Country diary: A wheatear stands out among the shingle

The wheatear is in stop-go motion. She’s in the stones, she’s in a sea-kale patch, she’s on a lump of concrete. At each point she is poised, head held high, and although she may have been hunting spiders in the shingle, her eye is on the main chance, which is far away across the sea.

Dungeness is the “dangerous nose” (said Tilda Swinton, in her foreword to Derek Jarman’s Pharmacopoeia) poking into the Channel and the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe. On the brightest of September afternoons, Dungeness is made of light. Each stone, each handful of stones, each drifting contour of shingle beach that forms a cuspate foreland made from the movement of stones, is light.

“Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” asked John Donne in his 1633 poem The Sun Rising, which is here on the wall of Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. And the wheatear may ask that question of the sun too.

This is not “land” in the accepted sense, it has a kind of stop-go geology: shingle hisses with the breath of its flow, given and taken by the sea in waves, tides, currents and sudden storms. Both shingle and bird are wearing autumnal colours: flinty browns, kale grey, straw fawn, chalky white. The wheatear’s beak is as black as the old Dungeness lighthouse, and its occult beam rotates in her eye.

There are other points of light: blue bugloss and yellow hawkbit flowers, windows of funky little dwellings, and the faces of visitors enchanted by the weirdness. An upturned boat, a rusting car, a nuclear power station, bleached driftwood, a small heath butterfly, a yellow bulldozer, green rock samphire, pylons – these filmic objects orbit sunlight in the shingle.

On this tundra of light, the wheatear gathers her thoughts around the compass in her head. Where has she come from? Northern wheatears, Oenanthe oenanthe, that bred here may have already left on their autumn migration. We know the global population of all wheatears winters in sub-Saharan Africa. Her next leg may be south-west to Morocco and, if she’s not killed by people, she may journey on to Senegal. Her migration to the sun is a motion “lovers’ seasons run”.

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