Bog Myrtle & Peat

Whiles at dusk as I sit in the porch with a wreckage of the summer’s grass around me, a kestrel comes to the yard. He’s a young bird of this year’s fame, and he has to wait until the swallows go to bed before he dares to approach the gaping, whitewashed sheds. The little birds hate him, and now that every pair has fledged two broods of juveniles, the quantity of swallows is prodigious here. A hundred turn and churn above the desperate craneflies, and it would be an act of lunacy for the kestrel to come near when every alarm is set to riot and repel. So he waits for the cool twilight and the early flick of bats above the thorn trees, and the first I hear of him is the gentlest landing of claws on the old tin roof.

If I am very still and settled on my chair, he hunts around me. And at first I assumed that he wanted mice – because kestrels do. But he seemed to strike so often and at random, even on the thinnest patches of moss where surely no mouse would dare to stroll so brazenly. It couldn’t be mice, and clearly something smaller. One night that kestrel killed and came to eat his meal within earshot, vertically above me on a rail over my head. Bits of a dorbeetle fell into my hair, and I had my explanation.

The hunter works until it’s dark and the geese have churned away from the stubbles beyond the river. Stars blink and waders weep in the silent, rising mist. And when I can no longer resist the urge to turn my head and look up, he’s gone.