The South Downs at dawn
The south-east is crowded, they say, with no room left to build or breathe. Here, though, in this place, where the M3 curves away from the London mainline, there’s an older, wilder world. It clings on in the cultivated fields and pastureland that sweeps down towards the periphery of the nearby zoo, and plays hide and seek in the woods where hazel trees grow beneath oak and beech.
Charcoal tones of night smudge the sky as the dogs and I walk down a broad track between two big fields. An overnight frost has sculpted the mud underfoot into a lunar landscape that’s as dangerous as it is seductive. Once, twice, I rick my ankle but I’m distracted by the field to my left. This past winter it’s been kept to stubble - and hares, given away by their dark-dipped ears, have taken to lingering there. This morning, those hares are nowhere to be seen but, in a sky that’s lightening and bluing with every passing minute, there’s a dot that I fancy could be a skylark.
A red kite is also airborne early. A little further away, a pair of buzzards are waiting for the thermals on impatient wings. Two species of raptor before breakfast is nothing to sniff at but I can’t help being greedy: I’m looking for my peregrine. It’s a young bird – one that must have fledged at nearby Winchester or Salisbury – and it’s still learning to hunt. I’ve watched it fly in a disorganised flurry at starlings, woodpigeons, even crows.
Today, like the hares, the peregrine is absent. The kite circles away as I reach the woods that fringe the fields. Beneath the trees, the mud is soft. In the dim light, I make out the slotted tracks of a roe deer, the first few clear, with well-defined edges, the rest blurred and indistinct. Perhaps the animal was startled by the sound of the tiger that’s calling in the distance. Although less a roar and a throat-clear, the noise prickles at the hairs on the back of my neck.
The woods that separate me from the tiger and its enclosure are old. I know this from the starry carpet of wood anemones. They’re slow-growing plants that spread not through seed dispersal but via their roots. ‘Six feet in a century, Miss,’ one of the local forestry workers once told me. I envied him both his knowledge and his well-trained spaniel, lying motionless at his side.
My dogs frolic and cavort, sending sleepy pheasants crashing out of the undergrowth with a clockwork whirring of wings. Where the trees thin out, and another field beckons, iron-grey hair dusts a stretch of brambles. The dogs snuffle and sneeze at it. One cocks his leg, displaying a confidence he would not have were he to meet the badger face-to-face.
As I open my mouth to call the dogs to heel, the rounded head of a great white ghost, drifting to bed on silent wings, brings my raptor count to three. And, beyond the trees, as if the barn owl was not enough, the downs are glowing gold with the dawn.
By, Louise T 2018