Walking south down the track, and a little past South Hessary, I once again missed seeing a small bird take off from a patch of wet ground. I’ve been trying to identify it for months. I always seem to be looking away when it’s on the ground or just taking off, and by the time it’s caught my eye, it is both too far away, and headed in the wrong direction for me to clearly see what it is. Today, a single bird flew off, uttering “pew”, a short pause, and then a second “pew”.
My walks on Dartmoor take me over the same path most days. I’ve learned to enjoy the repetition. By removing the novelty of the walk, I see so much more. The minor changes in the landscape. The arrival, and then departure, of the song birds. In spring, the stone chats were the first that I noticed, bobbing alongside the fence on the final stretch of the walk. Then the wheatears. I could see they were different, but I wasn’t sure why. Over the course of a few weeks, I became proficient at identifying the wheatears. The black streak leading from tip of the beak past its eyes, like a masked bandit. A light russet chest, a white bum (the source of its name), a black wing stripe, and a grey body. The colouring and behaviour, as if a stone chat and a wag tail had interbred.
Then, distinguishing the meadow pipits from the skylarks. The telltale crest of the skylark is not always present, but their songs are. The meadow pipit is true to its name. It will always pip pip pip. The meadow pipit can be identified by its “have-nots”. It will never sound like a babbling brook as it flies away, it will never hover high above you, and it won’t raise the feathers on its head in alarm. Those traits all belong exclusively to the skylark. By the height of summer, I had seen enough of both to be able to guess, with reasonable accuracy, if I was looking at the smaller meadow pipit, or the larger skylark, based on size alone.
It wasn’t the single outing that allowed me to identify the birds. Repetition. Arriving at the same place around the same time to find the same birds engaging in the same behaviours. I had to do it over and over again before I could see what had become familiar.
There are other birds, too, which lack the migratory seasonality of the song birds. The crows chase the ravens. The magpies fly between Peat Cot Farm and Whiteworks. At a macro-level of observation, the behaviour is predictable and dependable, but there are patterns that I have yet to observe. There are fewer of these larger birds, and it takes more time to learn their habits. Where I can aggregate patterns from seeing many small birds, for the larger ones it is too easy to assume there simply isn’t a pattern to observe.
This is how it is with the plants that I use for colour making as well. Some, will always have colour on offer; others, are more closely linked to the season. Observing the progress of a rowan tree from bud to leaf to flower bud to flower to berry made me more aware of the individual tree. There is a gully, just off the leat where three rowan trees live side-by-side. This year, one was full of berries but had very few leaves. The other two, younger trees, had more leaves than berries. The only way to know if this was normal for these trees was to wait another season. Learning the birds took weeks, learning these trees will take years.
Some trees are faster to learn: the willow behind the pub is irregularly damaged. When there are broken branches, I can make ink. When there are not, I cannot. The spruce will always have a litter of bark it has shed. I can always make spruce ink. When I began ink making, I lacked subtlety. I assumed today would be the same as yesterday and that tomorrow would be the same again. A day of foraging colour made it seem like all colour was always available. Now, I know better. My daily walk has shown me that seasons with the same name can differ. The more I repeat myself, the more I learn.