Scaup and smew

There's a gentle rasping of oak limbs one against another in the north wind. It stopped me where I was carefully walking, thinking I'd heard a very dainty woodpecker.
On the fringes of the little oakwood Tammimäki are birches and some poplar, but here at the centre is very little but oak, just a small number of rowans. Oak of all ages, from the oldest, which I measure tip of nose to outstretched left fingertips as one yard, to be five yards in circumference to the smallest underfoot saplings, a single stem and inches high. There's little or no grazing here so the regeneration is thick, healthy and vibrant.

Among the freestanding large boulders the woodland floor is carpeted with berries. Down low, the lily of the valley berries glow orange, poisonous miniature persimmons. Herb Paris too, its single fruited stem offering what appears to be a cultivated blueberry. It's a narcotic. Mrs Grieve tells me it's only used in homeopathy these days, and considered poisonous. There's a red berry borne by a plant with leaves like a raspberry but growing low. The only edible berry here is the wild redcurrant, growing higher, but just about tasteless.

It's a small woodland, cared for by the government: conserved with minimal management. I see dead trees left to stand or fall as they will. There's also some that have been deliberately ring-barked: a double cut deep into the wood that killed these trees which were certainly alien species. But in decay and death they have provided homes for more invertebrates than they did alive.
They are still standing and I'm thinking of the old gamekeepers' gibbets on which were hung "vermin": unwanted species around a pheasant run - crows, foxes, buzzards and the like. Our manipulation of other species is unbounded.
I don't think anyone walks here any more, but there's the remains of a stone dyke, more of a boundary marker made from large boulders removed from the adjacent field, than anything to keep stock in or out. It's hard to get to grips with the origins of this woodland. Most Finnish woods are of mixed trees - predominantly birch and pine. A complete stand of oaks, extending to a woodland is rare.

A brown dragonfly moves along the path ahead of me as I leave Tammimäki and head west for the wetlands which are a staging post for birds on their migrations. The beautifully named garganey and gadwall; the scaup and smew all rest here. As do some thousand of greylag geese who are here at the moment, until their long flight south and west to Spain
And dancing, circling cranes.
The geese ululate and warble above; resting in a form is a hare in the middle of the big cutover wheatfield next to the bay.
As I move south, inland a little through a deep fringe of woods, aspens are rattling in the wind and a little below that red squirrels are dancing, making curious soft clicking noises. Now and then a leaf falls from their gymnastic browsing and flutters slowly to the floor of the wood. There's a drone of winged insects. The wood is an orchestra this evening - from the aoelian harp top notes, to the cello continuo of mosquitoes.

I've done a kind of spontaneously choreographed walk here, led by sightings - now under this tree, now against that bank - of mushrooms; led as much by my appetite as any squirrel.
I head for home with the sun beginning to sink, a bagful of what Finns call butter ceps - sticky and brown on top, butter yellow underneath.