NATURE NOTES

Getting to the top is a hard slog with the wind against us, but the view is magnificent and we are rewarded with a sighting of two crossbills and a phonebill - while from the spinney opposite, a pair of shuttlecocks flit to and fro between the alder and the elder. The alder is older than the elder, but the elder alder is still younger than the new yew, which is said to date back to William and Mary or even William and Glyn. This autumn however has been particularly wet and the yews are blighted with the tell-tale circular bracts of ring ouzel.

We head south along the B1096 toward Dalton Sweekly. Here where the Cartesian limestone meets the Edwardian gallstone, Sir Edward Elgar composed his famous Enigma Variations, so vital in cracking the German code during World War II. The view has changed little since Elgar's day - you can still see the surprisingly well-preserved spire of St. Cliff-Within-Richard, and flocks of fieldfares and busfares still gather on the winter wheat.

Descending toward the mudflats where the East Tine joins the Turpen Tine, we hear the low 'tut-tut' of a flock of red-faced curmudgeon, down here from their brooding grounds in Scandinavia, where they tend to brood rather a lot - while from the reed-beds opposite, a solitary male sniper snipes at his dowdier and more downtrodden mate. Suddenly a wrong-headed bog-trotter breaks cover from the osiers. It is smaller and bolder than its Northern cousin the level-headed bog-trotter, and normally eats small millibars. Today though, it is feeding on the messy triangular pods of the pig's ear or dog's dinner, an untidy plant at the best of times.

The sea is gun-metal grey beyond the dykes, but the western sky is full of "the piled gold clouds" of Larkin's poem Four O' Clock Outside Carphone Warehouse.. December generally brings in a fair crop of winter visitors to these shores, and the casual birdwatcher can usually rely on finding the odd pair of winklepickers stepping nimbly along the ebbing tide - though the same cannot be said, alas, of the Arctic turncoat, which can’t be trusted to turn up at all.