Tracks and Tracery

Harsh but beautiful, this winter has given us some fine mornings but not many as memorable as this.

First distraction was the badger prints taking a long route around the woods. Then the fox, both keeping to the footpath for much of the time. Then the fox's prints veered off to go under the fence.

Was it experience that had taught him to go through here where the lethal bottom strand of barbed wire stops for the stile?

Better than yesterday, when mist made the fresh snow more strange and chilling in another way. Today the sun as it came through a couple of clouds blessed the snow covered branches with a hint of gilding. Another reward for an early start.

Cathedral-like tracery was everywhere in the woods, stunningly illuminated but with no artificial device.

Other tracks told us that a larger mammal, red deer, was close by. Would it be the hinds of a few days ago?

This time they were stags. The sense of rightness of the features in a landscape is of course a subjective thing and you can believe something is so natural and inevitable and be astounded that another person can think differently. But I've yet to speak to anyone on Blacka that does not feel this way when it's presented to them as an issue. When deer are running so gracefully as they do in this landscape how could anyone want to change anything?

Only perhaps a soulless bureaucracy that pronounces it to be 'in unfavouarble condition.'

The gratitude of small birds is touching after a cruel night as they welcome the few scraps of grated cheddar.

But the robin got it into his head that there was a store of cheese in my camera case and seemed quite annoyed to be wrong.

Blacka's heroes that make a morning like this happen are the trees. Each one plays its part and shame on those who would want to attack them under the pretext of 'management'