Gibside: A perfect day

July 2020

There was nothing to be seen on the nest, though the nest itself was worth studying through binoculars. It’s big. We guessed they would have flown by now, but the young are given to popping home from time to time before setting off to make a life for themselves. Mary saw it first – an adult Red Kite perched twenty feet or so up a shattered tree stump. We stood perfectly still. And for a while the kite sat perfectly still, before swooping down not thirty yards in front of us, settled in nearby trees then rose to join another above. Both birds circled briefly then disappeared. We see a lot of red kites around the estate, but the closeness – the colours, the wings, and the huge size – stunned us. Those of us with cameras didn’t have the wit or the presence of mind to use them. Watching such magnificence, it’s easy to picture the kite gracefully rising with some struggling mammal grasped in its talons. They sometimes do things like that. Red kites will take small mammals, worms and insects, and even quite large birds, but primarily they are carrion feeders – competition for the crows that we so often see harrying them.

Red kite

It was a dull, damp day, yet a perfect one. Leap Mill Burn flowed dark under its canopy of trees. We paused at a waterfall where dippers often nest but, unsurprisingly, we saw none. Flowers though were many. Foxgloves, red campion, yellow pimpernel and hedge woundwort framed by pendulous sedge and hard fern.

Yellow pimpernel

Hard fern

Red campion

Both sides of the track here are pockmarked with what were probably coal diggings. Bell pits were a common means of mining before the advent of shaft and drift mines. There is a drift mine entrance by the burn well below the track at its highest point and a hollow way connecting them – a vestige of the route used to transport the extracted coal. Today the way is blocked by a barrier of sentinel foxgloves, brash and saplings quick to colonise the unused path.

New tree planting is doing well

At the junction of the track with the upper West Wood track is a bench, and beside the bench an exquisite sculpture of a hare carved in wood. It’s at its best in the rain. We don’t get to see many hares, but they are here. The estate is at its narrowest further along the track, with fields in view on either side – a good location. It’s the only place we have ever seen them.

Hare sculpture

Ringlet butterfly on hedge woundwort leaf

Wood sage

Then came the mist and the rain

Our progress was more tortoise than hare. We ate our sandwiches out of the rain under the shelter of a cedar beside the betony-fringed Octagon Pond, entertained by a little grebe, a family of coots and a procession of baby mallard. Downhill, at the Lily Pond, the lilies were in flower - the perfect shape of the lotus: a perfect day.