We see them both at the same time, the buzzard and the carrion crow, drifting in eccentric ellipses outward from the woodland edge, the buzzard trying to circle, to reconnoitre the open scrub beyond the river, the crow being a nuisance, tracking the buzzard’s tail feathers, jibing and feinting in its slipstream. It’ll keep it up until the buzzard clears off. We’re on the brink of the crow’s breeding season, so this bird is hopped up on spring territoriality (with crows, it doesn’t take much).
It’s not really spring, though. Perhaps it’s what ee cummings called Just-spring (“when the world is mud-luscious”). The snowdrops are out in the riverside copse, but the primroses aren’t. A little grebe eddying in a backwater of the river is a murky colour, caught part-way between its winter and breeding plumages. A fair few of our winterers are still here. We hear siskins before we see them, nattering companionably in the leafless alder-tops (once I pick them out, doing trapeze tricks, streaked in highlighter-pen yellow, I marvel that they were so devilishly hard to see).
A single goldcrest trickles downward through a holly, like a falling pine cone. Soon it’ll decamp to a pinewood somewhere to build its moss-and-cobweb nest and breed – perhaps somewhere not too far off, most likely north-east of here. Or maybe it’s one of those birds that in autumn made the mad, impossible migration across the North Sea, and it’ll return – all 5.5 grams of it – to a home forest in Sweden or Finland or Germany.
Upstream, we’re attended by the familiar spirits of the quick-running northern river: a kingfisher, brooding on a low perch of hooped willow, and a grey wagtail, zipping in hectic cranefly flight over the crests of the ripples. Salvos of rival robin-songs ring in the overhanging trees. A magpie bounds upward from the leaf mould, leap-flying through the low branches, a small dinosaur, all tail, legs and black reptilian profile.
The buzzard and its one-crow mob are out of sight now. For a minute or so the entire sky is empty, warm and blue.
