Nature notes

Having resolved to turn my back on materialism and reconnect with the soil, I have been strolling contemplatively the lanes hereabouts, spotting birds’n’shi’.

I work in a nice place. Here’s a picture I took on my phone:

If you turn right out of my office and follow Lansdown Lane up its steep course, it turns eventually from a reasonable road into a very narrow road, and then from a very narrow road into an undrivable dirt track before finally spending itself in a field. There is a pleasing symbolism about this steady ascent into rusticity (and conversely, the homeward decline into civilisation). The field at the Lane’s peak is stuck to the side of a valley spread with hedgerows and very noisy sheep. The multiplex cinema on the Bristol ring road is only 10 minutes away. Bath’s Roman remains are 15 minutes in the other direction. But here, nothing but greenery and sheep. Ah, England. England, eh?

Anyway, having already wowed Nige with my accelerating expertise in British wildlife – just the other day I spotted and catalogued a veritable menagerie including: a pair of small dark randy butterflies, a hovering kestrelly-kite sort of bird and a small black tweety bird – I have been continuing to record for posterity the local flora and fauna.

Yesterday’s walk yielded successful identifications of:
- a very small brown bird, shrieking intolerably
- a magpie!
- a robin!
- three largish cows
- two white, very flappy butterflies
- a dog

And, most thrillingly, this:





This, I can only assume, must be the famous ‘shitbird’, of which they speak so often on The Wire.