Posts

Showing posts from March, 2017

Heading north-east

Image
Migrating Common Cranes (Martin Kelsey) I can be anywhere in central Extremadura in late February or early March and if the weather is fine, there will be a moment late morning when I will stop what I am doing and gaze south-westward. My pause will have been demanded by an approaching, but still distant sound of cranes. I strain my eyes as I seek engagement with the flock, but experience reminds me I just need to grant myself a few seconds of patience and the birds will materialise. Mirage-like, the flock appears as a chain, with the composite birds linked in a line, or sometimes swept into a skein. As they get closer, so it becomes clearer that I am watching perhaps two hundred individual birds, but still they hold a meta-form. That is until an abrupt and noisy transmutation occurs, the shape disaggregates and the birds, chaotically at first, start spiralling. They have discovered a thermal and the benefits of lift outweigh their momentary halt in progress. Above me the flock, now