The North Ron Diaries: 9th - 15th March

Backstory: I quit my job. Ran for an island. Swapped a desk in London for a 12 kilo rucksack, my camera and a small Scottish island. A really really tiny one. You can walk the length of North Ronaldsay in an hour, it has a population of about fifty and is home to a unique type of sheep and a bird observatory, where I will be volunteering for the next four months. The following is extracts from the diary I’m keeping.

 9th of March

I have never seen the Pentland Firth calm. I was travelling up under the yellow cloud of a Met Office severe weather warning for gales and high waves. Today I would take a ferry and then a flight and I was distinctly unhappy about this. The boat left Gills Bay, slowly — motors revving and the boat juddering. I don’t get sea sick but I can’t bear to be inside a boat when I can be on deck, so I stood outside, braving the wind while hanging onto a bench. It was a bright day and stretching all around was mostly white: the foam of waves, and spindrift creating drifting rainbows along the surface of the sea. I was half in the mind that I might find a White-billed Diver. But the only birds braving the raging sea were Guillemots: Common and Black (in breeding plumage already), Kittiwakes, Gannets and Fulmars. Fulmars are one of the world’s greatest and least appreciated birds. They may dress dowdy as seagulls, but its the mind of an albatross inside that sets them apart. The wind that forced me to hold onto a railing just to stand up was a plaything to them. Stiff-winged soaring, carving shapes through air that shouldn’t physically be possible. Elegance in heavy weather. Grace under low pressure weather systems.

***

Logan Air could have the slogan ‘making people believe in God again’. It was hard at times, cooped up in a tiny metal box with two propellers flickering in the corners of my eyes, to not think that this would require divine intervention at some point. The wind shook the box. It would hit turbulence and drop. For a couple of seconds too longer than comfortable progress would seem to stop: the propellers still circling and the engine still rattling, but no forward motion could be felt, until it jinked its way through the air again. Underneath: the Stronsay Firth and the Sanday Sound were wrinkled white and blue-grey. Sanday island was all peninsula and isthmuses draped across the sea, like a bracket on which North Ronaldsay is suspended. The descent to North Ronaldsay was hairier still. The plane turned on its wing above the sea to face the island and drifted down towards the runway. The wind was side on, turning the plane at an angle. Lights resolve themselves from amongst the gloom. The white horses on the waves whip into the rocky shoreline. Blink. Look again at that rocky shoreline. Suddenly I find myself unable to not look at the overlapping strata of rock as the plane descends, angled across the runway, and drifting in over the rocks. Until — at seemingly the last possible moment — the pilot accelerates, the nose swings back to the runway and we hit the ground, the right way up and in the right direction. My internal organs return to their right places. It was either divine intervention or a well-trained chap called Colin, possibly both. I unfold myself out of the seat and I have arrived. North Ronaldsay: population fiftyish…and one now.

***

There is currently a dead Great Skua in the porch. A victim of a broken wing from the power lines that cross the island.

10th of March

Last night I didn’t sleep for the gale banging my window frame all night. It’s more than wind. This is air that sounds like it’s ripping through the walls of the buildings and tearing through grass. I expect a scene of devastation when the sun comes up.

***

It feels real now but I'm still not taking it all in. I don't have an idea of the island as a whole, as an organism or ecosystem. I'm still trying to believe my own eyes and immediate surroundings. Yesterday playing as a film on fast-forward: I watched it but I didn’t see it. I went for a walk after arguing with the toaster — which burnt one slice and left the other untouched — and went over the dyke, along the coast to Gretchen loch. Terminology: dyke here means wall, which is doing semantic somersaults in my mind from the East Anglian meaning of ditch. Further counter intuitiveness: the dyke keeps the sheep off the fields and on the beach where they eat the seaweed and navigate wet rocks with aplomb. Pinned between a fierce wind flinging spindrift and foam at me, I do less well, making sure of anxious deliberate footfall on the wet rocks, acutely aware of the waves flagellating on the rocks. By the time I reach the hide overlooking Gretchen loch a vicious rainstorm soaked my binoculars through and stung my face raw. Shovelers do circuits around the loch despite the weather and Fulmars run along the loch surface and take off into the wind, as if the loch was the sea. Of all the things that take getting used to, that Fulmars are everywhere is one of the most jarring, but also the easiest. It's a bird I want around in my life. I find everything they do to be beautifully elegant, even if they belong at sea and not in or above fields.

Binoculars soaked. I can't see a thing so walk over fields to the main road, up past the Laird's house and up to Ancum loch. Lapwing and Golden Plover, Redshank and Turnstone, and copious feral Greylag Geese make up the birds. By now the sky is brilliant blue. The sun polishes the fields into wet gleaming green.

***

The obs takes a delivery of food and I help fix the shelves in their new freezer, price up cans of cod roe and meet some locals who want to buy their groceries from us. Mark takes me for a drive around the island mid afternoon, showing me the routes for the daily census counts. Later I create the bonfire. Onto it yesterday's dead Great Skua goes, a Viking cremation for a pirate bird. The evening is still and calm, blue sky and golden sunset dappled with clouds. We retrieve three Twite from the Heligoland trap: two female and one male and the first time I've seen a healthy bird in the hand, having its measurements taken in return for a ring. Twite are fabulous creatures.

11th of March

Sanderlings on the golf course. Turnstones in the fields. Dunlins on the rocks. Sheep on the beach. Skylarks take off and get swept back fields. Fulmars nestled under walls and a Glaucous Gull waddling, the size of a sheepdog. A Long-tailed Duck sits on the flashes morbidly staring at the others out to sea. A male amongst the waves raises its neck, in anticipation of displaying.

This is still a wind harrowed place. Today the winds swung unexpectedly southerly and we headed to the eastern flank of the island, to the golf course that is alleged to be the most northerly in the world. A golf course on an island this tiny seems extremely out of place, though it is Scotland I guess.

The island takes your assumed context for birds and shakes it all up. On the links were Sanderling crawling, a flock as a silvery smudge with black notches marking them out from the grey-green grass. I’m used to seeing them chasing waves on open sandy beaches. Meanwhile Turnstones in fields, Pink-feet, White-front and Tundra Bean Geese amongst the least promising flock of feral Greylags. Passable photos were obtained of the latter. Snipe kick up from most fields. It keeps you awake even when you feel like the tiredest man alive.

The afternoon: bar training, fire-safety training. Imbibe the information, sign the forms. The evening: learn the bird log process. Sleep.

12th of March

Still persevering with Thoreau. Cliche: alert. He understands. He understands why I had to leave the desk and London for something I felt I could grow with. Resignation is committed desperation! These are my more fervoured rebellious thoughts. He reflects my depressed ones too but I'm not sure if I can handle an entire book of me agreeing with him. He suffers terribly from his own pious idealism though. Ultimately I’m reading him on an island, to see how it alters how I read my own solitude. I’m wondering instead about work and toil, because I seem to default to a stoic suffering: I have blisters from the muck boots and wind-burned ears, a perpetual fug of tiredness and half an eye on how this will be worth it in the end. I’ve also been thinking a lot about god: it’s the sort of landscape that makes you irresistibly think of big things.

***

Today there was a major island funeral and the first time the obs has been full of visitors. Despite the alcohol involved a funeral isn’t an ideal place to meet people, particularly not when you’re nervously handing bowls of soup and platters of cheese and ham sandwiches around emotional people. The only incident on my first bar shift was hearing ‘a box of red wine’ as a bottle, and then searching for the key to open the already unlocked store door. Oh Steve. As with a surprising amount of things in life, it just needed a good shove.

***

The weather has still been atrocious, still with a hint of easterly. I tried to count the Wigeon on Gretchen loch as part of today’s survey but the wind was such that standing up was best done bent at an angle, half-hiding behind the collapsed sheep dyke. Of course, still no sign of the Green-winged Teal. The waves were spectacular, crashing into the wind and rocks in a meringue of whipped white. A Snow Bunting foraged amongst the sheep grazed rocks. Highlight of the day was the Glaucous Gull of yesterday, battling the wind in Nouster bay. It appeared overhead and out of the sun, and first noticed as a gull where the wingtips didn’t seem to end in the correct edge of black. It moved out of the light and then I could see the sun and sea bleached white features, the missing primary feather and large bulk of the bird. A note on gull ageing: almost any gull born last summer will be in its first winter plumage by now. But Glaucs and Iceland Gulls retain their juvenile feathers throughout the winter until they end up beaten and broken, more shaft than feather and bleached the colour of ivory. I like that about them. A biological stoicism.

13th of March

Tiredness abides. The wind and rain passes. It dawned gorgeously, still and calm. A Skylark singing sort of morning. A Merlin hunting singing Skylarks sort of morning. I take the bike up to Dennis point, the very northeastern tip of the island for today’s census. The kelp flies have hatched this morning and the beach is aswarm with them. They blunder into me, like small hail stones. A flock of Starlings, at least 300 strong counter-swarm and lay waste to them. Rock Pipits take the pickings at the edge, too wary to commit fully to the frenzy. A couple of flies flew into my mouth. I didn’t really see the appeal. Ravens and a Glaucous Gull off the tip of the point. A Water Rail scurrying (the only way they have of moving) between thick weedy margin of the dyke and a rather small pond. I thought this would be good for the island but apparently not.

It is a morning of arrivals. Meadow Pipits and Pied Wagtails are fresh into the island, a Sparrowhawk dropped in too — pursued by Hooded Crows — and presumably made its way off north again on such a fine clear day. Fair Isle can be seen from here, somedays.

***

I really can’t express enough how nice a day today was. It was the sort of day when performing a daily census of the island’s birds isn’t just my daily task but what I would be doing anyway, for fun. That can’t be overstated as to how good that feels. I’m reminded of an Andrew O’Hagan essay on his holiday in Bora Bora. He pauses after his lavish descriptions and apologises — because ‘paradise makes pricks of us all’.

Paradise has work as well, and not just in the naming of the beasts. This afternoon we took down the rusty chickenwire that has been half of a Heligoland trap for the past six years, and replaced it with fresh wire. If paradise involves ladders, nails and hammers in one direction, and a marsh in the other with electric lapwing song, a quartering Hen Harrier gingered by the evening sunlight, and
a Green-winged Teal then I am quite ok with this. Tasks in a nice environment aren’t tasks at all. And not a way of killing time either (so as that I don’t injure eternity, thanks Thoreau).

We caught two female Blackbirds in the Heligoland trap and I held and released them both. Nestled calmly between my fingers, they behaved well. You release them simply by letting go, which heart-stoppingly feels like you will drop and the Blackbird will just drop calmly to the ground and injure itself. But this is not so. For a split-second after you release and the bird drops, its wings flick out and it disappears over the pallet fence. That was all I felt. Too nervous to feel any more.


14th of March

Six more blackbirds released. Each a beating heart and keen eye, a bundle of energy and a plumb line from my hand to behind the nearest wall.

Later we switch on the rugby, serve some fisherman in the bar and then watch England v Scotland. England win, naturally. The evening unwinds. Unspooled: stories and reminisces of islanders of old and what it was like, merely 30 years ago. Sunny and full of youth, laced with currents of darkness, anger and regret for people lost and the decline of the island. I want to meet more of the islanders.

15th of March

Tiredness abides. A full stop. The last day of my first full week at the obs and it feels like it's been a year. Ok, I exaggerate. Into the space of a week, it feels like a month of upheaval and weather has been packed and wedged in.

This morning. A fine day to rival Friday but wind ruffled. My blisters stagger around with me, keeping me moving forward. I headed up to the east links, where a low footpath between high cattle fields kicks you out at a gate, opening up at a white sand beach, bands of kelp and boulders and seventy Sanderlings describing the extent of the sea’s waves. The sea still blue. The sky cloudless. Common Seals on the rocks and a flock of Bar-tailed Godwits on the sand. On the links: three Glaucous Gull, all bleached juveniles — one a new arrival on the island — and a Snow Bunting.

Back by the crofts near the loch a Hen Harrier materialised above the bones of a bush, hovering, then quartering on and out of sight behind another croft. I ran up the road to see it again but when I get to where it disappeared… nothing. You can’t engineer a Hen Harrier. Can’t predict where to see one. It’s a matter of it appearing from behind a wall and disappearing in thin air, of its own volition. They are impossibly difficult.

Tiredness increases. The rest of the day spent feeling as if under glass. Strangely devoid of the experience of life.

I’ve recently been discussing landscape with a good friend and it has reminded me that my taste in landscape is an acquired one. She is excited to be among the baize and bone of chalk downland; I am thrilled by marshes, space and the absence of ‘landscape’. We both grew up in the same part of Suffolk. She turned inland in the search of English hills and I turned outward, looking for the edges. She thinks these marshes are boring. I think I get it from dad, who as a child asked to go on holiday ‘somewhere bleak’. I’ve always felt the same, as if taste in landscape was genetic and not formed from a patchwork of childhood memories involving seawalls and shingle beaches and ever-grey skies.
 
I mention this in lieu of explanation. It was dad’s fifty-something birthday and we were stood on the selvedge of a seawall, admiring the scimitar curve of Essex. We were stood on an island but it is almost indistinguishable from the mainland. Behind us: a yachting village the other side of the river. The Crouch washes the bank metres from our feet and stretches east, merges with the Roach and dissipates into the shallow muddy expanse of the North Sea. In front of us: Kentish power stations are dark smudges in the murk, the Thames hidden and betrayed only by ships apparently sailing through dry fields. The marsh is essentially a building site. It has yellow cranes and diggers — emblazoned with Hawk — spread across it. Here is where the dirt being dug out from under London by Crossrail is being shipped to and turned into a new island in the river. The island will be an RSPB reserve and the noticeboard has optimistic images of Spoonbills. While they have high hopes for here, politicians bicker over whether to build a Crossrail station over my local park.

If the new nature is that which we can find in the margins of our urban lives, then I guess this is the new old nature. The desolate and remote locations of old nature, but a nature made by diggers and trains instead of fences and signs. We can lose sight that nature is as often man-made as it is man-destroyed. And the wildlife? A Rough-legged Buzzard hung over the marsh, flickering wings and spread tail, showing its patchwork of peat and cream plumage. A Hen Harrier ghosted low along the ditches, terrifying partridges and a Marsh Harrier drifted higher over the wetter areas, worrying the wildfowl. They do not care about the diggers.

But the real highlight was the Corn Bunting. In a crop field by the car park we found one. Dumpy, streaky and very brown, it is what is thought of as a birder’s bird. We found another, and another, until the crop field was alive with birds moving amongst the leaves. The flock was at least 100 strong, which would’ve been unremarkable 100 years ago. Perhaps even 50. But since then they’ve declined by 90% throughout Britain. A bird that used to be so local that populations 30km apart could sing with different dialects, they are the canary in the coal mine of British agriculture. I hadn’t seen this amount of Corn Buntings in my entire life, before today. I wasn’t even aware such gatherings happened in the 21st century.

And I remember when I last saw a Corn Bunting. I was a couple of miles into the Sussex downs with the same friend who is now so excited to be moving there. It had rained all morning and we were on the top of the green escarpment. Around us the landscape seemed like a dream of genteel Englishness, a period fiction of the past. From a manure dump a Corn Bunting sang its tuneless jangle. It looked as though it could’ve been shaped out of a lump of soil and straw, earth magicked to life. I was excited. My friend was bored, irascible, thoroughly uncharmed. Evidently an acquired taste.

The canal water is crisp sky, floating factory logos and double-headed ducks swimming. Briers are tangled tight around the security fence, frozen stiff and pale, becoming perches for Robins and foraging lines for Blackbirds. The towpath puddles cracked underfoot. A low branch mugged me for my hat. The sky clouds over, early morning light dulls and Moorhens bail out of the hawthorn bushes I walk past, crash landing in the canal. The mirror is broken; the water turns green and grey. The towpath bends towards the four lanes of traffic and the train track. Through the trees, the lit-up high street logos of a suburban retail park.

I am not in a park. But I have fields and trees and the crunch of ice in the grass and mud. In the foreground four old oaks survive in the fields, gnarled and proud amongst scrub laced with footpaths. The paths are heavily-used. Lager cans strewn like fallen fruit that won’t rot. Dogs walk their owner. I find a pair of Little Owls perched with their backs to me, dappled pale on grey plumage merging into grey twigs and white sky. Frowning anyway, the white M shape on the back of their necks creating a 'false face’ in a state of ever-fierceness. Then a yellow eye gets glanced in my direction, with disdain. Electrifying the gloom.

I want to melt away at that precise moment. It is an urge that comes over me, when looking for owls; when every cracking twig, or kicked pebble seems amplified, exaggerated to comic levels of clumsiness. I want to disappear in bushes and watch the owl unobserved. Instead it converts its disdainful glare into flight at one sudden, inelegant and human movement.

Back by the canal it started to snow. Droplets, then a flurry, then a blizzard. A Cormorant, frosty-headed with hormones, dives for fish.

This is the unofficial countryside. Where pylons poke out from woods, where the undeveloped and unmanaged corners are closer to the spirit of nature than many too too tidied nature reserves. It may be unofficial, but it’s not counterfeit. Encounters with wildlife seem more genuine, less predictable, wilder even, in these neglected corners. The Little Owls in this suburb of London symbolise it wonderfully. A 19th century introduction by Thomas Powys, the fourth Baron of Lilford and an eminent Victorian ornithologist, they spread throughout Britain filling its hitherto vacant ecological niche. They can be found throughout the countryside, where ever there is a landscape of open fields and undisturbed farm buildings or an oak tree’s maze of branches.

Can be found. I haven’t seen one well in the countryside for a couple of years now. Not because of a dramatic decline, but because they’re so discreet they mostly go unseen. I should’ve been looking closer to home. What the Little Owl is then is the unofficial owl, the discreet exotic; the perfect inhabitant of the countryside that exists where it shouldn’t. And why old trees, such as the four oaks between the canal and the retail park need protecting as rigourously as any oak in any pristine part of the official countryside.

Hoar frost forms as a sub-zero dew, on bitter still nights under the stars. It is the architecture of temperature and moisture: a crystalline fragment of frozen water like glassy barbed wire. On fenland afternoons when the blue sky lies about the temperature, the hoar clings on to the links between the boardwalk slats, out of the sun and beyond the reach of errant footsteps. Breath still condenses around our faces. The track away from the boardwalk is thinly iced and deeply puddled. We turn back with the ice cracking around our feet above puddles deeper than our boots. Between the reeds and the lode runs a thicket of hawthorn and tangled guelder rose bushes. A mob of Fieldfares descends from the clear sky on to them, as unruly and noisy as drunks at closing time, squabbling over the best of the pale red berries.

The fens. A landscape made by man. The extent of green and brown and water may deceive but the spirit level horizon and ruler straight lodes remind you that this was once below sea level. It is a landscape you can put a precise date upon. Wicken Fen is also precisely datable: from 1899 when the first patch of land was bought and set aside as one of the first nature reserves in Britain. Fenland is a young habitat too, requiring constant management to ensure it doesn't dry out or succeed into scrub or woodland. The sea of reeds in front is a landscape that is kept permanently young, younger than its 115 years. 

The sea of reeds gently sways in the slightest of breezes. Spider silk shines against the light, joining reed head to reed head. I shiver. I've been coming here since a child and I have no warm memories of the place. I have memories of seeing my first Barn Owl on a family walk down the lode, wellies ankle deep in snow. It was spotted first by my mum, flying towards us. She thought it perhaps was a swan at first. I've been here in summer and still felt a distinct chill sweeping over the landscape. I can hardly picture it in anything other than winter; half-frozen in still tranquility, full of the empty space and silence I crave.

The sun turned golden and lit up the reeds.

The tranquility lasts just a moment until the next step flushes a Blackbird with clanging alarm notes. The sun disappeared. A Hen Harrier drifted down a ditch. A young male. Young: the brown-streaked underparts were suffused with a golden freshness; male because the wings were glazed with a greyish-blue tinge. It is a bird that carries its own sense of drama. There are no underwhelming Hen Harriers, being physically imposing and the rarest raptor to breed in England. Winter in the fens offers them relief: easy pickings along the fields and lodes, safe roosting in the middle of undisturbed marshes. In summer they head to upland moors where — with the habitat for 300 pairs — four nested this year. Tagged chicks vanish. Adults get their legs crushed in illegal traps. Meanwhile an adult male joined the young male out over the marsh. The adult's blue-grey plumage appeared as ghostly as its effortless movements in the cold light.

A blood-orange sun sinks out of the cloud, flares briefly and drops below the horizon. A clean air sunset. A Barn Owl quarters slowly into the gathering night

Lost

At the tip of Portland — an island that is not an island — is a garden that sits just back from the cliff top overlooking the English Channel. A cold wind blew under deceptively blue skies. In the garden was a Barred Warbler, a young bird that got lost on leaving Eastern Europe and ended up clinging to the last bush in Dorset. And stayed there, not trying to relocate to the rift valley of Eastern Africa where it belongs at this time of year. A wintering record in Britain is almost unprecedented. 

© Max Whitby / NatureGuides

The first glimpse I had was of a disembodied bird in the back of a bush. Against the light, haloed and fragmented by twigs, I could make out the stout bill and tip of the tail surprisingly far apart. I was expecting a grey bird, but found a delicately silver one instead, with a keenly staring eye. It hopped out and the stout bird turns graceful, clinging to the thin twigs and contorting its body to dismember the fruit donated to it by local birders, which it vigorously guarded from the local sparrow flock. Over the course of about an hour’s observation it revealed a subtle charisma; a behaviour more akin to a bolshy thrush than a small Sylvia warbler.

© Max Whitby / NatureGuides

We laud birds for their migration feats and characterise them as epic and heroic. With that though comes something quite human; they got lost. Whether by winds, misfortune or a misfiring migratory impulse, they become transient visitors, a temporary taste of somewhere exotic in the bleak last bush in Dorset. If an interest in birds is built around a pan-animal empathy, I empathise most strongly with these birds. The lost and the awkwardly out of place.

Spiders in Acton are a sign of seasonal change. I've not experienced anything like it, nor lived anywhere like it since the age of seven, when I was ripped from the suburban housing estate comforts of Hertfordshire, and rerooted to an ugly working village in the middle of Suffolk. In that village there was space, and the privacy that comes with four walls separated from the neighbouring houses. I discovered birds. Cocksure Pheasants strutting through the garden, the raucous Rookery over the road and Fieldfares raiding the apple trees in the garden of my neighbour too elderly to pick them. The first Chiffchaffs of the year became important to me. It signified spring. Autumn by the sky filling with birds again after the summer lull. Juveniles of many species locating due south and sailing over. 

Last summer I moved to London. To a job in deepest west London, where the grey and beige seep from the sky and the concrete and color everything. I lost my horizon to the perimeter of the street. My sky was no longer so full of birds. In its place I found spiders. I found spiders straddled across my front gate in the murky half light of the morning, only I didn't find them until I found them on my face, silk breaking around me and feelings of both disgust and guilt. Sorry little guy. We repeated it for two months, gradually decreasing in frequency until around November and the arrival of winter in the city. 

Winter isn't a season worth celebrating in London: it is damp, mild and filthy, and its citizens match the gloominess of their surroundings. It is mild enough so that the Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps don't have to leave, and this doesn't give spring a headstart but spoils it's grand arrival with the longer, brighter days. If the leaves never quite all fall from the trees than what is winter? Where does that leave spring?

So instead I celebrate autumn, and away from the countryside and coast that I grew up on, in and with, I've turned to spiders. I watch them on grey Saturdays as I wash away the past week with endless coffee. I learn their names. It seems the polite place to begin. The Garden Cross spider. With a name it can go beyond mere surface appearance. A surface that is stripy brown legs, alternating light and dark, with a crucifix of broken white stamped onto its abdomen. And I watch one weaving its web from the inside out, against the pale sky where the web can’t be seen, leaving her to space-walk slowly and purposefully, suspended by her own invisible lines. When woven the web is both intricate and massive, the size of the window looking out onto the garden. It collects a hoverfly and a small wasp, both quickly wrapped up in excess webbing and slowly deflated. A life transfusion. In it she finds the protein that gets metabolised into the white crucifix mark on her back.

Meanwhile in the spiders I find a life that makes me feel better about being in the city. Amidst the rush that threats to drain the life out of me, I can still find new ways to mark the seasons, and keep in touch with the nature around me that’s different to what I’m used to in the country.

And then October. The spiders begin to fade away and the sky is pierced with the soft edged calls of Redwings and the clatter of Fieldfares amongst the traffic noise, jet engine roar, parakeet shriek and sirens, alarms and the hectic hurry. I miss the spiders just sitting there.

Funny how your ideas of nature can seem so solid and yet change so quickly.

Scene one.

Last week I was in Madeira, up a dry riverbed and halfway towards the summit of an old volcano. The steep sided rock faces were covered in laurel forests, thick and lush. They seemed primordial, untouched; the habitat of the Trocaz Pigeon said the book. We saw two. Distant flyovers, weaving along the fringe of trees at the edge of the cliff top. Later we tried another valley. Just next to the go kart track, down the valley from the gravel quarry. The bottom and top were orchards mostly, scattered with houses. Lorries thundered past, temporarily turning the world to dust. And when it settled: Trocaz Pigeons, perched not too distantly in the trees. The colour of stone, but shaped more athletically than you might think possible for a pigeon. When they flew up the valley they were darker: Jackdaw-like actually, with large pigeon tails and thick white and black bands.

Further down the valley by the main road, the river has been diverted by concrete to take it under the go kart track. Pallid and Plain Swifts fed in a frenzy on the insects just above the water. It’s cooler here by the bridge. And you need the dark background to work out the shade of black-brown on the swifts. All the while the smell of burning petrol, the whine of two-stroke engines and the screech of tires and the site of swifts careering chaotically.


Scene two.

I got a text just as I was leaving work. A Wryneck at Wormwood Scrubs, the second ever record for the park. It hastened my step.

I had given up on birding the park for the summer and never quite gotten back into the swing now it’s ornithologically autumn. It can be the most dispiriting place. I am still young enough to struggle with a 6:30am start for diminishing returns of Meadow Pipits and Whitethroats, and the staring mutual incomprehension of joggers and model aircraft flyers. But a Wryneck. They’re not supposed to turn up at west London parks with views of brutalist council estates, the Shard, the Heathrow flight path and the London eye… 

I got there for the last hour of light. As the sunset burnt up over distant building; I watched the open grass, searched amongst the brambles. I found teenagers smoking in the bushes, people drinking beer by the benches, artists sketching the umbellifers in the long grass and football practice. Multiple aircraft flyers and joggers tracing rings around the park; British Airways and parakeets shrieking through the sky, and a multitude of friendly dogs. No migrant birds. No Wrynecks taking a quick break between Sweden and Africa in this islet of green grass, or any of the as-advertised Whinchats either.

Nevermind. It’s the promise that nature can surprise us still — can turn up where least expected and in the least promising of places —  that sustains.