While yesterday I was greeted by bright light and hazy skies, this morning’s patrol takes place enveloped in a dense low cloud, visibility reduced to a mere 40 metres or so.
On arrival in the car park, a charm of Chaffinch burst up from their foraging at the base of a cut-back Hawthorn.
The rusty see-sawing of Great Tits emerges from the Brambles as I approach the Lighthouse track, a cloud of Goldfinch lifting from the thorn scrub and flitting towards the Holm Oaks beyond.
Descending the damp tarmac, the fleshy, verdant leaves of Winter Heliotrope can be seen crawling from the shelter of a derelict quarr, while yellow-flowered Gorse squat across the hillside, wreathed in cloying mist.
The flinty bickering of Jackdaw can be heard from their usual telephone wire perch on the presently invisible Lighthouse. As I reach the Horseshoe Bridge, I flush a Wood Pigeon with a clatter, before our resident Ravens glide overhead, honking companionably.
Gaining height on a cattle-cut desire line dusted with Roe Deer slots, I skirt the Gully, and slowly the songs of Robin, Blackbird and Dunnock rise from the tangled depths.
Topping out and continuing north into Saxon Field, the soft mud yields more signs - the splayed toes of a mystery five-toed mammal that previously ducked beneath the field gate (Possibly a Mustelid, probably a Brown Rat), and the delicate, diminutive slots of a Muntjac Deer, barely larger than my own thumb pad.
Though the persistent sea fog renders their high-flying displays redundant, the territorial melodies of Skylark drift down to me from the heights of Ox-Eye Field, and the weak sun slowly but inexorably begins to burn through the miasma, promising a better day ahead.