Winter Walk

I went for a walk down one of the lanes around my house, into an area of intensive arable farming which I think of as ‘the prairies’. One field had been recently ploughed and not yet planted up. There was a mixed flock of rooks and jackdaws feeding there. Past that, there are huge fields of winter wheat, with not much sign of life until I reached the stream, where I saw a small flock of bramblings, high in the trees. In sheep pasture beyond that, there was a single brown hare, looking very like a clod of earth. It was soaking up the last of the sun’s rays just before dusk. Walking back, a barn owl flew over and disappeared behind the trees along the line of the stream. I waited for it to reappear, but there was no further sign of it.

Brown hare watching the sunset
 
Mist coming in over the East Yorkshire prairies at dusk

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