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Larkhill_Geoff

<t>I will add mine, for what it is worth, though I want to be the sceptic here as I usually am. I was out for the nightjars over the far side of the down, nowhere near where Sam and Bill mean, the other end entirely. The dog stopped dead on the track at last light and would not go on. Hackles up, th...

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>It could very well be a roe deer, dave. A roe stood broadside on a skyline at dusk looks startlingly like a tall person, the stillness is what fools you, and I have flinched at it myself with twenty years of knowing better. I will not tell you what you saw. Only what it might have been. The down ...

Larkhill_Geoff

The wind is the bit that stops me too, Mick. The animals going still is real, I see it on the bat detector, a whole soundscape can drop in a second when something moves through, a fox, an owl on the wing, and everything holds its breath. But that is the creatures choosing to go quiet. The wind does ...

Larkhill_Geoff

Not just the archaeology showing the drought either. The dew ponds up top are dry to the clay, which I have not seen in twenty years of walking them, and the larks have gone quiet early. Everything is a month ahead of itself. Beautiful light for the photographs though, Col is right about that.

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>A hawk will do it, Anne, or a peregrine, the whole field freezes and shuts up and you can walk into a pocket of silence that follows the threat about. That is the dull answer and it is probably the right one. But I will be honest with you, because this board has made me honest lately: I have had ...

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>Lovely, Anne, and that little book is worth far more than you think. That run of dates is real data; the naturalists call it phenology, and amateurs like you keeping it faithfully for decades is exactly how we know the springs are creeping earlier. As for the cuckoo, I am sorry to say I hear fewe...

Larkhill_Geoff

Another night owl. We should compare notes on what the small hours are like out here.

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>Doreen, the bats are exactly what nag me, and I say that as the resident sceptic. Animals do not respond to a sewage works. I will keep logging it, time and temperature and where, and see if it has a pattern. Probably I will find the boiler and feel a fool, which would honestly be a relief. I wou...

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>Odd one and probably nothing. For a few weeks now, out at night doing the bat surveys, I have been aware of a low hum: very low, more felt than heard, a sort of pressure in the ears. Worst in the small hours, worst when it is still, and it seems to come from no direction, or from the ground itsel...

Larkhill_Geoff

<t>And worth saying, they were little worlds of their own, the dewponds, grand wildlife spots when they held water, newts and dragonflies miles from any other water. When they go dry, all of that goes with them. I miss them, ecologically. A whole small living thing on the top of a dry hill, kept ali...

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Anyone else hear a low hum at night?