Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: December 2021

As I drive home hundreds of birds break across the darkening road. Twilight has softened their shapes. I cannot hear their sound. They have the feel of crows though. 400 at least, perhaps, as the moon picks out clouds and the shape of wings against the coal and blue sky. If I believed in god I would say the tunnel and swerve of a flock of starlings were her hand upon the land made wing and flesh. But these fly as individual things. The eyes and ears of other gods upn the land perhaps.

There is a burst of feathers on the hill at home. Downy feather mainly. Not enough to pick out what it was. An owl, or a hawk perhaps has picked and plucked another bird clean. We have long eared owls here. Buzzards. Sparrowhawks. Red Kites too, my neighbour says. What was left of the kill, if anything, may have come to the fox or the badger that crosses the hill. There are things here, dramas, eyes watching and ears cocked. We do not see them always. They more often see us.

The pine marten is here too on the farm though we do not see her. She has been perching on our bin. picking at the chains we have secured the lids with. Last winter she moved in. Sat out storms amongst the rubbish. Picked carefully through what little we left to snack through the snow on. The first morning I found her I laid the bin down on its side, carefully. Prised the lid open slowly with a stick. Stepped back. Out she came. Leaping. Spinning full circle as she sprang clawing at the air as she spun then down the drive with liquid and rippling urgency. Go on you beautiful.

We surprise a deer, an antlered stage on the forest lane. He starts, bucks, pivots on his hind legs and springs into a run. Stops then. Turns. Looks. We are with one another now, not thirty feet apart, closely watched each by the other. We are both too far from him and not far enough. He needs to keep us in his eye. And he needs to run. This I think is what holds him. Holds him. Holds him. There for a minute. Two. A car comes. He turns, pours himself through a gap in the trees and is swallowed up by the woods. In seconds he was never there.

In early December I see the red squirels chase each other across the driveway. They spot me and bolt. One scrambles up into the fissures of an old ash, invisible in the crooked bare crown. The other bursts through the patchwork hedge and loses itself in the brambles my neghbour’s cows cannot tame.

Storm Barra comes. Our power is blown for two days. The house gets cold. Colder still. The kids wrap up in books and blankets and boardgames. The forestry becomes a game of pick up sticks, spruce trees like toothpicks picked up by the wind and scattered across the large powerlines. Trees down willy nilly across the roads. Mainly from forestry. Where the clearfell was made. Alders along the border of the commercial wood come down too. Some rotten, home and forage for our woodpecker. Some are too angled against the spruce. They have grown off kilter, pushed out looking for light. With their windbreak gone they let go in the wet earth and wind.

We have some few trees down on the farm itself. Old bits of ash, ivy covered alder and willow, a large limb of cypress broke off and landed across the shed. Some we will take for firewood. Much we will leave to sit, rot, feed the soil, the bird, the insects and the trees. Become a hedgehog home or hunting spot perhaps. A poplar heeling over, the roots one one side peeling out of the earth, the crown resting against our power line. This we will take for timber, smaller limbs for the fire, the large trunk I’ll mill into boards, shelves, a table or worktop perhaps.

Family come after the storm to visit. They cut holly for their homes. A little something of us to be with them. A little something of the wild world of the farm to have in their homes. The hedgerows here, sometimes trimmed by a farmers son, have springing from their hearts whole uncut Holly trees. You can tell his families farm boundaries by the towering Holly. The farmers son will not prune nor fell them. Old memories, faiths and stories come bubbling up through in this, and in the gap beween practice and belief, wildlife gains a foothold. Mistle thrushes burst forth defending the berries. The lipstick of their berries rubies hidden in the heart of the hedge.

After the storm tractors with trailers of sawn and broken wood criss cross the lanes. Mossy willow trunks loaded whole, bright split sycamore rounds jumbled in piles. The cut wood of alder reddening as it does in the back of pick ups. Clean limbed ash. The council clear our fallen alder and leave it in a field. “We left it there for you in a useful size. You can take it for your fire”.

Most mornings, and many afternonos, mist lies across the valley. Thin wisps that connect the contours of the hillsides like giant cobwebs. Thick mists that you punch a hole through as you travel. Mists that swirl and gather in the hollows of places. The country turns silver and gold, the mountains bronze and tin, the mountains a palette of blues, greys. The colours of blue tweed caps from Donegal.

It is a slow month. A quiet month. A month of solitude and thinking. Of warm fires. Of wasps waking up in slippers in the attic. Of mist on hills and the crack of falling trees like ships broken on rocks in the storm. A month of family coming home. Of missing and being missed. Of gaps in time and life too big to catch with words but that wrap you up in them when you hug hello and hug goodbye. Worried that you will get wrapped up and carried away with the power of it. And, when people come and people go, some of you does.