Letter from Coed Dyfi (Dyfi Forest)

Julie Brominicks

We’ve been silent and still for an hour.

I’m wearing my thick green coat for camouflage, and sweat prickles my neck. A plastic leaf tickles my nostril. My foot is numb but can’t be rearranged lest I jerkily kick the wooden wall. Noise is not an option.

We gaze at the view through the glass, Jason and me. A wooded hill right, swallows trawling for insects rising from buttercups left, and clouds moving swiftly across the wedge of sky between. A sapling sways like something nautical.

Sound comes in pulses. The quadbike that came and went. The chittering of swallows. Sheep bleat. Stream speak.

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Photographer

My friend Jason is a wildlife photographer. If I swivel my eyes I can see him motionless but comical in a balaclava festooned with fake leaves.

Jason lives in Oxfordshire where his photographs include hares and little owls, but luckily for Natur-Dyfi Facebook group members addicted to his shots of pine martens and dippers, he returns frequently to the Dinas Mawddwy area where he lived for six years.

He doesn’t shoot through glass so has not brought his camera tonight. Usually wedged in a tiny pop-up hide, he waited over 200 hours (not at once) before snapping his first pine marten. Still, he’s a chatterbox when calling round for coffee, so this quiet tenacity fascinates.

Rain streak. A jay lands, grabs at the ground, leaves. The song thrush stops singing. Silence, except for our intestines. Later Jason confides he has trouble with shortcrust pastry. Pale moths flicker from rushes. Rainlight washes the trees. I don’t care if the badgers don’t come. It is something to see a valley breathe.

But they will come. They come every night, so Jason’s friend Dave, whose land this is, built the hide in which we sit.

‘There were eight or nine out last week,’ Jason told me on the way here, ‘and a cub, but the other day I sat outside and I had my flash units but I wasn’t feeling it. Two walked past from the higher sett but that was it. I know they were in the setts because I could hear them snuffling. And last night there was one behind me that took me by surprise.’

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Social groups

Badgers have out-lasted the wolves, brown bears, arctic foxes and wolverines that once also roamed Britain. Their setts are vast underground complexes up to a century old with multiple entrances which pine martens, foxes, mice, voles and rabbits can take advantage of. They live in social groups but forage independently, mainly for earth worms, and very occasionally for hedgehogs, if other food sources are scarce. Most hedgehog decline is due to habitat loss.

Dave’s got nest boxes everywhere and has a big pond we crept down to earlier. ‘Don’t move’ Jason had whispered having spotted something. I froze. Midges munched my eyelids, and a kingfisher swooped in blue flight and perched on a post in front of me, where its Irn-bru-orange plumage dazzled.

Jason got lucky meeting Dave. Elsewhere he uses tracking skills learned from his father in Oxfordshire, who was a
farmhand and gamekeeper; ‘a real one, not a plus-fours-wearing oik that drives round in a green mule throwing corn at thousands of poults.’ Sometimes his Dad would ‘borrow’ a boat from the college to poach from the big estate across the river.

Jason’s got stories too. How the technology that helps wildlife photographers (he once called around with a borrowed thermal-imaging camera) also benefits hunters. How he sells photographs of Mach-Loop jets because no one buys pictures of wildlife. How he was in his hide waiting for otters when all these naked women swam past and he didn’t know what to do.

Badger

After nearly two hours he tenses. A badger appears, small and wary. A young male, coat spiky from wet grass, revealing pale underfur. He’s looking straight at us with beady black eyes.

We don’t breathe. Cautiously he approaches the handful of dog biscuits Jason tossed out earlier, swaying his head like a cobra, sometimes jerking it back. There’s something of an anteater about him. Something bear-like in his explorations, huge paws, steel claws. Crunch-crunch, pause to listen.

Crunch-crunch pause.

Suddenly he splays himself on the ground before darting off and moments later a buzzard descends, flouncing its feathers like a petticoat before it too has flown off; spooked, Jason speculates, by my white forehead, having not pulled my balaclava down properly.

We wait. Dusk. ‘They have satellite setts’ whispers Jason, ‘so if there’s danger they’ve got somewhere to bolt.’ Presently another badger appears. ‘I love the way they bobble along, oooh it’s a female, she’s got nipples…’

She is scenting. Sniffing the air. Larger, snufflier, apparently more comfortable in her carpet-bag coat than the wary male who also reappears.

‘This one’s really confident. It would take a lot to put them off now’ Jason whispers. The pair are aware of each other but don’t interact until suddenly raising their heads in one swift synchronized movement, they look in our direction and skedaddle. A crescent moon and bats accompany our own departure.

Jason takes photographs to show people what’s on their doorstep that they wouldn’t normally get close to. He likes
the thrill of it too. ‘It’s almost like being a hunter and beating the animal but only shooting with the camera. Knowing
you can fool or outfox a creature with better smell and sight.’

I got a different kind of buzz. From the holistic interaction and sequence of arrivals and departures, of sounds and clouds. Jay, thrush-song, rain. Badger, buzzard, badgers, us.

So this morning I get up in the dark, wind a scarf around my head, creep into the field and lie against a storm-toppled oak. Day comes in small vibrations. Midges feast on my eyebrows. Birdsong swells and recedes. Insects drift. Dew forms, buttercups sway, clouds wipe the sky. My breathing becomes at one with the field’s gentle inhalations.

But when the hares come streaking and bounding, they billow across it like smoke.

Jason’s photographs are available to purchase on Instagram.

This one’s for Jon Gower. Gwella yn fuan!