25.

May 12th.

At five o’clock this morning the dawn chorus is almost deafening. The loudest are the blackbirds, as always. One other camper is parked a few pitches away from me, a white, expensive looking, all convenience sort. They are not up yet. The sky is busy and changing all the time; long bubbles of grey white cloud moving fast beneath a backdrop of mottled strips of cloud, while swifts screech and arc across it.

The lane out of the campsite winds steeply uphill to a plateau where cows lounge and graze, bells clang and tinkle and, apparently at this moment, no human is about except me. Lax flowered orchids, white helleborines and serapias line the verges and I can hear the liquid ‘pyrrup’ of some bee eaters flying at a lower level than the swifts.

I sit at a picnic table and look up towards the peaks, some still streaked with snow. It is cool but I can feel the strength of the sun already on my lap.

Three dark spots appear, circling, spiralling. Within seconds I can see they are birds with huge wing spans, sun dazzling through the wing feathers, the back edges dark, black even. Legs bare, yellow heads, golden cream ruffs; they are clearly vultures, Egyptian vultures. And magnificent. They wheel in synchrony and begin to spiral upwards and outwards until they are pale specks again over the rim of the mountain. Sylvie would be having hysterics if she saw them, but they are hundreds if not thousands of meters away from her level, and looking for carrion, not her scrawny, thin feathered chickens in their arid run.