We’ve had days of rain – days that have felt like weeks, months; aeons of rain, the sullen Aire on the brink of spate, flood warnings all across the Yorkshire valleys – but today is white and blinding blue. It’s not that early in the day, but it looks like I’m the first to break the crust of the snow on the path leading up to the open moor. White-faced sheep warily watch me go by.
Last time I was up here the moor from Baildon to Ilkley was gripped by heatwave, the land groaning and cracked under the weight of the weather. Not now. The ratcheting calls of mistle thrushes – big-bodied and bolshy, on the wires, in the snowed-up grass – contend with a blistering northwesterly. Under the snow is green rock and glossy slug-black mud.
I saw little owls here in the summer, humped and scowling on the tops of the drystone walls, like ill-tempered copestones. Today I don’t see any at all. Instead I see another bird of whom it might be said, as Shakespeare’s Helena says of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “though she be but little, she is fierce”. I’m coming around to the quarry’s far side when she cuts, body slightly banked, wings snapping, through the bitter middle air. A merlin, Falco columbarius.
The merlin – all 230 grams of it – is a chaser rather than a pouncer, a tireless low-altitude specialist that comes in low-angled and harries its prey (pipits, larks, small waders) at pace across moor and heathland. On scouting flights, it rises a little higher and adopts a brisk-winged gait that gives it the look of a mistle thrush – a little wolf in sheep’s clothing. Anyway, I don’t see what this one was after. I lose her as I navigate the slippery quarry edge.
Overhead, first four laughing lapwings and then seven nasally parping greylags pass south-west. There’s some weather mustering at the northern horizon – a bruise-blue shadow when I set off back downhill, a brushed-steel grey spaceship of cumulus looming over my right shoulder by the time I’m back at the road.
