A Bird’s Eye View…

          A Bird’s Eye View of Dearth

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A kestrel watches from its perch aloft

Through the wheat stalks, sunset yellow,

A cat to the corner, treading soft,

Seeking game in shadowed hedgerow.

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It’s fur gleams golden in the sun,

Sleek lines lie wide by several ounces:

Fast as the raptor flies, it couldn’t run,

But furred predator prefers pounces.

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A lizard flickers in crinkling grass.

The hawk would swiftly clutch the prey

To feed last nestling, but alas:

The cat clenches its quarry today.

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Blinking as the fed feline bites,

The bird scans the straw for insects

Sooner left for lesser hawks and shrikes;

Still, scant life of any size it detects.

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Turning attention to the trees,

Tinged brown by fire fuelled by snow

Fall felling boughs, then heavy heat,

Finds as few pickings as down below.

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Frogs diminished by the dryness

Since even before spring arrived:

Only two eggs laid, to cry less

As sibling ensures one survived.

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Now, itself barely clinging to perch,

The raptor would wonder, as declines,

How only scorched earth left to search

Seems still to fill so litters of felines.

  I write a lot of poems, and a lot of my poems are inspired from what I see outside in Nature.

However, I rarely take a photograph of what inspires me – if I am thinking of the poem, it usually never occurs to me to take a snap. I don’t think of posting the poem at that stage, and then I realise I’ve no photos to illustrate it. Of course, going back to get a photo of a kestrel along the wire where I saw it is next to impossible, though I do see them when I’m driving in and out of the village.

So the two photos in this post are clearly not of a kestrel. One is a bird of prey, yes, but the other is a bee-eater, a species which I’ve been trying to get a decent snap of for years, because they really don’t hang around when human’s are near, despite the fact that they are to be heard over head delighting with voices as colourful as their plumage, which is to me, the best in any bird in Europe.

Both were taken while cycling near the village, where there’s still a huge abundance of birds of prey, such as hen harriers, booted eagles, red kites and golden eagles, to name just the ones I can identify!!

And there is an overabundance of feral cats, too…