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.

Encounters

Elegant was the first word that came to mind. An elegant cycle of gulls, carving irresistibly
through the current of air up above the tower block roofs. There must have been over a hundred of them, black hairlines against a lumpy mass of grey cloud. I could see the birds stretching their necks out, apparently taking gulps of fresh air.

Flying ant day. Crawling in the cracks by the kerb a couple of winged ants remain earthbound; by this evening most were airborne. The gulls were a feeding frenzy, though frenzy is the wrong word entirely for an action where grace seems to replace effort. Starlings scythe over the street, momentarily filling the sky in their pursuit of the ants.

Thunder starts to rumble. The sky began to empty.

I remember flying ant day from my childhood. I remember cars cooking in the sun and the pavement beating heat back; and both carpeted in flying ants. An annual day of plague in the suburbs. You don’t seem to get those numbers anymore. It's almost cliche this nostalgia for the animals of childhood that are missing now.

***

His eyes were inscrutably dark, and nestled under a furrowed brow of his own intentions. He never turned his restless gaze from me, yet muttered quietly to himself. He was smaller than the female -- about a third smaller -- and resting on the borrowed glove over my hand. Simultaneously heavier than I'd been led to believe but lighter, much lighter, than you'd guess. I decided I liked him.

I have always preferred the company of animals to people. Sandy (he) was a Long-legged Buzzard, an elegant bird of arid places, and the rich colour of a desert sunset. With his dead weight in my held out arm, I found myself entranced by the agile power hidden behind those eyes, and those quick movements as it kept its head stable under my trembling arm. It stretched its wings, lightly brushing my face with its outermost flight feathers, as if with disdain. Human, know your place.

I was just another passing face at the falconry place, another awkward shuffling land creature like its master, but without the supply of raw chicken and rabbit. And yet…

***

From the crest of a rolling wave of Chiltern chalk you see southern England spread out before you in its summer browns. In the haze of this hot day it seems to stretch out endlessly, but I know this is nonsense. I mentally clone out the M40. Underfoot: scabious and vetch, a Pyramidal Orchid and a hundred other flowers I don't know. Beyond: a cloud of Chalkhill Blues and a Dark Green Fritillary, Small Skippers everywhere and a few Marbled Whites still. A place such as this writes it's own poetry.

Red Kites spiral above -- and beyond -- until passing out as specks in the haze. I found a Silver-spotted Skipper by the path, it's wings shut tight and proboscis rooting around the blue sun of a scabious flower. A new species for me, with large flecks of silver in its greeny orange underwings, distinguishing it from the other orange skippers, that aren't so closely tied to this habitat. It flits off, scudding low over the flowers, chases off a burnet moth and goes in search of other quarrels. A fun butterfly.

In Remote Part

Blair Atholl is a quietly overlooked corner of the Cairngorm national park, despite being tucked beside the A9 less than an hour north of Perth. The station is served by two trains an afternoon, doesn't sell tickets and has a pair of House Sparrows breeding in an old House Martin nest. It's quiet outside of the castle walls — the only tourist trap in the village.

I took the track north up the river Tilt, to Glen Tilt. A Red Squirrel hurries away from me up a dead branch leaning against a pine, curls it's tail up behind it and waits for the danger to pass. I carried on quickly up the path, joining a gravel track that services the few crofts down the glen. There is nobody around but the landscape holds the fingerprints of humans. From an opening I saw a cow stood upon a hummock in a field full of the scars of old ridge and furrow farming. Rifle shots crackle around the valley from the nearby firing range. From a grand stone bridge you get a clear view of either bank of the river Tilt: thickly forested with spruces, weedy birches and small clumps of larch trees. 

The larches are important to Blair Atholl, which beyond its diminutive size has had a disproportionate effect on the look of the highlands. A non-native tree, larches have been planted on Scottish estates since the 17th century, but never with such fervour as by John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl. To a maxim of 'for Beauty, effect and Profit’ he carpeted his corner of highland Perthshire with 21 million trees by 1830 — 14 million of which were larches — chosen to grow straight and strong for the construction of naval ships. It was the most extensive plantation of its time and its hard not to see the effect of it across Britain. Think of the uplands and its hard to not to picture an autumnal larch waning gold somewhere in the scene.

I am alone, yet it is a solitude achieved whilst being surrounded by a nature as much human as it is self-willed. A sort of industrial nature with a purpose and a price tag beyond its mere existence. 

A Wood Warbler sung. A Roe deer with velvety antlers trotted through as more rifle shot cackled through the glen. Forestry moves on. ‘Planter’ John Murray passed away; the navy made their ships out of iron instead of larch; hunting became more profitable than blanket trees. The forestry here is a fragment of what there once was, and mostly spruce now.

The path exits the forest, a sign post promising me a shortcut to Glen Tilt. It takes me over a lightly grazed sheep field covered in Common Spotted Orchids and the orange peel of Small Heath butterflies. Past the sprawling croft, Wheatears nesting in a stone wall and Swallows still singing. It takes me through a cloud of flies that will buzz around my ears for the next ten minutes until the track returns me to the river, lined with lush deciduous trees and a slight breeze. Ahead of me the valley kinks towards Carn a'Chamain then on the map kinks back and properly becomes the Glen Tilt of famous natural beauty. 

 

I never get there. 

The sun broke out from behind cloud and the buttercup lined track came alive with butterflies. Many Small Heaths, by far the commonest on these grassy mountain slopes, but whites also, and a Northern Brown Argus. My first encounter with this Scottish specialty, freshly emerged from its pupae and shining copper and verdigris, with a single white fleck in the middle of its forewing.

Navigating the remoter parts of Scotland by public transport is a fraught exercise, bedevilled by trains that stop irregularly and three to four hour waits for the next one. I gave myself two hours to get here, two and a half hours to get back and I had run out of time with the Glen just out of reach, distracted by orchids, butterflies and trees. 

I don’t mind.

***

The next day I walked up Ben Cleuch, highest of the Ochil mountains. A short walk that climbs up 721 metres from the bus stop at sea level over the length of a couple of miles. It is knee knackering, despite the spring of peat and bed of grass. Ben Cleuch sits half behind, half on top of Andrew Gannel hill and does the trick of disappearing from view until you crest what you think is the peak and see several hundred metres more of ascent over the sheep smooth grassy sides. And when you reach the top -- the view of Dale-like Ochils gently falling away to the north, to wind farms, reservoirs and the Grampians beckoning on the horizon. To the south: the steep flanks of the mountains either side shield the central belt from view. You see Tillicoultry and Alloa, the bending Forth a ribbon of reflected white sky and Scotland's bread basket stretching into the southern haze.

I feel it in my knees, my calves and my thighs. After a week of walking it's time to give into the exhaustion and have an ice cream.

The way up is clouded by (relative) summit fever; the way down reveals the industry that was once here, whose death led to the mill villages at the foot of these hills decaying. The woods at the bottom are laced with rusting pipes that used to funnel water into the mills, the jagged peaks of an abandoned quartz-dolerite quarry look like a mock Cuillin mountain, the steps cut into the rock of the path and the old iron hand railing far too grand and permanent to be for the stream of middle aged hikers converging on the highest point around. Bracken and foxglove coat the lower slopes, the woods are a mash of natives and exotic trees, and stink of recreational drug use. The path spits you out at the top of the village, beside the well shepherded concrete sided burn that runs past an old mill, now housing. A Grey Wagtail flits up river as I poke my head over the fence. It uses the concrete steps that are now the river bed to forage for insects in a blur of yellow on grey.

It's the same story in all the villages on the south side of the Ochils. They make great walks, up the rivers and into the hills but shackled by the melancholy of the post-industrial and what once was but is now no more.