Noises of the night fill the countryside
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THE source of the River Enborne has travelled backwards a quarter of a mile.
Clear, bright rainwater meets the chalkfiltered springs, mingles and fills the swallow holes, washing a bright line of silver over the grass.
Earlier in the day, I saw a hare gallop through it in a brief burst of sunlight. I mistook it for a small terrier, spraying gold drops as it went.
There is the briefest, boiling, flash-in-thepan sunset and the wind picks up again. Gates bang.
It is blackbird pinking hour; the birds calling ‘pink, pink, pink’ in an incessant, percussive choir, punctuated by the loud coughs of pheasants going to roost.
It is a nervy, blurred time, the shift from day to night.
Then there is the terrible shrieking of a small animal – a rabbit being killed by a stoat, I think, until the sound is carried up above my head into the trees.
A late sparrowhawk, or an early owl? But what is the prey?
My stopping on the track is too much for the alert levels of the roosting woodpigeons and they explode with a volley of a racketing clatter.
A shower of leaves fall. The shrieking has stopped. The mournful, creaking, wailing of the dying ash trees in the kite roost cuts through the rising wind.
Each has their own voice – one bleats like a nanny goat, another creaks reassuringly like old furniture expanding in the heat, beside a fire it will one day fuel.
The staccato, stuttering shouts of the cock pheasants build into a crescendo, setting others off, so that there are vast, rolling waves of them calling, reverberating and echoing round the hills. The noise is quite overwhelming. There are thousands of them.
Out in the open, dark badger trails criss-cross the fields like ley lines. I stupidly answer a text and the phone’s light destroys a half hour’s stored night vision and I am temporarily blinded. When I stop tramping through the leaves on the wood’s edge, to listen, the tramping continues a few beats.
There is a ticking rustle from a big, silhouetted dead tree that hasn’t produced leaves in decades.
It’s bark has long gone, leaving it antler-bone white.
I wonder what the sound is. I imagine – bats walking down its trunk on folded elbows; a treecreeper roost; a stop-out squirrel.
As I recross my tracks there is a whiff of fox that wasn’t there when I started out. Lights from the few, scattered houses glow more easily through the trees now. And one of the estate cottagers have put their Christmas lights up, earlier than ever before.
We are grateful for it. We have never looked forward to the light returning so much.
Wild Diary
Foxes are beginning their mating season. You may hear the far-carrying screams of the vixen at night, or the triple barked ‘wow-wow-wow’ of the dog fox.
Not to be confused with the repeated, rhythmic barks of muntjac deer.