Mystery breeze has a haunting effect
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EARLY twilight and the strangest thing in the wood; it was unsettling, exciting and it was all I could do not to run with whatever it was.
It made my heart race.
The hollow track through the wood under the down was quiet and still and the owls were beginning to call.
But then a sudden sound rushed upon me from the tree canopy above, like a great gust of wind coming through the trees – yet no tree moved.
It was a hollow, curving sound. A sound like the sea being sucked out. A sudden, invisible wind tunnel in the air.
It came right overhead, with the speed of a passing jet and was vast.
It filled the air, yet I saw nothing and it frightened me.
The dog trotted out of the wood with tail up and fur on end, grey muzzle pursed for a woof she didn’t utter, looking up.
Old tales of The Wild Hunt and a childhood reading books based in both reality and myth, stir at this time of year. It was something natural, or wild – or haunted. A flock of birds then; but what? I know what birds are here, and the only species in big numbers, going that fast
would be snipe or golden plover, and they are up on the high tops, not here below. Unless… unless they’d pelted off those fields at top-speed, and dropped down the escarpment to the height of the tree tops, with a peregrine behind them.
Perhaps then they’d make that sound, wings scooping air in a hard, choreographed act of mass evasion.
I took to Twitter – and had a delightful variety of responses.
I dismissed suggestions of starling murmurations – even from the lovely, knowledgeable author and BAFTA Awardwinning TV producer Stephen Moss. There were no big gatherings of starlings here.
I returned at the same time and weather over the next few days and saw or heard nothing. And then, I did.
Bringing the horses, there was an iridescent scattering of the light.
A seething static noise out on the cold field; a beetling of the ground; a dewpond of darkly glittering shellac, rising and falling like a body breathing.
Hundreds of starlings.
The net of them lifted as one body, shimmered over me, in gliding silence, then rushed over the farm barns with a roar that held all the power of the sea in it. Stephen, of course, was right.
Somehow, the chattering of many voices, the frisson of a crowd; of pressing bodies moving together, seemed like something from another time all together.
A lost place that we still glimpse. Still feel. Still remember.
Wild Diary
Cold and frosty nights might not seem good for moths, but look out for the fur-coated December moth on your windows, fairy lights and in car headlights at night.