It is a new year but the new year is coming in with weather just like the old year went out with. What a winter. This is now 3 weeks of hard frost and 2 weeks of snow cover of some sort and with no sign of it warming up. holly and I headed out on slippery roads to check the rain gauge on Flanders and see what the Moss and its inhabitants were looking like in this big freeze.
We walked across the airfield to the old SWT reserve in a bitterly cold east wind, the sky a quilt of coloured rags black, grey, yellow and blue. The air was as cold as old iron and the ground as hard as it too. The surrounding fields were covered white only broken with red deer tracks and scraps where they had come off the Moss to scratch for meagre few mouthfuls of grass. But once on the bog the heather stuck through the snow giving a checkerboard black and white carpet that was only broken by the russet red of the bracken around the drier edges. The birch woodland edge rattled in the wind, the spidery branches blotted with smudges of witches brooms. Walking across the bog was hard going, the surface partially frozen only to break through to welly depth every few steps to reveal bright green sphagnum and black ooze. We didn't expect much water in the rain gauge, 51.4 mm showed a dry month. At that moment I was glad as emptying it with bare fingers was a freezing job and it was done quickly. Just as we finished a grey curtain swept over us and we were covered in feather like flakes of snow. But it quickly went and we headed back off the Moss. Holly decided we should leave a small maker to the visitors and built the smallest snow man on the Carse on the top of one of the fence posts while I tried to capture the cold of the Moss on film. It was a small but happy man. On the walk back across the airfield the only sign of life were crows and rooks methodically searching for fatalities of the cold.
At the viewing tower and boardwalk there was more sign of humans activities, a fair few people had been around the path sampling the frozen bog. From the tower the snow revealed lumps and bumps of past activity that couldn't usually been seen. The ridges and furrows of the old conifer plantation to the west showed like a zebra skin hearth rug. Closer in to the tower Holly was reading names in the black and white patterns of snow and heather, making sense of the hieroglyphs the bog had created. But then another curtain of snow blew in and drove us back to the truck, the Christmas cake waiting for us there an additional motivating factor. As I drove back the Moss had seemed so devoid of life that I couldn't help wonder if all birdlife has perished and if there will be any birdsong in a few months time.
