Wildflower meadows stretch down from toadflax-draped walls of the hamlet’s burying-ground to the valley’s winterbourne. They’re bounded by a curving succession of thickets. Between the thickets and the tall cypresses above the graves is a constant lively flitting of serins, voices restless as their flight. A badger trail contours round to a grassy bay, a vantage point across to the margin of the great oakwood beyond the stream.
I come here in the evening, hoping to catch sight of sangliers (wild boar), which live deep among the trees, and are often to be seen rooting around by the river, digging up black bryony that grows there. The young wild pigs are a delight, striped and scuttling like humbugs on legs. There’s no sign of them around the farmer’s newly harrowed field tonight. The only movement I catch is of several large birds behaving much as rooks might. When I focus the glass, they turn out to be red kites – old familiar friends from Wales – engaged in the most un-raptorlike behaviour of grubbing around for worms and leatherjackets.
A mingled scent of fox and tomcat is on the cooling air. I wonder what scenario may be on point of enactment? Instead, thus-fragranced regiments of early purple and pyramidal orchids, twice the size of their Welsh cousins, march into grassland where a day before there’d been no sign of them.
The warblers are tuning up for their evening recital, volleying frantic brief bursts of chittery calls across this quiet landscape. I sit and lend an ear – a more reliable tactic in identification than the visual with birds that have mastered every creeping art of concealment and now have new foliage among which to practise them. More in hope than expectation I focus my glass on the source of song and through an opportune gap in the branches see a male blackcap just as he’s opening his throat to give voice to a fluting sequence of plaintive, clear notes that perhaps not even a nightingale can surpass. Close by, a Cetti’s warbler splutters out his plosive, clangorous response.
