Life in the Freezer

RSPB Pulborough Brooks

A feeble sun, risen barely above the horizon casts long shadows on hard frozen ground. On the south part of the brooks, in the lee of the wind there is such silence that every sound is amplified; from the blackbirds turning over leaves under almost ever hedgerow to the sound of the stoat tip-toeing along the bank of a frosty ditch.  I feel like I am the only person here.

A solitary cloud breaks up the endless ice blue of the sky, moving meekly along above a threadbare willow that creaks lazily in a gentle breeze. The ground is concrete hard, and most of the flooded meadows have succumbed to Jack Frost. Lapwings, driven from the water's edges, forage busily  in fields for insects, mingling with flocks of nervous wigeon, arrived from Russia, to whom the temperatures must seem positively balmy. Two snipe hunker down in a nearby ditch, before a tiff send one shuffling unhappily off to a less favourable spot. A shoveler looks on from the water's edge, unmoved.

Behind a hedgerow a large herd of black fallow deer gather, some lazy with sleep, others jumpy. I move downwind of them, and away from a chattering group of birders. As I expected the deer are driven further along and closer to me, so close I can see the long lashes of a doe above sad looking eyes. We watch each other for quite some time, before a far away dog barks and the startled herd flee away to the north. 

A goldcrest fusses acrobatically about the willows, watched by a curious squirrel. Somewhere nearby another calls, and then another. While the goldcrest flits from branch to branch a treecreeper, white breast flashing in the dappled light, contents himself with the grubs that have moved into the light on the trunk. 


Even the larger meadows are given over almost in their totality to ice, a freeze that seems to have happened so suddenly that ripples have frozen into the surface of the water. Far away a flock of greylag geese, with a few white fronted geese secreted among feed contentedly, ignoring the presence of a juvenile peregrine tiercel who preens himself on a molehill. There are few waterfowl for him to drive up, a solitary shelduck huddles up on a frosty bank, an injured wing folded awkwardly across his back. 



Everywhere groups of tits flit back and forth between trees, coal, blue, great and long tailed are much in evidence; as are numerous house sparrows. 

Above the fields to the north east a kestrel hunts, now hovering, now swooping, circling and hovering again.


On the path leading back south a cacophony of cackles erupt from a flock of fidgety crows, and the falcon peregrine is driven up and away at great speed; arcing round in a loop she flips upside down, a flash of black and white streaked underbelly, yellow talons as sharp as daggers lash out and she is gone behind the tree line. 






Breath forms clouds in the air, and the chill works its way into the bones. The cafe's bread pudding and warmth calls me inside.
 

The Enchanted Wood

Ebernoe Common

Heavy snow-laden clouds seem to be propped up by the tall  birch trees around the small Victorian red-brick church, and the occasional flurry of snow litters the car park with flecks of white.

To the east of the church a path runs south and then south east, made up in that ancient way of compacted rubble, slippery with mud, ice and beech mast. To the left is Furnace Field, in warmer times a favourite haunt of adders. Now, nervous fieldfares bolt out of hedges to snatch morsels from the iced-fingers of grass.

Further on, across a stream-bottomed valley there stands a restored brick kiln, a reminder that this which nature has reclaimed was once a centre of industry, where the sounds of hammers echoed for miles around, while ther forests flickered with fire.

More evidence of this industrial past lies south-west of the church where a frozen furnace pond supports a small flock of mournful looking mallards. The pond sparkles like glitter has been strewn across it surface, and each clumsy mallard footstep echoes from bank to bank.

Great clouds of blue, coal and great tits engage in what appears to be a competition to throw over the largest leaf as they forage among the beach mast. Suddenly an old English sheepdog appears and sits obediently at my side. For a while we stand together in silence watching the birds before the voice of an unseen mistress calls him away, and with a glance over his shoulder he is gone.

Bemused I turn back to find the tits have left, and a solitary grey squirrel sits where they foraged, clasping a beech nut. I hear what I initially take to be a jay mimicking a buzzard, as they are known to do, when the call rises in volume, incessant and repetitive.

I scan the skies, the squirrel scampers up the nearest tree, and above two common buzzards appear. One is noticeably smaller than the other, who calls constantly. They glide only for short periods and at a low altitude, the cold air probably lacking the thermals they need for their familiar soaring displays.

It is easy to see why in Scotland they are known as the 'tourist's Eagle' with their long fingery wings and gliding flight. After fifteen minutes or more of calling and circling they fly west into the weak sun and are lost over the beech trees.

Across the forest the repetitive beat of a drumming great spotted woodpecker sounds out, loud but unseen, pausing occasionally, waiting for an answer that never seems to come.

Paths criss-cross this ancient forest, tempting the explorer. They are the remnants of trackways that lead to the industrial sites that were once common here, some are hollow-ways, hundreds of years old. It is easy to get lost here, happy care-free lost of a child in an enchanted forest. Following any of the paths north leads to the church, or if not the road that leads to the church, where a welcome flask of soup waits in the car.

The Suburban Park

The Suburban Park

The park is all that is left of extensive agricultural lands and market gardens which have all vanished within the last 150 years or so as the built environment and ribbon development ate away unchecked at the rural landscape.

Since then it has been chipped away at, with public service buildings eating away chunks of land and blocking out the light. Amenities built for the young result in large areas of tarmac. Ponds have vanished under an epidemic of health and safety legislation; and at night sodium lights glare from among the trees.

Recently the local council dispatched some workers who summarily beheaded every living thing on the west side to a height of six foot or so, lest their leaves should fall onto the expensive but rarely used tennis courts, or drift onto the highway.

Yet for the careful observer life thrives here. In the south a clump of trees houses three squirrels who perform acts of derring do on a trapeze of branches, while magpie chuckle their appreciation. A pair of shy jays live here, emerging only to chase away the odd rook who covets their prime position in the high branches.

Each morning a chorus line of great, blue and coal tits sing the sun up over the houses, and occasionally a sparrowhawk drives them into great clouds of wing and beak.

Those that pass through, and they are many, would do well to stop for a minute, and breath the air.

Cissbury Ring

Near the car park conspiratorial ravens chatter in electronic voices, mattock beaks silhouetted against the skyline . A magpie argues angrily with them before alighting in a conifer which flexes as he scolds me for too close an approach, I salute him theatrically and he turns his back in disgust.

As I toil up the steep slope night falls like a shroud slowly covering the sleeping land. Cobalt slides into slate into black.

Sulphur, magnesium and neon sparkle in the valley below, while to the north all is black, all is silent. Man is emasculated, stripped of a sense. The vulnerability of the apex hunter is absolute here. Darkness is everything.

Senses become muddled, the air tastes of spring; but smells of autumn. Smoke rises from backyard fires as christmas smoulders and drifts away on the breeze. A cloud of blue tits trills a lullaby from shrubs hard by the path, where sad posters beg for news of lost friends.

An woodland trackway lives with the sound of the night as feet slide in a muddy gravy, feeling for friction,  the incline increasing before giving way to springy downland turf. Here and there under skeletal trees a smattering of freshly dug chalk sparkles like fresh snow in the moonlight. A barn owl screeches as it wakes, ravenous, the sound is everywhere, without sight the ears are sharpened.

The only other sound is the breathless labour of ascent. 

Ancient ramparts rear up into the black, the prows of chalky ships against a black sea. In the northwest corner the remnants of flint mines sink into the earth, their shrubby hollows tempt unwary ankles to twist.

Once there was no turf on these ramparts, stripped bare the chalk would have shone like a beacon for miles around on nights like these; this capital of an ancient downland kingdom.

Far below downland sheep pick over a brown field, white felt on a children's playmat. On the horizon Chanctonbury's regal crown of beech crests the horizon. In a coombe below a solitary green woodpecker laughs manically at some hidden joke, before flying drunkenly into the nearby copse. A tawny owl welcomes the night with it's horror-movie call.

Suddeny, just below the rampart, Chalkpit Wood erupts as the owl wheels and stalls, hovers and plunges, bringing terror in a thrashing of feathers and fur, a slicing of dagger-talons, and then: silence.

A horse's head of cloud canters across a full moon, and trees become human, stalking in the night, with fingery roots grasping up intent on harm.

This is an old landscape, a place of ancestors, long since swept away on a tide of revolution, a place of life and industry, of loves and losses; now reclaimed by nature.

Protected now, preserved forever, no-one will punch a high-speed rail line through here, destroying all that matters for the benefit of the few who chose to live far away from their employment, to the detriment of those that chose the simplicity of a slower life.

Far away someone ignores a car alarm.  In this moment I live forever.

Angmering Park

08.01.2012

Every tree around the Dover seems to sing as Angmering Park's  native woodlands come alive with the sound of the redbreast, establishing territories in preparation for the breeding season. Daffodils peer shyly through the shrubs. Winter hasn't happened here this year, it's mild and it feels like spring, belying the early winter day it really is.

A path leads lazily through the estate, passing Sussex flint fronted cottages, where once foresters lived, crossing stands of beech and oak where light fingers creep through to the forest floor and holly berries attract flocks of busy blue tits.

The path north terminates at a t-junction where it meets The Monarch's Way, the route taken by the fleeing Charles II after his defeat at the Battle Of Worcester in 1651.

The path splits two parts of the wood, one where native broadleaved species stand, and where the woods ring out with the song of mistle thrushes, blue tits and robins. Fallow deer skulk among the trees, and a wood mouse breaks cover from one of a number of world war two shell holes to steal a morsel from a roadside ditch before vanishing into the inch thick leaf carpet.

On the other side, dark, lifeless non-native cash-crop conifers stand soulless and still. There is no sound here, and one imagines no life. The contrast is extreme.

Here two hundred years ago a highwayman was hung. Jack Upperton's gibbet is secreted in a woodland glade next to the ancient road to Steyning,  and makes a quiet place for a stop. Once the coming together of ancient trackways, still visibly carved into the landscape, this is now a restful place, and the better for it.

Delighted children wave browning leaves identifying oak, beech and birch,and climb into shell holes with youthful delight.

A flock of wood pigeon rise nosily from a field into dusky skies, and tired legs beg to be taken home.

02.02.12

Amberley Wild Brooks is marked on some maps as Amberley Swamp, and there's a sign warning of 'dangerous marshes'. Whether its brook, swamp or marsh matters not, they're all the same when they are filling your boots with cold, black wintery water. Stonechats converse nosily, with voices that sound like stones being tapped together. They remain a sight unseen, hidden perhaps among clouds of blue tits, great tits and coal tits, as here are there a small flock of long tailed tits flash by. No sign of the Bewick's swans that bought me to this boggy playground, the low marsh and high shrubbery restricting visibility to only short distances.



I follow the route back, and recall a calamitous navigational error that had me jumping ditches, climbing fences and being chased by cattle a summer ago. A new signpost saves others from the relationship ending arguments that such mistakes can lead to. 

Although only January 2nd, daffodils decorate the roadside here.

Heading back through Quell's farm there are some gaps in the treeline that afford a peering view down onto the shining waters of the Arun, now on it's ebb. On the opposite bank a chocolate Labrador barks at nothing in particular, and flushes the falcon peregrine from the reeds just below me; three silent, hefty wing beats and she's away, lost behind the trees. I am right under the perch where I saw her on my last visit, and can see why she chooses this spot, with it's high view out across flooded marsh where a hearty menu of wildfowl await a hungry hawk.

The short eared owl's are big news now and  Waltham Brooks  is busy with heads popping up from behind every bush. Here the Arun starts to run fast as it heads for it's gap in the South Downs just south of Amberley. Suddenly the peregrine flashes past, flying low, and turning hard south after crossing the river, calling in in what seems sheer delight at her flight. She rises up into the sun, like a fighter pilot preparing for ambush. It's like looking into a fire trying to follow her and she's soon lost from view.

No-one in the field reacts, so hard-wired are they into finding their target species they fail to see this perfect hunting machine not twenty feet above their heads. Thirty years ago these creatures were dying out in our country, but now they are recovering. The peregrine has evolved so effectively, so perfectly that her qualities are incorporated in the design of modern fighter jets.This individual is large, her white underside flecked with fine dark spots, and her back is a fitting RAF blue. It's a curse that the sun is the wrong side for anything more than a blurry silhouette of a photograph.

Seeking out a wet and boggy seat to provide cover for photographing owls  a merlin is flushed and he swoops away, sending up great clouds of assorted tits and starlings. Behind me, and across the field the owl-watchers ignore this rare and stunning bird, the smallest of our falcons.

A short eared owl quarters the field right next to me, he hunts me, my size diminishing to that of a vole, his eyes fix mine, I cannot tear my gaze away, he closes, his mottled feathers merge with vegetation, only his eyes have colour, bright amber staring, fixed and then, suddenly, he's away. He veers dramatically west, dropping one wing and away, into the sun. Three feathers rest lightly on the ground hard by the hawthorn.




He calls his shreiking call, and hastens his pace, swinging towards the flood defence bank over the old canal lock.  He drops low, skimming reed mace and rises to confront a nearby male who has strayed onto his territory. They grapple mid-air, shreiking and calling, tussling with talons raised, before my male breaks and with fast beats to propel him away glides into nearby shrubbery to lick his wounds.

There are six owls here today, the most seen since November when they first arrived and they put on a show for the gathered twitchers. One rises right in front of a waiting photgrapher, vole firmly clenched in knife like talons. 

Three Bewick's swans honk as they pass overhead, signalling the coming of sunset, and short splash across fields to a waiting flask.