While I was taking the large dog for a walk yesterday I stopped to listen to a bird song. It was a song that I haven't heard since moving here - the distinctive pee-wit pee-wit of the lapwing. Sure enough in the distance I could see a small flock of the birds -distinctive with their black & white wings & odd flight. I associate these birds with Nottinghamshire farmland - great flocks of them whirring in the sky filling the air with their shrill, whooping-whistle call. I checked out details about the bird and was surprised to discover his huge range over the UK - I thought it was a bird of the South & midlands - it's like finding an old friend that you left in a previous home (http://www.rspb.org.uk ).
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Today I went to look for the lapwings but they had moved on. instead I was treated to two great sights. I threw a piece of left-over Christmas pudding into the hen pen. Only Alfie the cockerel expressed any interest in it, the hens wandered off pecking at the grass & other bits I had thrown in. Alfie stood by the pudding and on the other side of it stood a crow. Three crows regularly patrol the strip of land the hen-pen sits on, they normally only fly into the pen after scraps when humans leave the area. The pudding must have been a great prize as not only did the bird stay put whilst I was just a few feet away with the small dog but, it marked it's prize while Alfie hovered about beside it undecided what to do. Then the bird pecked at the lump & tried to fly away with it but as it must have weighed at least 3x as much as it did, satisfied itself with a small piece. Such bravery inspired by a left over piece of Christmas pud!
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Half an hour or so later I was out walking the large dog when I stopped and looked around - I could hear the raucous racket only a groups of corvids can make. I spotted a small group at the top of a tall hawthorn. As I watched a buzzard lifted up off a near-by tree into the air & the crows mobbed it until it flew away. As it did so 2 other buzzards & another large bird appeared. The 3 buzzards circled in the air like vultures in a cowboy movie, lifting higher on a spiral & then disappearing from view. The 4th birds was not a buzzard, it's lower body appeared snowy white in comparison to the creamy/buff of the buzzards. While the buzzards soared in the thermals this bird dived away at amazing speed with broad, black-tipped wings and vanished amongst a stand of alders lining the brook. Seeing the two types of birds together in the sky clearly showed the difference between their movement, energy & shape. I am surer than ever that it was the goshawk I've caught glimpses of before. I know they are in the area as a few week back a local farmer reported seeing a dead one by the road-side. To think, if I hadn't stopped to look at the crows making a racket, I'd have missed that wonderful sight.
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Mr PoppyM is a local man & has a pronounced local accent & use of dialect. I'm trying to record some of his colourful life as part of a book-project I'm working on. I have no illusions that I am a writer of stories and certainly not a writer of plays. So it has been quite an experience turning someone else's tales into a written form. The first two stories have been a disappointment as whilst I can capture the plot everything else gets left behind - they become a soulless catalogue of events! The latest plan is write the tales out verbatim & to go from there - it can only be an improvement.
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The final listening thread - over the Christmas period I have listened to two radio plays - what a treat "The No1 Ladies Detective Agency" in Radio 4 & the "Wizard of Earthsea" on Radio 7. It brought back to me the simple joy of being read to! I'm now onto the "Adventures of Tin Tin" via the wonder of BBCi player - I can't recommend that facility highly enough.
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