quick gullet-full for a hungry youngster. The new aviaries house pheasants and peacocks and other exotic species, but I'd rather have the herons. 

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.