& shy alder; shy beech, violets subtle in the ditch; a late kite, the moon waxing slowly

& somewhere in the gap where clouds pile backround red kites whistle unseen voices carrying in the wind driving hard dark canopy

@leopardsbane.bsky.social

& the new moon - 2 days old - right in the middle of everything

goodness, thank you

grey heron; wheatear (f)

on rising tide:
wheatear; ringed plover; redshank; oystercatcher #birds

sandmartin colony, right on the edge of pasture - holes mined into the red land on a sea-eroded soilface - similes of bats, fish, insects as they swarm, but nothing could be more hirundine than those movements in 3 dimensions, the cut of wing & aviator's visor, the zeeping calls, the purpose #birds

centre of the oldest part of the parish - a doorful of sky & death's head chewing nettle, anemone in ancient seminatural, a hive secreted where there is no path

& out front a willow warbler pouring out a descending scale (a hopeful sobbing) & the woods by the village road collude with the burn to soften & shade into cover

& greylags commuting in a scudding sky - wind more february than april - red kite passes high, scanning & scanning below (you send up a sandpiper at the burn, watch it flicker away on small, stiff wings, find an overhung nook to bob back at you)

& in poor light a cormorant patrols lochan's edge with low profile gunboat beligerence - then starts suddenly for a jagged exit over plantation (out of which comes a willow warbler's descending call)

time of cuckooflower - 1st in years it is not by the window, caught instead at temporary traffic lights; nevertheless, time of cuckooflower

northern scottish

the word 'daft' gained an extra layer with me

we share a surname, turns out

& evening shuts up shop early (even the greylags clocked off at 8 & went south to wherever they roost), songbirds stop & a barn owl screams; all neighbours - human & not - decide it is night

& will never lose sight of that

& the shattered stob with its mist net of insects & the meadow pipits' rise & fall & long clouds shipping west

& the scented whins & the sunset echoing & the running hare & the martins circling

& a hare's ass - knew they were here, could not prove it

& since yesterday a fall of martins to the loch - rapid & batlike amongst the surface plankton of insects - & in the rank ditch tadpoles continue, remarkably

skyroil clearblue through silver to seagrey, early bluebells & larches awake, greenfinch yeezing all afternoon

- barnacle geese still wandering with an air of waiting, decoy terns on a spit, inert but placed in hope

up west in the bluster, lapwings displaying in the wind, scurvygrass on merse & a buoy on waves' upswing

& under the cloven oak yr landlord threatens - justifiably - to fell, jackdaws spend the afternoon choosing lumber - lengths of sturdy timber - to joist & splint to nests

& place of patchy wetland, this - some quarry, you suspect, some marshy holes that ice left - gloam & dawn you notice them, going dark into day without slanting light - waterbirds moving between them, undistinguished nowheres by pasture & road

black headed gull colony - marine cacophany deep inland - teal passing in a different act of a different play entirely - but all goes on in the softening of everything into blossom & leaf, a new & emerging plotline that is shared

blackthorn time & a goldcrest shifting its punctuation line by line in branches above; male goosander moves strongly upriver, great white egret wades conspicuously

heathaze & edge of focus, a watchful osprey that later makes away with a fish, then hunkers on a low branch to eat it