Notes from a politically unstable tropical island.

A heatwave. Two weeks of torrential rain. Another heatwave.

It is a quarter past ten and it is 25°C*. The tawny owls have fledged; I can tell because they are not in the nest tree, but also I can see, in the dim twilight, their small bodies launching into the night. They play a game where one flies to a near tree, and cries out, again and again, with a curious dog-toy squeak, until the other gathers the courage to make the journey over. They play this over and over, all night. When I return later, they are in a different, much more distant tree, and it is too dark to see them.

The garden is full of fledglings, teenagers- bluetits and longtail tits and greenfinch and goldfinch and of course swallows, all full of joy and the power that comes from learning to master the sky. It goes straight to the juvenile kestrels head, and he picks noisy fights with the crows, which he loses; but mostly the garden is dominated by the orchestrations of the three juvenile magpies who bicker amongst themselves and anyone else nearby. They stalk joyfully through the long grass with a comically stiff gait, picking through for treats, grubs and ants and amphibians. They gather around the pond and gossip, they tap the window glass at 5am and admire thier reflection, and by 10.30 my husband asks ‘don’t they ever go to sleep?’ as if complaining about the neighbours unruly children. About the only teenager not in the garden is my own, who is avoiding the heat by flying to the tropical jungle (the temperature in Honduras is a mere 30° compared to a high of 36° in Oxfordshire as I write this)

So I walk in the dark when the temperature is almost bearable. My nature writing is specious at the best of times, but in the dark it becomes increasingly untrustworthy. I tell you confidently what animals I am seeing and you believe me because you’re not here to fact check. On the edge of the golf course, I see a reddish thing scuttling ahead- common sense would suggest a fox, but it is not moving in the elegant manner of a fox. Its tail is sticking up vertically, for starters; it could be a badly deformed Quasimodo fox, I suppose. More likely a dog. Things that look like wildlife you can’t quite place are often just dogs, which come in all shapes and sizes, but this one only really looks like a dog from one of those photos where a dog has run through a panoramic shot and now looks to be skuttling along hunchbacked on three legs. With a tail that sticks up vertically. I can’t see an owner, though so I come to the conclusion it must be a cryptid, which makes perfect sense, particularly as it seems to have vanished into thin air.

Another thing nature writers never seem to suffer from is fear, but I am walking through the woods at eleven and the undergrowth is alive; dry and crackling with life which is surprisingly and alarmingly loud in the tinder dry shrubbery. Something on the path ahead is far too large- what is it? a munjac? a badger? a jackalope? It’s too dark in the woods to tell. It’s probably that cryptid again. Or a different cryptid, escaped from the biology lab. Or something terrible that has been lurking in my unconscious and popped up on a woodland path like a character from a fairytale. I’m probably meant to follow it. I’m definitely not going to.

I’ve come looking for pipistrelles but the night seems short on them; I don’t know why, perhaps it’s still too hot for them and they are hiding. Perhaps they are holidaying elsewhere, only a few lollygaggers fluttering around. I saw three noctules by the lake though, a rare sight this late at night (I am certain about this because of their call signal so you can believe me about that), and the Daubenton’s bats are doing well, fishing on the lake quietly.

Another weird sound, low down this time. Just a mouse, I think confidently, and you would believe me too, wouldn’t you? Well you shouldn’t. Because it’s a toad. The wood is teeming with toads, toads you can’t see from human height, up to toad buisness, whatever that is. They won’t tell, and if you look at you the freeze and pretend they were up to nothing at all. Don’t believe them. They’re up to something, gathering in the woods late at night. Probably in league with those cryptids.

Workings

I’ve listed a few swallows prints but I have been beleaguered with obstacles. Mostly heat, but there was a rainy couple of weeks where I could’ve been busy printing, but the studio was full of ants. Apparently the special insulation that was installed into the walls just before I moved is an excellent ant medium and turned my walls into the largest ANTWORLD™️ habitat. Except without the viewing window that lets you look at the ants. They’d sensibly started the nest in my son’s room so I didn’t really notice till it grew down to the studio below and strange crumbs (of insulation, it turns out) started to rain down. Pest control were speedy and incompetent; he assured us he’d just remove the insulation and therefore the ants, and the problem would be solved, only to remove a chunk of my wall before declaring he’d pissed off a lot of ants which were now looking for new homes, so we had to evacuate so he could gas the place. He used more technical, and less I’m an incompetent fuckwit, terms than that, but thats the gist, so we got to check out the local premier inn. Fun times.

Anyway, we’re a month away from that disaster and someone else has come in and removed even more wall and declared us ant free which is rather at odds with the large number of newly fledged queen ants currently pouring out of a hole in the hallway wall.

Commonplace

Please enjoy this selection of excellent artists you should know about.

Tallmadge Doyle, Pitseolak Ashoona, Kenojuak Ashevak, Rithika Merchant, Kumi Obama and Solange Knopf.

*if celsius confuses you, that it very hot. It would be hot in the daytime here, actually.