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Letter from Coed Dyfi (Dyfi Forest)

15 Jun 2025 6 minute read
Dyfi Forest. Photo by Philip Halling is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Julie Brominicks

We’ve been silent and still for an hour.

I’m wearing my thick green coat for camouflage, and sweat prickles my neck. A plastic leaf tickles my nostril. My foot is numb but can’t be rearranged lest I jerkily kick the wooden wall. Noise is not an option.

We gaze at the view through the glass, Jason and me. A wooded hill right, swallows trawling for insects rising from buttercups left, and clouds moving swiftly across the wedge of sky between. A sapling sways like something nautical.

Sound comes in pulses. The quadbike that came and went. The chittering of swallows. Sheep bleat. Stream speak.

Photographer

My friend Jason is a wildlife photographer. If I swivel my eyes I can see him motionless but comical in a balaclava festooned with fake leaves.

Jason Hornblow and Julie Brominicks
Jason Hornblow and me. Photo by Julie Brominicks

Jason lives in Oxfordshire where his photographs include hares and little owls, but luckily for Natur-Dyfi Facebook group members addicted to his shots of pine martens and dippers, he returns frequently to the Dinas Mawddwy area where he lived for six years.

He doesn’t shoot through glass so has not brought his camera tonight. Usually wedged in a tiny pop-up hide, he waited over 200 hours (not at once) before snapping his first pine marten. Still, he’s a chatterbox when calling round for coffee, so this quiet tenacity fascinates.

Rain streak. A jay lands, grabs at the ground, leaves. The song thrush stops singing. Silence, except for our intestines. Later Jason confides he has trouble with shortcrust pastry. Pale moths flicker from rushes. Rainlight washes the trees. I don’t care if the badgers don’t come. It is something to see a valley breathe.

Badger portrait by Jason Hornblow the night before Julie’s visit

But they will come. They come every night, so Jason’s friend Dave, whose land this is, built the hide in which we sit.

‘There were eight or nine out last week,’ Jason told me on the way here, ‘and a cub, but the other day I sat outside and I had my flash units but I wasn’t feeling it. Two walked past from the higher sett but that was it. I know they were in the setts because I could hear them snuffling. And last night there was one behind me that took me by surprise.’

Social groups

Badgers have out-lasted the wolves, brown bears, arctic foxes and wolverines that once also roamed Britain. Their setts are vast underground complexes up to a century old with multiple entrances which pine martens, foxes, mice, voles and rabbits can take advantage of. They live in social groups but forage independently, mainly for earth worms, and very occasionally for hedgehogs, if other food sources are scarce. Most hedgehog decline is due to habitat loss.

Dave’s got nest boxes everywhere and has a big pond we crept down to earlier. ‘Don’t move’ Jason had whispered having spotted something. I froze. Midges munched my eyelids, and a kingfisher swooped in blue flight and perched on a post in front of me, where its Irn-bru-orange plumage dazzled.

Kingfisher photographed the following night by Jason Hornblow

Jason got lucky meeting Dave. Elsewhere he uses tracking skills learned from his father in Oxfordshire, who was a
farmhand and gamekeeper; ‘a real one, not a plus-fours-wearing oik that drives round in a green mule throwing corn at thousands of poults.’ Sometimes his Dad would ‘borrow’ a boat from the college to poach from the big estate across the river.

Jason’s got stories too. How the technology that helps wildlife photographers (he once called around with a borrowed thermal-imaging camera) also benefits hunters. How he sells photographs of Mach-Loop jets because no one buys pictures of wildlife. How he was in his hide waiting for otters when all these naked women swam past and he didn’t know what to do.

Badger

After nearly two hours he tenses. A badger appears, small and wary. A young male, coat spiky from wet grass, revealing pale underfur. He’s looking straight at us with beady black eyes.

We don’t breathe. Cautiously he approaches the handful of dog biscuits Jason tossed out earlier, swaying his head like a cobra, sometimes jerking it back. There’s something of an anteater about him. Something bear-like in his explorations, huge paws, steel claws. Crunch-crunch, pause to listen.

Crunch-crunch pause.

Suddenly he splays himself on the ground before darting off and moments later a buzzard descends, flouncing its feathers like a petticoat before it too has flown off; spooked, Jason speculates, by my white forehead, having not pulled my balaclava down properly.

Badger portrait by Jason Hornblow the night before Julie’s visit

We wait. Dusk. ‘They have satellite setts’ whispers Jason, ‘so if there’s danger they’ve got somewhere to bolt.’ Presently another badger appears. ‘I love the way they bobble along, oooh it’s a female, she’s got nipples…’

She is scenting. Sniffing the air. Larger, snufflier, apparently more comfortable in her carpet-bag coat than the wary male who also reappears.

‘This one’s really confident. It would take a lot to put them off now’ Jason whispers. The pair are aware of each other but don’t interact until suddenly raising their heads in one swift synchronized movement, they look in our direction and skedaddle. A crescent moon and bats accompany our own departure.

Jason takes photographs to show people what’s on their doorstep that they wouldn’t normally get close to. He likes
the thrill of it too. ‘It’s almost like being a hunter and beating the animal but only shooting with the camera. Knowing
you can fool or outfox a creature with better smell and sight.’

Julie’s attempt at a photograph

I got a different kind of buzz. From the holistic interaction and sequence of arrivals and departures, of sounds and clouds. Jay, thrush-song, rain. Badger, buzzard, badgers, us.

So this morning I get up in the dark, wind a scarf around my head, creep into the field and lie against a storm-toppled oak. Day comes in small vibrations. Midges feast on my eyebrows. Birdsong swells and recedes. Insects drift. Dew forms, buttercups sway, clouds wipe the sky. My breathing becomes at one with the field’s gentle inhalations.

But when the hares come streaking and bounding, they billow across it like smoke.

Jason’s photographs are available to purchase on Instagram.

This one’s for Jon Gower. Gwella yn fuan!


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Linden Peach
Linden Peach
17 days ago

The situation, the scenting, the nerve splaining, the twitchy confidence, the expectation and the breath-drawn waiting that characterise Julie’s nature writing are all as ever beautifully captured. Except that this is no more ‘nature writing’ than Jason’s photography is nature photography. We are taken to the edge of the natural world, into a cosmology and beauty that is sadly disappearing. Big words but what else are we seeing in the kingfisher’s sacred combination of colours and that badger’s face drawn in a past we can no longer imaginine. Julie, like Jason, captures what we rarely see and then with a… Read more »

Julie B
Julie B
17 days ago
Reply to  Linden Peach

Thank you so much Linden.

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
16 days ago

Hey Julie, I lived in them woods 3 miles up from Aberangell, a place called Nant Hir, it had a rusted-up water generator in the stream nearby, we could not get it working so we were energy light…but the idea was a goody, no?

A word of caution. your combat outfits would ring terrorist training bells with prevent…

Our next summer HMO was above Cwm Llinau, this we passed on to the first of the Alternative Center pioneers…

Anyway just saying that was captivating without traps, all the best…

Last edited 16 days ago by Mab Meirion
Julie B
Julie B
16 days ago
Reply to  Mab Meirion

Dear MM, thank you, as always! So we were almost neighbours….

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
16 days ago
Reply to  Julie B

Separated by half a century, lovely place to get lost, the lanes go every which way… I won’t take up too much of your time, I’m watching a video of David Nash so as to play catch up as two of us local lads paid him a visit back in 67, A polymath artist of the new age, one Gypsy Dave Mills was also in Blaenau, he did some work as a textile artist painting in coloured dies on brown paper… (This was drawn into the virgin cloth while vulcanising the door mat at the same time, clever machine, who… Read more »

Last edited 16 days ago by Mab Meirion
Julie B
Julie B
16 days ago
Reply to  Mab Meirion

Wow, so many stories! Thank you for them. And for you, this was yesterday’s mountain shortcut.

Julie B
Julie B
16 days ago
Reply to  Julie B

Ah – sorry MM, I tried and failed to upload a photo, it was too big. You’ll have to imagine Cader’s cloud-dissolved crags.

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
15 days ago
Reply to  Julie B

I wake up to the view of them, the recent full moon was a fireball, a time elapsed explosion on the ridge…

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
15 days ago
Reply to  Julie B

The old tradition of pooling memories within the community, the cloud of its day, is passing, AI will render it all a fiction…footpaths are closed , rights of way denied and Private signs are making a comeback, the old roads and passes will be barred with pay as you go turnstiles…guilty as charged, a trespasser…forgive me…

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
15 days ago
Reply to  Mab Meirion

This is becoming the case with writers in Wales eg Planet and New Welsh Review, all funding being hoovered up for the Chosen Few and off-shored . I can watch hikers and writers summit through binoculars from my garden…a piece on RTZ and the Mawddach in retrospect, is over due…

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
14 days ago
Reply to  Mab Meirion

You worked at CAT, you must have known the people I was referring too, and lot of my old friends in the Corris Valley and the Mach market traders…!

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