Seal Music

You can hear them long before you see them, on a still morning like this where the air whispers with butterfly wings. Swallows are gathering over fields of gold stubble, gathering to pull the summer away on their wings as they head for Africa. The sea breathes in shallow breath, as though sleeping, its surface, a mirror for the sky. It is warm, and there again, on the edge of the slightest breeze, is a cry that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

I thought it was a lullaby as I walked towards the cove. 

Flocks of jackdaws tumbles over cliff edge where small rockpools held the light, like moonstones in the dark rocks. A lazy buzzard lifted heavily into the blue.

Closer, and louder, closer and louder, and mournful and beautiful. Then, there in the water, two seals. It was a love song, not a lullaby.

And on the beach, on a hard bed of stones smoothed by the sea, a pup.

This year there were two pups, and in the sea two seals, perhaps mother and daughter and a bull seal courting. They say that seals return to the beach where they were pupped.

The sun was warm as I sat for a while and watched. Still so calm. I could hear the seals calling across Ramsey Sound from the stone beaches there. 

In the sky the blackest ravens circled and called and somewhere a chough joined in the song.

Above the cove a small herd of ponies basked in the morning sunshine, calm on their cliff top perch, some coloured like the bracken, others like the white lichen that grows on the rocks.

On days like this it is so hard to go home and into the studio to work, but I have things to do for my publisher for Frankfurt Book Fair, and I will come back, with a long lens. Now it is time to draw cats.