Woodland Dearth

Among my first experiments in watercolour illustrations for poems...

 

WOODLAND DEARTH

 

Others may range widely,

But I shall stay at home,

And sleep behind the screen

Of this holly. None

Shall see me by the day.

 

And in the lean year,

When the quiver-nosed

Rodents dwindle, I shall

Pluck the last of them

From their haunts:

 

Under that beech, they must

Expose themselves

To steal the mast; this oak

Hides squirrels I have

Watched all week,

 

The litter of those leaves

Heaves at night,

I snatch black moles

Out of their element,

Squealing, almost blind.

 

This stump hides a hole

Where rabbits, buck

And doe, have been mating.

Their kittens shall emerge,

And I am waiting.

 

The stream I drink at now

Serves rats and voles

As well; though they, too

Are scrawny, they must

Drink, or else die.

 

It is all down to patience

And a watchful eye:

I thrive by knowing every hole.

 

Others may range widely,

But I shall stay at home.

 

Source material: Species of owl which subsist on rodents in tundra or moorland are compelled to wander in years of dearth, but woodland species such as the Tawny Owl, Strix aluco, are entirely sedentary. They rely on an intimate knowledge of the geography of their woodland, which enables them to subsist on the few remaining rodents in the area. It is necessary for Tawny Owls to do this, because it is much more difficult to hunt in a woodland habitat than in the more open, and less variable, moorland and tundra habitats, and thus “local” knowledge is a key to survival. See John Sparks and Tony Soper, Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History, p. 92.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2004.

 

NIGHT IN THE CLEFT

 

It was pitch darkness for him, climbing the pylon hide

Beside the cleft tree where she nested; he clambered

Up the rungs by touch, blackness pounding his rods and cones.

 

She saw him easily, when all his sense was dulled;

Her muffled wings did not beat, but swept her

Soundless from the cleft; he was fixed

In the spherical lenses of her eyes, and she inserted

 

One claw in his gaping pupil. Feathers

Flurried around his head like dizziness

As he slipped from the rungs. Her way

Of saying: “Touch not my little ones.”

 

*

 

He has her in a picture, one wing upturned

As she clambers through the cleft, her head

Looks in his direction, two pinpoints of flash

In her wide, unblinking orbs. Her left leg

Ends in a talon, hooked for eye-taking.

 

Her iris has no time to close.

She is blinded

Awhile, by his light.

 

Source material: In 1937, the wildlife photographer Eric Hosking was blinded in one eye by a female Tawny Owl whilst he was climbing the ladder of a pylon hide adjacent to the tree in which she was nesting. Hosking himself observed, “I attach no blame whatever to the owl who thought her young were threatened and was prepared to defend them.” At the time, there were no antibiotics available to treat the resulting opthalmia, and Hosking’s eye was later removed. “After all,” Hosking observed, only one eye is used when taking photographs.” A picture of the owl in question may be seen in his Eric Hosking’s Birds: Fifty Years of Photographing Wildlife, London, 1979, p. 26. A pylon hide is a wooden structure erected near to a tree in which birds are nesting, which allows the photographer to come relatively close to the birds without causing so much disturbance as to cause them to desert the nest. For a detailed discussion of owls’ superior night-time vision, see John Sparks and Tony Soper, Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History, pp. 172ff.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2004.

Done