snowwalk79

December 17^th, 2010. 7.30 a.m. Clear and calm, but very cold. Day-old snow, refrozen overnight, holds the land in its bite. All is arrested, freeze-framed. I walk north. On either side, the white fields of winter are flattened under a huge weight of sky, empty and still. Trees and bushes are etched black against white, all bare save for the oak. At eight, a simmering sun pushes above the south-eastern horizon, then cools and creeps low into layering cloud. I turn east along the droveway to Rampton. There are birds here but they are reluctant to fly. Fieldfares burst from the bottom of hedgerows, in ones and twos, holding out till the very last moment. There are dozens of them. They whirl away, whimpering quietly. When the sun breaks free, they station themselves in the hedge-tops, catching the meagre heat in their breasts. Redwings, too, though less numerous. A pinch of goldfinches fidgets and flies. Out in the shining fields, the winter flocks gather. Wood-pigeons, in their hundreds, crouch like smooth grey cobblestones in the frozen surf of the ploughland. A spangled necklace of starlings garlands the sunny side of a field hedge. A black army of rooks musters beyond. A single, small, white-rumped wader rises up from a ditch and flicks away silently to land further up. It’s a bird new to me, and I follow. It flies again on rapid, shallow wingbeats but I glimpse only a white underbelly and longish bill. It could be a green or curlew sandpiper, but I’m guessing.

While I’m scouring the fields though binoculars, I become aware of being watched. I turn and glance up the track. There, not fifty yards away, is a vixen, staring straight at me, caught in mid-stride as she crosses. She doesn’t move. And neither do I. She is lean and light, winter-hungry. Her fur is not as deeply-coloured nor as dense as I expect, her brush not as bushy. She is on high alert, wired, but I find no fear in her face. What does she see? Perhaps she is young, and this her first direct encounter with Man. We hold holy communion for a full ten seconds, then she breaks free from my gaze and disappears into a hedge between fields. I try to follow her progress, checking both sides of the hedge through the lenses, but she is nowhere to be seen. No birds scatter, no grasses part, no rabbit screams.

I turn into the old rutted trackway and leave the birds behind. They seem to prefer these lower northern fields today, and become fewer and fewer as I walk south, slightly uphill, into the pallid light of a faltering sun. I am accompanied only by the squeak and crunch of my own rhythmic tread, the hollow ring of puddle-ice, and the shatter of crystal as I break through the surface. The frozen, whipped mud is as jagged as lava. In three miles I see little. A covey of red-legged partridges, seven of them, scurry between furrows, then flush into flight and descend in a long, low glide to the other side of a field, landing at a run. The rusty spikes of willowherb, thrust through the snow, tremble with a trio of dunnocks picking through the last of the seedheads. This is the first time I’ve seen these unremarkable but now rather rare hedge sparrows – small, brown-streaked birds with mouse-grey heads and breasts – and it is a small triumph that they have appeared in this place at this time. A kestrel sits atop a dead stump with its red back to the sun, but before I get within two hundred yards it launches into the freezing air and takes a long, unhurried flight over the wimpled snow-fields, the still black cut of the brook, the copse, the church-tower, the village of men, the streaming highway and on over the fenland farmland, far into the north.

jaywalk76

November 28, 2010. Late morning. Cold, clear and sunny. No snow last night, but a very heavy frost. A sparkling high-definition winter’s day, with everything at its sharpest and most intensely coloured. The horse pasture below the church is a white sheet of crystals. A jay flies low and settles on the ground. Not often encountered this year, though for the past week or so a pair has visited the garden, ever-wary and off at the slightest of movements. This must be one of them. The light is behind me and for the first time I see its true colours – both deep and pale pink, black and white, and that flash of sky in the wing, a pure azure more perfect in blueness than all other blues.

Beck brook is partially frozen over, as translucent and flawed as old glass. The feeder from Histon is sealed across, though further up, a clear stream of water flows between shelves of white ice. On the ground each blade of grass is a colony of towering crystals, and each leaf a crisp, curled shard of colour that shatters under the boot. Beyond the brook, in the middle of a winter-wheat field, the green just breaking through, is a solitary little egret, slender and white, hunched at the shoulder, standing on one thin black leg in the sun. Perfectly still, it doesn’t even swivel its head or long bill, as if frozen solid. Last seen, in this same vicinity, in early June. An hour later, when I have looped around, it passes overhead, towards the north, long neck tucked back, legs and yellow feet stretched out behind. It flies on stiff concave wings, never straightening or flexing them, holding the curve of the air. That each species has its own distinctive wing movement and flight pattern, as one would expect, is still endlessly fascinating, still wondrous to me.

In the patch of woodland along the brook, blackbirds aplenty scuffle through litter, and fly off with a protest into the undergrowth. There is a steady, slow-motion falling of leaves from above, a reluctant descent of minerals through air, from field maples and oaks. A couple of squirrels, in different locations, retreat to the biggest trees and eye me from on high, their thick, soft tails arched forward over their backs. I am on the lookout now for our local tribe of black melanistic squirrels, though these two show no sign of the tarbrush. I tarry for some time at the brook where it curves round to pass under the road-bridge. The sun has brought out the birds. On the bankside, robins, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, and a solitary redwing, with blushed flanks and a striking pale supercilium through the line of the eye, pass back and forth over the water, here clear of ice. These last are usually highly gregarious. A moorhen picks through the shallows. The clear light transforms this sombre, uniformly dark bird into a creature extraordinary, for it is exquisitely, subtly two-toned – deep grey-black above and paler slate-grey below, separated by a wavy white line; in front, a small red bill, behind, the double white tail, jerking incessantly. Then an unexpected delight. A kingfisher alights on a thin branch arching over the water, as kingfishers do. Facing away from me, I see only the iridescent turquoise-blue back but as it flashes away downstream it reveals its orange-red underparts. A little winged jewel. I’ve not seen one since mid-July.

Walking upstream I put up a male mallard. It flies high in a big sweeping arc and as it turns back towards me, five others, two drakes and three ducks, in tight formation, wing fast overhead in the same direction. It soon catches up with its crew, and off they go, united. A flight of mallard against a big winter sky – what could be more evocative, more symbolic, of an English winter, except perhaps the scent of woodsmoke? A single lapwing flies west on broad rounded wings – strange to see one on its own. Then five minutes later, half a dozen follow suit. Reaching the big fields beyond, hazed green with young blades of wheat, I find dozens more, scattered evenly over a wide area, working the frozen earth. Green-black bodies, white below, with distinctive wispy black crests, they look small against the great expanse. White gulls wheel lazily above, landing occasionally. The hedgerow harbours several dozen fieldfares which abscond one by one as I approach, making small noises of discontent. They keep looping forward into the next tree along, blue-grey and rust-red in flight, flashing white underparts and black tail.

A final epiphany thanks to today’s special light. Woodpigeons, as plump as college porters, sit in a pasture, larger than life, sunbathing. The commonest bird in these parts, easily overlooked, yet in coloration and marking, really quite stunning. That white wing bar in flight, for example. But up close, the degrees of blueness in the greys of head and wing shading into the magenta-pink barrel-chest, the splash of white and shimmer of purple and green on the neck, make this a most handsome bird.

cormorantwalk71

October 30th, 2010. A beautiful afternoon, the finest of mares’-tails flicking a high blue sky, sunny. Yet in a three hour walk I see little of note. The land is lit, warm, coloured by autumn, and empty. Almost. I am just outside the village, on a track behind the last row of houses, when a large bird flies slowly overhead, not high, dark against the light. I know it from its unmistakable profile. It’s a cormorant. Only the second I’ve seen in these parts. To see one even is remarkable  – for we have no large inland waters nearby, only the small forbidden lake on the airfield and four miles away, out of my range, the flooded gravel pits at the Country Park. Could the cormorant be flying between the two? There are geese I know on the forbidden lake, and then there’s the great crested grebe I found the other day, wounded, beyond the horse pastures, that could only have wandered from there. Perhaps there are cormorants too, and other unknown treasures. I must find a way to visit.

I edge along the side of a large ploughed field. It has been worked right up to its bounding ditch and hedge, leaving no verge at all. The soil is wet and I am soon carrying a slab of mud on each boot. In the shade of an ash-tree, silver mushrooms have pushed up through the dark clod. I’ve never seen anything like them – brushed-metal capsules, immaculate. They only occur close to the ash – beyond, there are none. They must live together in some sort of symbiotic relationship. Out in the bare expanse only a few rooks, pigeons and gulls pick at the ground. I turn into Gun’s Lane, medieval mudway to Cambridge, lined with pale yellow blackthorn and reddening hawthorn. Up ahead a flock of two-dozen migrating redwings settle into a tree-top, but as soon as I get near, they take off and fly up the track into another. They are very flighty these birds, and won’t let me get anywhere near to get a close look. They keep to the tree-tops.

I walk through the scrubland, a pasture, the badger dell, and back down the long, straight line of water euphemistically called Histon Brook without seeing or hearing anything except for one or two woodpigeons. Not even a rabbit. Extraordinary. The fields should be flocked with migrating birds. The landscape has not been so empty all year. As I near the village, though, there is one single eruption of life. The sun is balanced on the western horizon, a blinding white light. I am surprised to hear, half a mile away, a once familiar hubbub. The rookery at Westwick is loud again. I thought it had been abandoned some time ago but I’ve not passed by for awhile. There is a commotion of rooks above the trees, restless, excited. Then they begin to stream outwards in small, loose groups, flying westward, straight into the sun, group after group, until the last one leaves the rookery and there are one hundred and forty rooks ( I count them) in a long, straggling column, making their way slowly across the evening sky. I go to the rookery and look up into the tall stand of sycamores, studded with nests. It is utterly quiet, deserted. Not a single bird remains. Why would rooks leave their rookery just as the sun is about to go down? Don’t they roost here at night? And where do they go? Not that I really, really want to know. I’m just glad to report that there are mysteries still in the world.

walk69

October 24^th, 2010. Late afternoon, again. A bright cold day, with high cirrus and even one or two piles of cumulus in an autumn-blue sky. I take the long muddy track past the spent strawberry tunnels – half a square mile of plastic slowly deteriorating, muffled snatches of Slavic from the last lonely workers within – and across the green weed-field beyond, one of the few to have lain fallow all through the year. A family’s out walking, the small boy behind pushing his bike through the grass – it’s rare to see anyone venturing out off the roads or paths. The big lapwing field is now down to rape, striped with seedlings. This western side of the village is bathed in the wash of A14 traffic but it’s open and I can walk in the last of the sun, now just a finger or two above the horizon.

Skirting the deserted golf course I strike south towards Girton, perched on its slightest of ridges. From this direction you can see why it was settled, just a few vital feet off the fen. A strip of sown borage between the verge and the field is still in striking blue flower. I disturb a kestrel from its post in a hawthorn and it quietly flips over the hedgerow into the golf course. A hundred yards further up, I unnerve it again, and this time it flies low and slow across the sweep of brown field in front, barely two feet above ground, sharp-winged in the light, eventually settling into the earth itself, looking small and insignificant in the clod. It defecates forcefully, ejecting a hot squirt of mouse and small bird, then flies up to its watch in the hawthorn once more. But the fields are otherwise utterly empty. It is only on the closely-mown turf of the driving range, just below Girton, that I see a few birds. A handful of fieldfares and redwings, last seen in mid-March, and a scattering of active black-and white wagtails. Migrants, taking a break. Among them a resident green woodpecker, its black mask gazing at the sky, red nape and olive-green back lit by the lowering sun.

I pass through the churchyard at Girton as a single tolling calls the villagers to evensong. Feral pigeons, white and grey, huddle on the shutters of the squat stone tower. The church is white and lit within, as empty as the fields. In the recreation ground only a teenage girl sits still and solemn on a swing. I cut through the ‘community woodland’, with paths and benches set in an impenetrable thicket of ash saplings, and set off along a very muddy and slippery ‘permissive footpath’, between wire fences, across the fields towards Histon. A woman and her dog pass hurriedly by. Nothing moves in the fields. Over in the west, the far horizon is a Chinese landscape of castles on forested mountains set between deep plunging valleys. The sky behind is softly layered in a spectrum of colours – deep orange merging up into yellow, then into green, then into indigo blue. Dusk soon overtakes me and the light is sucked from the land. It is a long three miles back home without the company of light or landscape or creatures, but I pick up on the concrete strips of the guided-busway, which will guide me, if not buses, back home. In the east, not high above the heave of the earth, a more-or-less full moon appears, bright but tiny, a mere farthing in the darkness. I hear only the sound of my breathing and tread of my feet. I become aware of a vague shape in front, a figure approaching, a man in fact, who soon emerges round-faced and stocky, of oriental extraction, beside me, and without breaking stride we exchange a ‘gd’evening’ and pass on, each fading back into our separate black nights as if we had never existed.

walkabout 15

2^nd March, 2010. Walked out in the afternoon to Lamb’s Cross, then up Cuckoo Lane to Rampton, Rampton Drift to the guided-busway, then south to Oakington, 5½ miles. Like yesterday, a glittering spring-like day, brimming with light. The sky is high and clear and blue. More birds are about, and there is rejoicing in the air. A buzzard wheels slowly round and round very high above the village. Through the binoculars I can just make out its distinctive underwing pattern – brown then white then black wing-tips and trailing edges. A green woodpecker flies across a meadow and clamps itself to a telephone pole, halfway up, as if it was a fridge magnet. This is the second I’ve seen today – there was one in the garden earlier. Because of the distance between sightings I think they must be different birds, and different too to the one I saw the day before yesterday up on Cuckoo Lane by the brook. If so, they are doing well in these parts. Three tiny long-tailed tits flit about in a roadside tree. The farmyard and its hedgerows are alive with little birds – robins, blackbirds, blue tits and great tits, peach-breasted chaffinches, greenfinches and others too small and too brown to identify. There are larks on and above the fresh green fields, singing their hearts out, but difficult to see clearly and identify, just disembodied voices calling down from the sky. Much of the water has drained from the fields, and Beck Brook has fallen at least 5 feet since the day before yesterday, though it is still flowing steadily. As usual at this time of day gulls are streaming north-west, but today they are flying very high. I only notice them because the lowering sun catches their white underwings on the upbeat, so they flicker on and off like silver fairy lights in the heavens. A small flock of fieldfares flit by. No sign of my kestrel though. Wherever there is pasture there are individual song thrushes and redwings here and there on the ground – I watch one lean forward then pivot right back on its tail, head held high, steadily pulling a reluctant worm from the earth. The wartime pillboxes along the eastern edge of the old airfield, protruding from low mounds like strange grey mushrooms, have been squatted by rabbits. Each has become a warren to which its denizens scamper back when disturbed. In every direction rooks, in ones and twos and small gangs, are about their purposeful and mysterious business, running errands, hurrying to appointments and trysts this way and that across the sky. Suddenly all is in motion again – winter is receding and the earth rolls on.

walkdontrun12

21^st Feb.2010. My first tentative outing on foot since my knees went five weeks ago. To see how they stand up. Because, after a dismal, wet, snowy morning, the air has cleared, the sun is out and it’s a sparkling afternoon. I’ll walk it though, a couple of miles perhaps. Dozens of redwings are in the horse pasture, not bunched together at all, but spaced out evenly over the ground, the sun catching their cream and chestnut-striped breasts and smudge of red beneath their folded wings. White cloud-scribbles and criss-crossed contrails bleed into the high blue sky. Low above the eastern horizon the warmed air is blooming into cumulus pillows, precocious, presaging spring. Beck Brook is still brown and swollen within its deep-set banks, flowing quietly towards the North Sea. Not a trace of snow survives across the land. 200 yards away in the middle of a field, green with sprouting blades of wheat, two hares clock me and make for the shelter of the hedgerow, running smooth and strong. Cuckoo Lane is muddy and slippery – it would be difficult if not impossible to run on I think. Meanwhile my legs seem OK, twingeing here and there, and ankle-aching, but good enough for a walk like this. Back through the yard of Lamb’s Cross Farm as sun is close to setting. As usual, the tinny sound of a radio leaks from the dark cavern of the barn – Lady Ga-Ga this time – cold comfort for the tractors and the captive cows.