Eden Wild Goose Nature
Nature notes from the Focus Magazine November 2020

Autumn Musings:  ‘All shall be well’

What a time of year this can be on the good days. We can’t deny the turning of the seasons: the days are getting shorter, there’s a distinct chilliness and the leaves are beginning to flutter down when the breeze gets going a bit. Maybe some of us feel a bit of a lurch in our stomachs as our minds inevitably turn to wintry thoughts of when the light levels decrease, and the nights start really early.
 
And yet…what beauty there is to be enjoyed still. Walking out today, I’m sure that in my 2+ years here I’d never seen the surrounding hills to North, East and South West more clearly. The air felt as clean and bright as a well-scrubbed whistle and all was sparkling as clearly as through a window in a window cleaning advert.
 
I walked past some mature hawthorn trees that have not been tidied up, full of red berries. There was such a flurrying and chattering coming from the trees with a crowd of birds enjoying the autumn feast and stocking up for the leaner months ahead. With the sun so bright in my eyes I couldn’t make out many species but there were definitely a good few tree sparrows and lots of chaffinches. So now I’m reminded to start looking out for the winter thrushes, the fieldfares and redwings, who leave their breeding grounds in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and join us for our somewhat milder winter. Not so long ago, we were celebrating the dawn chorus, the birds lustily singing out in the thick of their breeding seasons, and here we are again - our summer visitors, the warblers and swallows and swifts for example, have left us and new ones have arrived to take advantage of our balmy climate (at least in their opinion.)
 
Isn’t it all rather wonderful? No worries for these creatures about social distancing, isolation and quarantine - they just carry on with their yearly cycle of breeding, surviving winter, keeping as fat and as fit as possible before beginning it all again when Spring comes around, as it surely will even in these rather uncertain times we’re living through. We can only watch and take heart, observe the patterns of nature that are still so evident, breathe deep and hold on to those deceptively simple words of Julian of Norwich, a holy woman of the fourteenth century,  that call to us across the years,  ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’.
 
Philippa Skinner