Above Pont y Cleifion, tidal reaches of the river Teifi run wide between banks of feathery, blond phragmites. White mist clung to the water as I walked along the southern bank, the sky an unsullied blue. Upriver the sun rose through thinning vapours. Gilded streamers followed the draining tide as it swirled through whirlpools under the bridge. The morning world glistened.
A school of gulls occupied mud-banks opposite Rosehill marsh. Some people like warblers; others finches; there are raptor enthusiasts. My preferences are for Laridae and Corvidae – gulls and crows, both of which get a bad press. I find them endlessly fascinating.
There were crows in view today – one solitary carrion crow picked along the muddy shore in search of shellfish. But gulls were here in profusion. They are so beautiful, such a wildness in their skirling cries. “Yr wylan deg ar lanw, dioer, / Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer” (“The fine gull on the tide-flow, indeed, / One colour with snow or a white moon”) wrote the 14th-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym.
The only gull that fits his description is the ivory gull, now a rare visitor from the Arctic. But there were plenty of silvermews (herring gulls), black-headed gulls and a few common gulls, all in various stages of plumage.
It was the juvenile silvermews that seized my attention. A group of maybe a dozen had taken possession of a tree trunk brought down by winter floods. They were flying up from it to a height of three metres or so, then folding wings and plunging into the water to emerge with twigs, which they threw in the air and caught again like eager children. The adults meanwhile splashed vigorously in the water, groomed, spectated.
Suddenly one of the flouncing youngsters came up with a small fish. A lurking great black-backed, piratical, klepto-parasitic, rushed in, stole the catch, and the whole gull community rose in a cloud of spiralling, querulous protest. I thought of Blake: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?”
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