Category: Wildlife

April, and no politics

It’s 26th April. We had snow three days three weeks back, and we’ve had sunshine since then, often brilliant sunshine, days on end, and the sky’s been a Siberian blue. But it’s not been enough. Not enough to tempt the blossom to really get going. True, the blackthorn which so brilliantly belies its name has been bursting white for several weeks. Only now is the green peeking through on the lilac and the rowan and the laburnum in the garden. The early beech leaves are that so-perfect lighter shade of green. Oak is poking, reluctant, slow.

And the ash is nowhere to be seen. It’s always late of course. Some branches have a few desultory flowers. But how much will they leaf this spring?

And yet…

Yes, it’s chill. But I’m enjoying ‘slow’. I want to lock in this April, its blue skies, and long-drawn out sense of promise.

I’m even listening to the news. At 8am and 1pm. And Channel 4 at 7pm. It’s not winding me up as it has through these torrid and foolish Brexit years. April has worked wonders.

Ted Hughes maybe overstates it, but I’ll go with

A soft animal of peace/Has come a million years/With shoulders of pre-dawn and shaggy belly

Has got up from under the glacier/And now lies openly sunning/Huge bones and space-weathered hide.

We’re up on the moors, grazing sheep, lambs maybe, above Calderdale where Yorkshire meets Lancashire. Ted Hughes country. Also my grandfather’s.

Imagine, also, if we could hear as once we did the cocks crowing across the morning:

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –/Tidal dawn splitting heaven from earth,/The oyster opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cockcrows kindling in the valley/Under the mist –/They were sleepy,/Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.

Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets/And sank back again dimming.

(Others join in, ‘challenge against challenge’)

Till the whole valley brimmed with cockcrows,/A magical soft mixture boiling over,/Spilling and sparkling into other valleys….

Sadly, not into my valley. But we can imagine…

Dawn chorus

The dawn chorus – we all listen in from time to time, often unwillingly if we’re lying wake, sometimes thinking – one day I’ll get up and get out there and …. just listen. You can’t worry about stuff when the trees enclose you, or the garden’s dew-covered in the dawn, or there’s a big sky and the last stars are losing out. You can’t worry about stuff when all you’re doing is listening. And maybe you’ll identify one or two birds amid all that joyful cacophony.

So one Sunday morning, early in May….

4.45 in the Buckholt beechwoods, the rain not long stopped, just enough light through the trees to see our way along a slippery path and avoid the roots. A tawny owl with a too-woo answers his mate’s too-wit. No too-wit: we only hear the answer. The thrushes give voice to the morning ahead of the crowd: their repeating phrases are mesmerising.

Robert Browning: ‘That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,/Lest you should think he never could recapture/The first fine careless rapture!

Browning was thinking of April, and we’re one week into May. But it’s been such a chill spring, April is still the abiding spirit.

A blackbird starts up its more random and fluting song in competition – as we hear it – with the thrush. For him it just might be competition for a mate, or setting out his territory.

It’s many years since I’ve walked through woods at this hour. Back in 1975 it was the tropical forests of Guatemala, and I remember a firefly that startled me, and listening for a jaguar, just in case. The dawn silence broken as I remember more by monkeys which took to swinging through the trees. My destination then was the vast temples of Tikal, in a clearing cut back from the jungle. My destination today – no more than a bacon sandwich, or maybe a return to bed.

But who needs destinations. Enough to be in the wood, and listening to the chorus. A great tit starts up, easy to recognise, then much too easy, and intrusive when we want space for other birds. Maybe take out the robin as well – which I love but its tuneful meanderings sound out from every direction. Without the great tit and robin, we novices would be able to focus more readily on other species. The coal tit, also a repeating call, but more mellifluous. The wren high-pitched, rapid and loud for a bird so small, so difficult to see. The chiffchaff chiff-chaffing. A goldcrest? – but maybe it’s pitched too high for me to hear – so another bird? But which?

We hear no more owls, but there are wood-pigeons, and collared doves. And by the side of the path Roman snails, tough-shelled and edible and enjoyed by the Romans who introduced them, and found more abundantly near Roman sites to this day. Too early for the adders and grass snakes, but who knows, later in the day, beneath the mats which are put out on the common, where adders find shelter.

‘It is the bright day that brings forth the adder. And that craves wary walking…’ (Julius Caesar)

But this is a dawn chorus walk…

The enemy – the pheasant. (We hear them but they belong on the woodland fringes.) 25 million introduced into the countryside each year, and they’re protected. There’s evidence they eat snakes. Which do we prefer? As someone said, you can see who drafted the legislation. Money of course comes into the countryside from the shooters, so the arguments aren’t all one way.

And habitats – we love our woodlands, but a hundred years ago great swathes would be taken out – clear-cut or coppiced or pollarded. The woods were resources not a place for recreation. And a place of mystery and seclusion, a place apart. There were the working woods, and the deep woods. And the deep woods still stir our imagination. One reason I love Buckholt and Cranham woods is that you can get lost there. There is always that frisson.

We try now, as Natural England does, to re-create the wildlife habitats of a one-time working woodland, without the working population. So we take out the saplings, we cut clear and we coppice – but it’s not easy to re-create habitats when we want them for recreation, not for work.

The chorus is better on bright mornings, than on wet, or cloudy. Better where the mix of habitat is greater – meadows next to woods, or gardens. Maybe. But there’s a magic in the woods at 5am, and at 6am – no sunlight reaches path or canopy (the clouds have yet to break), but the pale green, the bright new green, is illumination enough as I lift my eyes from the path. And to either side, a stretch of woods where bluebells thrive. This is mixed-habitat wood, and meant to be that way – there aren’t the great expanses of bluebells we can see elsewhere. Or wood sorrel. And only in a few places is wild garlic abundant.

Near the end of our walk, one crow. Only one. Distant. Too raucous. Round a corner, a field, scouts stirring from their tents – maybe collecting wood for a fire. Takes me back a few years. Then back to the road, and the village.

Fifteen hours later, sitting out on a patio, looking north to the woods where we’d walked. A song thrush strikes up, always inventive, compulsive listening. First bird of the dawn, the last (almost) of the twilight. 9.25 he flies down from the tree to roost. There’s a distant blackbird, and an early owl in the woods, a few seconds, then he’s quiet. And an evening crow. Like the morning just a single caw-caw, and that’s it. Then all is still. 9.30 a single bat flies past. There’s a breath of wind. 9.35, another bat and, a minute of two later, more than a breath of wind. Not only the leaves but the branches move.

All the while I’ve been contemplating a sunset sky which held its colour, its luminous reds, for at least half an hour, and above, alto-cumulus, a gentle bank of grey cloud against the light blue. The sky is as quiet as the land, and I feel I could step off into the woods and around the globe without disturbing a soul. Nearer at hand the oaks and ashes still gaunt in outline against the sky: the day (the 8th of May) has been one of summer warmth, out of the blue, out of the ether, a surprise and a wonder, summer in spring in winter.

It had rained before we began our morning walk, and after we finished. And it will rain tomorrow, then turn cold…

with thanks to Kate Gamez, of Natural England, our walk’s organiser, inspiration and guide

Nature notes from Cranham Common

No more EU, no more referendum, for now.

On a very different tack, or since I’m on land not at sea, on a very different track – the track across the local common, with its glorious sense of space. The valley to Painswick opens to the south and beechwoods lie behind me and to my left and right. And underfoot the closest to a carpet of cowslips that I’ve ever seen. No fertiliser touches this land, and currently it’s grazed on a rotation basis by a few contented Belted Galloway cattle. I can see them often from the bedroom window, beyond the cricket field, each with its single wide white belt.

Last year cowslips just touched the land, now they’ve almost taken over, and I’ve never seen the like. They’re small and they droop, gently, and there’s a kind of mute acceptance, a contendness of place, about them. It’s almost as if they’re apologising for being there, for holding on to one stretch of country when once they covered the fields and meadows of England.

Spring has come suddenly this year. The chestnuts were late, and even now the ash is holding back, no leaf green yet emerging from the buds. But we’re high here, exposed to winds, and Spring is just a little behind the lower country. A few daffodils survive, and the bluebells and wood sorrel are abundant, the celandine reclusive, and the wild garlic anything but. They’re not quite in flower yet, but the smell in places is all-pervasive. Driving back from Oxford last night, passing through woodland, the smell invaded the car, almost as if we had a well-seasoned Sunday roast in the back.

On my morning run, down by the stream beyond the common, by the delightfully named Haregrove Cottage, the birds were in chorus, and it was 9 o’clock – four hours past dawn. How many decibels higher will it be tomorrow when we walk out at 4.30 on an organised dawn chorus woodland excursion? It amazes me how the birds launch into their chorus almost as soon as they stir, sing their hearts out, and then subside into a more occasional chirping and chirruping as the day takes hold.

And here I am writing. Outside she’s mowing the lawn – she turned down my offer. But you can clip the edges she said. So that I will do…

Wildwood

In a previous blog I mentioned Roger Deakin’s Wildwood…

He makes habitable the Tudor farmhouse he buys by keeping out the wind and rain but still allowing at least partial free passage for the animal and insect life who had been its previous owners. He sleeps in a caravan to listen to the rooks, he’s part of the moth-makers circle as they cluster round the bright lights that draw the moths in, he recounts the stories of willow-men and the basket-and bat-makers who work the willow.

His is a wonderful but all too little known counter-balance to all the damage we do to our world, to our climate, to our landscape. I wonder at times whether we could impose a back-to-nature requirement on all road-builders, all architects and town-planners, anyone who would spread bricks and especially concrete over the landscape without a thought for future generations who will be left with it when lifestyles and domiciles and transport have moved on. Where once we felled trees in Britain at least we now have open pasture and hedges and copses which hide and nurture their own wildlife. Where we put down concrete nothing can grow, save after decades in the slow-wearing interstices where weeds find a scraggy home.

It would be good to have a long-term damage assessment built into every new project, with a minimum threshold in terms of decay or decomposition, to remind ourselves of the duty we owe not just our children, but to many generations hence.

It seems that the Environment Agency haven’t a clue when it comes to considerations of this kind. Deakin quotes their indifference to the withy (willow) growing tradition in the Somerset Levels. Floods brought poisoned water which ruined the crop one year, and no-one from the agency visited, and now it seems they have plans to flood the withy beds permanently. When I’ve heard stories about the agency in other flood situations I’ve always put it down to shortages of staff, or local misunderstandings, but it seems that it goes deeper, to an institutional level.

On a lighter note, Deakin notes that cricket bat willow only grows really well in England, to the frustration of Australians who must import English willow wherewith to thrash, they hope, the Poms.  Louis MacNeice writes of the drunkenness of things being various. Here we have the singular, the co-incidence of place and time to play which led to a game where the spring of willow and the resilience of cork and leather make for a game perfectly matched to human strength and capabilities. A more stolid bat would propel the ball much less far, and vibrate the hand, a softer bat and the ball would die before it left the square. Without willow where would we be, without the game that’s an antidote to all the frenetic activity which characterises most popular sports. With maybe the exception of snooker, but that’s about paralysis rather than relaxation of mind. But I digress.

20:20 cricket is another game altogether, although it still requires the magic of the willow wand, which however brandished remains something it seems modern materials can’t replicate. Long may it remain so.