Autumn musings

Oscar winding up ...

At the back of my cottage is a field. It’s one of those nondescript patches of our landscape that sees little traffic other than the cutting of silage and an occasional foray from Oscar, my ever-attentive whippet. If there wasn’t a public right of way, I doubt there’d be a gate to the road.

And yet for all its isolation — or perhaps because of it — it’s not a silent or deserted place at all. If you were to walk there in twilight, you’d likely see badgers by the northern hedge, or perhaps the family of foxes that live nearby. There are rabbits too and an occasional polecat; there’s even, somewhere in the scrub, the remains of our tortoise, which escaped, never to be found again.

Often, as I write in my garden office, there are buzzards looking for a meal; kestrels too when the grass is fresh cut. Over the years I’ve seen dragonflies, woodpeckers, almost twenty different butterflies, an adder, many weasels and a stoat… The night brings owls and moths and who knows what…

I sometimes wonder if I should submit my sightings to a wildlife survey. But they are so fleeting and incomplete that instead I write blogs and essays, which I guess is a record of sorts. What’s interesting, is that there’s often as much to see from my window as there is when I go travelling.

If Oscar could talk, he’d say it’s all about paying attention – and no doubt waiting patiently too. Yesterday, as he sniffed the morning air, I glimpsed the unmistakable tail of a red kite hovering above us. When I first came here, the nests of these magnificent raptors were protected by the army; today, there are over 300 breeding pairs in Wales.

That progress should give us hope — and prompts me to muse, that perhaps my little tramped field is not so nondescript after all.

A version of this post was first published in the AAC(UK) monthly newsletter