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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/28/robins-alarm-red-danger-green-space-shropshire-country-diary
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| Robin's alarm flashes red for danger across the green space Robin's alarm flashes red for danger across the green space | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| When I heard the robin’s call, I stopped on the path and peered into the woods. The call had all the qualities of alarm that we recognise: an annoying insistence, a way of filling space with inescapable sound, an instinctive understanding that something was wrong. Like heart-monitoring machines in A&E, a reversing vehicle or a broken-into car, it was a warning but, unlike mechanised alarms, it was made from a narrative – a collection of rapid phrases, sharp as rattling a box of knives. | When I heard the robin’s call, I stopped on the path and peered into the woods. The call had all the qualities of alarm that we recognise: an annoying insistence, a way of filling space with inescapable sound, an instinctive understanding that something was wrong. Like heart-monitoring machines in A&E, a reversing vehicle or a broken-into car, it was a warning but, unlike mechanised alarms, it was made from a narrative – a collection of rapid phrases, sharp as rattling a box of knives. |
| The season might have just tipped over the balance of the autumn equinox but the woods were still green. Infinite greens – leaves, stems, trunks, brambles, ferns, shadows – merged together to form a vanishing green in which everything disappeared. Something stirred in the crab apples and the alarm flashed red-for-danger as the robin turned to face me. | The season might have just tipped over the balance of the autumn equinox but the woods were still green. Infinite greens – leaves, stems, trunks, brambles, ferns, shadows – merged together to form a vanishing green in which everything disappeared. Something stirred in the crab apples and the alarm flashed red-for-danger as the robin turned to face me. |
| Out of the woods, the world was changing faster, accelerating through the seasons; there was no way to arrest or relax the perpetual motion of careering time. What’s the point? The Point here is the name of a scrubbed-over field on the steep slope of the Edge facing west. | Out of the woods, the world was changing faster, accelerating through the seasons; there was no way to arrest or relax the perpetual motion of careering time. What’s the point? The Point here is the name of a scrubbed-over field on the steep slope of the Edge facing west. |
| From a tall lime tree above thorn and briar tangles at the top, the view opens across Severn Vale to the Breiddens of mid-Wales and the Berwyns beyond them. Throughout this landscape, harvested fields were turning tawny, and there was a similar tint beginning to seep into surrounding leaves but, across that slowly undulating expanse, an anarchic grid of oaks in hedges, open fields, copses, spinneys and woods held the green land together. | From a tall lime tree above thorn and briar tangles at the top, the view opens across Severn Vale to the Breiddens of mid-Wales and the Berwyns beyond them. Throughout this landscape, harvested fields were turning tawny, and there was a similar tint beginning to seep into surrounding leaves but, across that slowly undulating expanse, an anarchic grid of oaks in hedges, open fields, copses, spinneys and woods held the green land together. |
| From the Point, released from the intimacy of the woods, it was possible to feel the extent of the web of trees and woodland connected below ground by water, roots and fungal threads and above by sunlight, breeze and birds. | From the Point, released from the intimacy of the woods, it was possible to feel the extent of the web of trees and woodland connected below ground by water, roots and fungal threads and above by sunlight, breeze and birds. |
| The robin was joined by other alarmists, but I was not the cause of their concern. For the briefest of moments I saw what was: the barred feathers of a tawny owl, taking its chance to escape the mob, into the vanishing green. | The robin was joined by other alarmists, but I was not the cause of their concern. For the briefest of moments I saw what was: the barred feathers of a tawny owl, taking its chance to escape the mob, into the vanishing green. |
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