Dog days are comin’

Noctules. Owls. Bad calligraphy.

It is 10pm, the sky is blushed with sunset, still tinged with midsummer magic, and for the first time in some days, deliciously cool. The path is dusty, and sprinkles of dry leaves rain down, as if it were autumn. I wasn’t going out to look for bats, which is why I saw them before I heard them. I had my detector in my pocket, of course, but I hadn’t turned it on. I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary.

Noctules are big bats, they fly high, ranging far and wide. I hear them passing sometimes because they are noisy, but if you want to see them properly, really properly, you need to know where they are sleeping, so you catch them as they leave their roost, which fairly early for a bat, just before sunset. This is fine, because usually by midsummer, they are in their summer roost and I know the appropriate location of that. I’ve come to associate them with dog days, flying in the dusk over the playing fields on hot summer evenings with the boys still playing football beneath, but this year, despite my increasing vigilance, my life has been largely noctule free. Several weeks ago I headed down early in case I was somehow missing them, only to discover if you come out while it is still light, terrible things happen; humans are still up, and worse still, they were sitting on what I hitherto assumed was my personal bat watching bench. Incidentally, if you creep around the woods trying to avoid people about a week after the tiny frog exodus, you will find the grass therein is absolutely heaving with minuscule amphibians which makes progress slow but then, you have a lot of time while you wait for the terrible humans and their awful dogs to bugger off.

I did not find the noctules, and thus came to the sad conclusion that the tree that fell down over winter must have been the noctule roost, and I will never see the halcyon days of noctules gambolling en masse again. That’s why I was not looking this evening. I had given up. But now, high above the lake there are bats; maybe an amateur could mistake them for a bird. I walk as close to them as I can get, up the little almost-island, the bit where the land at the edge juts into to lake. There’s probably a word for that, a sort of inverse peninsula. A natural jetty. The geese are preparing to sleep there but the goose babies are practically adult now and they ignore me as if they are used to, and perhaps tired of, my nonsense. The bats swoop past my head, their distinctive hetrodyne signal blurring together into a senseless mass of noise that seems impossible to interpret, not that I need to. I know they are noctules.

I try and count them and fail. At least six. The noctules are back, finally returned from the maternity roost with even more noctules. I am so used to decline, to things being taken from me, that this growth in population seems to defy the odds. Look at them all, hear the cacophony. As they gradually begin to to drift off into the night, I return to my thankfully empty batting bench, and listen to the static clicks of the Daubenton’s bats skimming the surface of the lake to make short work of any midges they find. I know where the pips are, and they are doing very well; that they are not at the lake probably means there are tawny owlets nearby. I haven’t heard any owls, but I haven’t heard much from the owls in the garden this year either, and they seem to be doing very well if I base their wellness on the appearance of pellets in the garden. For some weeks they were presenting a regurgitated pellet near the washing line; thankfully, perhaps politely (more possibly due to a dislike of flapping drapery) , they have moved thier upchuck point away from the drying laundry near the pine tree. I used to think finding an owl pellet was a rare and precious thing; now, when I remove one it seems to seamlessly regenerate overnight like the head of a hydra.

The world seems a terrible place sometimes. Bad things are happening, brewing on the horizon, their ominous dark clouds casting shadows over our lives. More than one of my close friends are struggling through the darkest of times right now; unimaginable suffering abounds in the human world, in nature. Who am I to delight in bats and owls? Why should I have this happiness when the world is endlessly plunged into darkness?

Because it would be plunged into it anyway. Despair is what they want, but these morsels of delight are what keep us going. We must find them in our everyday life. The blossom of a favorite flower, the soft shoot from a seed freshly planted, the smell of coffee. Things given away for free, tiny morsels that could be overlooked- seek them and feast on them. Learn to forage joy, to find sustenance in lean times so we don’t starve. We must learn to notice them now, to give thanks, so that they are there for us when times grow dark. Besides, I am not afraid of the dark; it is when the bats come out.

Workings.

If you bought a hare, they’ve gone out now. The rest of the edition is to be probably going to be held over until after the small and mighty exhibition at The Royal Society of Painter-printmakers in London Bankside in September. I found out I was accepted into this this week which is delightful, but means I have to work out the logistics of getting work to and from London while being a hermit who can absolutely not cope with the overstimulation of a drop off, let alone one in the big smoke. Any ideas let me know.

Also, I’ve been drawing my feet.

Findings.

I was asked to write a poem out in neat, which, since I am not a calligrapher, I hated. I do have quite nice handwriting, but I fail at the final hurdle with it all; I cannot write in the slow and meaningful way calligraphers do, and I am never careful enough to get all the letters looking the same. I know how to do it theoretically but I just can’t maintain concentration for that long, or rather, I’m just not that interested in letters.

I thought that the writing would get better with repetition but found that this is only true up till a point; it gets better for a while as I remember the poem and make less spelling and general errors; the lettering itself didn’t get that much better, and then there was a definite peak after which I was throughly bored of this poem and things got worse. This is over several days of practice. No doubt it could improve a bit if I were to practice my writing generally, but as I said, that I not going to happen as I find it very boring apart from that one year I was absolutely hyperfixated on it which is how it going looking like that. Also, it’s a very long poem, just drawing out the guides was a chore, so it’ll have to do.