Bog Myrtle & Peat

Summer bounds past in a dusty rush of heat and flowers. The world has moved a thousand miles since my last post, and now I crouch beneath the weight of dry, sunbright days. There is too much to tell, but let me gabble in hurried tones of fox cubs, roe kids and yellowhammers; a bolting… Continue reading

Reading through Mary Colwell’s new book on curlews (on which more to follow), it is surprising to find how quickly humans lose touch with species which have disappeared from the landscape. Travelling across Ireland, Mary met dozens of people who had quietly forgotten about curlews since they declined out of sight. When she plays them… Continue reading

As the pickup rattled down the road this afternoon, a crow pounced up from the deep grass verge and landed on the dyke by my wing mirror. I would have driven past, but instinct and experience have taught me to be particularly nosy at this time of year and I slowed to a halt. It’s… Continue reading

Adders basked in the shelter of old stones, and the land trembled with heat. Lambs slept in the neighbour’s fields, sprawled with their eyes closed and panting as they grew. After days of secrecy, the oats came bursting out of the crumbling soil with indecent haste. The drab grey field suddenly bristled with creamy green… Continue reading

Spring has a habit of running through my fingers. A million tiny moments blur into a raging glare of growth, restoration and pleasure. It becomes hard to pick between the images or pull them apart, and the overall effect is close to sensory overload. This blog inevitably sags beneath the weight of this load, and so… Continue reading

Decision taken, progress made – I’m heading for oats in 2018 and the work is underway. There have been several speed bumps on this journey, not least because of a particularly bad oat harvest in 2017 which resulted in a real shortage of seed oats. I rang around most of Scotland and Northern England before… Continue reading

Having wondered about greylag geese over the winter, it is fun to see the birds beginning to think about nesting on the hill ground. An encounter with an Icelandic greylag in February ramped up the respect I have for these birds, and I no longer think of them as mere feral interlopers. They are certainly… Continue reading

The bull calf is finally free from his shed. He has been indoors for four months, and now his world explodes in light. He runs and bellows over the field, kicking his heels and rolling his eyes with delight. It’s a joy to see him thrashing the ground and mashing the molehills with his forehead.… Continue reading

A cold north easterly wind has crushed everything into silence. We are a fortnight behind our usual calendar of events, and although we now have swallows and willow warblers, it’s hard to believe that cuckoos will be here in the next week. I have held off visiting the leks because many of the sites I… Continue reading

Worth a very quick update on my crab apple project, which began in October with the grand harvesting of apples from suitable native stock. It was a slow, methodical process to extract the seed, and I was surprised by how variable the seed rate was in each fruit. Some of the apples contained four seeds, many… Continue reading