Portland Bill: The Long Patience of May

There is a particular kind of waiting that belongs to cliffs in spring. I'm off next week and the FOMO is real but when there I'll feel more settled. Come what may.

Wind off the sea. The flask gone tepid. The kids whisper "over there" and our scopes lift in unison. I have stood on cliffs more often than I have seen anything from them.

This is what migration mostly is. A horizon. A held breath. Weeping eyes. Hours in which nothing crosses but a Herring Gull and the mounting suspicion that you have come on the wrong day.

And then, sometimes, it changes.

A Honey Buzzard lifts off Portland Bill like it has been there all along, blown across the Channel on the right wind and arriving with the casual air of a creature that has just walked from another room. Then a Red-footed Falcon hangs against the May light, far from anywhere it is supposed to be.

None of them came for us. That is the part that matters.

We carry the scopes and the field guides and the small private hopes. The birds carry an old set of instructions, instincts. We meet, briefly, on the right wind.

What watching asks is so much smaller than what migration asks. To stand. To wait. To not, for a moment, be the centre of anything. Patience is a rarer skill than it looks. It is also, increasingly, what these creatures need from us: not love or presence, just the quiet space in which to keep arriving.

The Honey Buzzards will move on by evening. The Falcon, if it stays a week, will have given a great deal of pleasure to several hundred people who will tell each other about it for years.

There is something settling in the thought that they go and come and go again whether we watch or not. The watching is for us. It is the bit we get to keep.

Bring a flask. The wind takes a while to turn.