The sun had risen over fields of oats and gone down on a prairie of stubble, yet still the skylarks sang. Though the world beneath their wings had been transformed, they continued exulting or lamenting in twilight overtime. I listened to two, three, or many voices intermingling at the fading of the day, but whether they sang in the sky or gave their evening show from the ground, I could not tell.
Other voices came too, though intermittently. Restless flocks of geese seeking rest crisscrossed between land and lakes. Numbering no more than a dozen at a time, they passed low overhead, their wings making a fuzzy buzz. The birds were muted but not mute; single birds made bleating calls that to me were riddled with anxiety at the approach of night.
The bat recorder in my hands stirred, though I heard nothing. For just a few moments, I saw a straight-winged bat fly off into or over a tall hedge, but anything else was beyond my senses.
The detector screen came to life. “Recording… finished, recording … finished.” Days later sonograms on a computer would show that noctule, common and soprano pipistrelles had been making an ultrasonic din as we walked alongside that hedge.
The circuit of this bat survey ended where it had begun, in a small copse beside the fields where, by now, the skylarks had fallen silent under a blue-black heaven. Somewhere in the wood, a baby tawny owl that slept in shade and woke at dusk was squeaking for attention.
Torches off, we trod carefully as the canopy closed over us, our steps guided by memory and the path of least resistance; if there was no vegetation tapping and raking at our ankles then we must still be on the track. I stopped, turned in a stupid attempt to locate the owl, and became disoriented.
A steep-sided, water-bottomed ditch that had been on my right was now ahead, behind, to the left or the right? I was lost and fearful, caught by the impenetrability of total darkness.
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