celandine & sunflare, failed hunt for a great crested grebe & a moth you cannot identify

late afternoon in the glen of clearblue water - gather of wild garlic - wood anemone, butterburr & saxifrage all out (fighter jets screaming through the sky above, stirring up rookery denizens), a dipper evades you, hitting their airbrakes to take a bend

& april night of the fullmoon climb until bullocks huff downhill & you hop back across the cattlegrid to watch silver evening churn comms ping on & west glows & goes wan & then quickly in tears of dark veil

& nuthatch - twigstraddler - high in canopy barbed with buds,wheeting voice huge (louder than songthrush; louder than jackdaw), sings until 4pm & leaves but your brain continues to repeat the rhythm

& burn shifts the weekend's rain, frothing under hawthorn bud. nuthatch wheeting into dusk but heading NNW isobars of fieldfares. elder deep into leaf, everything a stretch.

at soft ebb heavy squall of sleet driven by winter's wind - sky west still open & venus falling: right above, pocked ice of the moon

& whatever folk tell you it is late winter - raw wind & snow in hills confirm - but light stretches; little grebe - birdfishripple - refuses again to be clear; heron drops reed-legs to disappear; sky & moon & flurry are slow enough to catch

& still sometimes you look up from yr desk to a vertigo of sorts - the ionic tower of the power station, the flat topped hill, are in the wrong place & with wrong distance between them - nothing is where you laid it down

oystercatchers back in the pastureparks, hangovereyed, dibbing with purpose for invertebrates

& the new moon - a longboat, a contrail veering - which has no business being in that part of the sky (still, you adjust to new surroundings)

& the 1st butterfly of the year - a peacock, basking on rooftiles

& equinox a soft & open day (a thrush calls bring-it-down, bring-it-down dawn to dusk) - spawn reminds you of pub windows of yr youth (something is going on in there beyond understanding - grey heron, a regular, knows fine)

not the best of shots; nevertheless, chiffchaff in the lane, chip-chipping

& jackdawclatter sunrise, equinox & end of the dark half

& the loss of one dimension - parchment paper blurring - everything is smaller & more distant (you lit a candle at noon to balance the glare of the screen)

& up the track to get higher - above roofless streading, beyond cattlegrid - a marshy, flowing upland (where quadbike ruts quit, pathless [a pair of buzzards peform a courtship of sorts]), quit when a dark hummock stands up & bawls in bull

late errand - barn owl so engrossed that when you kill the engine they ignore you, drop off the post into black & on you both go

& sun sets underwater, broken by a greylag stirring sky - pair of pied wagtails islandhop, a reed bunting flits through shade & into cover

19.10, a luminous gloaming 1 week before equinox: Venus at the seam of seasons

& between weathers & shafts of late sun buzzard turning a small wheel as wings of hail converge & you head back downhill past ditches cobbled with frogspawn

& after rain subsides a welcome slantlight & in the bins a tilting building that invites investigation

sinter. wring. time of 2 habits & modes. double preparedness. a a janus time.

& a stonechat is there & gone, flashing white epaulettes. willow has woken.

& far out on the loch little grebes whinnying (a small horse on helium), big voices from little bodies - there is wing-shimmering & running on water, there are deep & sudden dives, vast & small-scale drama

gulls banking to hunt as tide loses its grip. travellers of winter storms find landfall all memory gone. invisible skylarks halfway to space (so it seems) jettison song. meadow pipit & stonechat perch & go. barnacle geese oar over.

& reed buntings flickering out over water & back to tapers in rushy shallows, a sky clear & deep - & over the Solway, thin snow on fells

& the arclights ping on & the sky's ebb tide indigo hour & evening creeps later & the movement & stillness a time on the cusp of hesitation & go

& the lengthening bright, go wellytrudge a length of burn & find greywagtail behind the wire that keeps cattle & you out, riffled lochan on the way back & the settling in goes on

& March's fullmoonrise - high pressure at last - the lenten moon in lazy rise, open skies & calm dusk

1 night from full, the lenten moon

& as you arrive a greylag sentry calls intruder - & the pair take wing, leaving a small armada of canadas to close formation (little grebe dives into another dimension) - the big hill surfaces, blowing cloud, light seeps as the sun falls

a wild day up west in good company, cormorant at their pulpit & crashing waves - pair of rock pipits flickering peripheries - fall of tide worn husks of shell, stout hull of a harboured vessel tilted, at rest

& sunset reddening sapstirred bark jackdaws begin roosting hour skirting the moon

shadowy creeks of saltmarsh from where a little egret startles takes wing until starsmall curlew paces & stares * down to estuary forgotten post swings shadow to turn of tide & fading human footprints overlaid by avian waxing moon firms faint imprint on afternoon

& you do not wish to be lulled into a fool's spring, but a little light can do it, the great tit's tea-cher-tea-cher all day long & finding a toad traversing the lane, these things will do it too

& thin rain blasts through - in actual pulses a static shot won't catch - despite lengthening light all wet woods & no sun, no light to ignite anything - but the moss on the fencepost on the corner swells & takes it all in

& by dusktime the hill is gone, & all the land south. even the treetops are rubbed out by cloud. the robin is in there somewhere, casting & reeling a tune

& middle of a rashy field greylags moving purposefullly in a group, behind you the thrush so conspicuous of voice all day remains shadowy of body - 2 geese rise as a bawling bullock trots downhill, put grey behind them & row towards pocket of fading blue

& trees soughing in the rain, wind ruffling the lochan & a small jetty creaks - raft of mallard offshore the only other movement until sunset flares above plantation

& a robin appeared thursday - full-throated twilight to twilight since then - skirmishing off 2 contenders you have seen

& after washdown rain lured out by sun & followed flocks of fieldfare uphill to where the heron stood still while their ragged coat dried & the churn of sky turned dark again back under cloudburst with rinsed scraps of rainbow

founder on low battery mid-february but push out & uphill for clean air in the lungs windless & still but inhale the cold catkins & a stand of trees you will study the map on how to reach

& dusktime helps establish who is here as song increases - wren & great tit, bluetit, song & mistlethrush, intermittent chaffinch (peeping of gs woodpecker), dunnock overachieving in volume - robinsong oddly absent

& evening arrives & you escape - the light lengthening noticeably - reed buntings on barbedwire & the gap beneath a deerfence someone has made passage; way back a red kite cambers, steadies ENE

& the lane all mud & rotting snow - fresh flurries higher up - but 6°c ambient & mallardtracks letterpress ice, all in movement & swirl as you try to find rhythm to day, to place, to season

& that howling wind at 1am spread wet snow & left a foggy-headed morning of slump & thaw jackdaws in pairs convene & send slush tumbling down

@haggewoods.bsky.social @naturelark.bsky.social - if I said hart's tongue fern (clinging upper walls of broken brick-&-mortar field drain gully), what would you say?

up a lane you have not explored - crusty footing & tangled woods, pheasants cloking & ticking wrens - field drain with hart's tongue fern (you think), arrive eventually at the lochan (as all uphill lanes here seem to), scabbed with ice after 1 hard frost, alder reflections glitching in the gaps

halften at night a pyre of winterstricken branches still burning middle of an unploughed field