The Shortest Day
With the prospect of days getting longer, I feel the urge to start making a few natural history notes again.
Recent highlights have included sparrowhawks on their rounds again. So far we haven’t spotted one making a kill on one of its swooping surprise visit to our bird feeders.
It’s usually a smaller, greyish brown male visiting, which pauses for a few minutes break in the hedge or crab apple, then continues towards the woodland edge where its progress is marked by groups of wood pigeons flying up and away from the treetops.
One afternoon as I unloaded the car at the front of the house, a sparrowhawk sped past just one foot above the pavement, climbing swiftly to clear a tall larch fence and heading between the houses to the back gardens beyond.
Christmas Day
An immaculate-looking cock pheasant is pecking around near the bird feeders alongside three females. They’re not alone. There are another three females down by the pond, four checking out the hedge by the shed and more of them foraging over the veg beds, some of them pecking at all that’s left of our cavolo nero. It’s probably the calm before the storm for these pheasants as Boxing Day is a traditional day for a shoot.
My father used to meet up with his shooting friends at Terrington, in the Howardian Hills, North Yorkshire, not far from Castle Howard. He’d bring back a few pheasants – two would be a brace of pheasants – which would hang from the shelves in our storeroom, smelling increasingly gamey until my mum plucked them.
Boxing Day Walk
We join a motley procession. Two pied ponies with young riders are walking on, guided by an older couple, the man kitted out in yellow high viz jacket. Following ten paces behind them are four hikers in animated conversation then, another ten paces behind, a man with a dog.
We emerge from a footpath to tag along at the end. There’s no way that we can stride out to overtake them on this narrow country lane, so we adopt the measured clip, clop pace of the party, a relaxed pace that I could imagine a party of medieval pilgrims adopting.
Chaucer’s pilgrims upped their pace when they saw the towers of Canterbury Cathedral up ahead We still call this pace between walking on and a gallop a canter.
It was spring-like enough on Boxing Day for a song thrush to be singing its varied thrice-repeated snatches of song. A robin sang its wistful trickle of a song in the hedgerow.
No spring flowers as such yet but a few periwinkle flowers are already showing on straggling stems in the hedge near some old cottages on Coxley Lane.