Cuckoo on Scout Scar

Wood sorrel

The cuckoo. Bird or wandering voice, asked the poet Wordsworth?  Cuckoo, cuckoo, now here, now faint and further off,  now close in my ear.  Without the luxury of good binoculars I wonder if Wordsworth is telling us he rarely or never saw the cuckoo.  Or was he consoling friends who often heard but never saw  the bird.
Another overcast morning, with light rain, but still. So once I heard that wandering voice I was intent on a close-encounter. I heard him again, found him in a tree, saw him fly low and rapid in stealth flight.  I can do stealth too. I know not to let my profile be seen against the horizon, I keep low, using stone walls and hawthorn and juniper to conceal me, where I may.

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Some days, there's a mismatch between what I experience and what I can show.  Wood sorrel flowering beneath juniper bushes and in the mossy shelter of a wall.  Clumps of cowslips rising from winter bracken.  Early purple orchids and rue-leaved saxifrage.  The May tree. hawthorn,  flowering everywhere. And the cuckoo leading me a merry dance over the fell. Once again, I found him outlined against the sky in a tree with two small sentinels watching his every move and letting him know he'd been spotted. Meadow pipits will host the female cuckoo's egg, but not if they spot the deception first. And they're onto the cuckoo, following him, perching close by. He must outwit them, if he can, so stealth is the way of the cuckoo.
The stonechat break into alarm calls.  The pair bring beaks insect-crammed  to feed their brood.

Low light is good for flower photography and I was attracted by this budding hawkweed, hawkbit.  I'm more interested in the symmetry of its petals than in which of the compositae it might be.  Once the bud opens to the warm sun those petals may close again, but not quite into this perfect form.