Covid19 Lockdown Diaries – The Unexpected Guest.
Lockdown, day in, day out, day in, day out.
Break for Lunch, break for Tea (I’m Northern I don’t do Dinner or Supper!) Breakfast, a break from my fast, oh yeah, I get it now!
Meal to meal, drink to drink, is it too early? Who’s watching anyway?
Bored as a bored thing, working from YouTube, or ‘home’ as my department likes to call it…
Moaning on Twitter, I’m exasperated on Facebook and strictly Macro on Instagram, when I can be bothered.
Splendid isolation? Not really, I should be doing what all half decent citizens should be doing – birding!
I eat my lunch and go back to my favoured habitat, the couch…
What should I read now, finished the C19 Update edition of the Guardian online, read a magazine and somewhere I am in the middle of a 1977 Led Zeppelin Tour that all goes horribly wrong and is badly written anyway, and that’s when it happens, that thing I’m going to tell you about.
I nodded off, briefly, and please don’t judge, I’m 56, it was nearly warm and quite cosy and its been a long day. I’m not sure if I dreamt. (I read somewhere once that we all do, all the time, but if I did it wasn’t like one of those where the house is flooded, the lights have gone off and there’s Slade’s Noddy Holder and an Alligator, with a lightsabre jobs that you get at Christmas after Port and Stilton)
I’d had my shower, every day if you ask but not at a set time these days, when I can be bothered or can fit it into my busy schedule.
Anyway, give it zzz’s, nodded off, slumbered, bit of shuteye, whatever, I was well away.
And then, suddenly I wasn’t and at this point I’m in what I like to call, burglar mode, dishevelled, half asleep and not quite knowing what the hell is happening, but kind of interested in a fearful way.
It’s a sound, a familiar sound, or it should be a familiar sound but I can’t quite place – hang on Gulls!
Its Gulls, have I dropped me ice cream?
No, I’ve been asleep – what on earth is going on?
Confusion.
I’m not at the Seaside, thanks again Coronavirus, I’m in my 100 Year Old terraced house in the middle of a reasonably large ‘grim up North’ post-industrial town, oh, and now, I’m ‘sleep’ running!
(at this point I should confess that running isn’t something that I take lightly, although in my glory days I was a third rate local team prop-forward, it is something that I very seldom do, in fact in retrospect the last time was for a Black Shouldered Kite disappearing around a headland in Spain.)
Anyway, I’m still running, through two couches and on into the living room, out to the dining room (posh!) and shouting
“Is the back-door open?!!!”
Luckily, and in doing so avoiding a certain hospital visit, it is, and I run through shouting to my good lady
“pass me them Bins through the window?”
And that my dear Mr Watson, is when my suspicions where confirmed – Osprey!
Yes, Osprey, Pandion haliaetus, the ‘Fish Eagle’ if you must.
The sound of every gull in the vicinity all shouting and screaming in its direction (at first I wondered if we had an ant hatch going on) but no, one of our most spectacular passing migrant species on its way North was currently soaring above my house, an angular pointy wing, reminiscent of the larger gulls mobbing it, but with clear white underbelly and those lovely dark carpals and smudgy ear patches, as the late Bernard Matthews would have it – bootiful!
An alien in our mist, a true stranger in a strange land, even our local buzzards, kettling high, twisting and wheeling on their own thermals, ignored it as it planed through the cloudless blue sky.
And its soaring in my Leica’s like a good ‘un, all mine, nobody else’s, my own little lockdown treat, its disappearing rapido and I’m not convinced the missus saw it, even though she insists she did (although she did once fluke a Red Kite when I sloped off to the pub (remember them?!!!) on a Camping holiday in Pembrokeshire.) it doesn’t soar, doesn’t lose height but keeps going, Northerly direction, until even my 50x bins are struggling, but what a day and what a sight, unexpected, but very much appreciated!
Sometimes it’s the (not so) little things in life that keep you going, now I’m off to WhatsApp my local Bird Groups in a kind of virtual grip off situation, then?
Maybe catch up on that nap on the couch? lovely – happy days!
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