Marshland is my favourite habitat. I am a marsh-dweller at heart, instinctively drawn to any sodden, wind-whipped, wind-flattened place of wild song. It’s the mystery of marshes that I love—the fact that even the smallest patch of boggy ground always feels wild, and that these places retain a thrilling sense of impenetrability and threat. It’s for those reasons too that I love the secretive snipe most of all marsh birds. The intricacies and varieties of snipe crypsis are a beautiful embodiment of its environment.
It is simultaneously easy and difficult to see a snipe up close, because they hide in plain sight. When you do see one, and see it well, you can appreciate just how brilliantly the bird’s plumage mimics fenny colour and substance. The full spectrum of bog browns is there in the stippled stub, sedgy striations and loamy sod of each feather, which in the aggregate gives the impression that the bird constructs a piece of marsh right there in front of you. Snipe are the very stuff of their habitat (or, which is the same thing, their habitat is the stuff of snipe), so the trick to finding one in the field is to carefully examine the wet edges of promising territory and hope that some tiny part of it materialises as snipe; or, conversely, start from the premise that everything you’re scrutinising is snipe until it gives itself up as mud and grass.
Even the noises snipe make seem determined to give away as little as possible. If you accidentally disturb snipe from the ground, they burst up at the last second from your feet, uttering a quiet ‘snick’ or ‘sneck’ which to me is somewhere between a kiss and the sharp tear of cloth, as though the bird has just ripped up from the grubby fabric of soil itself.
Snipe are camouflage masters, but, remarkably enough, they appear in several of our place-names. You’d think that their bog-drab understatement would rule them out of any criteria for useful place-marking. But there they are in places such as Snitterfield, Snydale, Snitemore and Snite. In the last of these it seems that literally just the Old English name for the bird was enough, the place itself invoked for early medieval folk by those mysterious marsh-keepers divining earth’s sub-secrets with their twitching bills like priests at solemn rituals.
On this exceptionally, unseasonably warm day in October (it’s 22 degrees Celsius), I saw two swallows flicking and swooping out to sea. It’s not unusual to see swallows at this end of October, even into November, but it feels more and more like a farewell as autumn wears on. There are other signs of its progress towards winter: gathering, clattering woodpigeons in stubble fields; seeping redwings overhead at night; brent geese gargling in estuarine creeks. There is a handover of birds going on, a seasonal changing of the guard. The seasons, their passing and weathers, never feel certain or predictable anymore though, and I can’t help feeling on days like today that much of what once passed for seasonal certainty (in an echo of the uneasy sentinel relief in the opening scene to Hamlet) now betokens some strange eruption. Something rotten in the state of the world.
The disruptions and anxieties of climate change notwithstanding, the coming and goings of migratory birds through the seasons have always been, and still are, important to our connections and responses to our immediate environments, determining and shaping not just our sense of the seasons, but our sense of the places in which we experience these seasons. A friend and colleague, Nick Acheson, has written of the ‘gap’ that is left, physically and emotionally, when hirundines leave his home turf at summer’s end. Likewise, Charles Foster, an avowed swift aficionado, has written of the funk he suffers when his favourite bird leaves for Africa in August. He makes every attempt to ‘avoid that sudden sickening emptiness’, to reduce the ‘desolation and despair’ (The Screaming Sky, 2021). Without swifts, Foster’s street in Oxford is devoid in some sense, and the ‘sky has no form, no structure. Its beams have been removed’. The fabric of place, of the very air we breathe, is rent in pieces, disintegrates into nothing.
Common swift (Wikipedia Commons)
No wonder then that people might once have dreamed about preserving that essence of summer place, or may have been so stubbornly attached to die-hard myths about some species sleeping out winter at the bottom of ponds: a small wick sputtering through the dark cold months, a flame aglow in the benthic gloom. That’s a myth to believe in, to keep alight.
Surely, this is the idea inspiring the Wise Men of Gotham‘s foolish and unsuccessful efforts to ‘pen’ a cuckoo in a shrub for perpetuity (it’s a popular ritual—there are ancient cuckoo pens all over the country). At the root of that legend is the powerful conviction that a cuckoo’s voice, suddenly sounding to our great anticipation one April day from the back-end of winter, and just as suddenly ceasing in mid-summer, is somehow spring itself. It is the genesis of the season, and the breath of its invocation calls forth warm and generous life. To prevent cuckoos, swifts or swallows leaving in mid-summer would be to somehow capture and distil aestival substance, to be shelved alongside jars and flagons of summer’s golden yield, as though the matter of the birds themselves–fission of light, energy, song–is that of the long-day moment of our year. The very idea pinpoints the most life-affirming, life-full moment of a place, calls it out, and then keeps it tight, clutched in a fist close to the praying heart. That prayer becomes more precious and more fraught every year.
The True Sounds of Night, Part 2 will be here soon, but I wanted to take seasonal advantage of today’s post before the moment is lost.
I heard my first chiffchaff of the year today. Small as this occurrence might seem, small my nod of recognition, small as the bird is itself, it is a triumph of the still-early year. The chiffchaff is one of our very earliest spring arrivals, arriving from the Saharan south in mid-March when the land here is still winter-dim, so there is a glorious sense in which its bright notes carry a little of the warmth and light yet to come. Its plumage conveys something of this spring promise: a dusky, suffuse dun, but with the subtlest, emerging hint of mossy green—a small brightening.
The chiffchaff’s song is only two notes. Actually, it’s often three, sung like a small child determinedly chanting its first numbers, but it’s two that have been remembered in its mimetic name: chiff chaff, chiff chaff, chiff chaff … To be sure, it is monotonous. It has nothing of the blackcap’s variety and sweetness, nor the wood warbler’s silvery, tremulous splendour. But it is the most spring-like of all to me; unquestionably defiant, definite, delivered with such unfaltering and vital energy. The chiffchaff hammers those metallic notes on the anvil of its own syrinx. Translated into poetry, they are spondees, each one equally emphatic with no room for lesser syllables. CHIFF CHAFF CHIFF CHAFF CHIFF CHAFF …
The name feels old, but is recorded no earlier than Gilbert White’s famous references to the bird. Very early English people must surely have had a name for this spring chimer, but if they did it fell out of use, or lives on secretly in some county dialect word for this little leaf sprite (perhaps even chiffchaff itself, the local Hampshire name that White obviously inherited?)
Strangely, the bird doesn’t have the same popularised status as other, more celebrated summer migrants. It ought to, though, and ought to be better known—this bird that arrives well before most others, declaring its gladdening presence right across the land with such hopeful insistence and never letting up.
It’s been far too long since I posted. Nearly two years of juggling writing a book (which is still very much in the early stages!) and bringing up two young children has meant I’ve got very lazy about finding time to post blog entries as well. It is a resolution this year to try and get back to form. So, here’s my first effort of 2022.
At the beginning of this year my family and I moved house, after over a decade living in Cranbrook. Various circumstances forced the move and the speed with which it all happened, and my wife and I found (still find) ourselves caught between novel excitement for a new-build house in Headcorn (also Kent) and the wrench away from a sixteenth-century, old-beamed cottage in Cranbrook that we had come to love very much. We have both felt the detachment from all that history. We had never imagined ourselves living in a new-build, for the very reason that we both feel deeply attached to places that are steeped in the past.
There was, however, a moment of serendipity when we turned up to view the Headcorn house(and subsequently put down a reservation fee that very morning). The new estate was just off Ulcombe Road. Ulcombe is a village just north of Headcorn that I had come to know very well through many trips for the book I am currently writing. It means ‘the owl’s valley’. Moving from Cranbrook, ‘the cranes’ brook’, to another bird place, just when I’m writing a book about birds and place, was an omen I couldn’t ignore!
What follows is the first in a short sequence of posts on my explorations in and around the village of Ulcombe, searching for tawny owls and pondering the night.The sequence is adapted from an owl chapter in my book.
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In November, when the trees were nearly bare, I drove in the pre-dawn hours through tree-tunnel lanes, seeking the sound of owls and owls’ true landscape. Darkness. At no particular point, I pulled up right in the road, turned the ignition off and got out. I leant on the bonnet while the car blinked and cooled to silence. In these narrow Kentish lanes with high banks and tree-roofs, far from big towns and hidden from scattered rural habitations, the dark feels absolute. Scudding cloud doubled the dark—no moonlight, no stars.
It’s a point easily overlooked, but our experiences of night are not the same as our ancestors’. The changes to our night sky, in fact, are so recent and rapid that it’s no exaggeration to say that up to the nineteenth century—the twentieth century even—it was a simple condition of people’s lives that night was dark; that it was distinctly divided from the day; that this cycle, by and large, determined rhythms; and that darkness could only be dissipated by the moon or the shadowy flicker of firelight. The differences with modern experiences are probably more apparent now in the twenty-first century (which has never known a time without intensive, global industrialisation) than has ever been the case in human history. In our own times, light pollution violates the solar pattern so aggressively that only the most rural or unpeopled parts of our country are spared the star-blinding sky glow. Urban lights right across the West can be seen from space (if you take a Google look at the planet it’s not so much night’s space-blackness you see across half the globe but the astonishing light show illuminating that blackness).
It’s a startling realisation. When we speak of ‘dark’ now, it is infected by these dazzling intrusions. The word itself, though, is rooted in a purer, different understanding that traces back through Middle English derk to Old English deorc and back further to a proto *derkaz past. Medieval folk, speaking pre-modern English, had various other words for ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ too, such as þeostre (THAY-os-tre). As a term in our once richer nocturnal lexis, þeostre could not have encompassed the industrial twilight that now passes for night in our metropolises and conurbations.
Þeostreness–real dark–intensifies nocturnal sounds. Devoid of the distractions and diminishments of anthropogenic light noise, it sharpens sounds’ presence and clarity, and, too, our senses to hear, feel, them. That morning, hoping for an owl in dark about as dark as I could find in south-east England, I got to thinking about how that sort of darkness must have genuinely affected they way that people living in past ages heard and understood owls. Owls must have seemed, were, intensely, the ‘first true sound of night’, as J. A. Baker, author of The Peregrine, memorably puts it. For him, an owl’s ‘dark release of song’ made ‘dusk bristle[ ] … like the fur of a cat’. I love that. Conveyed through blurred senses in Baker’s description, an owl’s sound is an animate shaping force.
I drove on, deeper into the lanes and the owls’ realm. There was still time yet, still time for the last true sounds of night.
The frost today was so full and white and stiff with sharp glistenings it was like snow had fallen. The cold mist, which hung with us all day, made the air so thickly and densely grey—every fine degree of grey—it was as though I might weigh it, turn it in the hand.
Hoar frost in the Wealden landscape south of Cranbrook, 10th January.
I took the lanes south of the town into the frozen woods and meadows, then into the gills, following one brook into the ancient shaws that have survived down the centuries in the High Weald. In spring this place bursts with oak-green light, shimmers with bluebells, luminous with wood anemones and heady wild garlic. All that colour and life was yet to come.
A gill valley south of Cranbrook under frosted winter mist.
The ‘gills’ define the Kentish Weald—a network of streams cutting through steep, wooded valleys. They made this landscape so difficult to farm thousands of years ago that many of the shaws, fortunately, have never been unwooded. Down in the gill the world is double enclosed beneath beneath hoary trees and beneath mist. I was glad to be alone in the old land and all that silent stillness.
Suddenly, above me, a winter tit flock—then all around, and that little spot was immediately alive with small-bird movement. A great tit oiled its rusty hinge. Blue tits snickered and tee-heed. Long-tailed tits were restless, feeding, feeding, branch to branch, tree to tree, attending to nothing but the roving imperative of simple survival.
Everything about these birds is smallness—the upside-down deftness; butterfly buoyancy; finicky feeding in slender tips of tree tops; song all peep and scold and titter; mouse-scurry of mouse-birds. The long-tailed tits are smallest; dainty, downy and whiskered. They seem light as one of their own tiny feathers, and their aerial song is so delicate it is as though the birds’ tiny frames are transfigured into their own tiny fairy notes. The Old English word for the family (from which we derive ‘titmouse’, though the two words are unrelated) is mase: ‘little or tiny thing’. ‘Tit’, incidentally, means the same thing, so titmice are ‘small-small things’.
Winter smallness defined that moment for me. Not just the birds, but the secrecy down there under winter-thin trees in the valley nook. My sense of place was the slow, clear run of a brook and little birds in search of little food for little whirring bodies.
It flashed across the marsh, once and momentary—a lighthouse beacon, the sudden flare of sunlight on angled glass, like accidental morse code. We waited in silence, sure we’d seen something, though doubtful enough to put it down to ghostly illusion. A trick of the light.
There! Again. A brilliant whiteness materialised instantly from itself. It swelled and diminished all at once, pulsed itself along the horizon, a good two miles from where we stood on the sea wall with the North Sea to our backs. This was no ghost, but miracle nonetheless: a mercurial flock of knot, one thousand strong, joined by dunlin and grey plover, spiralling, dilating, compressing, flexing, pouring down and through the estuary.
Knot massing on the shingle. Image: Tom Mason/Daily Mail.
Knots are not the only birds that fly in this mesmerising, synchronised fashion. Starlings are best known for this phenomenon known as a murmuration. That species can gather in millions, filling the sky with borealis transformations. But, for my money, knot are the most spectacular. You don’t get starling numbers, but they add to those virtuoso shifts in shape and size a constant change in colour. The flock appears suddenly, as though from an icy fracture in the winter sky, so intensely white it blazes even against bright, clear morning, but then all those bodies and wings turn as one and they are suddenly silver, then as suddenly again, black, and back through to white, until there is an exact angle when a precise shade in the wintry spectrum somehow dissolves the flock entirely, and you lose them.
Observing knot like this is an exercise in metaphor. Your mind races for comparison, a way to conceptualise what you see: smoke, blizzard, writhing eel, multiplying cells, double helix, bait ball—the centre generating outwards while consuming itself inwards with predator rapacity. To witness this spectacle of disintegrating wholeness is to perceive the world newly and to know it more marvellous.
The Essex marshes at dawn, two hours before the knot spectacle occurred.
This morning, five days after the solstice, the year tipping into the next and turning to light and length, we went out. Two days of indoors indulgence made us keen for outdoor winter solemnity–for the plash of drenched paths and water-logged fields; for the sting of rain and the bite of wind to invigorate indolent, fireside senses. In the event, the rain ceased. We went out to still winter blue and clear air.
Woods Mill is a small Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve near Steyning. This morning its woodlands and meadows were sodden and deep with dark, drenched earth. Its waterways were true winter burns, saturated and flowing fast. We embraced the wet and the mud, and my daughter sought the best puddles in new wellies, a bright red waterproof suit, and a novelty pair of binoculars.
My daughter is old enough now–just shy of two years–to take attentive, independent interest in the natural world. We have always encouraged a connection whenever and wherever we can, but now there is added joy in her personal discovery. She knows an impressive number of species’ names, and currently delights in showing us each morning the ‘incy wincy’ spider who inhabits a cobwebbed corner, or the hibernating ladybird who suddenly appeared on our living room lampshade.
In one dell we paused to fuel her energy and enthusiasm with squares of chocolate. Crumbs of hazelnuts fell on the boardwalk as I snapped the slab into pieces. Immediately a robin came beneath our feet, deftly and briskly picking at every tiny morsel, nimbly withdrawing to a fence post just feet away. We crumbled more to entice it back and instantly it came, closer, closer. I held out my hand. Cautiously, then boldly, it flew to my palm, snatched what it could, went back to its post. We repeated the routine, and again and again it came and came.
Islay knows the ‘robin bird’. We often listen to one singing at the top of a bare sycamore at the end of our tiny garden. But this was an astonishing new moment for her–sudden, unexpected–that brought a wild creature right into her little, growing sphere.
In the end, the encounter may have meant more to me than to Islay, but I knew it meant so much because of her. She will not remember, but perhaps it has changed her world nonetheless–a small but remarkable moment shaping her perceptions. I felt fully and newly this morning the thrill of a parent who knows how vital are such moments spent with and in the natural world.
We left the robin feeding, joined by another. With its back to me, the soft browns of its plumage were near indistinguishable from the dull wood and bramble and sedge of its surroundings. When it flicked round to face me, its breast blazed–sudden, unexpected–in the sullen landscape, the colour of low winter sun or the smouldering embers that accompany our dark nights indoors.
I’d never have found them two minutes later. I watched them, a pair, drop to ground after twenty minutes working the field and hedgerows and there achieve an instant metamorphosis—bird become sullen vegetation. Fixed on the spot where they went down, I located them only by their intensely yellow irises, stark and astonishing against indistinguishable feather-scrub, like a night creature’s eerily luminous eyes in singular darkness.
Photo: W.dog.net
Short-eared owls are always a remarkable and special winter sight. They breed in northern and Scottish uplands, but their numbers are swelled from autumn onwards when continental birds disperse to new territories across the rest of more southerly Britain. Some years bring so many birds that every likely patch of land for hunting seems to have a resident pair (one year the small common just across from my in-laws, right on the edge of a busy town, had a pair that hunted each evening right among the regular dog-walkers).
The owls’ seasonal appearance makes them particularly associative of shortening, colder days. Their cryptic plumage is somehow the stuff of winter itself: matched to the subtleties and gradations of arctic tundra. It is the drab beauty of earth and grass intricacy; winter browns of loam and thorn, sedge, stubble and reed. It’s those facial markings, too, which conjure for me the year’s darkening nights—that black smudging mask framing the eyes has something of a Gothic, All Hallows spectre, a ghoulish stare that is unyielding and severe as winter itself.
Mist coming in over the owl field. Beeding Brooks, Sussex, 27th December 2018
That evening mist came in quickly as the sun set. It seemed to generate and rise from the earth itself, as though the field steamed with optimistic warmth. The cows became monoliths, their dark, head-down bulks forming a stone henge. To the south-east where St Peter’s church stands on a knoll, I could hear the jackdaws’ nightly Tenebrae in the tall stands of beech tree either side of the rectory. The birds continued to drift across from the west, their black forms like bonfire fragments in the red sky. Periodically and suddenly, the growing roost broke to an explosive cackling as thousands of jackdaws took flight before settling again minutes later.
By contrast, the owls hunted on in complete silence, easy and elegant on long, languid wings. The mist in the last minutes of light had consumed the whole field and the owls’ ghostly figures dissolved into whiteness.
When it comes to favourites, certain British birds nudge their way into the top ranks repeatedly: the robin – unofficially Britain’s top choice – is predictable enough, as are other garden species, such as blue tit and blackbird, or perhaps something less commonly seen; a barn owl or kingfisher. I suspect my own favourite, though, is shared by few, and would never occur to anyone curious enough to hazard a guess. Fieldfares are unfamiliar to many, a birder’s bird maybe, unnoticed in the hedgerows of sodden ploughlands in such short and dreary days. But these mobster thrushes are mysterious and attractive. They exist like the promise of hard snow – overnight, sudden and thrilling, they come with the boreal cold.
This year, as every year, I have been walking and driving the lanes in search of fieldfares and their thrush cousins, redwings, mostly across the flatlands of Romney Marsh not far from home in Kent. These winter nomads breed right across sub-arctic Scandinavia and the Baltic regions, making their annual incursions each October and November to wander and raze berry harvests in southern Europe. I found a roving flock last November, one bright and blue morning when it was painfully cold. I knew the birds were there long before I saw them, announcing their presence with restless stony calls, a ringing magpie ‘chak-chak’. For all this commotion, they can be frustratingly difficult to catch in good view. They remain teasingly invisible in the bare but impenetrable thorns. Suddenly, at the moment you become just too close, they burst from cover as though the trees have kept their leaves all along to release just now in a brisk gust. The action is surrounded by accelerating notes that rise in pitch and dynamics, scattering with as much force as the birds themselves. These cackling fits disappear again just metres down the frosted path, though some birds veer upwards to sit defiantly at the top branches. They mark my advance like a procession, always just ahead and out of reach, as though alarmed and mocking all at once.
The fieldfare’s evasive presence seems fittingly mirrored in their slight cultural legacy. The name as we have it is certainly medieval, but its origins, although almost certainly older (Old English feld ‘field’ + fara ‘to go’), are all but lost, scantily and obscurely present in the inky tracks of just one or two Anglo-Saxon scripts for scholars obsessed with such things to ponder and trace. Fieldfares, curiously in my view, have never attracted poetic attention in the way of so many other British species. John Clare, of course, does not forget them as passing details: they ‘chatter in the whistling thorn’ (‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’) or ‘come and go on winter’s chilling wing’ (Shepherd’s Calendar, March). At the end of the medieval period, though, it is clear that fieldfares did not go unnoticed: Chaucer ends his catalogue of birds in The Parliament of Fowls, unexpectedly, with the ‘frosty feldefare’, and in the Sherborne Missal (c. 1400), there is a remarkable titled image of the bird, accurately depicted in all its striking colours (see here for some of the images, although the fieldfare page is not included).
I find a new, hustling chatter of fieldfares on Romney Marsh again this week in mid-February. By now, with most berries stripped, they are dispersing to the fields, roaming in big numbers. Chaucer’s phrase, I’d say, has it right – their hoary plumage is a precise configuration of winter splendour, even on a day as drab and wet as this. They mark extremes: that pristine white underwing and belly, that storm-grey hood, are balanced with colours that flare like hibernal dusks, or the light and warmth of indoors we seek against such cold – the colour of smoky whisky, or the slow burn of wood fires. I follow fieldfares across tree-lined fields, follow their flights down hawthorn paths to be with all that clattering verve that turns and turns again straight into the wind.
There are some birds that are early fixed in the imagination, and hold their allure for a lifetime. These are not childhood memories of actual encounters, but of something more mythic – birds that made claims on my experiences long before I ever set eyes upon them. I knew them only from illustrations (John Gooders’ Kingfisher Guide to Birds in Britain and Europe; a scrappy pocket Collins), or experienced them vicariously in my uncle’s scrawling field notes. I loved their rarity, made them live – the impossible colours of bee-eaters, rollers, waxwings; the wildness of eagles – in my assiduously copied sketches from a hand-me-down set of Ladybirds. I dreamed of discovering these birds myself, desired them as much as those accumulating notebooks in my uncle’s study – dinky and black, with an elastic band that made a firm snap when you pulled it into place.
In an attempt to conjure one of these exotic species, I once invented reports to my mother, hoping that the fantasised chase across the South Downs would turn up a real life counterpart to the impressive sunset vision depicted in that Ladybird plate. It was years before I finally saw a great grey shrike – a strange songbird from the north with a grisly habit and a dapper bandit mask to suit. I’ve seen several since, but I am still compelled to see these birds when small numbers make their winter homes here each year from Scandinavia.
The first of all my shrikes (John Leigh-Pemberton, Birds of Prey, Penguin, 1970); an early Ladybird book of birds (1954).
This morning was ideal out on the brooks, the first properly cold weather of the season and everything reduced to a shrike’s wintry colours: the stone-hard whites of frost, the bare blackness of trees, and low mists tracing every degree of grey-silver. As shrikes do, the bird I was after appeared quite suddenly, there atop a nearby birch. It was gone as quickly, in the second I glanced away, but there it was again, at some distance, silent and sentinel on another tree top. Shrikes establish large territories and can go unseen for long stretches of time, though they will be present all winter, remaining faithful to particular sites year after year.
Despite its scarcity, the bird has a long-lived gruesome legacy in British folklore, which pertains to the red-backed shrike, too, once a breeding species in these isles (unlike the great grey). Its various names speak of its macabre reputation, derived from its family propensity for impaling prey on thorns, recalling a butcher’s meat store, or the huge iron hooks from which his carcasses hang. The great grey’s scientific name reminds us of this habit – Lanius derives from Latin for butcher or executioner. A meat-hacker: the butcher-bird.
(Photo: Duncan Usher)
Its infamy goes back much further, however, as indicated by the strikingly similar cluster of names across northern European countries. Its late medieval English name was the waryangle which existed in various dialect forms for centuries, all of which, like Germanic werkangel or warkangel, mean something like ‘suffocating angel’ (compare Modern German, würger and würgengel). The name is not attested in Anglo-Saxon records, but may well extend back this far; waryangle, may, in fact, derive from Old English wearg (criminal) and incel (diminutive suffix): ‘little-villain’. Certainly by the fourteenth century the name was invoked as an abusive term. In Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, the summoner is denounced by way of comparison, ‘as ful of jangles [tricks] / As ful of venym been thise waryangles’ [as shrikes are full of venom] (a shrike’s butchering thorns were thought to be forever after poisonous).
Remarkably, in an age without binoculars, and which is traditionally dismissed for its unscientific indifference to ornithological precision, the earliest illustration we have of the species actually comes from a medieval English missal (1400) produced in Sherborne, Dorset. It very clearly and accurately depicts a grey shrike labelled waryghanger, one of many British species depicted in this remarkable manuscript. For this illuminator, at least, the shrike held a place in the native imagination, as it always has in mine. Its flight from thorn to thorn points on to shrikes I have not yet seen, that exist in those books and pocket notes that occupy me still.
The Sherborne shrike (Image: Janet Backhouse, Medieval Birds in the Sherborne Missal, British Library, 2001).
The Compleat Birder 
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