It's good to listen...

...when the world is full of noises.

I went to see Kairos and on the way down the track the hedges were alive with the wingbeats and rustlings of birds, mainly pheasants and partridges, but also blackbirds and chaffinches, robins and wrens.

On my way to the tree, i saw a dead pigeon. Freshly killed, I thought, but totally uneaten. I could not work out why the predator had left it there.

I sat by a tree. Listened to the rustlings. Saw a squirrel. And a silent muntjac.

And then it were as though the trees were alive with a rattling and a clattering, twigs, leaves and acorns falling as flocks of pigeons landed and changed position in the trees around me. They caused so much disturbance, even just forty birds. Imagine the arrival of a flock of passenger pigeons! They could change the course of a forest's story!

I rose to leave after an hour or so. Just thirty yards away, I passed the pigeon again.

Who had been eating while I sat just a short walk through the woods? I caught a movement, turned, saw ears, but it was a hare, whose rest I had disturbed. He, like me, had been sitting by a tree, I saw his form at the base of a trunk.

He had been sitting less than four metres from where someone else had been dining on pigeon breast.