Crow

Anything wild catches my eye.  Surrounded by day in Swiss concrete, there is little moving to distract me: except the crows.

In the bare branches of the stunted municipal trees they hunch and wait for a dropped sandwich; a popped pringle; an unloved apple.

They throw back their necks and caw jubilation to waiting mates .  Unfurl shake of black shawl wings and sky borne : quartering and dividing the dark tarmac, deciding  how to achieve the ground and to eat their quarry.

Swoop. Decent. Great wings folded and tidy they step delicately martial across their parade ground of discarded dinner and impale a morsel in anthracite black beaks .  Food inspected, assessed, consumed, they return replete to the bare winter tree  and watch us, intelligent sentinels, as the darkness falls.

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November

In the autumn there seemed ages to tidy up the garden, no rush in the mild sunshine to get all those jobs done; but I had somehow forgotten about the dark and the rain and the wind. Between all of that and a full time job, there have been only a few half hours of dry daylight to spare and my lovely garden is soggy, muddy and dank.

It reminded me of the old Thomas Hood poem about this low month.

Only a few more days to go of November and then I can put up the Christmas decorations , make the house silly and sparkly, celebrate the end of another good year and start planning for the next year in the garden!!

November

No sun–no moon!
No morn–no noon!
No dawn–no dusk–no proper time of day–
No sky–no earthly view–
No distance looking blue–
No road–no street–no “t’other side this way”–
No end to any Row–
No indications where the Crescents go–
No top to any steeple–
No recognitions of familiar people–
No courtesies for showing ’em–
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all–no locomotion–
No inkling of the way–no notion–
“No go” by land or ocean–
No mail–no post–
No news from any foreign coast–
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility–
No company–no nobility–
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member–
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds–
November!

Thomas Hood

Feed the Birds

Winston, my cat, is glowering at me from the mat.

He is not allowed out this afternoon , to give my birds a chance to feed. November has little to recommend it, but it does mark the start of the  winter bird feeding season. The feeders are festooned with fat balls, the tables are loaded with seed and the birds have arrived in style.

First the blue tits swarmed in, then came the great tits and sneaking in amongst them a jauntily quiffed crested tit.  Then the robin spotted the food, then came a few chaffinces, a solitary green finch and a smart nuthatch followed. The white back of the head stripe announced a coal tit and suddenly twice the size of everything else there was a fat billed female haw finch, who bullied everything else away for half an hour of solitary gorging.

Winston was still inside, still in a rage and then to add insult to injury a sparrow hawk swooped through the trees looking to do some feeding of her own from amongst my new guests.

Why is she allowed to hunt and not me?

Oh, Winston the injustices of the world are manifold. Have a stroke instead.

Ruskin’s Rock.

I braved the wind and rain of the weekend to walk in the woods. Black wood peckers drummed on tall trees, leaves whirled yellow sparks and my favourite rock nestled in the embrace of old roots.

I love the complexity of this rock, the shattered up turned layers of brown thrown against the smooth white Jurassic limestone, held hard in the gnarled pine roots.

John Ruskin loved rocks and drew them meticulously. He taught a generation to observe and to reverence them in nature and in the structures we made from them and the ruins time returned them to.

For Rabbit Patch

And all other lovers of the genius of Durer!

The Great Piece of Turf

My garden is now officially shut. I glimpse it darkly as I feed the morning birds and sense it fleetingly as I peel the potatoes for dinner, but the rest is darkness between work.

So I turn again to representations of the green I cannot see on  a work day in November and the most wonderful of all is Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf.

This water colour was painted in 1503 in Germany and the detail and precision surpasses any digital photo I have ever seen. Dürer is more often remembered for the remarkably messianic self portraits of his undeniably commanding and attractive face; but this small picture contains the whole natural world in all its multifarious, magnificent complexity. Here are  the grasses; the lace edged tansy leaf; the seeding dandelion flowers and fleshy clasping plantain leaves. Here is the view from the ground, the vole’s eye view; an unnervingly clear eyed botanist’s view, who understood how marvelously interlinked and nuanced the living world is and reproduced it in this unassuming  slice of perfection for ever.

 

Looking for Crumbs.

As the season changes I am just about to start feeding the birds in the back garden. Big bag of bird seed is on the shopping list for Monday and the bird feeders are out of the shed waiting to be cleaned.

I have a bird table on the other side of the house, which up until now  has been the sole territory of the sparrows and has been filled daily with bird crumbs, leftover couscous, crumbled crackers and what ever else didn’t get eaten that day. In the last few weeks it has been taken over by blue tits, great tits and even a jaunty crested tit. There has obviously been some sort of turf war and I am curious as where my squabbling and normally numerous sparrows have gone.

Today, there was a new twist as I noticed honey bees rolling about in crumbs of discarded flapjack. The last flowers have secumbed to the first frost , but the warm weather has encouraged the bees to keep flying and the sugary flapjacks were obviously just what they needed to refuel  on a still November afternoon.