The strange creatures

As well as spotting all the fruit in the last post, I was also struck by the animals and birds.

At the start of the walk, I watched corvids, gulls and pigeons feeding on a ploughed field, my passing disturbed them. Also a pair of kites who were roosting in adjacent poplars. One then the other spooked and flew out only to circle back to roost in trees further along, and again to be spooked by me walking underneath.

At the bottom of the track, I was dazzled by the many birds feeding on the trees around and above me. The air buzzed and sang with the sound of their contact calls and the foliage shaken by their movement. It was transcendent, almost hallucinatory. A dreamlike vivacity in the green and blue. A woodpecker mined a dead branch and a treecreeper scuttled up a trunk.

In the wood, I saw that the Goddess Oak was hosting hornets in her bellybutton, while as i sat near Kairos, a whole classroom of adolescent squirrels leapt and chittered in the trees around me, and in Kairos too.

It was all so alive, so alien and alive and I was so irrelevant.