As we eat our picnic in the car
single goldfinch comes to the clump of thistles
right in front of us and pecks at the seedheads.
Kite
fliers are trying their luck. A parascending design is
doing well but a blue plastic butterfly can hardly get off the ground
without looping right back and crashing down again.
There's
the waspish drone of a radio-controlled plane. I remember that in
the early 1960s Heath Aero-modellers' met every Sunday here. A mown
circle, still there in the 80s, acted as an airstrip for their wire-guided
planes which, of course, were limited to flying in circles.
A
kestrel hovers in the distance but is soon chased
away by a crow which continually dives at it as
it chases it off the heath.
Gipsy
Ponies
A woman appears across the heath
in the distance and at a glance I assume she's out on a walk with
a child in a pushchair. As she gets nearer I see that it's an old
pram chassis with a bucket attached to it.
Returning
to the white van parked next to us she fills the bucket with carrots
and sets off over the heath again. Commoners in Heath once (and
probably still do) had the right to graze sheep, cattle and geese
on the heath. Today pied ponies, gipsy ponies as they're often called,
are the only grazing animals you see here.
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Kite
fliers are trying their luck. A parascending design is
doing well but a blue plastic butterfly can hardly get off the ground
without looping right back and crashing down again.
There's
the waspish drone of a radio-controlled plane. I remember that in
the early 1960s Heath Aero-modellers' met every Sunday here. A mown
circle, still there in the 80s, acted as an airstrip for their wire-guided
planes which, of course, were limited to flying in circles.
A
kestrel hovers in the distance but is soon chased
away by a crow which continually dives at it as
it chases it off the heath.
Returning
to the white van parked next to us she fills the bucket with carrots
and sets off over the heath again. Commoners in Heath once (and
probably still do) had the right to graze sheep, cattle and geese
on the heath. Today pied ponies, gipsy ponies as they're often called,
are the only grazing animals you see here. 
