Still
BY ALEXI FRANCIS
Alexi Francis is an artist and illustrator, who
studied zoology at university and now lives in
East Sussex. Here she describes how silence and
stillness can bring you closer to nocturnal nature
in the most magical of ways.D
usk, when the edges of all things blur. A time
of mauve and moonlight, of shapeshiftings and
stirrings, of magic. It’s my favourite time of day.
Nocturnal wildlife has a special fascination; it usually
lives out of sight beneath the radar of our everyday,
human lives. We pull on our f leeces, let the camp-fire
die down and steal into the woods. I hear the moan ofthistle-head had seeded and there was so many that
the whole fen was draped on a long loose scarf of dirty
snow. The tiny seeds on each head are dark and the
plumes of down sandy pale and almost transparent.
As the plant grows, both seed and plume crowd tight
together but the whole head loosens as it dries and sets
so the seeds are pushed up and out while the down
froths around them.
On the first autumn day on the fen, the wind
sometimes took a whole thistle-head and sometimes
just a hank of down. The loosest heads were the first to
be prised from their prickly anchor but even these
lift-offs involved countless local struggles, the breeze
picking at the ties that held them down to its plant, the
down committed to its fight but still not going
willingly. Once these negotiations were over the
cottony seed heads were lifted, raised, and then
encouraged along above the thistles and the rest of the
field of grass, sorrel, loosestrife, wild carrots and dock.
As they blew, the strands snagged on one another,
riding the air like soft chain-shot, wool-gathering as
they went. Everything was f loating towards the
south-east in a silent, spreading, milky broadcast.
I stepped off the bank and followed. Like snow pushed
away from the earth, the down sometimes rose in the
wind and climbed upwards.
There was more. Thistle is a goldfinch food and
there were dozens of them, at least 200 hundred all
together, feeding in loose jingling f locks on the burst
heads. Their expert beaks made repeated delvings intothe thistle hearts, until the birds surfaced and superbly
husked the tiny seeds they had picked, turning it as
required in their beaks like magicians shifting cards.
But the breeze and the blow distracted them and
made them f lighty. Group after group lifted as one
from among the thistles, each pulled by the bird ahead
of them and pulling those behind.
Their departures and their landings released still
more down and fanned the drift yet further. The
golden bars along their wings caught the light like the
slub of silk, and twinkling their toy piano music they
moved off through the f loating down like itinerant
weavers f lying their precious thread through the
homespun, until the whole fen became a field of
the cloth of gold.
Extract from Four Fields by Tim Dee (Jonathan Cape).“Everything was floating
towards the south-east in a
silent, milky broadcast”