Return of the vagabond waif

We’re back in the tiny scrubby woods for our daily walk. It’s full of litter.

Newton Abbot Quay - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

Imagine a world where every sip and morsel of food is covered in plastic with a 1,000 year life. No, you don’t need to have an imagination; it’s here already.

“A moment on the lips. A thousand years in the ocean.”

Newton Abbot Quay - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

This railway bridge is part of Brunel’s Great Western Railway. The railway was a monumental act of environmental vandalism, with train tracks running along both estuaries of the Exe and the Teign, with tunnels blasted through sea cliffs and tracks laid across beaches. The initiators of HS2 showed a lack of imagination in missing out the word ‘great’ from the name of their modern monumental act of environmental vandalism. Support for their desecration of ancient woodlands would have been much greater if they’d called it ‘great’.

There’s an apple tree hidden in a small stand of birch and elder. This is just the sort of place I would have gone as a child. The only difference is the amount of plastic here now and the absence of a wet pornographic magazine half-hidden under a bush. Technology has moved on.

A Blackbird is making a feast of one of the apples.

Blackbird - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

This is one of the few shots I got where it hasn’t got its nictitating membrane out covering its eye from damage by flying pieces of apple.

Blackbird - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

We’re here to see the Yellow-Browed Warbler again. Last time we had great success:

When we were researching what bird the Puffin Whisperer had found I checked it out in Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs by TA Coward. The fact it mentions identifying eggs tells you it was published in 1969, although my copy is the 1975 reprint.

Birds of the British Isles - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)
The Yellow-Browed Warbler is top right.

The book calls a similar species a vagrant. I can tell that’s not an English word the Puffin Whisperer knows by her expression. I check the Italian translation. “Vagabondo”, I say. “Ah, vagabondo!” she says. It’s a vagabond waif.

We wait, alive to every feint call, and hyper-aware of the tiniest of movements in the trees. And here it comes:

Yellow Browed Warbler - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

What a charmer.

Then it’s time to start our walk back through the countryside to home. Coronavirus has made vagabond waifs of many of us.

Newton Abbot Quay - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

I wonder; is this what HS2 will look like in 100 years?

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