LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: 'WALKING UNDER THE WOLF MOON'

A walk in the English countryside on the January night of the Wolf Moon...

This is an extract from my forthcoming book ‘Night Life’, walks in Britain after dark, and the sequel to ‘Nightwalking’, Doubleday, 2023.

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The first full moon of the year. The wolf moon. To take the dog for a nocturnal ramble was a poetic irresistibility.

Humans are diurnal beings, and stepping outside into the dark is never neutral. Some feeling, on a range from fear to exaltation, is always engendered. Tonight, it was disbelief. Stepping on to the farm lane, the great white orb ahead, I could have read by its light a small print book, and its rays transmogrified the black Labrador into a golden one.

On the wall by the barn a tawny owl regarded our approach, until something more interesting arrested its attention in the orchard behind. With a mechanical swivel, as if pivoted, Old Brown turned his head 180 degrees. (There are owls that can rotate their heads through 270 degrees.) The tawny flew off, a leaf blown by the wind, a scene from a silent film.

Frost was already taking grip; on the grass strip in the middle of the lane my boots shushed a metronomic lullaby to aid the sleeping land. The poor pigeons were unimpressed. Our perambulation disturbed their roosting, and they clappered out of the lane’s hemming trees in bow waves as we progressed. There was the click of claws and snuffling nose of the dog, otherwise quiet, as though the white moon bleach had imposed a frozen silence on the fields and woods. Full moonshine tends to smother star- and planet-spotting, yet Mars was conspicuous in its attendance of the moon, a gentleman equerry, a man-in-waiting.

Mars, the red planet. We invariably depict the celestial bodies as white, but the heavens are coloured. The constellation Orion boasts the orange Betelgeuse and the blue Rigel. Dubhe in the Plough is yellow. Venus is golden. Sirius, the dog star, even twinkles in varying hues.