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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Second Sip of the Summer Wine (1 Viewer)

halftwo

Wird Batcher
Swallows: blue torpedoes, take a feather to their nest by the reservoir, under the footbridge.
Rain has pinned life beneath its falling and along the dam wall a sulphur and black Grey wagtail sits near the half asleep Oystercatcher pair. A Pied wagtail and two Meadow pipits fly-catch across the pitted water's surface, and return.

Songs burst brightness on the dull day, then the shrill peeps of Common sandpipers echo off the dam. One launches itelf - flicking out an arc on arched wings, skimming the water and back to a rival, which takes off and rises to the upper reservoir.

Sudden alarms and a Sparrowhawk bombs the valley: it dives behind the trees where Starlings scream.

On the banks a broom in bloom above the bilberry like a static firework, and along the lane the cow parsley foams frothily. Campions and forget-me-nots and purple tipped thistles dot the fresh greens.

The wood is cave dark but Goldcrests' songs - the finest filament of silken thread - stitch themselves to the calls of Siskins above.

A Blackcap, belly as grey as the sky, blasts its staccato from the clearing. The path rises through the wood towards the moor above. Then, sudden and silent, a Roe deer stands, tip-toe balletic and conker-coloured. Then slips away into the fern.

The insistent burble of Curlews' song falls with the rain, swamping the spaces between the trees, bubbles bursting softly in the wet. Above the woods a Green woodpecker's call rolls down the hill like a boulder, briefly squashing all other sound.

Up and up and the great green ampitheatre of the moor circles the reservoirs below, humped shoulders sheltering lower land from the worst. Rain, the day's theme, fills the brook. A Great-spotted woodpecker bounds from the pines, wings a blurred chessboard chequer, scarlet undercarriage like an old wound.

Down through the plantation: cuckoo flowers in the open patches, subtle, beautiful, rising above new grasses pushing skyward. Look: a Woodcock rises a slope out from the Scots pines, cryptic colours now showy against the green; secretly silent and gone.

The sky darkens and the water becomes as black as a tar pit, rain hissing. Now the shock of a fish jumping, high and milk white, like a dead face. Its fall to inky water joining a million simultaneous raindrops.

Back by the woods a soft squeaky scratch: a Spotted flycatcher sits low in shelter, ambushing mosquitos. Nearby a Treecreeper shimmies up a sycamore, bark-coloured, mouse like, whispering its song as it rises a spiral around the tree.

Easing rain and a brighter sky starts a Cuckoo's call - it echos around the slopes and over the waters, taking over the world for a long while. Then it stops just as Crossbills' calls jink over the conifers. They land nearby.

Back by the dam the Oystercatchers have woken, and a Blackbird braves the rain still falling to brim the deep valley with his song.
 
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Beautiful H2, thanks for posting this, I'm looking forward all the more to our September visit to God's own county! Here in the Alps the rain is pounding on our chalet like one of those Brazilian drum ensembles!
 
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