The latitude-crossing martins have today arrived back at my parents’ house. Their warm conversational chittering bounces off walls, drifts through windows ajar. Feeling relieved & thankful; having the company of these sweet & sunny birds, each year, enriches my life beyond price.

Saw a beautiful fox today, carefree trotting across a pinstriped field to unbroken skylark song. He paused briefly at a hedgerow, curious as to some rackety male blackbirds, before slinking through & onwards. The heart still glows.

Today! — swifts, spire-high, back drawing thin & crooked lines above town. A big anchor point in my life, is the yearly return of the anchor bird.

Today, after 10 years of wildlife-friendly gardening, patience, hope & monthly checks, I discover that a hedgehog has set up nest in the hedgehog house! Inexpressible joy! My inner child is beaming. And quite possibly my year is made.

Revealed by the little path across the fine-leaved dewy lawn this morning, certainly hedgehogs forage in a tortuous meandering way, leaving loops like those of an ancient untamed river.

Excited in anticipation of these imminent arrivals — lucky to still see all three in the local skies.

(Illustration of swifts, swallows & martins by John-Leigh Pemberton c.1966.)

the last thrush
the first pipistrelle
a moonlit crossover

sat in traffic
the silver lining —
rooks amid cowslips

The lullabying notes of a mistle thrush — no other bird song better rides the wind.

There’s a blackbird in full, rich, carefree song; in classic pose with tail cocked, silhouetted against ashen sky. It’s pouring with rain. It’s pretty much a perfect moment.

glittering stream
dappled celandine bank
wagtail flitting

longer light
building warmth
the nettles higher
scents thicker
and a leafing tangle
with sharpest thorns
draws a scratch
through quiet air
of notes new, familiar
Sahelian
there! —
back, in bright flight
the sparkling whitethroat
stung into song
dear hedgetop dancer

atop a hedgerow ash
still largely bare
a throwback to winter
a lone fieldfare

one last chack-chack

Today I happened to meet a huge, magnificent, twisted & spreading oak tree. Greening wonderfully. Hundreds of years old. (I decided not to photograph—scale & splendour would not have been truly captured.) This tree brightened my day & made me feel a little better about things.

It might seem odd, to make & maintain a saucepan-sized bare mud patch at the wildlife pond, but this I have done, & now a female blackbird is toing & froing, leaving with beakfuls of mud for her nest. Which is just lovely.

sunlight breaks through
for the first time today
larks rise & sing