{"id":7750,"date":"2018-06-16T17:32:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T21:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/?p=7750"},"modified":"2018-08-26T13:40:50","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T17:40:50","slug":"skylark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/2018\/06\/16\/skylark\/","title":{"rendered":"Skylark"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 15 2018.\u00a0 <\/span>Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK<\/i>. I took family members to Stonehenge today, I grew up about thirty miles to the south and have\u00a0admired it several times over the years, usually just in passing, it was one of those places that happened to be on the way. Familiarity does not breed contempt, I still consider it a thought provoking privilege to see Stonehenge.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s a grand place, despite all that goes along with being a checklist-destination. <\/span><\/p>\n

It is difficult to find a way to describe the sight and feel of those pillars without trotting out one or more of a handful of now exhaustively overworked adjectives: timeless, awesome and iconic would be among them.\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps the nineteenth century, Wessex author Thomas Hardy hit the nail on the head best, describing it concisely as \u201c\u2026older than the centuries.\u201d And so it is, immovable, silent and utterly disinterested in our opinions of it.\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Stonehenge stands in a windswept, hedgerow-partitioned landscape of different greens, dotted with equally ancient burial-mound outliers. As we walked up a gently sloping grassy footpath I listened to an ascendent Skylark<\/strong> in full song. The male Skylark defines his territory with an accumulative song building a several-minutes-long succession of liquid notes, whistles and trills, it only ends once he\u2019s touched the undersides of the summer clouds and dropped back to somewhere near his mate\u2019s nest. It\u2019s a stepping-stone song that is as much a part of this open landscape as Stonehenge, Skylarks were most likely here hundreds of years before the stones arrived. However those early people\u00a0contrived to move and erect those massive stones it is likely that they would have listened to a Skylark\u2019s song just as I did today. <\/span><\/p>\n

And in a real flight of fancy: Is it possible that in fact the stones were hauled hundreds of miles and so arranged to somehow acoustically provide a central spot where people could gather on a summer day and listen to Skylarks? Bird of the Day any day.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 15 2018.\u00a0 Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK. I took family members to Stonehenge today, I grew up about thirty miles to the south and have\u00a0admired it several times over the years, usually just in passing, it was one of those places that happened to be on the way. Familiarity does not breed contempt, I still consider … Continue reading Skylark<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7750"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7847,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7750\/revisions\/7847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mybirdoftheday.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}