A friend and fellow wood-owner has built a hide in his patch that’s sunk into the ground so that windows, which are fitted with one-way glass, look out at eye-level over a nearby pond. From its interior you have the most intimate ringside views of the wildlife – which, meanwhile, hasn’t any inkling of human presence.
As we settled in and waited for the sun to rise and illuminate the view, a dozen blackbirds breakfasted on the trolley-load of apples encircling the pond. The birds hammered the fruits with gusto, then they would pause, hammer again, sending white-flesh fids flying in all directions.
Sometimes they sallied off completely, leaving a contrail of metallic sound ricocheting nervously among the trees. Silence descended; before all were suddenly back at once. They gulped more apple, head up, then down, and a pause for a personal squabble with more scraped-metal chiding; or more nerves and off they sailed.
This fruit-feeding alternated with other jerky, leaf-flicking stuff, the slate pin legs scratching mud in tandem with a downward stab and sideways flick of the lemon bill. Occasionally one would break off from the staccato rhythms of the group and position herself so close to the glass that as you leaned forward you felt sure she was looking at you as intently as you could see her.
Every detail was unmissable – the stained-oak eye, the sepia cup beneath her throat, her bird-track streaks running away down the chest into the fulsome shadow of her belly and then that spring-loaded legs-out, chest-up posture that looked one part gun’s cocked trigger, one part coiled-spring for flight. It was fabulous stuff.
As we sat and luxuriated in all this wild closeness we realised that we spend all our lives not so much in shelter but in a force field of fearsomeness that radiates from us into the world around. Our 4m-year-long heritage as top predatory ape has left us encircled by a dead penumbra of other creatures’ dread. JA Baker, the author of The Peregrine, called it a “hot hoop of fear”, and it was wonderful to escape it just for a day.
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