I was in awe that these tiny bundles of feathers could survive such conditions
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Version 0 of 1. As I walked up the hill, with Monach, the black and tan miniature dachshund, on her lead beside me, my route was towards the hill loch on the upper edge of the woodland. The main trees were moribund birch and their silvery and black-streaked trunks seemed to emphasise the frozen snow and frost. As we moved uphill we went under the trees to avoid the sound of the crunching snow. It developed into what was a totally captivating scene of stillness and, more importantly to me, of complete silence; that silence you have to listen for. I stood on the water's edge and looked out with some amazement as I had never seen this particular loch completely frozen over before. Then the silence was broken by birds calling from some distance away. The commonest call was the soft, high pitched triple notes of "see-see-see" and, sometimes, a short and terse sounding "chrrp" between. They were long-tailed tits and I tried pursing my lips to imitate their calls. Within a few minutes the birds were all around me as they flitted over the branches and twigs in their seemingly endless search for insects. I was just in awe that these tiny bundles of feathers, with their absurdly long tails, could survive in such conditions. Were they attracted to my pathetic attempts at imitating them? Was it just curiosity at seeing one man and his dachshund in "their" world of trees? More likely it was just co-incidence that I was in their foraging line along the edge of the woodland and loch shore. The birds reminded me of John Clare (1793-1864), who one of my early mentors, James Fisher, described as "the finest poet of Britain's minor naturalists and the finest naturalist of all Britain's major poets". Clare knew the birds as "bumbarrels", after the shape of their domed nests. His classic lines about them are in his poem Emmonsail's Heath in Winter. |