Forgotten Ground Regained

Birdfight at West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village

Sometimes, it’s simply for show –the broad-winged buzzard · bores skywards,smoothly outsoaring · her circling foes,her lazy little · languid manoeuvresa sop for the seagulls’ · screaming rage.Today’s different – death’s airborne.A murder-minded · mob of rooks flocks in fury, forty to one,beaks like bayonets, lost in bloodlust.Wide wings · unwieldy now,she jinks, jars, judders to a halt,veers, evades, avoids all attacks till she can fold her feathers · flat to her bodyand plunge precipitously · to perch deepin a protective tangle of treetops.The cawing crowd · of corvids straggles offdefeated, into the distance, dissolves in the furrows,leaving one last · lingering rook, stillflapping with frantic · effort, cursingand divebombing, divebombing, divebombing.
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