Stephen Halton – Wood Warbler

Stephen sent me this image of his watercolour of a Wood Warbler after I enthused about the bird in my series of blogs on bird song. It’s a lovely image, don’t you think? And it gives me the excuse, if any were needed, to reproduce Stephen’s poem about the bird’s habitat too, which first appeared on this blog in May 2017.

Stitching The Western Oakwoods: The Green and the Red

North Devon,
The Exmoor hills and valleys,
Western oakwoods smirring the slopes,
A warm summer’s evening,
Air shimmers and glitters,
Off freshly unfurled, pale oak leaves,
Everything haloed and backlit
Into
A storm of jewels,
Insects fuzzy against dark hillside,
Flying sparks of light,
Whilst caterpillars’ silk,
Tautly,
Stretches from leaf to leaf,
Like finest silver thread.

Then a faint shimmering,
Distantly heard,
Echoing off leaves,
And tremulously stitching,
And shivering,
Fusing the soundscape together:
A wood warbler sings,
Stitching and dappling,
The light.
And spins.
Its magic,
Of ocean-shallow,
Sea-green light,
Through layers of leaves,
Threading the one to the other.

Then a rich staccato of sound,
A rock in the stream,
And,
In the distance,
A redstart,
Sings its all too-brief song,
A mechanical stutter,
A promise never fulfilled,
As red-gold smoulders,
And lights a fire,
But cannot quench,
The pale yellow and green,
Of the wood warbler,
In its gold-flecked, leafy light,
Of a million,
Glittering,
Oak leaves,
On a Devon hillside,
Sweeping down to a sapphire,
Blue sea.

Steve Halton
May 2017
[email protected]

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