Last few nights I’ve been filming jackdaws flying in to the trees below my living room window.
Flying into their beds.
What a raucous rumpus they make.
I’ve filmed this pre-bedtime fly around they do many times.
But it never gets any less amazing.
Words & Vid: Ian Nisbet
If you’ve spent Sunday afternoon shopping in Trago Mills you’re probably in dire need of respite, recovery, refuge.
Stover Park is just over the road.
There’s a lake to walk your dog around. There’s a bird feeder observation point to scoot your kids around. There’s a Hide to tweetle birdies on the lake from. There’s Ted Hughes poems to read on marble posts. There’s a natty little dragonfly pond.
As soon as the sun appeared, dragonflies and damselflies skeetered around the rim of the pond. I think I only got a few dragonflies in this vid.
‘Only got’?! Dragonflies! Being there for me to film! No only about it. Only very. Got to be good.
And there were bees being good. And swans. And chaffinches, tits, and tree creepers, a woodpecker. All good.
And there was a squirrel being very good!
PS No pre or post Trago Mills shopping was suffered in the making of this film!
Words & Vid: Ian Nisbet
Exactly a week ago tonight we were camping out on the Teign Estuary.
We’ve got the tent up, climbed in.
And then the something magical happens.
The sound of a bird’s baleful burbling across the silent water. Which then turns into a high pitched melancholy flutey wail.
Then sounds of other night birds waking up. Owls hooting. Wading birds wading about.
I have to get the camera recording all this magical moon music. It’s wonderful.
It’s a curlew that’s what that is. Calling for a mate possibly. And possibly its mate is curlew calling back from somewhere over there.
These curlews flute and flootle across the echoey estuary far and wide.
They’ve taken over, captured this estuary.
Their pervasive presence dominates the soundscape.
Dominates the inside of our tent, the inside of our heads.
All night long I have to keep picking up the camera to record their plaintive callings.
And an odd owl or two hoots off from away in the trees on the left side bank.
This is what we wanted, what we hoped for; but could never have expected.
Something to surprise the wonder out of us.
A solo curlew concerto, with supporting birdy wind ensemble.
While we were sat eating our fried bacon breakfast this Little Egret turned up.
Looking for his own breakfast.
This is a painting Haze did immediately of her wild camping night on the Teign Estuary.
And here is what she’s written about it.
Down to the Teign Estuary on a lovely summer night for some ‘wild camping’.
Listening to Mahlers ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ (Song of the Earth)
Listening to owls hoot hooting.
Listening to the trains skattle rattle din on the far side.
Listening to the curlews melancholy moon music.
Listening to the air mattress slowly deflating, reflating.
Listening to that fried bacon sizzle.
We didn’t sleep much.
There’d been too much magic going on out there to waste it on sleep.
So that was Wild Camping Part 1.
Part 2 will be in a wildly wilder place: Dartmoor.
Successful completion of which will qualify Miss Brown for her Level 2 Wild Camping Certificate! (accredited by the Nizzwaz Institute of Outlandish Pursuits)
Oh!….. I do like to be to beside the seaside
Oh!……I do like to be beside the sea
Where the gulls snatch your food
And the sailor boys are rude
Your sandwiches get chewed
Yet it gets me in the mood
As the Brass band plays…Tiddly on pom Pom
Oh!… I do love to be beside the seaside
Oh! …I do love to be beside the Sea!!
Words & Drawing: Hazel Brown
It was this time last year, exactly a year ago, that i made the little film of ‘A little back garden, being summerly’; lots of wasps, and bees, and butterflies. Oh, and that Lily fat cat.
The Lily fat cat has long gone (been re-located) But the butterflies, and the wasps, and the bumbles bees, are in the garden again, still being summerly.
Butterflywise, we haven’t got a Red Admiral; but we have got what might be a ‘Clouded Yellow’ and a Comma, and lots of Cabbage Whites.
The wasps wasped and the bees bumbled all afternoon long, queuing up to drink till drunk on the passion flowers.
The cricket was burbling away from in the kitchen; at one point Geoffrey Boycott is going on about how some player (probably a hapless English batsman) has got less brains than a pork pie. But I’ve cut his yacketty racket out. Returned the garden to peace, and harmony!
Subliminal Threads 