A late walk along the clifftops to where the fulmars nest. It’s mildish for a north-east April evening, but a purposeful sort of southerly is blowing hard up the coast. The fulmars, dropping and rising from their nesting ledges, show me what they can do, riding the back of the wind, wings stiff like Stuka bombers: zoooom, they go, in raking diagonals across the parallel of the cliff edge.
In the grass fields and turned soil on the other side of the path, beneath the shivering hawsers of the Old Hartley communication masts, there’s a covey of grey partridges. They are red-listed birds, endangered, but they don’t seem to know it: they fuss and bicker, scuttle grouchily through the clods, and now and then straighten up to give a call – a curious, ratcheting cluck-cum-squawk like something you might wring out of a rusted-up old item of machinery.
Then, another noise, a bit further along, coming from the willows. At first I think it’s a farmer’s electric fence playing up. Then I realise it must be someone concealed in the willows operating an old-fashioned telex machine or perhaps a vidiprinter. Only after a moment’s more listening do I realise that it’s the high, pinging, oddly inorganic song of a grasshopper warbler, just returned from winter holidays in Africa. In the 18th century, Gilbert White’s neighbours took the sound for the chirp of some sort of insect; bird books from the last century typically liken it to a unspooling fishing reel. Today it’s difficult not to hear something digital in the sound.
I don’t see it, of course. Like most warblers, the grasshopper warbler is a champion skulker; it also has a notable ability to “throw” its voice and send pursuers stumbling off into the wrong patch of undergrowth altogether. After a minute or so, it’s gone. Just the choleric cranking of the partridges and the songs of dusk skylarks, somewhere up there.
On the walk back, I see something lying dead in the grass. I’m afraid that it’s a gull marked with black oil – but when I get nearer I find that it’s a grey heron, great bill turned away from me, plumage worried by the wind.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
