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THREE MUTE SWANS head for touchdown on the lagoon, coming in close over the treetops, their wing feathers wheezing away, as if with the effort of slowing down.'zwwick! . . .zwwick! . . . zwwick!'
In willows at the water's edge there are tits and a few Reed Buntings.
The lagoon, which lies between the railway and the River Calder is now bisected by the M1 motorway, west of Wakefield. It is a flooded sand quarry, landscaped in the the 1960s when the motorway was built. To the west of the motorway what I remember as a large rubbish dump is now a huge acreage of mown grass fringed by blocks of trees, which I can still picture as saplings.
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fly over.
It is another warm day for late October; we see three dragonflies on the wing, including a Brown Hawker, Aeshna grandis, the large one with amber wings.
There are major new developments at a nearby factory. Someone has painted out the lettering on a low wall at the roadside which marked 'FLOOD LEVEL 1947'. No need to worry visiting investors about the kind of freak flood that is, after all, only likely to happen every fifty years or so.