I have to tell you about a pamphlet of poems that is out this month from HappenStance Press called Uncertain Days. The poems are by Gill McEvoy and this is her
first collection. They span her life from childhood to her years living with cancer and are remarkable for their imagery, humour and humanity. Some of them are naturally more solidly edited than others but they make for an uplifting and thoroughly enjoyable collection. You can get hold of a copy via the HappenStance website.I drove out to the Fen very early one Sunday morning to join the BTO volunteers at Wicken and watch them catch and place identification rings on birds. We arrived in the pouring rain and waited in the shelter with everyone waiting for the clouds to pass. Bird ringing turned out to be a gentle and precise sport practised with an eclectic bag of equipment. The volunteers sat on deckchairs behind a 1960s picnic table on which they had set out weigh scales, identification books, an alarm clock and old tobacco tins containing the tiny pre-numbered aluminium rings in various sizes for different birds.
Every half an hour we walked out to the nets strung out between
the hedges like outsized tennis nets. These had pockets in which the birds lay safely until they were picked out and placed in cotton draw-string bags the volunteers wore around their necks. Back in the shelter the birds were weighed and their wings gently splayed out to examine their feathers. Warblers, blackbirds, bluetits, a robin, and a woodpecker were all caught and carefully ringed before they were released. I wrote a poem about a lovely grasshopper warbler that I released. They have an amazing call like a mechanical grasshopper; like a fishing reel. The spectrogram or sound map of their call is from www.avisoft.com/sounds.htm
