After The Fall

Easterlies, decaying. Overnight rain. Early morning mist, lingering.

Chaffinches scattering from the gravel track to the cliff-top wood. Redwings seep out of the hawthorns and oak — some landing, some leaving. Other thrushes (blackbird and song) call quietly, seemingly several to each bush.

Gravel becomes mud. Light becomes shade.

In the heart of the wood is a strand of sycamores. I stand underneath, disturbing nothing, becoming like an adjunct trunk. In the heart of the sycamore, three goldcrests — six grams of feather, bone and muscle — flit about the canopy, foraging invisible insects from the undersides of rusting leaves. Migrants too. From, not just the woods of Belgium and the deep pines of Scandinavia, but from beyond the Danube, the Vistula, perhaps the Volga too? We are still working out from how far east our goldcrests can migrate in winter. An advance at least on the often repeated old folk-tales, that could only explain their crossings of the North Sea by them riding on the backs of short-eared owls and woodcocks.

The tree welcomes them, wherever they’re from. Food and shelter before the leaves are stripped back by November gales and they move on, once more, driven by the need for food and shelter. The mist has burnt off and the sky is deep autumn blue. The thrushes vanish. Skylarks head over, high, in singles. Flocks of goldfinch determinedly bounce south along the cliff-top. The world keeps turning. A leaf falls from the sycamore. The goldcrests keep flitting.

A migrant goldcrest from Orkney, where ditches replace sycamores.

Field observation of an ocean sunfish.

If I had stared until it made sense I would still be there now, rooted to that Cornish headland, rain-washed and blinking at it all. Blinking at its fin, a blunt triangular paddle, the same pallid colour as the rain that had swept over the bay in waves all day. Flapping with, I don't know what, the tremor of the waves or the pleasure of a fish half out of water in the rain.

The waves washed it away. The fin disappeared in the grey dip between crests, only to surface a few feet further out. Fin and face, like a wind caught plastic bag drifting endlessly out to sea. I looked it in the eye, through rain-glazed binoculars, big and black and round. A plug-hole, soullessly expressive of depths and darkness unimagined. Unimaginable.

Ocean sunfish. Ocean-coloured sunfish. I knew it only by reputation. World's biggest bony fish, world's biggest niche creature. A once rare drifter in the warm water currents that now run like a river past the Cornish coast. I read later that it eats jellyfish and can reach a tonne. But it doesn't look like that to me. It looks like nothing I have ever seen before – much less understood.

Ocean sunfish, public domain image by Per-Ola Norman