The first time I saw a bee eater was over thirty years ago, on a beautiful tropical morning near a beach, now sadly part of a war zone – on the east coast of Sri Lanka, near Trincomalee.
We were newly arrived on the island and had made a hasty retreat from the capital Colombo which had proved too much of a culture shock. From Colombo bus station we fled across the island on what proved to be a magical, if decidedly uncomfortable ride, into the dense jungle interior, through the rich greens of palms and giant ferns, past small lakes and rice paddies where the white egrets perched on the backs of the water buffalo and kingfishers flashed turquoise.
We ended our journey at Uppavelli on the Indian Ocean and that is where the next morning on our way to the beach we saw the bee eaters – sat on a wire fence. They shone like jewels and I thought that they were the most exotic creatures I had ever seen.
Imagine how I felt then when Alan and Nira asked me casually if I’d seen the field where the bee eaters were nesting (bee eaters nest on the ground – I didn’t know that).
I had not! Alan duly drew me a map not only showing the bee eater field but also the wood where the golden Oreilles could be heard, although rarely seen as they are very shy birds.
I set out one blisteringly hot morning to the bee eater field, just out of town, behind the garden centre along a single track road. When I got to the field it was all furrows, dry earth and small mounds like hives – the nests. I saw the bee -eaters then high up on the telegraph wires, silhouetted against the sun.
I sat in some scratchy grass under the shade of an olive tree and waited for them to fly. Seen in flight from beneath their wings are like amber, translucent in the sun. Their backs flash bright copper like goldfish and there are glimpses of the emerald and turquoise. I wasn’t as close as I had been all those years ago in Sri Lanka but I was knocked out by just sitting, watching them, in a field of Van Gogh yellow, shimmering in the heat.
And on my way home I heard the Oreilles in the wood.
I very much want to write a poem about the bee eaters – about them, but also about the passage of time and how one’s response to the world, in this case the natural world -alters – how things are lost, how gained.
I’m still working on the poem. I found it very hard to get started but I did what I think all learners should do – I thought of the first line of a contemporary poem that I really admired and I used its rhythm and the way it began by the simple naming of the place, as my model – it gave me the confidence to go from there
The first line of my poem is – The field where the grass burns yellow…
