Sometimes it is best to just sit and wait. We settled down on a mossy bank among yellow pimpernel and unfurling fern fronds in an oak wood to watch the life around us.
Almost immediately two male green-veined white butterflies, contesting territory in a furious aerial dogfight, came bowling down the ride, briefly disengaging to feed on the spikes of bugle flowers before resuming hostilities.
I watched an orange and black ladybird scuttle across the toe of my boot, then followed the looping progress of a geometrid caterpillar so exquisitely camouflaged that it became a dead twig when poked with a grass stem. In front of us a female pied flycatcher flitted in and out of honeysuckle foliage that clothed the broken stump of a birch.
Penetrating phrases from blackcaps, hidden from sight, drifted down from the oak canopy where a long-tailed tit was busy collecting caterpillars.
But the chill north-westerly wind that had slowed spring’s progress in this wood throughout May soon made us shiver, so reluctantly we hauled ourselves to our feet.
As we rounded the bend in the grassy track we saw what looked like a fluffy toy stuffed into a cavity above the roots of an oak: a tawny owl chick, not long out of the nest, dozing away the daylight hours, just a few steps from the place where we had been sitting.
Its parents had dispersed it and its siblings around the wood, as owls often do, and would return with mice and voles at twilight.
Venerable oak and vulnerable owlet: it seemed almost as if the deep fold in the trunk of the ancient tree had formed to shelter this talisman of wisdom, so comfortable was the fit.
As we drew level its head swivelled and it surveyed us through half-closed eyes, then it opened its beak and emitted two loud metallic clicks in alarm. We scanned the branches above but could see no sign of its guardians, who must have been nearby. We walked on with that uneasy feeling that we, the watchers, had all the time been watched.
Twitter: @seymourdaily
