Redwing
The first bird of 2021 is a flock of redwings sweeping noisily across the cropped corn diligent as a search party. The field they quest over is the second in a row of fields that border the B4427 – The Old Gloucester Road – between Frogland Cross and Earthcott Green. These fields back onto Dockham ditch that runs from Hortham Brook – in what is now Woodland's Golf and Country Club (and used to be Baglands Farm) – to Oldfields Lane, behind Earthcottgreen Old Farm. I know this because I'm looking at a 19th century map superimposed on Bing satellite imagery on a website where this simple overlay provides a deep dive into evolving, lived-in landscapes.
The B4427 is not busy but it's fast, narrow and a popular tributary for cyclists who move more rapidly than I. Thankfully, each field entrance is marked with a galvanised steel gate recessed enough into the thick hedgerow to allow me to stop, take the binoculars out and not feel like I'm in danger of being felled by a passing SUV or peloton of blurred fluorescent yellow cyclists.
The search party continues its sweep, watched by a buzzard perched on a pylon strut, looking down at the field like a child peering into a well. Other birds flit between the trees that line Dockham Ditch, but I can't make them out. A female pheasant, neck extended, stands stock still in the long grass trim. I pan away, pan back and she's gone. The wind turbines shadow arms brush the trees and accelerate away over the field. I stow the bins, cycle on, and am tracked by redwings ghosting me at head height just off to the left. They flow over the hedge and skim the road in front of me. I suspect the buzzard has unseated them, but when I look back to confirm he's still there on the pylon, peering and waiting.
At the next field I stop again, scan the margins and pick up three roe deer through the binoculars staring wide-eyed at me that I hadn't seen without. They watch, I watch. Eventually, as with most wild encounters, their wariness peaks before my patience and they pom-pom away like cotton wool tumbleweeds, making me laugh out loud: their perfect camouflage ruined by the bright white pillowy target of their bums. The hedgerows shed birds as I continue on. They dart out before seeing me and ping quickly back for cover as if tethered on invisible elastic. I wish I could show them I mean no harm, that they might join me for a few minutes on the handlebars. But all I do is set off their alarm calls.
Today the landscape has that soft coldness to it, the smoke-less blue haze of winter that reminds me of the moment at the beginning of The Snowman when the real life scene transitions into the animation's bluer tones: somewhere between real and how we perceive real: Rebecca Solnitt's blue of distance. In one crucial way memory has served me wrong. I remember David Bowie in that scene, wellies on, taking in the winter view before turning from camera to trudge up the tussocked hill towards the line of trees that become the first frames of animation. But Bowie appears in an alternative introduction to The Snowman, as the grown-up child of the story, pulling the scarf from a drawer in the attic of his childhood home where the magic originally unfolded. "You see, he was a REAL snowman" explains Ziggy, and I believe him.