After a deluge on the first day of a week’s break in Pembrokeshire, the weather perked up, and we had six days of glorious sunshine, light winds and fairly warm temperatures.
A delight and a much-needed switch off for us both. 
A few gentle walks stretched our legs, and as is often the case gave us some special moments to remember fondly – a Kingfisher and Little Egret on the Nevern estuary at Parrog.
A seal off the small cove at Cwm yr Eglwys.
A peregrine above the cliffs near Abermawr, and a heron at their base.
But we had to look hard to see these. Once again the sea seemed largely devoid of any significant life, and there were almost no seabirds in numbers, or insects, save regular sightings of Small Copper butterflies, and a couple of huge ‘colonies’ of the late-emerging Ivy bee, Colletes hederae, – a solitary species, quite recently arrived in the UK, and now evidently well established in the sandy soils of the West Wales coast. 
Doing a little research back at base, I also discovered the website of a landscape photographer, Mike Perry, who lives very close to Dinas Island, and a short walk along the coast path from our base at Felin Hescwm. In this interesting 5 participant Zoom discussion linked to his most recent exhibition, he highlights just how much the Pembrokeshire National Park, which he has known for most of his adult life, has become seriously depleted in recent times for biodiversity – ‘wet deserts’ as illustrated by his wide angle photo “Field Trip, Wet Deserts, Pembrokeshire National Park, Wales 2019″. The discussion, titled ‘Landscapes for the Future’, explores why this might be, and what can be done about it. Without reaching any clear harmonious conclusions!
Here’s a shorter YouTube interview with Mike, showing him at home (in less clement weather) and what drew him to create his ‘Land and Sea’ exhibition:
On the last, still, starlit night of our stay, I wandered down to Aber Bach beach after dark, sitting alone on the pebble beach and listening to the gentle sound of lapping waves. I turned off the torch, my eyes gradually adjusting to the low light. Wondering if something special might happen. It didn’t, but later, sitting outside the cottage on the small balcony, I gazed heavenwards for minutes on end, again in complete silence, marvelling at the number of visible stars. And criss-crossing satellites. At least 30, with one or two every minute. I’d just decided that this would be a wonderful final memory of our stays at this very special base, when a superb bright, fireball-led shooting star sped directly overhead and out towards the Irish sea. Amazing, and trumping everything else we’d enjoyed.
Whilst there I also managed to read most of Adam Nicholson’s recent book “Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood”.
(There’s a lovely story about how the beautiful front and back cover images for the book came to be produced, on this Instagram page of the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.)
I thoroughly endorse the publisher’s summary of this book:
It charts Nicholson’s attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a marvellous layer of life he had previously almost ignored. He wanted to look and listen, to return to ‘bird school’ and see what it might teach him.
He built a small shed amongst the trees with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside, season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things.
Beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and a sense of wonder, always conscious that that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful and concerned look at our relationship with the wild.
Should you not have much knowledge of the life of birds in your local environment (as was the case for me), it’s a fascinating and enlightening read. My favourite chapter discusses how blackbirds develop and refine their song, as spring progresses, and how Beethoven might even have been inspired by them on his frequent early morning walks through the woods around his early home in Bonn. Notebooks at the ready to scribble down ideas as they occurred to him. (I must relisten to this recording I made in mid-April this year.)
Towards the end of the book, he lists graphs illustrating the 50 year decline in bird numbers of many of our common, and less so, species (e.g. Peregrine down by 80%). Some are bucking this trend, but overall it makes for very worrying reading and mirrors Mike Perry’s observations.
Just before we left for our break, we’d witnessed an amazing 30 minutes or so, when, early in the morning, our home was a hive of activity for around 25 House Martins, Delichon urbicum – a species that’s also declined by around 80% over the last 50 years. 
We’ve never had them build nests and breed at Gelli Uchaf, but we used to see them regularly in the valley, though much less often in recent years. So this was a special treat.
Our Pemrokeshire break allowed me enough quiet restful thinking time to work up 3 poems, which I’m including in this post. The first two relate to the large female spider which I’ve spent a lot of time observing over the last 6 weeks. We returned to find many wonderful orb webs all over the garden, and beneath our metal table.
But ‘Shelob’s’ web was nowhere to be seen. This is the last record I have, on the morning we left, when she’d made a hurried, simple half web in drizzly conditions.
I located the tent of Geranium leaves she’d fashioned for her lair, and looked in vain for the dark and light banded legs. Next, I carefully explored beneath the leaves and she wasn’t there either. Perhaps she’d already mated, and taken herself off to a more secluded location to lay eggs and guard them for the rest of her short life? Or, I fear, she was found and eaten by a predator, for whom she’d have made a good meal. I’ll never know, and suspect that like many nature observations, this year’s fascinating insights into garden spider behaviour will be a one-off.
Should her early demise before egg-laying, have been the case, she will, it seems, have left nothing behind for the world. At least in the way of her own genes. And been an insignificant, infinitesimal, tiny passing event in the world’s history. I didn’t know her probable fate when I wrote these 3 poems, but my images and words do give her a slightly wider audience and longevity than if I hadn’t bothered.
(BTW Fiona alerted me to the fact that if you’re reading these poems on a smartphone, they won’t scan very well, unless you hold the phone in landscape mode).
The Blob
A strange coincidence, state metaphor.
Fast bees work foreign flowers, as summer fades.
You show yourself, your complex weaving’s sure.
Such wondrous skill from simple, youthful brain.
Yet as the days grow short, I track your guile
You swell, fed fat. Their busy industry:
You simply wait and touch, and feel, and when
Tired hapless creatures’ wavering senses fail
With lightning speed you scuttle, band-legged blob.
Grim deadly duel, more netting silk is spewed,
Turned and trussed your trapped prey’s doomed, No Shelob
Sting required, your fangs’ swift venomed bite subdues.
Their life is drained, sweet pre-digested gruel
When all their honest toil and lymph’s sucked dry
Grim empty husk: their busyness, your fuel.
Wrecked web’s consumed. Dawn’s dew-etched pristine silk
A gossamer gem, its dark artisanal
Blob now bloated, safely hid, ‘neath leafy lair.
Few clues, no warning signs which shout beware
That slim chance, life-death dance, should threads ensnare.
20/09/2025
__
Feelings
Do you know that feeling?
Not emotions running wild, not love nor hate
More visceral, bleak, stretched back to murky, distant times.
As lads, we knew it well. No matter if on loch or stream,
Or spinning Tobys cast from rocky shores;
Worm or grasshopper; hand held hook impaled.
Or vice-tied nymph, now drifting, swirling, deep.
An unseen thread connects through time and space
Where stealth and patience, guile are all distilled
For when that feeling hits. A hunter’s thrill –
Brave life, now line-connected, soon to kill,
That fingered tug or thrum, which words debase.
Do you know that feeling?
Now I watch and wait, muse wild beginnings.
Not there, at very centre of her web
Where only after dark she safely goes.
‘Neath carefully tented leaf, she hides,
On bank where purple cranesbill blooms and blows.
I could finger-point, yet even in her prime
You may not spot those banded, stretched-out legs
Still, silk-hooked, waiting ‘til vibration stirs.
Draw up a chair, be patient, bide your time
Watch fur clad bumbles sense the fibres’ charge
And swerve – electrostatic saving shock.
An hour or three may pass, but time will come.
Some fly or honey bee with senses dulled
Too late, ensnared, will thrash. Revived, at last
She races down, claws probe, test, swiftly strikes
And now, as brutal as our priest or stone-bashed skulls,
She’ll dodge a sting and venom fang her prey.
Once life begins to ebb away, cocooned
She’ll haul it up, and safely hid, will feast.
She too must know that feeling’s thrilling cue
A struggling threat-linked life, alive, soon dead.
And soon a tiny mate will have to chance
His legs, risk copulation, fleeting thrills.
Sperm swiftly transferred, lineage secure:
Too driven to fear her cannibal skills.
Hide these memories, deep embedded. Face
Shared atavistic links: Feet now fingers,
Touch now feeling, silk now line, or finest lace
Move minds, not hearts, trump life or death or love.
22/09/2025
__
Themes of life and mortality are common ground for poets. In particular, read the whole of W. H. Auden’s poem simply titled “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,”, written to commemorate the famous Irish poet (1869-1939). This explores with wonderful insight, lines and clarity the likely fate of anyone (even the famous few) who choose to write anything and place it in the public domain:
….”Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.” ….
…. “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”
For the few weeks since we heard about the plans for massive wind turbines on the hills surrounding us, I’d wanted to write a poem to try to capture what I feel, just now. So here it is, and with a significant nod of recognition and inspiration to the wonderful Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, by Thomas Gray, which he completed in 1750, after much time spent looking at gravestones in his local churchyard at St. Giles Church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. And then much thought!
__
Rhydcymerau – an elegy
Far from the madding world, these valleys slept
‘Twas ever thus, since melting ice which gouged
And smoothed the folding hills called time, and left
Ten thousand long and weary years ago.
Yet greening plants and beasts and hunting tribes,
Brave first exploiters of this virgin land
Lived light, grew old and low, and when first scribes
Penned prose and verse, ‘twas nature’s pulse that ruled their hands.
These hills, these valleys’ voice sometimes rich roar
To drown an army’s din. Or silence so unfathomably deep
That owls will scarcely dare to drop to forest floor.
And lambs will echo-bleat, mist lost, for drown’ed sheep.
The brook which gave this place its name (bridged ford),
Still flows, now fast and deep, now shallow, slow.
Only the tangled trunks, which Darragh shook
Down North faced slopes, warned threats will change, and grow
And so a curse, and acronym-fed plots
Are set to strike this land. Corrupt TAN 8,
And ROC’s and CFD’s, the opening shots.
Desk dreamed and schemed, poor nature’s waiting fate.
Far from the madding crowd, the madding crowd
Sought harsh revenge: for Rhydcymerau
Grand plans were hatched for monsters, blading loud,
Red bright, which mock Glyn Cothi’s Afanc eye.
Oft-told demonic myth, of beast devouring
All who enter its domain. These beasts will
Dwarf the tallest rooted tree, and anything
That ventures near, ends sliced and diced, blade-kill.
Yet this is PROGRESS, vital, we are told
Will power this land (control these restless souls)
And should you treasure times gone by, unfold
Those albums dear – memories must pay their tolls.
Epitaph:
Slates slipping from the steep-pitched roof,
Guard-fenced and signed to keep us out
Deep-bedded souls who lived beyond brief youth
Might toss and turn – democracy’s bold rout.
Slab-chiseled lines, memorial notes
All gone and mould’ring with no face
Unknown, traceless, fair few who merit quotes.
Tough land stewards, who shaped this special place.
What makes a home, a people, race?
How to value landscape, nature, place?
Best pen a story, song or verse – lit fuse
Should those who follow dare to muse,
“What if? What if? What then?”
25/09/2025
__
Regular readers will know that in my blog posts, I’ve written extensively about local observations of a changing natural world, species decline, and changing climate. We’ve also boldly, and at considerable expense, chosen to improve our own home’s energy efficiency, and resilience, over many years.
So is my resistance to such huge schemes mere nimbyism? I hope not, and for anyone who hasn’t thought about the intelligence or rationale behind the UK’s headlong rush to ‘net zero’ at a rate far faster than any other country in the world, do spend an hour or so listening to an interview set up by the Institute for Economic Affairs with Kathryn Porter discussing how electricity and national grids work. Things I’d never understood before, with the dumbed down stories we’re usually told.
And what happens when the grid doesn’t work. And why Ofgem’s preference for pushing massive numbers of new renewable projects’ connections to the grid over replacing creaking ancient grid technology is quite likely to come unstuck. And what that could mean for everyone who expects electricity to flow. Always. At the flick of a switch.
With the recently trailed plans to introduce a digital ID scheme, (what could possibly go wrong? If you don’t think this is a good idea, there’s a parliamentary petition you can sign here, which already has over 2.5 million signatures), it also brought to mind Roger Hodgson’s most famous song. As part of the group ‘Supertramp’, he was way ahead of his time when he penned ‘The Logical Song’ included on their iconic 1979 ‘Breakfast in America’ album. Which is indeed full of catchy songs, with such a distinctive, unique musical style, and lyrics worthy of close listening. Here is Hodgson, still enjoying bashing it out, live, in 2015.
“My songs are pieces of my heart that have touched people in a myriad of ways.” ~ Roger Hodgson
And here’s a much younger Supertramp live song from earlier in their career. A song I only discovered today, ‘Even in the Quietest Moments”.
Composed with fellow Supertramp member Richard Davies, who sadly died earlier this month, after a long illness.
Ah, for those quietest moments.