Radio Lento podcast24 Apr 2021

Waiting for skylarks at the Rye Harbour nature reserve

If I sit here, very still, so as not to scare the water birds, might they come back? I hope so. They've wheeled away again, like they do. It's their drifting altitudinous song that I most want to hear. Sparse clouds are hurrying by. When the sun is out, it's surprisingly strong. It makes the air smell of warm grass. A sea breeze is blowing. Swishing in, from left to right through the tall stems. This spot is only a few hundred yards from the crashing waves of the sea, but a steep shingle ridge softens the sound into almost nothing.

It's quiet. Birds are all around, mostly in the mid-distance. A wader that's been sploshing along the shallow edge searching for food has come closer. It seems unperturbed. Does it know I'm here?

As I wonder I start to hear them. It is them. They're coming. The skylarks are wheeling back, beginning to unfurl their cornfield-yellow string of audible bunting across the sky above me once again. I drink their sound in. The simple timeless beauty of them. My body eases into a state of complete rest.

From somewhere behind, on a track that bisects the nature reserve a car bumps slowly by. A minute later a heavy truck follows. Clanking metalwork over deep ruts. It sounds like it's out of a film set in the Australian Outback. It stops, turns around, then clanks back off into the distance, the way it came. As it goes it draws a long and dusty spatial line across the sound landscape, reminding me this is a vast land, on the edge.

The skylarks continue to wheel. Two geese fly by. A migrating swallow makes landfall.

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