April 13th

 

Stormcocks drive away

the would be thief, their proud chests

puffed out and burly

 

Two haiku’s today. And some photographs from our lovely walk in the moors. The first one is about a pair of Mistle Thrushes who we witnessed chase off a magpie. I don’t think they would have built a nest yet, perhaps they were just defending the tree they’d decided to root in. Stormcock is an old English name for them. Quite an evocative one too as it honours their behaviour, singing from a high vantage point, even in the worst weather, almost in defiance or celebration of it. They seem fearless and fearsome birds. Unafraid to wade in. And they way they present themselves, chests out, head high, confident, noisy and musical. I’d never seen one before, so was quite exciting for me.

 

Silhouetted crow

black feathers consume the sun

dying in embers

 

The second Haiku relates to the following photo I took. About crows again, I keep going on about them. “Why don’t you marry one?” I hear you shout. It was just a lucky shot. but I’m very proud of it.

We also saw a skylark at ground level, I’d only ever seen them high up, singing their little hearts out. It disappeared into a field of rape. It sung, sung and kept singing all the way down, till it landed. Then it shut up. It landed in the vicinity of this patch!

A sunset pic

A puffball(?) on the trunk of a dead silver birch.

Finally, a pretty little long-tailed tit, whispering away with its mates in this hawthorn blossom. It sat long enough for me to zoom right in on him.

February 24th

 

Old twisted peat cart,

I followed your buried tracks,

As you sink and rust.

 

In the moors there is an old discarded peat cart, when I first lived in the area it actually looked like a peat cart, but over the years it has slowly deteriorated and sunk into the peat it used to carry to the edge of the moor, where it would be unloaded. I wanted to capture a sense of melancholy about it, everything returns to the earth at some point.

I don’t know how old the cart is, but peat extraction was still an industry in the area until the 1960s. The location of the peat cart is in one of the wettest areas of Flitwick moor. It’s quite hard to see in this photo, but I wanted show how wet the area is. There are a lot of silver birches in the moors as well, as can be seen by the tree on the left.

A closer view of the peat cart.

And finally a photo of this part of the moor, with another silver birch, it is exceptionally peaty and wet here in winter, so when I’m running, I have to walk through, making sure to not roll my ankle or lose half my leg in a mucky peat puddle! Anyway, it was a beautiful day today, the woods and moors were full of bird song. Their battle to establish territory has begun.

February 21st

Silver birch broken,

Lonely stump above the moor,

You still look alive.

 

I went for a run earlier, Spring is definitely in the air! The air was clean, the sun was shining. My eyes were caught by something pale and silvery, standing up alone in a cleared part of the moor. As I wasn’t wearing my glasses, momentarily I wondered if I was looking at a dog, like a dalmation, with the sunlight reflected off its fur. But it was the stump of a cut down silver birch. Its trunk still looked lustrous and beautiful and it sat sad in the middle of the clearing.