Willow Warbler

Sand martins hawking over the canal, swallows flying low over the sun-scorched fields. More of each than I’ve seen all summer.

The canal is half-empty, its underside exposed. A lone grey wagtail explores a patch of mud, female mallards sun themselves on a bank of shingle.

Pain makes me walk more slowly. Walking slowly makes me more attentive. I hear, for the first time on these towpath walks, the soft hhooeett hhooeett of a willow warbler. A plaintive, conspiratorial psst psst! I turn towards the sound and see, well-hidden in a hawthorn bush, a small green bird. Sunlit leaves. Sunlit bird. 

Like the swallows and the sand martins, the willow warbler is a migrant from Africa. It won’t be here for long. I feel privileged to have seen it.

No butterflies

The weather is unusually hot, over 30 degrees Celsius, and has been for a couple of days, with more to come. The jackdaws are feeling it, wobbling unsteadily on the rim of the bird bath and drinking deep. One stands on the ground for several minutes, its beak agape.  It looks dazzled and perplexed.

I take advantage of the heat to repaint the wooden tubs in my back yard. The paint dries immediately, takes another coat in twenty minutes.

Despite the cosmos and the buddleia, the wallflowers and fuchsias, there are no butterflies. Last year I saw dozens – peacocks, red admirals, tortoiseshells – but this year, not so much as a cabbage white. I hope the hard winter hasn't done for them.

Trickster Jay

In some mythologies the jay is a trickster or boundary crosser, a beautiful, boastful and wholly necessary guide to the otherworld. For me it's a bird of good omen and I welcome their occasional visits to my garden.

Every year, when the youngsters have fledged, the parent birds bring them to my bird-feeder, as though to say ‘if you’re ever in trouble, this is where you come’. 

And so, this afternoon, I see a young jay perched on the fence. He has been in nature’s dressing-up box. He sports an outsized moustache and is wearing baggy pantaloons in a delicious shade of peachy-pink. His jacket is much too big for him.

He will lose the breath-taking vividness of youth, but the luminosity, the exquisite colouring of his plumage will remain. If you saw only the flash of sapphire on his wing, you would think him beautiful, but there is so much more, the startlingly white rump, the neatly pied tale, the sophisticated pinks and greys of his back and chest.  Our very own bird of paradise.

Poem: Clearing the valley

When I was a child I spent my summer holidays with an elderly and much-loved aunt and uncle. It was they who introduced me to this valley. Sixty years on, the valley is busier and more densely populated, but the air is clearer, the stone cottages have been sand-blasted clean of a century of industrial soot, and the trees are coming back.

Some people say the trees are the wrong kind of trees, not native to the valley, and it's true that you’ll seldom see an oak or an ash, but you will find whitethorn, birch and alder, pioneer species perhaps, or maybe small enough to have escaped the axe, for it was the deciduous hardwoods that were hacked down to provide scaffolding for the construction of the railway; their absence is in itself part of the valley’s history.

Clearing the valley

the thorn trees

they let alone –

not that they were

superstitious,

only that the trees

cried out when cut,

and they couldn’t stand

to hear a woman curse

© Sheila Wild - Equinox

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.