The tall pines, oaks and birches shake in the wind, sounding like waves crashing on the shore. Small white clouds sail rapidly across the blue sky. I follow the path that winds down through the wood, passing fungi in the decaying vegetation, including sprouting yellow clumps of sulphur tuft and little purple domes of amethyst deceiver. The low sun gleams through the trunks and on to the brown, curling ferns as I approach the edge of the woods and look out across the flat brooks. Canada and greylag geese honk and feed on the grass, lapwings stand to attention or hoot and whistle in loops above the water.
A single acorn sits on the flat metal top of a post of a nearby fence. As I wonder how it got there, a jay flies squawking out of the trees and lands on the post. It carefully places another acorn beside the first, and then returns to the wood. About five minutes later it comes back and deposits a third acorn, which it lines up beside the first two, in a row. After a pause, the jay picks up one of the acorns in its beak and jumps down, on to the ground. I can just make out its head moving up and down in the long grass, burying the acorn. After a few minutes, the jay flies up to the post and picks up a second acorn. It turns its head from side to side, eyeing the final nut. It flips its beak up, so the one it’s holding falls down in its crop, and picks up the last acorn. It flies back to the ground.
There’s a commotion over the brooks – the lapwings are more agitated than normal and flocks of starlings swirl, rising and falling in spirals of black dots over the grass. An arrow-like merlin cuts through the birds, speeding low and out of sight. I watch for the small brown falcon, and finally it reappears and glides up to land on a fence post. The merlin slowly turns her head, almost in a full circle, to watch the settling birds around her. Then she leaps forward into the air and is gone. The starlings rise up in black clouds again.
