Fond climates and sweet singers

Travels with my App - up and down The Lane (Horsepool Road) - continue as the seasons turn.

A too-mild start to the month soon gives way to spells of finger-numbing cold, mist, some hard rain, named storms and lots of Welsh sunshine, commonly known elsewhere as: drizzle.

October starts with a final flourish of swallows and house martins. Gone too are the whitethroats and flycatchers.

There are far fewer flies but the wasps persist. Fewer flowers too, barring some late-blooming meadowsweet, a few tardy umbellifers, the last of the ivy and - of course - campion the wonder herb. Aside from these, it's nut, berry and seed time.

Reflecting this change of menu, the soundscape is corvid-heavy with clouds of crows, rooks, jackdaws in the fields and on the wing. Most strident are the screech-squabbling jays. Most unexpected is the "unlikely to see in Carmarthenshire today" (according to Merlin) hooded crow.

I'm guessing the Merlin app can tell one corvid from another although it has flagged a red-billed chough on four occasions this month. Just about possible here in estuary land, do you think? Although we are a way aways from the "mussel pooled and the heron priested shore".

Further thefts from Dylan's Poem in October incoming! 

Joyously, there is still to be found the poet's "lark full cloud". My childlike understanding of these matters had me assume the skylarks would be long gone to warmer climes. All things this bright and beautiful - like firecrests and kingfisher - would take one whiff of mellow fruitfulness and be off, I reckoned. But here they are, roughing-it residents, regularly seen and heard in the dank wood, spindly hedgerows and alongside the cooling, quickening, widening river.

The true (to my mind) birds of the coming winter abound: wagtails, redwing, robin, raven, long-tailed tits, siskin, as well as the arrow-headed skeins of greylags and canada geese, honking high up above.

The warblers are all gone now apart from an occasional chiffchaff and blackcap, still clinging on but restless to leave, it seems, as the finches flourish.

And "whistling blackbirds" churn through the fallen, browning crab apples; treecreepers scurry  across bark thick with moss; nuthatches tap-tap-tap and magpies sound their rapid rat-a-tat-tat rattle.

There are linnets, meadow pipits and marsh tits, to warm the cockles, plus the reassuring sound of wren, woodpigeon, song thrush, dunnock and goldfinches, tirelessly flitting about in their 'charms'.

Good to hear coal tits again after a silent summer. Great, too, to hear the river burbling along after running so low and slow these past few months. And so many robins.

● The free-of-charge Merlin app is developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a researchand conservation institution at Cornell University.