Breaking New Ground

Reconnecting People with The Brecks

May

On 18th May Sandlines visits the headquarters of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in Thetford for a workshop themed around Bringing The Spring: Birds and Migration. Our classroom will be the Gardman Room in the beautifully restored old Nunnery with its views of scrubland habitat and deciduous woods. And if the weather obliges, we’ll explore BTO’s site via a birdsong walk to the nearby River Little Ouse and spend some time writing outside.  

Spring is a time of amazing change. Winter recedes into memory and the air feels gentle again. Days lengthen and bright colour returns to the landscape – yellows, pinks and the enchanting blues of forget-me-not, speedwell and bluebell.  Today walking through the woods I came across a stand of birch trees not quite in full leaf and beneath them, making the most of the filtered sunlight, ferns in various contortions uncurling their fronds.  It reminded me that this is the season of intense, focused energy.  Think of the work it takes to push through ground into the light or to crack your way out of an eggshell with only a beak and instinct as your tools.  

 

Bluebells, daisies, feral goslings...it must be spring! © L.Williams

Some ideas for freewriting:
Imagine a new shoot emerging from the soil, a bird building a nest, a chick breaking out of an egg.  How might it feel to be under the soil or flying with a twig in your beak or feeling the air for the first time?  Write as if you are one of these spring-bringers.

Take just 2 minutes to jot down any spring signs you’ve come across today. What’s in the air? What’s in view? Any flowers, birds or insects you’ve noticed? How about you – any spring feelings?   □ LW

 

Birch Nest © L.Williams

Field Notes - The Returners

I measure the arrival of spring in the sounds of birds. As April morphs into May, I begin to list them, relearning their calls. Blackcap and chiffchaff are always first; they often overwinter so have little travelling to do to begin their spring songs. Then the willow warbler gives its tumbling scale of notes, perching breezily in the tops of willows and poplars. Hirundines next – I recorded ‘my’ house martins four days early this year, coming on the back of a wind from the Sahara dusting our cars red. Swallows are back chattering in the barn. Then the ‘scratchier’ warblers – reed and sedge warblers sheltering in the edges of ponds and scrubby riversides and the hedgerow migrants – whitethroat and lesser whitethroat, livening up the dormant hedgelines. And now I wait…one bird is here but so rarely seen now that it has eluded me: the cuckoo – a migrant call we cannot fail to recognise but now fail to hear.

  

We are learning more about the cuckoo’s life from a British Trust for Ornithology research project. And Breckland has its star performer. Cuckoo Chris, satellite-tagged in Santon Downham in 2011, has arrived back in the Brecks for the fourth year. He has spent the winter in the Congo moving through Mali, across the Sahara, into Spain and then across the Channel to the Isle of Wight. He has shown that the conservation of our birds does not just depend on action here but across the globe.

http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking/what-have-we-learnt

 

Chris the Cuckoo © BTO

 

Migration gives us many themes for our writing. What bird most signifies the spring for you? Try writing a short poem celebrating its return. Then try writing from the bird’s point of view – what does it feel like to be back? What has it seen on its way here? Then write a short elegy – the migrant that no longer makes it back.

Some reading: Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo by Michael McCarthy 2009; A Single Swallow: following an epic journey from South Africa to South Wales, by Horatio Clare, 2009; The Migration of Birds: Seasons on the Wing, by Janice Hughes 2009.      □ MA

 

 

Workshop News:  “Birdsong from the land. / The trickle-click of water / over shingle, sand.”

April’s workshop at Santon Downham found nine of us sitting along the bank of the Little Ouse. The river here is clear and fast-flowing, with plenty of small fish in the deeper stretches. The weather that morning was overcast and tranquil – perfect for watching the water and listening to its mesmerising currents.

 

Writers at the Little Ouse © Sandlines

Writing Exercise:  Somewhere something happens — Bring the great outdoors into your poem by thinking very locally, one detail at a time, about what you’re experiencing. This exercise works well as a way of drafting your field notes into the form of a brief poem.  Give yourself 3 lines (a somewhere, a something, and a happening/action):

                                Where river meets river bank

                                a willow tree’s shade

                                cools the iron bridge.

 

You can make lots of these small poems and string them together into a kite-tail of impressions.

Fern © L.Williams

 

Elegies! I like Melinda’s suggestion for writing an elegy to a bird that didn’t return. What a great way to think about absence and presence, two of the qualities we began to explore in the Forest and Flints workshop at Santon Downham. The elegy has a long tradition in poetry and you can find a helpful overview of its features at poets.org, the website of the Academy of American poets. http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-elegy

Interestingly, the elegy not only laments the passing of a loved one but also expresses consolation.  □ LW