After weeks of wet and gloom, I woke to the sun peering in at our window. Wheeling out my bike, I took to the hills. It had been weeks since I’d come this way, and seemingly, no one else had either: the herd of shaggy ponies, just beyond the tarn, stared as though I were the first human to coast past their field. A little further on, the winter donkeys brayed welcomingly over the gate as I passed. Getting off my bike, I stroked them in turn.It was only as I was riding away again that I saw the kestrel in the ash tree close by. With a head as blue as the lichen patterning on the bark of its perch, and a back as orange as the larches growing on the hill above us, the bird had been perfectly camouflaged. Lifting from its tree, the small raptor caught the wind and shot away down the dal