For Mark Mattock, June was the longest month — its persistent winds keeping summer at bay.

“As long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.” – John Coltrane

The sky is flawless, bar the floaters in my eyes, leaching to pale peach pink just a little where it touches the southern horizon. Above which a fading fingernail moon loiters. In the increasing glare blisters of scum slide across the water like a mini armada of Portuguese man-of-war. Some of the bubbles left in the wake of a Patchinko lure as I zig-zagged and plopped it provocatively across the calm dirty surface. Distant glinting backwash reveals a flotilla of passing Canadians, the cruising waterfowl camouflaged against the marsh banks. All is absolutely still bar invisible sound waves. 

A lower case ‘i’ dislocates from the text and starts moving smoothly across the page. The tiny beetle shines like a speck of wet ink. Miniature legs carry it to the top of the book page where in a sequence of bio-engineering beyond comprehension, it unhinges its polished wing sheaths, unfolds its impossibly small, perfect iridescent wings, and with unquestioning faith launches into the abyss that, this morning, is absolutely devoid of even the slightest breeze. My gaze flicks to the metallic greenbottles tasting my manky marsh-stained candle-white foot rested on my knee with their spongy labellum mops at the end of their proboscis. What are they saying? Moments later a hornet on an exploratory mission arrives, vibrating the whole cabin behind me. Loses her cool, smashes against the windows, suddenly pent with impatience. Clears the corners of old net-curtain-coloured spider silk and arthropod parts, dragging a feather duster of silk snagged around her double-hooked hind foot. A second beetle lands in the reed bed of hair on my forearm. I try imagining the hornet from the viewpoint of one of these miniscule beetles. Once free from the window the hornet returns to the route it passes regularly along, just beyond the decking. A sparrow hawk, a musket, has been doing the same beyond the trees, passing regularly along an obvious flight path to the eastern tree line, usually with prey grappled in his deadly skinny reptilian talons. Sometimes stopping to circle over the marsh with it for the benefit of his larger partner, watching from only he knows where, in a kind of “honey I’m home, look what I’ve got”. An upscaled version of which is the goshawk’s regular route over the canopy above me. Much higher up contrails mirror the worn footpaths on the heaths. Barely discernible deer paths lace through the leaf litter everywhere. Infinite unfathomable mycelial matrix beneath, networking; electrically, chemically, microbially; in ways yet to be discovered. Routes. Roots. Intertwined, knitted, meshed: in water, on land, in air, in memory. Sentience. Intelligence. All is connected and communicating. I am very small. 

All over and along the still waterlogged heaths and glades a carnival of Odonates. Damsels and dragons. Insect exoskeletal exuberance, opulence and extravagance. Dragon dandies: emperors, golden ringed, downey emeralds; chasers — broad-bodied and four-spotted. Damsels, in no stress at all: red, red eyed; emerald, azure, blue, blue tailed. Banded demoiselles. The acid heath becomes some mock Venetian masquerade ball, with the male hawkers and chasers vying to invite females, bursting from nymphal corsets, to join in copulation wheels by grabbing them behind the neck with offers of sperm held in their secondary genitalia, which also contains an organ to remove the sperm she might hold from previous liaisons! If she chooses she completes the wheel. Me? I’m just on my way across the heath to the shops. 

The last time I heard what I’m hearing now was from a balcony overlooking a wooded ravine one evening in Corsica, a decade and a half ago.

Cuckoo chatter. Got to be from the pair that flew over moments ago. Weird gurgling, musical bubbles burping from some tropical swamp sinkhole — I am actually in a birch swamp — repeatedly interrupted by a triple note ‘cu-cu-coo.’ A male and female antagonistically duetting. She is the rarely heard burper. I know I’ve heard at least five male callers in the area in the last fifteen minutes. Is she a late arriver to the party? It’s late in the season. Spine tinglingly uplifting; literally a cacophony of cuckoos. It feels eerily ancient. Once familiar. 

Bruise-purple and yellow-stained clouds bump across the pale green-blue above the horizon. The sky becoming bluer and cleaner with altitude. A blade-winged Sandwich tern glows, bouncing brilliant white against it, its yellow-tipped black dagger bill shining like some alien probe. Fooled for a moment, it had briefly hovered over the Patchinko lure I was working along the main river margins. I put the rod down to watch the osprey hunting over the marsh harrier’s turf, unbothered. Gull alarms go off at something — not the osprey — to my left, down river, quickly joined by panicking curlews and piercingly loud oystercatchers. Suddenly the whole avian marsh kicks off. Just over a year since our first close encounter, once again the sudden overwhelming tangible presence of the white tailed eagle. A gliding king-size feathered mattress passing low over the opposite bank. We are eye to eye, I’m awestruck at the piercing glare of absolute indifference. Swirling in its immediate wake, highly agitated herring gulls goading each other to grab at its tail feathers. When the giant raptor flips on its back and presents its terrifying weapons I see the red tracker attached between its shoulder blades. The gulls drop back. Larger black backed gulls join. It’s seriously pissing everyone off. Through binoculars I follow it up the river to the huge bend where it turns abruptly to land on the purslane beds. Grounded it is a little less lethal, and the uptight avian rabble goes full pelt for it. It just glares back with its fierce frown, sharp cold eyes, arrogantly down its huge billhook beak, unperturbed, not even bothering to duck as the gulls dive bomb in succession, wave after wave, like paper aeroplanes being thrown at it. But then suddenly it poises to receive something incoming and obviously more threatening. The diving osprey drops its taloned cluster of vicious curved hooks and grabs at the eagle’s head as it swoops past. The eagle ducks hard, chinning the marsh vegetation. The osprey has one more go. Crows join in, the marsh harrier, and a heron. The mobbing gets too much and I see the moment the giant raptor decides “fuck this”. It re-launches heavily into the morning, lifts and cuts through the haze in the oak crowns and away as the electrified atmosphere quickly vaporises. 

Across the watery expanse rain hammers the wind’s ripples flat. The wind that this year has been relentlessly holding summer at bay. It’s March in full leaf. Under the trees it’s claustrophobic, the incessant hiss and patter smothering the sounds of direction and distance. I sit watching the crowns bend and sway and wonder how that manifests underground, around the roots, through the soil. All the kinetic energy generated in the canopy, condensed through the boles, redistributed into the root systems, energising mycelial networks, microbial galaxies. In the rich dark matter of life. A spoonful of which we know less about than the universe above us. 

6 am. On the jetty Peggy and Polly dishwasher (pied wagtails) stuff knots of insects into the begging gapes of their two dusty grey fledglings. It’s free to do morning coffee back on the jetty again. A little later I went to retrieve the nest, now a damp flattened pavlova of pied shit and decayed grass stems, not realising, infested with minute mites, as I hadn’t had my glasses on, which rapidly infested my hand which I then transferred to the inside of my itchy ear. I could feel them walking right down deep into it, tormented by the bizarre tingling torturous sensation. This morning I also discovered that Walden the insolent cabin raider woodmouse is into lemon, more specifically the old slices left in the cups beside my bed or kitchen counter. He drags them out to stash in the nearest corner, while I’m asleep. 

A buzzard passes overhead, dragging a wet rag of pony afterbirth across the glare, above the heath’s massive constellations of yellow hawkbit flowers. A million petal stars stretching right across the close shaved grass and heather plain with occasional dark green fritillaries and small heaths respectively sweeping and flitting across and just above it. The magenta bells finally clustered at the top of the foxglove spikes towering from the squat heavy-petalled bramble domes. I thought at first the bird had caught a snake. Later into the journey an upturned adder with a miniature polished conveyer belt of overlapping black plastic belly scales lies perfect and serpentine in the dust at the side of the road. I pick it up carefully, it looks alive, little merciless blood-red eyes still glistening, no immediate sign of injury; loose, no rigor mortis. As exactly as I would have done as a young zealot nature kid I put the zig-zagged serpent in my pocket because it might be possible to mummify it in the sun; it’s small enough and it’s expected to be a sunny week. It’s too beautiful to leave. Old habits. At exactly the same time a car passes with a trailer carrying a large potted olive tree. In disbelief I’m suddenly a bit part in a contemporary interpretation of the book of Genesis. I didn’t get to see the sun rise on the longest day but was mesmerised by a huge hi-res orange moon, a shaving from full, and its gently wobbling reflection, rising grandiosely in its last light. 

Soothing sprays of shocking cold wet as my feet brush morning dew off the stiff satin blades of marsh grass after the “ouch” of treading under the oaks.  To the right of the jetty the rotted wood work of past platforms jutting from the mud. Like the fossilised teeth from the sunken jaw of some huge prehistoric raptor, trailing strips of bladder wrack as if the flesh of its last victim, cast long shadows from the sun lifting into the blue from the same spot it did sixty five million years ago. Once again the menacing bow waves of the first bass licking the polished sides of the narrow snaking channel, the advancing predator invisible, hidden under the distorted reflections on the chromed rolls of sky blue liquid. 

Long morning. Crabs are fishing? In the narrowest stretch of the trickling, centimetres deep, run-off three large crabs are very deliberately corralling the tiny gobies, pouncing frog like, grabbing at them with their huge claws and it looks all wrong. They stop once the water has risen enough to cover their backs. In the blinding shine from the mud, the rising heat from sun on the side of my face is  like sitting too close to the fire, fresh summer brood white butterflies trailing wakes of pure light. Lazy day, I relate to the large mullet now suspended in the water like aquatic zeppelins anchored to the bottom. A grumbling growl-cum-bark directly behind me sends shivers up my spine. I turn, expecting an approaching dog that could only be one of the keepers’, but who I haven’t seen for months. Nothing, which makes it even spookier. A twitching ear in the gloom under the oak hems releases my shoulders. It’s the Roe buck, miffed at my presence, cussing me. I need to gather some glassy green samphire before the tide covers it to make this evening’s Forest Bass seasonal classic: chicken of the woods and samphire orzo, forest and marsh melange, flavour and colour. Stretched evening and with another insanely beautiful moon. It’s still light at 10.30pm, because there are no lights.

I jolt awake in a panic. A thought shock, like an ice cold splash, that physically torrents through me. Whatever dreamscape I was navigating dissolves into never was. Nightingales — but the worm’s turned, the year’s second half already, and it’s once again too late to go and hear them. One less chance to do so. But there aren’t any near me here.  Missing a Glastonbury must feel the same. (never been). I’ve been woken like this regularly all my adult life. Until recently I didn’t know there was a word for this acutely felt emotion in other languages, cultures. In Welsh its hiraeth, in Portuguese, saudade; a complex chaos of senses inextricably linked to loss, longing, yearning; nostalgia. To land, culture, nature. To space and time irretrievable.  And why the overwhelming significance of the first Orange Tip, cuckoo, swift, mayfly; and being audience to singing nightingales, and subject of Purple Emperors; crucial moments of reassurance, reconnection, resurgence, replenishment; re-wiring, reminder…hope? From one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, whose imperial language has no equivalent for such deeply soulful words, for attachment to place. 

The giant evanescent fusion reactor seems to have paused briefly on the distant horizon, still too bright to look at directly. Between me and it furze land is aflame with cold fire, the dark kindled bushes like some vast migrating herd of spike-maned vegetal bison. Moths rise from the samphire green bracken like orange bits of paper ash, replacing the day shift of silver studded blues. Turning my back to the sunset I project my long stretched shadow, with a tiny head at the tip, deep into the heath edge holly grove, under the sharp needled browse line, and by stepping left and right, choreograph my shadow against the glowing pony-gnarled holly boughs, watching it skank from tall to tiny, jump-starting across the blackest gaps of deep space between, alternating against boughs near and far, like a giant ephemeral zoetrope. As the sun dips below the edge of the world and it all fades to black I take out my phone and open the saved YouTube clip, hold it in the air and press play. Within seconds the response I hoped for, needed to hear. The hypnotic pulsing churr palpably vibrates the air, as if gyrating the gnats dancing like grains of sand on a speaker membrane around my head. As if emanating from the power cables above and behind and as if I’m gently touching them. Pinpointing its source impossible as it changes pitch like switching frequency on an oscilloscope, or some sci-fi buggy changing gear. It is every bit as mesmerising as a singing nightingale but couldn’t possibly be more different. A “fern owl”, goatsucker, crepuscular cuckoo, nightjar. Dry heath summer visitor from the lush green Congo, source of the mineral in the lithium-ion batteries that drive the device — and ‘green energy’ revolution — with which, in hope, I reached out to it. 

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Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club