Rasping birds of paradise

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/02/rasping-birds-paradise

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The rivers that powered innumerable mills in north Carmarthenshire’s old flannel-weaving district spill down narrow oakwood valleys to join afon Teifi upstream of Newcastle Emlyn. These past few weeks their lovely network of paths – to experience which in May and June is one of the great pleasures of Welsh landscape – has been fragmented as floods pour over the stepping-stones where old pedestrian ways cross from bank to bank in search of the easiest route.

After days of rain I walked upstream for half a mile from the chapel in Cwmpengraig, and arrived at a crossing-point that had all the threat of a Highland burn or a Garhwali nullah. Somewhere under the brown torrent were great square blocks of limestone, their presence only betrayed by the flooding water’s turbulence and roar. I sat on a fallen trunk, took out my flask, and lent an ear to the sounds of the wood.

Related: Screeching alarm, silent attack

It seems so lifeless at this deep dead of the year, except that cutting the silence, and from not far away, there came a repeated cry like the sound made in tearing a piece of calico, as the 19th-century naturalist Richard Jefferies described it. My terrier heard it, and quivered to be away in pursuit. A jay, I told her. It will be here soon enough, once it’s finished its taunting of some poor tawny owl disturbed from its daytime slumbers.

Sure enough, our resting-place was suddenly filled with movement, rent by harsh cries. A pair of jays. Sgrech coed is their onomatopoeic Welsh name – wood-screecher. But that’s only their alarm call. These two, gathering acorns, conversed together in rasping undertones, like a jigsaw cutting into softwood. Their movement constant and watchful, their plumage an ethereal design of cinnamon and celestial azure.

Bright crows! WH Hudson (1841-1922) thought them the British bird of paradise, and railed against their persecution by shooters and its effect. Certainly, in my home oakwoods of Ariège, they are far more confiding than our brutalised British birds. It gladdens me to see them so.