ECHO 26/4/06 - Italy

The nightingale re-appears. An almost absurdly easy sighting. He jumps into view in the topmost branches of his favourite tree at the foot of the garden, up where the growth is thinnest. And he sings. And I already have my binoculars; he sits there breast puffed out fluting, head tilted up toward the sky. He’s learnt a kind of pre-warble whistle which he lingers on for a while showing off, before letting rip the main song pattern.

A walk on the ‘white roads’:
Dusty roadside buttercups; a triumvirate of hidden nightingales singing close to the railway line; fallen pinecones; swallows and larks chattering - in an olive field I watch martins reel and dive for food on the wing; they have the power of illusion, for as they turn at speed they literally disappear before my eyes, swooping down on one flight path then gone, winked out of existence as they twist into another only to reappear further up the slope some distance away, then repeat it all again - beyond the hamlet of Poggi I expect to see the odd, surreal wooden cross with its cut-out steel cockerel on top that I have gazed at often in the past on walks out here; that weather beaten, almost pagan artefact that a farmer must have put together as a joke some sixty or seventy years ago; its features cracked and the red paint of the cockerel flaking away - a lovely thing to behold as an element of landscape, set in a cluster of olive trees. Except now it has gone, replaced by a plantation of young plane trees and cultivated meadowland - a marker post that has significance now disappeared and I am saddened by this -