Rook on the shore

As ever, I have spent a lot of time at the Reserve. Seeing Kairos and feeding birds, as well as the bat survey.

The rooks are always interesting. Now the babies are out and about but they can't fly terribly well and seem very uncertain about everything. This one looked like he was considering a swim.

My time with the trees has been focused on trying to work out what I might say for the tree project. And continuing the Kairos Fairy Tale. Neither feel hugely successful. And there is a third to add to the mix: I need to send an abstract for a piece in an anthology one of my Vienna friends is compiling. I thought I could write on trees, but so far the mind is a blank.

I did, though, get inspired by the swifts when I was feeding the birds. It was a cloudy day so they were feeding lower down than usual and every now and then one would whizz past so close that I could hear the displacement of the air.

I had been watching terns and black headed gulls. The latter seem balletic, until you see a tern. They are sleeker and their flight has a grace and athleticism the gulls can't match. Then you see the sand martins, and once again, the idea of flight is notched up to another level of wizardry. And then, the swifts, than which nothing can compare. Against swifts, the graceful red kite looks ponderous, and corvids look pedestrian.

Scimitar wings and bullet shaped bodies, they move and turn faster than thought. They are flight as imagination. Flight as pure fantasy.

You hear a scream, and see two in a tearing gyre of combat or play. They are miraculous and magnificent.

When you like birds, as well as bees and flowers and mammals, the three dimensionality of the world is made evident. When you watch birds you realise that what we call "earth" is much vaster than you might have thought. It reaches down to the kilometre deep where bacteria can still live, and, more overtly, up, to the extent of the atmosphere. We live IN earth, not on it.

Anyway, I fed the birds and these ducks were waiting for their share - plus a lonely racing pigeon and a solitary pheasant.