Month: March 2017

Nature’s Alarm Clock

I’m woken by the Dawn Chorus. Not yet the full orchestra. A solitary blackbird playing oboe (chirping is too unrefined a word for it) from the uppermost branch of the wind-stooped apple tree and the dot-dot-dot-dash-dash refrain of a wood pigeon playing Morse code in the rhythm section where the telephone wire arcs up to meet the pole: that tar-barked tree which a bar later reverberates to the staccato beat of a woodpecker tapping up breakfast or test drilling for a new housing development.

I’m up now. Watching as well as listening. A cock pheasant is picking his way across the silvery field like a cross-dressing party goer in high heels. Not wanting to get his feet wet and weaving a snail trail across the dew. All burgundy and wine bottle green with neck curved up and tail curved down. A tipsy tightrope walker turned through 90 degrees.

The hen bird is dowdy by comparison. Brown but not mousey. Making her way up the hedgeline from the stream with an arthiritic strut. More Max Wall than Max Factor.

They’re on a collision course these birds of a feather. Choreographed perhaps? (It’s not just the sap that’s rising). A dance set to music. But if it is, he doesn’t know the moves and she rises entrechat* in a crescendo of ruffled pride. Her alarm muffled like an overwound clockwork toy heard through a blanket. And for a moment the chorus is quietened.

*Entrechat (pronounced: ahn-truh-shah’) is a ballet term which means to jump in the air from two feet – beat the legs together in the air, land either on one or two feet.

Clever Trees – Heligan

In the penultimate programme of his five part series on Clever Trees, Richard Uridge finds a headache-inducing specimen in the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:02 — 12.9MB)

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Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.

Sound affects

I’m sitting face to the sun like a Spring flower listening to the sounds of south Shropshire. A wedge of cold air – a thin blue arrow at the horizon and as tall as the stratosphere itself above my head –  has lifted the rain clouds that earlier varnished the already sodden ground with wet snow: tears for the end of winter. Each thread unpicked from the aural rope that anchors me to this spot…

The bleat of sheep.
The breeze stirring the sky-scratching twigs of the black-tipped ash.
The clap of the pigeon’s wings.
The laughter of the raven.

I lose count with the premature hoot of an owl woken from its roost perhaps by the gust of wind that’s dizzied the weathervane and spun the blue sky black.

Winter, for now, has returned. And the sound-deadening snow – more flakes than tears this time round – has ravelled the notes back into one soft symphony.