The morning the birds didn't sing

[Ramsbury_Anne]

This will sound like nothing, and perhaps it is. One morning last spring, early, on our usual walk up the down, there was no birdsong. None. Not a lark, not a robin, nothing, on a fine May morning when it should have been a wall of sound. Dead quiet for the length of the top field, and then the far hedge and it was all back as normal, deafening. Roy felt it before I did, stopped dead, said listen, and there was nothing to listen to, which was the whole point. We have walked that down forty years and never known it. It lasted perhaps four minutes of walking. Then ordinary again. Probably a hawk about, I know birds hush for a hawk. But it did not feel like a hawk. It felt like the volume had been turned off in one field and left on in all the others.

[Larkhill_Geoff]

A hawk will do it, Anne, or a peregrine, the whole field freezes and shuts up and you can walk into a pocket of silence that follows the threat about. That is the dull answer and it is probably the right one. But I will be honest with you, because this board has made me honest lately: I have had the same, more than once, this last year or two, a field of dead silence with no hawk in the sky that I could find, and the edge of it sharp, like a line you step across. I log it now. I did not used to. Something is making patches of the down go quiet, and I am a naturalist and I do not have it, and I have stopped pretending a hawk covers all of it. You are not imagining it, Anne. I only wish I could tell you what it is.

[Ramsbury_Anne]

Thank you, Geoff. I think I would almost rather it had been a hawk. But you saying you have had it too, and that you log it now, helps more than a tidy answer would have. Roy says we shall walk the other way for a while, up the far side, and I have not argued with him. Silly, at our age, to let an empty field move us so. But we shall walk the other way.