Sunday

Sunday was a good day. Its centrepiece was having a delicious lunch to celebrate a close friend’s passing of a landmark.  There was good food, good company and good conversation among a group of folk who to all apppearances were good people.

To say that we were a group of middle class, middle-aged people from middle England (we met in Oxford) might be a little simplistic but it would give you a good steer as to the gathering.  I’ll come back to that.

Oxford, for lunch, leaves most of the morning free so I spent three hours in a small wood in Northampton looking and listening for LSWs – Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers – because this is a good time to look and listen.  It wasn’t a random wood, it was Lings Wood, and it is a LSW spot, and LSWs had been spotted there recently. When I arrived there was already a birder present.

I saw Siskins, Treecreepers and Nuthatches, and a few other species but no LSWs. Sigh! That’s my second look for Lessers this year and no success so far.  But I’d given it my best shot so I was fairly sanguine about not seeing the target bird. Nature is not biddable – that is one of its major attractions.  I’d tried and not been successful – but I’d tried.

If a LSW had appeared early in the moning I might have popped in to Otmoor on my way to Oxford but it hadn’t, so I didn’t, and who knows what I missed as a result (probably someone reading this blog will know)?

And then there was lunch, but I’ll come back to lunch.

On the way home from Oxford it was getting dark so I thought I’d have a look for Little Owls in a place I’d been told they were often seen. It was the right time of day and hardly out of the way – in fact not out of the way at all if I went the pretty slower way home, rather than the rapid less attractive route.  And so I drove through the Northants countryside, along a country lane, lined with hedges which were dotted with Ash trees and there, silhouetted nicely, was that cute little Little Owl. How easy! How nice! How satisfying! The other side of birding from a three hour fruitless search. That’s what makes it fun – nature is unbiddable.

The only thing I was going to say about lunch, apart from the fact that it was good fun and delicious (as I’m fairly sure my friends will come across this blog) was that I didn’t mention it once, but several people asked how the campaign against driven grouse shooting was going.  Do the friends of your friends ask you too – or is it just me?  Eco-zealots? Hardly! Urban lefties? Hardly!  More like a bunch of people who now know there is an issue up in the hills that they are a bit interested in whereas a few years ago they didn’t know and they weren’t very interested.  Progress. People are more biddable than nature.

 

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