In Taid’s youth, ‘Y Llinos’ / [Carduelis cannabina] was in many parts of the UK and Europe, favoured as a ‘cage bird’ because they look and tweet so sweetly. A perfectly neat, dainty little finch, the male sports a crimson blood-red flush on his breast and poll in his breeding finery. His mate is an equally beautiful grey crowned bird of soft browns and cinnamons, with a smattering of pinkish speckles. Linnets are (almost quite literally) bloody gorgeous. Alas today, the linnet is a UK Red listed species due to alarmingly steep breeding declines, as well as shrinking overwinter flock numbers. They’re afforded full protection under the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981. 

Also today; It’s Summer 2019 and I am in my post nature reserve wardening epoch. I’ve gone independent and I’m officially a groundskeeping contractor, undertaking a wide range of duties for nature, people and the earth. I boast a wide variety of duties throughout my 7 day week, choosing work I enjoy.  I feel blessed, like I’ve sort of gone back to my roots and like I’m finding my loudest voice. Taid would be proud, I think.

Reporting for one of my duties yesterday morning, I was stomping along when I halted, suddenly. A perfect little feathered corpse lay sleeping on the tarmac and my heart fell on the floor.                                                                                                                                       “Be’ ti’chi, ‘deryn fach?” (yn Saesneg;”what/who are you, little {fem}bird?”), I muttered, picking up the soft cinnamon tinged body, still vaguely warm. I turned it over in my palm gently, to wonder if it was merely stunned yet alive. The eyes were still moist and bright, and there was not a single blemish on the little linnet. I blew into the chest feathers and thumbed at the bone. The bird was in good condition, well fed with a good amount of fat reserve. The poor llinos’fach – a juvenile linnet – had flown into the high wall and crashed to the ground a few metres below. It was probably on its first migration from its breeding ground. I wondered where it had hatched; nearby? How far had it travelled already when it hit that wall?

“wel, twll’tin mari’watcin a’r y glaw”, I swore inwardly. How dare this perfect little creature not long ‘born’, fly into a human’s wall and perish, before it could soar and sing and sail above the moors and heaths across England, Wales, or wherever the ‘gach it wanted. Fwcin’ storms in August had blown my little ‘deryn off course, I pondered. Congratulations, climate change, you’ve struck us again.

I had wanted to revive the little linnet in my hand and free it safely into the wind to resume its journey, but it had already left the mortal coil. Stroking the soft feathers, I swallowed my sorrow and remembered Tunnicliffe in his Malltraeth Summer home. I remembered Y Oriel, and how I marvelled at that mock-up Studio, when I was a kid.

I wrapped the beautiful little bird in a glove, and took it ‘home’ with me at the end of my morning. I’ve safely preserved it and intend to use it as a specimen like C.F. Tunnicliffe; study the immaculate feathers in intrictate detail, as he did. Then the little bird will be returned to the sextons and buryers – earth’s little undertaker beetles – to carry it back to earth from whence it came.

The Wildlife & Countryside Act of 1981 is legislation which protects all our native flora and fauna – respect its various schedules, and respect nature & Earth. 

[There’s a full moon over Sunset
Got our feet in perfect stride
And we walk in perfect meter
While we hold our smiles inside
And we hold our smiles inside
Like we’re holding back the tide
And we stride in perfect meter
Like the sun won’t ever rise]                                                                                                               –  J. Hince/A. Mosshart, Ash & Ice, 2016.

“By the moon, by the tide, by whatever you like, I’m just so easily led” purred Alison Mosshart. (Impossible Tracks, Ash & Ice, 2016.) She was bang on the money there. And she would be, she’s a woman; she knows the rhythms of the earth and sky like we all do. If ever there was a Goddess on earth, it’s her. ❤

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It is July 16th 2019 and today is a pivotal moment in the year. It’s a certain wonderful someone’s birthday; the first birthday we’ve not been a couple. But it coincides with a universal spectacle that we’re sharing, just a few miles apart at different sides of Surrey.. A partial lunar eclipse. We’re apart, united in the universe by the moon. How she brings us together, does Luna. Last night I lay under the stars on the downs, in the light of the golden orb. Tonight I was back to bask in the penumbra, alone in my Astra. Connected – smartphone beside me – but alone in my little capsule.                                                                         Quizzing back and forth on the best vantage point, hype was building across the internet. And the viewpoints were busy with rowdy young stoners, the last of the evening’s golfers and sleepy commuters cotching in their corsas. Nouveau-riche types hared along the roads, and the air was heavy and close. Luna is a powerful chick.

Look Southeast, Jones-girl. Go higher up. Try Tattenham Corner.

I duly rumbled away in a modest cloud of gravel-smoke and turned east, looking out towards Tadworth. As I neared the eponymous corner, I gasped and congratulated the sky in pure reverence. The Moon was bloody gorgeous; glowing a sultry pink-orange. The sky was her dusky blue backdrop, and the glow was as loud as an orgasm. My god, what a sight. What a perfect end to a somewhat fractious day.

I’d spent the bulk of the evening not far down the road, back on the arable treasure-lands of Langley Vale. I’d neglected the place since last month, when I paid a casual visit to the corn gromwell site to check on the number of plants there. A good trawl through Surrey’s best kept secret oasis was long overdue, and when better than the golden height of Summer?                                                                                                                                                         I enjoyed so many glorious, lonely hours and miles there last year in the long heatwave. My walking boots were ruined by knife-like sterile brome, which travelled as far as Anglesey with me like a stubborn rash. Even several dunkings in the Irish sea chasing Lion’s manes and compasses couldn’t shift that stuff. I think the boots eventually clapped out way before the last head of brome left the fabric. (Today, they’re festering in a shoebox in the car, like a pair of sorry-arses. I can’t abandon them, it would be like dumping a faithful old hound by the M5 – which isn’t even a good motorway.)

A year on, to the present; it was definitely a “fuck it” kind of day. Catching wind of two rare gems making an appearance in those beautiful margins, I floored it down to the village armed with reliable gen. I needed my arable flora fix.                                                                Venus’ Looking glass is like hen’s teeth, or the flash of a quail’s eye in a barley field. She is a fleeting flower, dainty and discreet, shy and sweet. I’ve never seen her, though I’ve scoured the arable chalk screes and margins of Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire for her for many hours. She’s an annual, but delicate – she lives on a knife edge in a modern, intensified world; she needs the right level of disturbance or she shies from view. Plough the field too deeply – or indeed, too shallow – and she may decide to vanish for years. She might rebel, flash a cheeky Victory-fingers at you, popping up by a roadside like a brazen hitch-hiker, far away from her chalky roots. She’s fleetingly glimpsed and she’s coveted, like all the most compelling beauties. Maybe that’s why I like her so much – do I want to emulate her charm and guile?                                                                          Alas, she evaded me once again today, in spite of grid references, Google maps, GPS, and all the goodwill and gen I could be spoonfed. (Thank you lovely local botanists by the way – you’re diamonds)                                                                                                                     The day’s tour wasnt in vain entirely, however. With the hawk-like vision of Steve Gale, I managed to wrap my eyes around another absolute wonder; the cutely named Weasel’s snout. A pretty pink annual (like Venus), it does indeed remind me of a mustelid’s nose, and it’s another shy and vanishing relict of the ‘golden’ era I often wax lyrical about.                                                                                                                                                     Scouring the messy scree of a field corner near Nohome Farm, I became distracted by assorted fluellens and flaxes, while Steve soldiered on in search of the main quarry. As I was eyeballing the tiny petals of a small toadflax, he located the single flower of weasel’s snout, stood stoic among the rough ground. I was well chuffed to see this little treasure.                                                                                                                                                         On this emotionally mixed day in time, I found my sunshine yomp around the vale nicely cathartic. Beautiful sprays of wild catmint to sniff. Carpets of round and sharp leaved fluellens running rampant. Small and common toadflaxes. Field madder and sprawling mats of black bindweed and knotgrasses. Delicate sprigs of narrow fruited cornsalad. Rough, common and opium poppies smattering the air with colour. Campions of pink and white. The whole colourful, loud orchestra made just for me, was here to drown out the buzz in my head for a bit.

Look at this place.  It’s a little piece of Heaven in Surrey. A bit of rough cantering cockily through the stockbroker belt like a football-pitch streaker.

Rambling around this little pocket of the county almost reminds me of my paternal grandfathers, great uncles and aunts. They were travelling farm-labourers. Itinerant and quiet – like me – but gobby and plainly spoken. I am an apple that did not fall far from the little perllanau-afal in the villages and mountains.

But don’t tell too many folk about rare treasures. ‘Cause then everyone goes scrumping, cocks it all up and Y berllan is no more.

Venus is a secretive maiden, and Luna is Queen.

With thanks to Steve, and of course ex-nghariad’annwyl…

..and love and gratitude to my hard-as-nails ascendants. You made me and you sustain me in this fucked up today-world. 

On making our way out of a well known magical city in the west a few days ago, fascination (and a little gentle coaxing) pulled me into a small church. Holy buildings have strong travel-ties with me. I only ever step inside such a building if I am in a foreign land, or something special (or sad) is taking place. They are places of transition and wonder, put simply.

And so, sensing that this little holy building was a little ‘gwahanol’, I crept in. I breathed in the comforting cocktail of old book, woodsmoke, limestone and dust. And a breath of calm flooded my head, as everything slowed down. The tinitus stopped. The music in my ears stopped. I tested the acoustics of the perfect little cathedral, and basked in the silence. I experimented with sounds. Still no ringing. It was glorious.

A couple entered. The gentleman of the pair – about 60 in years – struck me like a gentle chord. He reminded me of old times, a sort of urbane Jonny Kingdom. He was smart and eclectic looking, whiskered yet tamed. Wild yet quiet. Reassuring.

I watched him walk into the nave, and he stood like a beautiful work of art, in the spotlight.

I sat on the soft red step just below him, and stared. I glanced back at his mate, long haired and beautiful as she gazed at her rusty-plumed nightingale.

As he began to sing, I forgot my fucked up ears. My mind was silent, drinking in this mountain stream of pure love crashing softly past me. Each time I glanced back to smile at the lady, she was happily transfixed, and quiet. She was like the skulker in the hedge, the female nacht-songstress.

His words were clear as Exmoor water, and I heard every syllable, every phrase, every trill and whistle. He was a bird. A skylark on an Essex marsh, a pied flycatcher in an oak hanger, a yaffle in an orchard. When his chorus concluded, I cracked the silence with impulsive applause, guttural Welsh congratulations and English smiles and thanks.

He spoke no Cymraeg, but we exchanged a few words in various brief linguas, verbal and non. I am reliably informed that as I left the building, Mrs Nightingale chimed soft phrases back to him.

As we neared the van to leave the city via an incredible fudge shop, we spotted a harp. Feeling emboldened by the songster in the chapel, I got cocky and shambled over to the curly haired harpist. As I interrupted his mobile phone conversation in abrupt Anglesey-Welsh, he looked up and smiled sweetly to reply to my question.

“No, sorry, not much. But I have lived in Carmarthenshire. I am actually from Braintree”, was his gentle, home-counties lilted reply. He could easily have fooled me for Paraguayan, sat with his harp and quiet, dusky demeanour. Maybe of Chubut.

I smiled, and said I’d not long moved ‘home’ from Essex.

“Do you know Milgi Milgi? That one is as Welsh as the hills, but not harp-compatible, come to think of it. Learn Dac’w ‘nghariad. Your harp will be perfect for that.”

“Dac’w n’ghariad. Right. Got it”, he smiled.

“If ever we see eachother again, I shall expect to hear it…” I smiled broadly and waved ffarwel to the friendly young smiler.

And off I flew, once again.

If you read this, Glasto-bound little Bellbird… then that is what I shall call you; Bellbird of the harp.

As I get older (but never the wiser), I realise with deepening conviction that life is cyclic. The moon, the tides, the boom and bust of predator and prey, the seasons, our organ systems… the way our lives unfold in general. I am in a philosophical mood again because today, a saros cycle in my own life has completed, pulling at my heart a little.

Today I am in the West of England, on a cool July night. And some people very dear to me are right over the other side of the world, in the cold Atacama desert. They are watching that same golden moment I shared with them in Jackson Wyoming almost 2 years ago. That perfectly unforgettable moment in time and space. Immaculate totality.

My friend, I feel my heart ache a little bit when I think of you far away in Argentina, on this magical moment in our solar system. But I know you are in good company and happily basking in the beautiful umbre once again, my favourite eclipse chaser.

I treasure our moment in the light. And the shadow. For always.

Love from the Space cat.

Travel seems to be a prevailing theme in my mind at the moment, which comes as little surprise. Since my strange lonely nocturnal drive a few days ago, my thoughts have turned more and more to other creatures of the shadows, and the parallels between them and I.

With every passing year in the towns and cities, foxes appear more ubiquitous, numerous and bold. Within my own lifetime, I remember urban foxes being an occasional treat to watch at a distance at the far corner of the fields. As children, we’d even summon eachother to watch them from the window, binoculars in hand.

Nowadays, I see numerous individuals, day and night. As our species spirals out of control, our respective lives are becoming ever more entangled, in suburbia. It is almost like they smell humanity’s apparent moribundity and are rebelling against it, as our out of control capitalist fever sickens us all. As we move further from our own nature, foxes are communicating indignation and exasperation with us. Litter, pollution, concrete sprawl, agricultural intensification, ever conflicted land use. We’ve gone too far, and animals are pushed to their limits. Then humanity persecutes them some more.

Just a fox. Ubiquitous. Numerous. Pest? So how could I leave that vixen on the busy road, that summer evening?

It had been another nocturnal drive. I’d been somewhere with purpose on this occasion though, even if it was just to nip out for fast food. The irony there does not escape me. Nearing home, I saw her laying crumpled in the road, a motor casualty.

She was so gravely wounded that she scarcely bared her teeth or even moved as I hovered over her. Her chestnut flank rose and fell in morbid agony, and I felt a wave of relief that I’d found her in time. She would have died there overnight slowly in the road, unable to move or save herself with her broken leg. Seeing my car parked with the blinkers on, a man in another car stopped to give me a blanket. As I threw it over her fractious body, she struggled a tiny bit in my arms. She wouldn’t bite me, she was too hurt, and her muzzle was wrapped carefully away from my wrists.

Placing her on the back seat, I drove her home. Just before my friend (a wildlife rescue friend) and I were about to take her off to hospital in the crate that he’d just whizzed over to my house, there came a rather firm knock at the front door.

When I answered, two police offers curiously peered at me, saying they’d had reports of suspicious behaviour in the road, and traced my number plate to my address. A member of the public had seen me bundling the slightly wriggly shapeless lump into my car, and phoned the cops. After feeling slightly bemused by the fact that someone had assumed I was up to no good, I conceded that it must have looked a bit odd under cover of darkness.

“Oh, everything’s fine, it’s a fox. She was struck in the road. Come and see”, I said. Beckoning my doorstop guests to the back of Chris’s car, a pair of worried eyes shone back at them through the bars of the crate.

“Awwwww!” said the lady officer, taking a photo of the little vulpine face.

And after a moments admiration (and relief at the lesser amount of paperwork, I expect) we were left to business.

“Ok, thanks for that, we’ll let you get on…”

The vixen spent a couple of weeks in hospital being repaired by wonderful, skilled, loving humans.  And she was returned to whence she came, home to the street where I scooped her up. Her territory.

She’d certainly have died. But when and where I can take action and responsibility for my own species, I must pay our debts to animals. Just one fox, some might say. Not just a fox. A soul sister.

I am a sparrow, I am a paradox.

Beguiling but boisterous, beligerent, brazen, brave and bold.                                                    Cheeky, chippy, with a heart of solid gold.                                                                                        I’m frenetic, feisty, fun, flawed, fantastic, furious.                                                                        I’m contradictory, captivating, charismatic, curious.

I’m tied to brick built dwellings, even though I have wings,                                                        I tustle with the dust, but rise again to sing.                                                                        Itinerant, rebellious, ballsy, brassy, and proud.                                                                              I chirp in doom’s face when life kicks me to the ground.

I’m tied to my roots, wearing sharp clawed boots.                                                                          Jostling with my crew in my Sunday best suit.                                                                              I’m noisy and rowdy, but life is trying to hush me.                                                                        I ain’t gonna shut up, the world will never crush me.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             They think I’m just a sparrow, they think I’m red book bound,                                              That just ’cause I’m an enigma, the solution won’t be found.                                                They think that I am dwindling, they think I’ll never fly,                                                              That the world will try and deafen me, laughing as I cry.

But house sparrows and humans are one and the same.                                                              Our hearts are made of fire, they’ll never dim our flames.                                                          So chill, little sparrow, we’ve no need to frown,                                                                    Because together united, they’ll never keep us down.

In love, tolerance and solidarity with this iconic species, who has experienced a decline from an estimated 12 million pairs in the 1970s to between 6 and 7 million pairs in the current day.  And to my own tribe of sparrows (human and avian alike) who are as loud, loving and lairy as I am. 

The general rule of thumb in my part of the world, is that weather permitting, the adders will start to emerge from hibernation within a fortnight of Valentine’s day. I’ve found this to be true in each of the years I’ve been observing them, bar 2018 when the Beast from the East threw things out of kilter somewhat.

Following the local adders became an integral part of my life several years ago when I was a young woman. I became completely captivated by them. To the present day, no matter how many times I see this species, I find it just as enthralling as the electrifying moment I first clapped eyes on it. It was a warm September evening when two large females unexpectedly crawled by within whiskers of my feet. That moment almost seems too dreamlike to be real now, too fleeting. One zigzagged ribbon followed by the other, vanishing into obscurity. I was hooked. They were like medicine.

The following Spring, something happened to me, and the adders were symbolic of that. I began to stir from the apathy I felt towards my life. I simply started to bore of feeling hurt and wallowing in my broken, tattered heart. I wanted to start living. This sense of renewal was buoyed by my having a car for the first time. Being able to go wherever I pleased whenever I liked was a golden novelty, and I revelled in the new freedom.

And so on a warm February day several years ago, I came out of hibernation along with the vipers. And there marked a pivotal time in my life.

I felt a strange optimism that morning, and headed up onto the meadow. I padded around the edges of thickets with soft rolling footsteps, creeping like a bittern peering for eels. Then my heart leapt, as I happened upon a perfect viperine coil, hugged by rank grasses at the edge of a blackthorn bush. I discreetly sat myself down beside it at a few feet away, studiously immersed in this new found enigmatic world of cold blooded animals. He knew I was there, and we simply basked together, in mutual respect and curiosity.

Over the ensuing weeks of that Spring, I spent days up there combing the place for them. I found many more. I came to recognise individuals by knowing their unique head markings. I learned that the spot where I found the first of the season was an emergence site; other individuals emerged from around the thicket, meaning there was a hibernaculum there. I carried out formal surveys of them, there and elsewhere around the county. I came to make friends who also loved the adder, on the common. I even met the love of my life because of them, and our first ‘date’ was spent creeping around searching for them.

Every year since then, no matter what has been going on in my life, I’ve been ‘checking’ on the local population at various points in the reptile season. I developed a huge sense of personal custodianship over them, which many people may find eccentric. Even when I took on land management roles of nature reserves which held populations of adders, my ‘home’ adders were always the ones that were ‘mine’, rather than the ones that I ‘catered for’ at work.

This sense of guardianship of course brought with it some worry, like a parent worries for their children long after they’ve grown up.

Adders in the UK and parts of wider Europe are in peril.  I began to ‘realise’ this on a more personal level a couple of years ago when I acknowledged that the changes in my records, sightings and encounters with them were making me uneasy. The following notion is bordering on romantic of me to cogitate on, but I still find it compelling.

Theory has it, that women are more in tune with reptiles than men are. Apparently this is particularly the case at certain times during a woman’s cycle, when a woman can spot or detect snakes quicker than a person typically would on average. This is supposedly due to the influence of hormones, bringing about a heightened ability to detect ‘threats’ to the foetus in utero. In all mammals, nature dictates that for the preservation and continuation of life, a carrying mother must be able to protect her charge in every way possible. Perhaps there is grounding in this; I couldn’t say for sure, since I am only aware of one study (from  Nobuo Masataka of Japan’s Kyoto University) on the theory.

I can only offer my own experience, in response to that information. I am highly adept at locating lizards and snakes. Ever since I knew where to look for them, I could often find them quicker than my male counterparts could. In spite of having a hearing impairment and being short sighted, I can detect an animal and often identify which it is, by the flash of sound it makes, fleeing through the undergrowth. I can often tell whether I’m going to have a productive time searching or not. It could all be bollocks for all I know (I don’t think it is, however). And of course, I could in fact simply have seriously badass fieldcraft skills, but my perrenial scatter-brain and clumsiness convinces me otherwise, frankly. Who really knows? Maybe vipers and women are mysterious in exact equal measure.

Anyway, if factual, this feminine serpentine-sensing means that in sweet irony, this defence mechanism works in reverse in women like me, who seek – rather – than avoid reptiles. I’m not a maternal person, but that doesn’t alter the fact that I have the same biological mechanisms as any female. I can, perhaps turn this to my advantage in field-herping. The feminist beauty of this? It is a defiant victory-fingers-up at the society-bound expectation of all women to want to birth babies. I don’t want to bear life, but I want all life to thrive. I am a woman, and it is in my nature to nurture. All women may well have a ‘biological clock’ in the most basic sense, but it ticks in different ways for different individuals. Such is my theory.

Long live the viper, for she is one and the same as me, in a different body. She symbolises life, survival and feminity in all forms.