Blog Archives

My Cumbria Naturally blog

I'm a Nature writer, that's not just what I do, it is who I am.
Field-craft is about looking, listening, and interpreting habit and habitat. Nature is full of surprises and there's always more to discover..
Reflecting on the day, editing images, I seek to distil the essence of the experience, to recreate the thrill and immediacy.
Each blog is a journal, on the day and of the day. Complete in itself, each is a
piece in a mosaic, a variation on a theme in the dynamic of Nature.
To explore
SEARCH (top right) enter name of bird, butterfly or plant, topic or location.
ARCHIVE (dates right of page) to locate seasonal highlights. For instance, click on August and September 2025. A sequence from Sizergh tells of painted ladies and humming-bird hawk moth from Africa. Red admiral feast on fermenting damsons.
Blogs are best read on a computer or laptop as phones may change layout

Winter Thrush at Halloween

22/10/2020

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Birch catkins and witch's broom

I remember winter thrush resplendent. Fieldfare erupt from tall trees in scolding call and fly in sunlit colour. Redwing of whistling note, a smaller thrush with a streak of warm colour half-hidden by the wing, and with pale supercilium. Mistle thrush sounding like a football rattle. Winter thrush close, intimate, and abundant.
Halloween is high season for migration, when flocks are borne on a north-east wind. Halloween, when the clocks go back, the nights draw in and the woods are golden.

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Patterdale Red Deer Rut: an aura

16/10/2020

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Raven

Red deer and raven, aura of the fells in October. Stags roar, bellow and grunt- notes of low horn and tuba. Accompanists in the seasonal ritual of the rut. Posturing, if we could see the action unfolding somewhere in the enveloping mist A symphony of stags scattered over the amphitheatre of the fells. Each responsive to the other’s voice, loud, resonant, yet secret. Raven is the saxophonist in a riff of stag and scavenger, then an interlude of silence until a stag bellows and they're off again.

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Mistlethrush, fieldfare and redwing: Helsington Barrows

11/10/2020

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Mistle Thrush

Not a cloud in the sky early on a bright October morning. In the parkland habitat of Helsington Barrows the sun highlights anthills, a faerie light through tall larch now shadowed by gathering cloud. A clash of darkness and light. I hear mistlethrush, here in small flocks in August. And my focus sharpens as I catch a thrilling call. Winter thrush from the North, autumn migrants whose arrival on a such a warm October morning, seems anomalous, although the season is right.
Hush, be still and on with the cloak of invisibility. Look and listen. The wildwood will come alive.

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RIver Kent: salmon leap at Stramongate Weir

5/10/2020

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Stramongate Weir

Inky black and smooth, the water is held back by the weir, then plunges down in a cascade, into white water where a goosander is fishing, flapping her wings on the edge of the churn of white water. Sounds of falling water and of boulders rumbling in the bed of the river. A swan drifts toward the weir, hesitates, and drops white into turbulent white.

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My Cumbria Naturally blog

Winter Thrush at Halloween

Patterdale Red Deer Rut: an aura

Mistlethrush, fieldfare and redwing: Helsington Barrows

RIver Kent: salmon leap at Stramongate Weir

ARCHIVE

SEARCH (top right) or refer to archive