The month begins with the bee loud sound of the ivy. The day is bright. Warm for October. The ivy wrapped trees are covered in flowers. Late to flower, ivy is an important plant for pollinators. I spot bees dipping in amongst the ivy clad canopy of old Willow and Sycamore, hunting out the nectar. The sound is loud enough to fill the orchard. The Old Willow and Ash trees, cinched tight with winding towers of flowering ivy, are crowded with bees.
I feed the ewe flock on the hill and I hear the Wild Geese greet the opening of October with their sound. Moving the ewes on Hawthorn Hill I hear them on the wind. The geese graze the shoulder on the farther hill from mine. Their call a blunt klaxon that breaks the sky. Crows too. And ravens, the wings scooping great wingfulls of air as they thump through the world overhead.
The deer stags are raiding the last of the apple trees. Rising up on their hinds to delicately pick fruit, navigating their antlers between the crowded apple branches. Lying down to sleep in a slick deer scrape of polished mud and matted grasses. They sleep 20 feet from the house. I hear them rouse, and pick or crash their way through the bushes out front.
The raspberries are still fat and juicy on their vines but the blackberries are past their best. The lipstick red rosehips wet on the verges, the hips of the dogrose slim, the hips of rugosa fat and pale, the hawthorn becoming a darkening crimson, the fat sloes just beginning to come. Whatever sweetness the fat black brassy pearls of sloe have won’t come till the first frost. A hawk or buzzard roosts in our roadside rowan. The thrushes burst through it’s canopy in volleys to drive it off. A flurry of wings, thrushes like missiles, volleys of them, as some 30 or so mob the tree.
Haws 
Dog Rose 
Sloes
The same hawk, or buzzard, shadows me on my walk. It roosts in old beech and ash sometimes. High. Beyond the range of my ageing eyes. Flits from tree to tree as I walk. Always twenty steps ahead of me. It bursts from the treetops at times and glides to the cover of the spruce plantation across the road. Watching. Waiting. Scouring the valley farmland beneath.
The bats are still hunting, wheeling around the treetops in the avenue, scouring the lambing field, hunting high above the flock on the hill. I have seen the last of the swallows too, hunting the insects sent up by the sheep as they drift across the shoulder of Hawthorn Hill, grazing. Here too the dragonfly still hunts. The clean water of our spring and our quarry ponds a good home for them I hope. We see one catch a peackock butterfly feet from our us in the farmyard. Perch on a rowan nearby and feast.
Our flocks are still on the hill. We have not harvested our lambs yet. My broken arm will make that wait. But most other things are winding down. Slowing. Wasp queens are coming in to the house to find comfortable winter roosts. I find a wasps nest raided on the hill. Comb scattered. Wasps too angry for me to look for prints. I find a burst of feathers not twenty feet away, near the Hawthorn that crowns the hill. Is it the marten I wonder. The bees too, though still busy with ivy are winding down. Fewer windows for flight as the days cool down. We will, very shortly, take what honey we can. They will have arranged thier hives by now. Capped what needs capping.
We light the stove. Woodsmoke drifts down the lane. Like a memory it lingers where the air is still. The work of last winters hands warming us once more as this winter unfolds. The Sycamore, Beech, Ash and Willow that last winters winds brought down. Cut, split, stacked, then stowed for the late summer in the shed. A portion of the sun to warm us still.
Winter has us in it’s eye. It has not gotten to us yet. Warm enough still to work in shortsleeves but too cold to stand still in them. The light of the day dilute. Work done in darkness now. October feels like letting go.
The wasp watercolour is courtesy of Maker Magpie. For felt kits, watercolours, knitting and sewing patterns, her site is a trove of gifts, ideas, and gorgeous art,
