2023 Discoveries 2

A similar thing happened a couple of weeks later, just over the border in S Kent where we had gone for a walk with an anglophile German friend to savour the historic Wealden landscape.

Apart from the characterful vernacular tile-hung cottages, black-boarded mill, ragstone churches, poor clay soil still ankle-twisting from the wet months’ poaching…

…the deep-hedged hollow lanes, steep-sided ghylls and shadowed mine-pits…

…and wonderful spring colours of golden buttercups and exceptionally brilliant silver May, there came something altogether unexpected.

The blue sky had become overcast. We were walking along an overgrown footpath beside a line of trees, looking forward to the point at which it dodged through onto easier ground when – it was like the Redstarts – I picked out this distinctive song up ahead:

The fluting cadences of a Woodlark as it fluttered high above a Christmas Tree plantation – now, apparently, the preferred habitat for the species in many places. They still haven’t reached our end of Sussex as a breeding species and I was pretty sure they were only known from a couple of sites in the W of Kent. I hadn’t anticipated anything very special in the bird line so hadn’t even brought my binoculars but – as with Nightingales – it’s the song that is really distinctive.

So the best I could do was to record the song on this video, in which I’m not sure the bird is even visible. If you don’t recognise Woodlark song, the purpose of filming a miserable-looking sky is hard to fathom. And if I had had not picked it up, we’d have carried on walking.

This gives me another excuse to quote Olivier Messiaen’s sonorous interpretation of L’alouette lulu singing at night above a French heath.

Once home, I checked the Kent Breeding Bird Atlas 2008-13 and more recent county bird reports to confirm my suspicions that there were no spring records at all for this area. Since then, however, the KBR for 2022 mentions a bird in sub-song somewhere in the same area that previous year.

Another surprising discovery that day was Helmut’s dislike of the sweet almond perfume of Hawthorn blossom. I had never occurred to me that it could seem anything but delicious. In view of its abundance this spring, we did our best to persuade him of its beauty but I’m not sure we succeeded.