Something Might Happen

It looked as though something might happen. The meek and mellow afternoon was behind me as I turned into a sharp cold wind and saw a vortex of altocumulus breaking up the sky.

The next morning birds arrived with the storms. Migrating winter thrushes were flung all around me as autumn gales swirled into Britain. Northerly gusts pushed redwings and fieldfares rapidly south. They swooped in literally uplifted, though they must have taken a battering en route. Some flew in the wrong direction, only to join other flocks. There were cloudfuls of them; it was raining birds, not water or men or cats and dogs.

I went out on horseback wanting to be right in the middle of birds and weather. The horse pinned her ears against the wind, flared her nostrils at the singing electricity pylons and shied at dark leaves in the hedge (a gale is a sensory onslaught for a horse, a scary mess of sound and smell). I rode through a moody, glinting landscape of rain flurries, but didn't see any more birds.

I reached a grim graveyard where this year's hedgerow bonanza has been felled, blasted, flayed and burnt in a big let down for overwintering birds. National and local bodies organised this as 'conservation work'; a mile of the Roman Road that used to be a wild cart track wooded on both sides by a linear margin of ancient hedgerow was designated for access work, ostensibly to promote chalk grassland flowers. But the bonfires have created a rich nitrate and phosphorous environment perfect only for rampant weeds. The remains of the hedge offer scant food or shelter for flocks of birds.