The dark sky is already fading to grey, while the familiar, quiet streets are still lit by the street lamps that glow orange. The dawn chorus of hundreds of birds rises from the tops of the nearby wood and gets louder as I approach. On the edge of the town, the little channels that were dry throughout most of the year are filled with fast-flowing muddy streams. I squelch and slide in the pale brown mud of the path that enters the wood, following a trail of footprints filled with water.
The black, skeletal trees reach up towards the cloud. It’s possible to pick out the songs of individual birds – crows, song thrushes, blackbirds, robins, wrens, dunnocks, blue tits and great tits. From lower down in the understorey, there’s the call of a marsh tit – a sneeze-like “pitchoo, pitchoo!” – but I can’t see it in the mist and gloom of the dense vegetation, only the roaming blue tits and great tits flitting from branch to branch.
I emerge from the wood and wander around an unkempt patch of ground populated by low-lying shrubs, including wild roses. Their bare thorny branches still hold several remaining red rosehips, some now blackened with decay, as well as a few dark, furry balls – wasp galls. These protuberances, known as robin’s pincushions, are formed by the plant’s cells growing outward after a wasp injects its eggs into it and causes a chemical reaction. The galls are worn and bedraggled, but inside them the tiny wasp larvae will have finished feeding and turned into pupae, waiting to emerge as adult wasps in the spring.
Walking back to the town, splashing through the sodden grass, I hear soft whistles from the hedge and a brown bird flies out and away from me, flashing its bright white rump and black tail in the gloom – it’s a female bullfinch. She lands further along, and I find another female sitting in the branches next to her. Then I see a male with its shocking, vivid pink-red breast – a miraculous apparition among the dull colours of the damp morning. The bullfinches slink back into the vegetation and out of sight. Somewhere in the wood behind me, a great spotted woodpecker rattles its beak on a tree.
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