Walking on a January Morning

 

On one of the bright sunny mornings we had early in January, I decided to walk out through the castle park and down to the canal at Belan Locks, and then take the canal towpath back to Morrison’s, where I could pick up my daily paper.  It was a cold morning, but the air was as clear as crystal, and resident birds are already beginning to sing by January. Robins of course sing all the year round, and they were loud and insistent in the defence of their winter territories.

A delightfully musical twittering as I rounded the corner of a coppice turned out to be goldfinches, reflecting brightly in the sun.  A pair of bullfinches sped away along the hedge as I neared the stile between two fields, the male an astonishingly bright deep pink in the chest, and both with their trademark chubbiness, dark wings and bright white on the wings and above the tail as they flew.  I reached the locks and was met by a grey wagtail, the longest-tailed of our wagtails, constantly wagging of course.  The name “grey” seems inappropriate in the summer, when the colours that dominate are its black throat and bright yellow underparts, but they do come across as rather duller and greyer in winter.

A flash of white glimpsed across the hedgerow as I began to walk the towpath turned out to be a couple of little egrets, which really are a dazzling white, especially on a morning like this one. Little egrets are increasingly common in these parts, much smaller than grey herons, and distinguished by their long thin black bills, and their legs which, rather charmingly, are black but with yellow feet.  Last winter I often encountered a great white egret along this section of canal - this is about the same size as a grey heron. Not today though.

A wren fizzed across the canal and vanished into the reeds on the other side. I haven’t seen as many of these on winter walks this year as I did last winter, but they find the reeds and hedges along the canal a useful source of insect food.  Magpies and jackdaws were squabbling in a nearby field, and blue tits and house sparrows danced through hedgerow trees. A small and very agile group of little birds as I drew closer to Welshpool turned out to be lesser redpolls, little finches that are almost as acrobatic as tits.

But then the bird that absolutely made my day: a kingfisher, perched on a small branch on the opposite side of the canal, like a brightly multicoloured jewel in the sun. The blue of a kingfisher is iridescent: in ordinary light it’s slatey and dull, but the sun turns it into something else completely. It was quite still, and I watched it for maybe two or three minutes, not daring even to raise my binoculars. Then two young mums with pushchairs came chatting along the pavement on the road side, and the kingfisher was off, a glowing arrow of blue. Sadly, I don’t suppose they even noticed.