Extracts from the Sound Diary:
Turning the soil below an airoplane sky full of crisscross cirrus.
Glinting sunny starlings bunch and stretch, pour over the hedges, lengthily as a snake; hunting the fields where the grass is at its shortest, beaded yesterday with hail, today bloomed with fawn stalks. They are spreading fertilizer at Tir Glyn.
Dunnocks are singing silvery in the quiet hedge.
Robin sings a drier phrase, hesitating to throw himself headlong into the freezethawsundarkhurtlingair.
Cattle mooing in metal sheds.
Speckly oval flinging to and fro flock of starlings, clotting for a while on wires;
shaking out, gently falling on the turf. Stippled green waves send up magpies
rout crows. Stippled green blue green egg of birds, rug of birds, snake of birds off they rush to a new field, rise glinting, drift, settle.
March 13th
In Pwllheli for Rob's schools concert.
At dusk on the freshwater side of the Cob, a Water Rail fossicking at the base of reeds. Stripey Snipe got up, and the rail slunk among the stems.
March 15th
In Pwllheli again, this time with Gwyd- we got into the office of the Sofa Seller, with a beautiful view of the sluice, where a Great Created Grebe dived. Do they breathe out as they hunt, the trace of bubbles would suggest steady exhaling. Or is it the air trapped in feathers?
March 18th
With Jan, looking for Wheatears on Bychestyn. There was at least one Skylark singing, Meadow Pipits parachuting, but no Wheatears.
We watched first one Peregrine, on the cairn on Pen Y Cil, then a smaller bird low down on the Parwyd, presumably the male. As we admired his dark blue-grey back and solid black helmet in which his yellow cere seemed prominent,a flutter nearby made him, and us, aware of a Black Redstart , which flew and bounced and quivered from crag to crag.
March 20th
First day of Spring, sunny after a dull start, and a bitter East wind.
On my way back from the village with milk, was glad to be on my bicycle, not least because I was able to hear, in the hedge at the top of Porth track, the first Chiffchaff I have seen this year. Mum says a number were seen on the south Cornwall coast last week. The hen Chaffinches (possibly the cocks too) make a "wheep" call similar to Chiffchaff, but the reedier sound of today's bird is distinct. Lots of wing-flipping, which helps to distinguish it from Willow W.
A lizard with the end of its tail missing, basking on the bank along the track to the house.
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