Wintry days

The Beach

The influx of grandchildren usually means a trip to the beach no matter what the temperature so gloved, scarved and wellie-booted, we set off to dig and build and play giant steps against the on-rushing waves. Several brave souls in black neoprene were surfing on the incoming swell. Our beach is becoming popular with the boogie board crowd but California it is not, especially in February. Someone shouted “Dolphins, dolphins!” and there they were, two dorsal fins on black bodies breaking the surf.
They were not dolphins but harbour porpoises able to operate in the shallows only twenty yards or so offshore. Maybe they were curious as to the identity of the other group of aquatic mammals disporting themselves in the same waters. The surfers certainly looked like a fellow species.
Home with socks, wellies and children soaked from having lost the game to the waves, lunch was enlivened by the arrival of a large cock pheasant outside the patio doors. Christened Geoffrey by the children, he has taken up residence. The guns of the local shooting syndicate echo over the village but Geoffrey struts about the garden, like a WWI staff officer, well fed and safe, far from the action in a nice comfy billet.

Geoffrey

If Candlemas be clear and bright
Winter will take another flight

The second of February was a beautiful, sunny day and, true to the rhyme, winter is back with frost and snow. The cold weather does bring the birds to the feeders and the woodpecker has been back for the peanuts, though, unlike the finches, blackbirds and sparrows, he doesn’t hang about, more of a smash and grab raid. I did manage one decent picture though.

The snow has made spotting the local wild life a bit easier, like the four brown hares limbering up for the mating season with racing and chasing an in a nearby field. It is a bit early for the boxing matches to start in earnest. That will be next month.. Too big for the buzzard hunched on an ash tree to tackle, they don’t need to turn white like their mountain cousins but the little stoat in his full ermine fig that shot across my path, will be glad of the frosty whiteness otherwise he would have stood out like the man in a Bateman cartoon.
The countryside is stirring; the only dampener on the old joie de vivre was that, I noticed the beach hut is due a coat of paint. Oh well, everything has a price.

'Owling at the moon

Two owls have been calling close to the village. Their hoo-oo-oo cries embodying their old Scots name – houlit.. There is something elemental in the sound of an owl. Like the pee-you of the buzzard or the flutey sound of the curlew, they evoke a wildness, a remoteness that the singing of a thrush never does. Birds of ill omen in most cultures but also of wisdom, owls have always held a special place in human myths. They occur over and over in literature from A. A. Milne to Thomas Gray, from Lear to Tennyson.

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom brings logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail
When blood is nipped and ways be foul
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-who
Tu -whit Tu-who – a merry note

(Love‘s Labours Lost)

Not Shakespeare’s most elegant lines perhaps, nor his usual accuracy as a naturalist.

Tu –wit Tu-who is the sound of two owls, a male and a female, calling to each other In my nocturnal ramblings, I hear two, presumably, male birds tu-whooing away like pantomime ghosts but no answering tu-wit. It looks like the females are not around or are not in the answering mood at present
I hope there is a change soon for the poor owl needs to hear a tu-wit to woo!
Sorry!