joannec
Well-known member
Simon Barnes on Buzzards and Bluebells from todays Times, another nice piece.
Buzzards above and bluebells below – the darling sights of May
Simon Barnes: Wild Notebook
It happens as the train passes between Reading and Swindon. One moment they’re not there, next minute they are. Bird of impressive size, and possessed of a certain ragged elegance: a slightly ramshackle aerial mastery. Probably the best soarers in lowland Britain.
Buzzards. Birds of the West: though that is all changing in its own, leisurely biological time. I was travelling from Suffolk for a weekend in the near West and there is a sort of Buzzard Barrier you must pass through. It comes at that point of the journey when you need a break from your book, however good, and you turn to the window and start: big bird! And after the briefest of double-takes you know it’s a buzzard and you are now at the beginning of the true West.
Birds of prey, bunny specialists, hammered to rarity by the pollution of the Sixties. I remember the sense of awe when I saw a pair soaring over the Fal estuary as a boy: that I should see such a thing!
These days, once you have gone through the barrier, they are almost common. You see them rising in thermals, seldom troubling to flap, great patrollers of the airways. Occasionally, you see them in social gatherings: I have seen 50 and more at a time in a roost, often sitting rather incongruously on the ground.
The last British bird atlas, put out by the British Trust for Ornithology, showed that the buzzard was confined to Wales and the West.
The BTO starts work on a new atlas in November — a great and essential project — and it expects to see a dramatic change: that the bird will be recorded in virtually every county.
They had been held up by illegal persecution by gamekeepers, but now things are moving in their favour. There are fewer gamekeepers, the warmer winters are good for buzzards, and the post-myxi bunny population has stabilised, giving them plenty of good grub. I have even seen buzzards a few times in Suffolk — once from my garden.
They’re not common birds round my way yet, but they’re around, and increasing. In another 30 years or so, it is likely that there will be a uniform spread of buzzards all over the country. Now I like that magical feeling of passing beyond the Buzzard Barrier: as if you were moving into a place where different rules applied. But the destruction of the Buzzard Barrier will be a still greater thing. I look forward to the time when I will greet buzzards in Suffolk with a neighbourly nod, rather than a wild surmise.
And so, with the buzzards wheeling and mewing overhead, I took a walk through wild western woodland with five dogs woofing and plashing and panting and arsing about all around me: one border collie (red merle), one black lab, one lab/golden retriever cross, and two golden retrievers. My sister has dogs the way other people have mice.
And in this excellent company of hounds, I walked through a carpet, or rather a lake of bluebells. Is there any floral sight quite so spectacular as that of a bluebell wood in May? In Britain? In the world? An endless swaying world of lacustrine blues, every possible shade of sumptuousness. As I scrubbed my Levi’s on the draining board of my student hall of residence, I used to long for the denim to fade to precisely the colour of a bluebell wood: once achieved, their wearer would, without doubt, at last be cool.
These days, rejoicing in such uncool things as buzzards and bluebells, clad in various uncool shades of nonblue, I walked through the woods dressed in their antique bluebell cool, with a blackcap giving a contralto aria overhead and the dogs wuffling and snuffling in their self-important way through the endless lake of flowers.
What a joy it is to be uncool, if only for the fact that I no longer have to pretend to like King Crimson and Pink Floyd. I’m not cool in sporting circles because I like books too much; I’m not cool in bookish circles because I like sport too much; I’m not cool in either place, or anywhere else for that matter, because I like wildlife more than anything.
But how splendid to be able to like the things I actually like. Freedom from cool is one of the great steps towards personal freedom: and it can come for any of us, all of us, by acknowledging, by coming to terms with, the love of nature that lurks within, waiting for a chance to get out. Show yourself a buzzard or a bluebell wood, and you can find yourself remade. Glory be to God for uncool things! Isn’t that Hopkins? Near enough, near enough.
Buzzards above and bluebells below – the darling sights of May
Simon Barnes: Wild Notebook
It happens as the train passes between Reading and Swindon. One moment they’re not there, next minute they are. Bird of impressive size, and possessed of a certain ragged elegance: a slightly ramshackle aerial mastery. Probably the best soarers in lowland Britain.
Buzzards. Birds of the West: though that is all changing in its own, leisurely biological time. I was travelling from Suffolk for a weekend in the near West and there is a sort of Buzzard Barrier you must pass through. It comes at that point of the journey when you need a break from your book, however good, and you turn to the window and start: big bird! And after the briefest of double-takes you know it’s a buzzard and you are now at the beginning of the true West.
Birds of prey, bunny specialists, hammered to rarity by the pollution of the Sixties. I remember the sense of awe when I saw a pair soaring over the Fal estuary as a boy: that I should see such a thing!
These days, once you have gone through the barrier, they are almost common. You see them rising in thermals, seldom troubling to flap, great patrollers of the airways. Occasionally, you see them in social gatherings: I have seen 50 and more at a time in a roost, often sitting rather incongruously on the ground.
The last British bird atlas, put out by the British Trust for Ornithology, showed that the buzzard was confined to Wales and the West.
The BTO starts work on a new atlas in November — a great and essential project — and it expects to see a dramatic change: that the bird will be recorded in virtually every county.
They had been held up by illegal persecution by gamekeepers, but now things are moving in their favour. There are fewer gamekeepers, the warmer winters are good for buzzards, and the post-myxi bunny population has stabilised, giving them plenty of good grub. I have even seen buzzards a few times in Suffolk — once from my garden.
They’re not common birds round my way yet, but they’re around, and increasing. In another 30 years or so, it is likely that there will be a uniform spread of buzzards all over the country. Now I like that magical feeling of passing beyond the Buzzard Barrier: as if you were moving into a place where different rules applied. But the destruction of the Buzzard Barrier will be a still greater thing. I look forward to the time when I will greet buzzards in Suffolk with a neighbourly nod, rather than a wild surmise.
And so, with the buzzards wheeling and mewing overhead, I took a walk through wild western woodland with five dogs woofing and plashing and panting and arsing about all around me: one border collie (red merle), one black lab, one lab/golden retriever cross, and two golden retrievers. My sister has dogs the way other people have mice.
And in this excellent company of hounds, I walked through a carpet, or rather a lake of bluebells. Is there any floral sight quite so spectacular as that of a bluebell wood in May? In Britain? In the world? An endless swaying world of lacustrine blues, every possible shade of sumptuousness. As I scrubbed my Levi’s on the draining board of my student hall of residence, I used to long for the denim to fade to precisely the colour of a bluebell wood: once achieved, their wearer would, without doubt, at last be cool.
These days, rejoicing in such uncool things as buzzards and bluebells, clad in various uncool shades of nonblue, I walked through the woods dressed in their antique bluebell cool, with a blackcap giving a contralto aria overhead and the dogs wuffling and snuffling in their self-important way through the endless lake of flowers.
What a joy it is to be uncool, if only for the fact that I no longer have to pretend to like King Crimson and Pink Floyd. I’m not cool in sporting circles because I like books too much; I’m not cool in bookish circles because I like sport too much; I’m not cool in either place, or anywhere else for that matter, because I like wildlife more than anything.
But how splendid to be able to like the things I actually like. Freedom from cool is one of the great steps towards personal freedom: and it can come for any of us, all of us, by acknowledging, by coming to terms with, the love of nature that lurks within, waiting for a chance to get out. Show yourself a buzzard or a bluebell wood, and you can find yourself remade. Glory be to God for uncool things! Isn’t that Hopkins? Near enough, near enough.
