Bird Watching At Whisby

This afternoon I took advantage of the mild, sunny, early spring weather and stole an hour or two in Whisby Nature Park just south of Lincoln. The chiffchaffs had now arrived, whipping the air with their familiar, faintly monotonous, repetitive 2 to 3 note song. A lot of bird books illustrate chiffchaffs as dowdy, yellow-brown birds. But the reality is far different, especially in today's clear, slanting sunlight. Through my binoculars they looked magnificently beautiful in their lustrous yellow-green plumage when I picked them out in the birch trees' topmost branches. They faced one way, then turned 180 degrees to face the other, and sang for all they were worth in order to stake out their territory.

The yellow flowers of lesser celandines and their heart-shaped leaves covered the grassy bank of the drainage channel by the path circling Grebe Lake. The little islands in the lake were noisy with black-headed gulls which screamed and squabbled. A couple of early butterflies took off in jerky flight but it was impossible to identify them. Blackthorn was blossoming along the eastern edge of the lake. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed briefly one of the first swallows or martins to arrive here from Africa. It vanished before I could take a proper look at it. Bird identification can be so frustrating..!

Later I was lucky to see a sparrowhawk coasting over Willow Lake - a few flaps and a glide, a few flaps and a glide. It was a male, its belly barred bright orange. These birds (indeed, birds of prey generally) are increasing in numbers all over the UK - which is great news. Also I just missed seeing what I think must have been a water vole as it dunked into the reedy, still margins of the lake - the ripples spread out in concentric circles, but it didn't reappear. I scanned in vain for a kingfisher on the Dragonfly Lakes. But I did see 5 pairs of gadwall very close-up. In the sunlight these are the most striking and delicately marked of ducks. I spent ages admiring them.

Though I'm not normally one for lists and statistics, I thought it might be fun to count and list the number of bird species I noted today. The total was 35. Not bad when you consider that most of the wintering ducks and geese have now left, and it's still too early for most of the spring visitors. Also, since Whisby is predominantly reed and rush fringed lake and pond, with willow, alder and relatively new birch woods (interspersed with the odd remanant of older oak forest), the traditional bird species of more mature woodland - jay, woodpecker, nuthatch, treecreeper for example - are harder to find. And it's not really the right environment for waders either.

Anyway, here's the list:

Wren, Robin, Blackbird, Magpie, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Long-tailed Tit, Chaffinch, Goldfinch, Bullfinch, Dunnock, Carrion Crow, Rook, Wood Pigeon, Collared Dove, Green Plover, Kestrel, Sparrowhawk, Mute Swan, Greylag Goose, Canada Goose, Great Crested Grebe, Little Grebe, Coot, Moorhen, Mallard, Gadwall, Shoveler Duck, Tufted Duck, Pochard, Teal, Goldeneye, Cormorant, Chiffchaff, Black-headed Gull.

I heard a pheasant but didn't see it so haven't included it, nor have I included the brief swallow/martin sighting.

Charmed

The final results of the annual RSPB Garden Birdwatch survey are now in. These are the birds you were most likely to see in the average UK garden in late January 2008:

1. House sparrow

2. Starling

3. Blackbird

4. Blue tit

5. Chaffinch

6. Wood pigeon

7. Collared dove

8. Robin

9. Great tit

10. Goldfinch

11. Greenfinch

12. Dunnock

13. Magpie

14. Long-tailed tit

15. Jackdaw

Although the house sparrow and starling populations have reduced drastically over recent years, they are still there at the number 1 and number 2 spots.

Except for jackdaw, all these species I see regularly in my own garden - though long-tailed tits are not as common, and only in the winter months. Happily surprised to see the goldfinch at number 10 on the list. This again reflects my own experience. I've seen more goldfinches this year than ever before - normally they're infrequent vistors to this garden. Only a few days ago a 'charm' of goldfinches descended on the flowering cherry tree.

Sad that the song thrush seems to be in an inexplicable decline. I haven't spotted one in the garden all year. It's one of my favourite garden birds - handsome, and with such a lovely song - second only to the nightingale's. And they're wonderful at controlling the snails which attack the hostas and the beans.

Beating The Bounds mentioned recently the classic book on birds by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, The Charm of Birds. I end with a quote about goldfinches from this charming book:

One of the prettiest nests ever found was a goldfinch's. It was in a yew tree, and the outside of the nest was made of green lichen : the lichen you find on beech boles and wooden palings. The inside was incredibly soft to the touch, which was possible only by a very long stretch, so the bamboo ladder was fetched to get a clear sight of it. Then it was found to be lined completely with dandelion 'clock', each little sphere detached from the many that make the full round of the puff. Another nest, this time lovely in its environment, was again that of the goldfinch. Holding my face deeply into a pyramidal apple-tree in full blossom in order to enjoy the light filtering through the mass of petals that clustered on the boughs so thickly as to shut everything else out, I became aware of the ruby mask of a goldfinch, sitting on her nest not ten inches away. She never stirred; happily I had insinuated myself very gently into this 'world of light'. Neither did I withdraw hastily. I stayed long enough to see how the rose and gold of sunlit apple-blossom could be deepened by this touch of red.

I love the little observant touches of the pyramidal apple-tree, the ruby mask of the goldfinch, and the detail of the bamboo ladder.

My Camino

It's now more than 3 months since I returned from Santiago, Spain, at the end of my Camino. But in many ways I feel I'm just at the beginning of my journey. Its significance hasn't revealed itself in a blinding flash. Its true meaning will perhaps only come to me slowly over the next months or even years. All I know is that I think about the pilgrimage I made every night before I go to sleep, I dream about it, and it's never far from my thoughts during the day.

Many have written about the Camino - it's spiritual connotations, its promise of companionship, the intimate conversations with fellow pilgrims, the gaining of an intense self-awareness. The Internet is full of such stuff. There are books by Paulo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine, and other writers famous and not so famous. Fables, stories, histories abound, some of them bordering on the mystical, the transcendental and the just plain crazy. How to find a still centre, a personal meaning which makes sense to you amidst all this madness?

When I started the walk I just lived from day to day. I wasn't even sure I would finish it until I was half-way across northern Spain. Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I was in company (certainly most evenings), often I was alone but not lonely. I adjusted quickly into a simple routine of sleeping in a strange bed, getting up, walking 25 - 30 km through often beautiful and remote landscapes, having a picnic lunch in the early or mid- afternoon, finding a simple hostel or refuge to stay in overnight, eating a cheap, hot evening meal either prepared by myself or the warden of the hostel, wriggling into my sleeping bag at an early hour. Doing this all over for 60 days. For me there was a perfect, mindless balance of freedom and discipline in this lifestyle I found immensely appealing. But I'm still struggling with such questions as: Was this a selfish thing to do? Was I just trying to escape the 'real world'? Was the whole experience nothing more than a glorified, extended holiday which I had the good fortune to enjoy because I had some free time? My heart keeps insisting on the answer 'no' to these questions.

What I've found is this. I scratched a spiritual, wanderlust itch. But now the itch is even more insistent. The thirst I had, far from being assuaged, is even greater. This is why pilgrims return again and again to the Camino, or variations of it - twice, three times. a dozen times. To top up their spiritual reservoir. To scratch again at that everlasting itch. An itch that will not go away.

The photo shows a polychrome wooden sculpture in the abbey church at Moissac.

Cowslips In The Snow

Usually any snow dusts the Derbyshire hills to the west and perhaps the Lincolnshire Wolds to the east but misses out the Trent Valley where we live. But earlier this morning the snow did fall here, at times in thick, fast flurries. A covering of 5 - 10 cm was predicted. And this certainly happened in our garden. The flowering cherry was "hung with snow" quite literally for a change. And the cowslips were braving this last blast of winter. However it's melting quickly now.

Chilling Out

I've never known Easter weather like it. Wind, rain, snow, sunshine, hailstones. It's calm one moment. A raging gale the next. The sun comes out and all is tranquil. A few minutes later the sky clouds over and the wind swirls out of nowhere. I nearly went camping in the Yorkshire Dales over the holiday period. Actually I'm quite glad I didn't. Because we're having an Easter cook-fest safe within these 4 walls. Fabulous home-made lasagne, hot cross buns, marmalade cake, joint of lamb with garlic and herbs... Recipes available on request!

Wild Geese

I have loved this poem by Mary Oliver ever since I first saw it reproduced in some newspaper. I cut it out and kept it. Loren Webster has some interesting things to say about Mary Oliver's poetry here. I really must read more of her work. This poem - I think it's quite a well known one of hers - explores that perennial theme of human alienation from yet connection with nature which I've touched on in some recent posts.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Blogging Is Not Life

Blogging is not life. Life is life.

I saw this on someone's blog.

I think I'll take a walk.

Then not blog about it.

I'll let you know if I managed it.

Or perhaps not.

Sucked Into A Vortex Of Blogs

OK, it's confession time. I've never used this blog before as a platform to air personal problems. I've never given a blogworld exclusive on my hamster's latest digestive ailment. I've never blogged about my last visit to Tesco's, that shop-cathedral of our consumer culture - it's no accident the trolleyways are called aisles. (Bloody awful, if you really want to know - it was jam-packed with screaming kids and I left in a suicidal mood!) I've never yet talked about my dysfunctional family, personal angsts and phobias, my 50th birthday party. But the time has come. To come clean. To get something off my chest I've been suppressing far too long. I must admit it now. I'm sure I'll feel better afterwards. It'll be a relief, I'm sure, to release this news to the anonymous yet surprisingly intimate virtual world. The truth is: I'm blog-addicted.

Beating The Bounds summed it up nicely: ...after about 5 minutes of surfing and blogreading... in the non-virtual world several hours have passed.

You could say that, working from home, it's too easy for me to get distracted from professional humdrum computer work and sink into the mad, opinionated, anarchic, strangely beautiful blogworld. Perhaps I need to get right away again - and do another 1000 mile trip through the wilds of nowhere. But even on the Camino I found I was blogchecking on some dusty, superannuated computer in a bar in the middle of a Spanish cornfield.

I fear I must limit myself to just a few blogs a day, wean myself off gradually like a druggie on methadone substitute. Just visit the blogs I really, really like. I confess: I'm a blogaholic. And I can't blame genetics, because blogs didn't exist for my parents. But could I pass this condition on to my children? Have I set in motion a catastrophic change in my DNA?

Gosh, I feel so much better for that. But I've got to go now. Must follow that link...

Water Is Interestingly Strange

Although many readers will be familiar with Thoreau's Walden, I'd like to put in a plea for his unjustly neglected work A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers. I have an old hardback public library edition published by Harrap & Co and bound in green cloth with handsome gold leaf tooling on the front and spine. However the 1st 1849 edition was hardly a success. Publisher after publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was only published at all because Thoreau agreed to bear the cost. Although I myself can quite happily read it straight through - I love quirky books! - I suppose it's best dipped into and browsed for its literary, natural-historical, self-revealing gems.

To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Another great Thoreau treasure trove is his Journals. I have only a selection of these, published in a 1961 Dover edition called The Heart Of Thoreau's Journals. I would like to read a whole lot more.

We are slow to realize water - the beauty and magic of it. It is interestingly strange to us forever. Immortal water, alive even in the superficies, restlessly heaving now and tossing me and my boat, and sparkling with life!

How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming!

That last one sounds just like some Chinese aphorism, doesn't it? There are hundreds upon hundreds of aperçus like these to be discovered and delighted over in the Journals...

I Long For The Hills

Big gales in the Midlands last night and throughout this morning. The electricty has only just come back on. No computer, no work, no blogging. And, more importantly, no electric toaster and no daytime TV (only joking). Ted Hughes puts it rather more vividly...

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye...

From The Hawk In The Rain (1957), his first collection of poems.

Not that there are any hills to see from this, my Nottinghamshire window. I wish...

Morning Mist

Emerson and nature philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) were both Transcendentalists and big mates in Concord, Massachusetts in mid-19th century New England. I've written before about Thoreau here. There's a charming little book I possess, Morning Mist: Thoreau and Basho Through The Seasons, published by Weatherhill of New York, which points out the similarities in outlook between Thoreau and the 17th century Japanese haiku poet, Matsuo Basho. These are some extracts from it. I hope you enjoy.

My solitude shall be my company/ and my poverty, my wealth. Basho

I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude... Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Thoreau

A good house -/ sparrows delight in the millet/ behind the back door. Basho

Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks...to pick a dinner out of my woodpile or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass. Thoreau

At my hut/ all I can offer/ is that the mosquitoes are small. Basho

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it... flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or... the most expensive furniture. Thoreau

The bush warbler -/beyond the willow,/before the grove. Basho

I hear the bluebirds... the blue curls of their warblings thawing the torpid mass of winter - assisting the ice and snow to melt and the streams to flow. Thoreau

I am like a sick man tired of people, or someone weary of the world. What is there to say?... A morning glory/on the fence of my gate,/shut all day. Basho

I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what will I do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons? Thoreau

"Employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons..." I could think of many worse occupations...

The Sacred Integrity Of The Mind

From the Introduction to my Ward Lock edition of Emerson's Complete Prose Works: He [Emerson] was a moral and intellectual preacher for a free platform. His soul, imbibing the lessons of the ages, in communion with the springs of Nature, fervently sympathising with the aspirations of his fellow men, spoke with electric effect to his hearers as they hung on his utterances. The trammels of ecclesiastical systems, the crystallisations of formal creeds, the limitations of outward observances, of time honoured expressions he threw off, and sought truths in which all men can unite. It was not because he lacked firm convictions, or thought one sect or party as good as another, but because he felt that truth was beyond party or church, that he spoke in favour of unity of heart among men of all religions. The utter foe of slavery, white and black, the simplifier of religious ideas, the awakener and quickener of intellectual and moral life among young men, the idealist in a world continually dragged down by the material, Emerson was an inspiring seer of the highest value to his time and country. His legacy to the world is not a system, not a creed, not an observance, but a stimulus, an impulse to a perfect life.

An egalitarian, he believed that every one had a store of riches within: The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

And that the genius and the ordinary person are connected far more closely than any deferential, class-bound, hierarchical society would have us think: In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Finally - and taken from his essay Self-Reliance once again - Emerson champions independent thought and nonconformity: Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Travelling: A Fool's Paradise?

I've been thinking about the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) ever since Cameron McNeish mentioned him in his podcast recently and I myself quoted from him in Thursday's post. I don't suppose many people apart from PhD students or biography writers read him from cover to cover these days. Indeed, it's a concentrated and time consuming task. My own second-hand edition of The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published by Ward Lock of London, runs to 656 pages of minutely typefaced, densely packed text. Yet how rewarding it is to dip into these wise and inspiring essays. Every time I do so I leave with rich rewards. We tend to think it's a given that travel must broaden the mind, that it's beneficial for its own sake. How refreshingly provoking it is to see Emerson giving an alternative view:

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

This comes from Emerson's great essay, Self-Reliance.

Surely Bob Dylan had read this essay before writing his song, Trust Yourself, for the 3rd paragraph begins: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Camino Blues Revisited

I was listening to Dylan's Love And Theft again today. From Mississippi: You can always come back/But you can't come back all the way...

Yes. Yes. Yeeesss. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, there really is a Dylan line somewhere touching a nerve about everything one's ever imagined or experienced. And everything one's never imagined or experienced too.

You can never come back all the way, because you have changed, circumstances have changed, and time has moved on.

Wilderness Connection

Have a listen to Cameron McNeish's inspiring podcast with Ron Craighead of Backpackinglight at http://www.backpackinglight.com/. Cameron is editor of tgo, the UK's leading outdoors mag, and is passionate about the importance of 'wilderness connection'. His informal and enthusiastic reflections range far and wide, from the shielings and ancient standing stones of Scotland to the significance of wilderness writers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey and Colin Fletcher. He's romantic and emotional about the subject - but also pragmatic and realistic about the need to lobby politicians and get them on our side in order to achieve rights of access to the countryside and to preserve wilderness areas.

French Leaves

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

My photo was taken in France last year when I walked the pilgrim path of the Way Of Saint James. It shows autumn trees and volcanic rock near Belvezet on the descent from the Aubrac plateau to Saint-Chély and the wooded valley of the river Lot.

Beauty

Since quoting the poem The Unknown Bird in this morning's post - and spurred on by singing bear's comment on it - I haven't been able to stop myself reading and rereading many of Edward Thomas's lovely, quietly resigned poems. So here's a final poem by him. It's one of those which leapt out at me straight from the page.

Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph -
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

The Unknown Bird

As well as Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, there is another poet called Thomas I like very much, and that is Edward Thomas (1878-1917). A somewhat melancholic and solitary figure, his life was cut tragically short when he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in WWI. He scraped a living as a hack writer, producing reviews, nature essays, topographical works, even a novel - anything to earn a crust.

But his friend, the great American poet Robert Frost, encouraged him to uncover his true, literary talent - which lay in the writing of a type of unsentimental, acutely observant, rather melancholic nature poetry. His poems had a strong, posthumous influence on later English landscape and nature poets such as Ted Hughes. Thomas was a keen walker and walked through much of Southern England and Wales in his travels.

This poem, The Unknown Bird, is one of his finest poems, and one of my favourites:

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him:
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off -
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straighway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

There's a hint of mysticism in this poem I find very appealing, a sense of something being just out of reach, a communion with a spirit in nature which can give momentary release from the pain and suffering of human life. This chimes in very much with the theme of my recent post A Gift From The Gods.

Boultham Mere

Yesterday I took a walk down to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve of Boultham Mere. It lies just west of Lincoln's Tritton Road Trading Estate. It was a gift to the Trust from the British Rail Property Board. Not the most likely place for a wildlife haven, I know. I'm sure most Lincoln folk don't even know of its existence. You reach it down a muddy dirt track alongside a drain bordered with old warehouses and scummy farms and fields littered with wireless masts. Over a sluice you enter an inglorious hide overlooking the old railway ballast pit that is now the mere. Here were stationed the 2 fanatically keen bird watchers I'd met 2 years ago on my only other visit! Do they live here, or what? Anyway, as is my custom, I asked them lots of birdy questions about what was to be seen there, and they replied in a most generous and friendly way.

The sun was behind us, illuminating the bright choppy water. The reedbeds and willow saplings quivered in the breeze. Above the railway line on the other side of the pond reared the rock pile of Lincoln Cathedral. Soon the celebrated peregrine falcons would be returning from Africa to nest there. Shoveler duck were feeding in the centre of the mere, filtering the water with their elongated beaks. They looked absolutely gorgeous in their new breeding plumage. There were common gulls, and 2 much larger herring gulls, and lots of black-headed gulls which jinked and dived acrobatically in the wind, then skittered down onto the water, bobbed their heads under, and rose again into the cross-currents of air.

A merlin shot past from right to left - one of our smallest birds of prey, a rarity in these parts, probably on its way to its breeding grounds in the high moorlands. Then, soon after, the bird I'd come here to see, a bird I'd never seen before but knew was here - another great rarity in the UK - flapped across the water from the reedbed on the left to the reedbed on the right. A bittern. I had a great view through my binoculars for perhaps ten seconds. Its yellow legs streamed aerodynamically behind. It was a transient, priveleged moment. How many of these secret, unvisited wildlife places lie on our own ordinary doorsteps, I wonder?

Birch Trees At Whisby

After a very windy night, today I took a walk in Whisby Nature Park. It's quite near here, just south of Lincoln. I think it was formed out of old sand and gravel workings. We used to go there quite often at weekends when the children were young and the dog was alive. The wind had died down a lot but it was still blustery. A low sun emerged out of cloud from time to time, transmuting the dull pewter of the ponds and lakes into shining silver.

A stoat streaked across the path near Grebe Lake, the black tip of its tail clearly visible. A grey squirrel shot up a tree. I only caught a glimpse, as grey squirrels always seem to climb up the other side of the trunk, the side hidden away from any human observers. On the lake itself the usual coots and moorhens and tufted duck bobbed about. And the odd pochard. And a pair of goldeneye, 2 pairs of shoveler and 3 pairs of gadwall. Overhead screamed black-headed gulls, their heads now darkening into chocolate-brown breeding plumage.

It was a little too early for the chiffchaffs and willow warblers, those first spring migrants, and much too early for the nightingales, for which the Park is well known. This is the only place I've ever seen nightingales. You can get very close. They're beautiful close up, not boring brown birds at all. And their song really does live up to all those romantic hyperboles.

Some small Shetland cattle (a rare breed) were lying down very still and quietly on the Grazing Marsh. Just beyond, the pitted Sandhills were awaiting the eventual return of their sand martin colony. On Willow Lake I saw a single little grebe, several great crested grebes, a few more gadwall - and a raft of perhaps 20 shoveler duck feeding in the middle of the lake. And gathered on one rough patch by the lakeside, clumps of purple-stemmed colt's-foot were bursting through. The yellow eyes of these flowers are fringed with long yellow lashes.