As I sat with my coffee in the conservatory this morning I was seranaded by the local great tit with its tee-cher, tee-cher call. It was the only persuasion I needed to finish my coffee, don coat, hat and boots and set out for the local cemetery, 5 minutes away. Recently I have been restricting myself to the cemetery and woodland burial ground but today opted to squeeze through the gap in the burial ground fence, negotiate the steeply banked ditch and complete a circuit of Gooseman's Field, known locally as the Horsfield for the horses that are kept on there.
The air was full of the sounds of singing birds and spring was definitely in the air. More flowers appear every day and today daffodils joined the throng. They have been there or there abouts for a while but today I noticed the large varieties as well as the dwarf ones which have been flowering for a few days.
As I walked around the woodland burial ground I spotted what I though was a pheasant in the long grass but it didn't look quite right. It was obviously uneasy at my presence and quickly took to the air; not with the noisy palaver of a pheasant but with the slower wing beats of a buzzard as it flew to a nearby tree where, presumably, it could keep a better eye on me. I saw it again a short while later gliding over the Horsefield. I'm not sure whether it had caught an item of prey, vole perhaps, or was worming.
Having decided to take in Gooseman's I hoped to pick up linnets and skylarks. As soon as I crossed the ditch I could hear and then see linnets. There were several reasonable sized flocks of them making a great deal of fuss with their grumpy sounding calls. There were several singing skylarks as well as I walked around the meadow. One of the benefits of my hearing aids is that I can hear skylark singing again; it was a bird that I had lost as my hearing gradually worsened. I hadn't realised until Heather kept remarking on skylark song that I couldn't hear. There was also a songthrush in full song in the hedge dividing the field from the cemetery; an absolute delight.
On my way back through the cemetery I stopped to photograph the long, waving catkins of the alders, which, not so long ago, had been just a purple haze around the trees. Spring is definitely just around the corner.
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