I can find a quality of wilderness in moss-covered rubble, flooded fields and tumbling willows, so I didn’t have far to go to find a subject this morning. These chunks of sandstone form a wall around the raised bed behind the pond. We used the soil that we excavated from the pond to make the raised bed.
It’s a still, sunny morning with a clear blue sky but although the temperature has risen to 50ºF, 10ºC, there’s still thin ice along one side of the pond.
There’s a jingly song from the next garden which I take to be a dunnock:
‘pwik – kiwik – pwik – chEE’
My bird book (Alan J Richards, British Birds, A Field Guide) describes the song as ‘a not unmusical jingle of notes, shorter in duration and less powerful than the Wren’s’. The wren belts out its song so emphatically that you know it means business.