A Buzz in the Meadow (2 page)

The terracotta tiles on the roof are also fired from local clay. They are known as canal or channel tiles, a design that dates back to the Romans, and are laid in alternating rows of gulley and ridge. I doubt that Monsieur Nauche made those himself, since firing them is a bit of a specialist job, so they are probably one of the only major items that he had to buy in, but they would not have come from far away. Otherwise, pretty much the entire building, and its surrounding barns, was constructed from materials that could be gathered for free from the immediate surroundings, and this gives the buildings a natural, organic feel, almost as if they grew up from the ground of their own accord like an eruption of unusual, rectangular mushrooms.

I bought Chez Nauche in 2003, from an old farmer named Monsieur Poupard. So far as I could establish with my feeble grasp of French, he had lived there all his life, keeping dairy cows and growing arable crops. Well into his sixties and with no children to leave the farm to, he had decided to sell up and retire. He had not looked after the old place, allowing it to fall gently into ruin. The roof leaked, so that the internal timbers were slowly rotting, and the old lime plaster was stained black with mould and was peeling from the walls. The window frames were rotten, the glass was cracked and covered with patches of old plastic sheeting, and the front door was rotted away at the base, with old pieces of tin can hammered flat and nailed over the gaps. The plumbing consisted of one old dripping tap above a stone sink – there was no bath, shower or toilet, and the lavatory facilities consisted of a bucket in the shed.

It was, to put it mildly, a doer-upper, but for all its shortcomings it held one huge attraction for me, as a wildlife-obsessed biologist. Monsieur Poupard's lackadaisical maintenance schedule had allowed the house and its surroundings to be infiltrated by a myriad of creatures. In many modern British houses, house-proud home-owners are horrified if they see a single woodlouse on the carpet, or an ant in the kitchen. This attitude must swiftly be abandoned at Chez Nauche, or a nervous breakdown would inevitably ensue. The house has slowly settled into its environment over the decades, and is swamped and overrun with plants and animals. Although I have made some improvements in the ten years since I bought it, it remains to this day a haven for wildlife. The roof tiles are crusted with orange, black and cream lichens, which are grazed upon by caterpillars. Mosses grow in the gullies between the tiles, particularly on the north side of the house, and millipedes, woodlice, water bears
1
and numerous other small insects live amongst the damp green cushions. The walls are also encrusted with lichens, and are smothered under the lush foliage of the grape vines that cling to rusting metal brackets along the wall. When the sun shines, as it often does, these walls are a popular basking spot for butterflies, bees and flies, warming themselves before going off to look for a mate or nectar to drink. These insects are hunted by zebra-striped jumping spiders and mottled brown-and-green wall lizards, agile creatures with long, clawed toes that scurry impossibly quickly over the vertical masonry, dashing into holes in the soft clay mortar at the first sign of danger. Most of the insects are too quick to be caught, especially if they have managed to keep warm and ready for take-off, but once in the air they run the gauntlet of the swallows that nest in the barns and swoop low past the house. From the base of the wall at the front of the house sprout old lavender bushes, their twisted, woody stems sagging under the weight of purple blossom in summer, alive with bumblebees, butterflies and the blurred wings of hovering hummingbird hawkmoths, their long crooked tongues reaching down into the nectaries of the flowers.

An old cobbled path runs to the front door, and the cracks between the stones are inhabited by bulbous-headed black crickets, the males singing cheerfully and incessantly to attract a mate. The lizards and young western whip snakes also make use of the holes amongst the warm stones, hunting there for beetles and spiders. In front of the house is a stooped and gnarled selection of ancient nectarine and plum trees, with bracket fungi sprouting from some branches, and chubby green caterpillars of the scarce swallowtail grazing on their leaves. Great green bush crickets perch on the branches, the males rasping out their incessant chainsaw-buzz in an attempt to drown out the black crickets down below.

Inside the house, where it is cool and dark and the buzz of the crickets is just a distant hum, crepuscular creatures abound. Spiders of numerous species spin their webs amongst the ancient beams; spindly daddy-long-legs spiders spin irregular, shoddy webs from which they dangle upside-down, while giant
Tegenaria
house spiders prefer to make close-woven, funnel-shaped webs leading to a deep hole in which they can hide. The beams themselves are tunnelled by the fat white grubs of long-horn and death-watch beetles, and also by woodworm (not a worm, but a tiny beetle). Under the furniture and in the kitchen cupboards lurk satin-black darkling beetles, ponderously slow but heavily armoured, so they have no need for speed.

At night, the mice take over; on the floor, house mice scurry, with the occasional larger, huge-eyed wood mouse. They search for scraps of human food, tasty spiders or day-flying insects that have blundered into the house and become trapped. On the walls and beams, dormice scamper: garden dormice, with delicate racoon-like facial markings and a long tail ending in a fluffy tip; and the scarcer edible dormice, favoured as a delicacy by the Romans. Endearing to look at they may be, but the garden dormice are aggressive little beasts, churring at each other through the night, and they often wake me with their rumbustious skirmishes. Because of the nuisance they make of themselves, I have trapped many dozens of them; they are absolute suckers for Cantal, a hard and pungent cheese from the mountains of the Auvergne – it gets them every time. When my eldest boys Finn and Jedd – at the time about seven and five years old – first saw one of these garden dormice, growling angrily at them from the trap and gnawing at the mesh to escape, they rushed to wake me up with the news: ‘Daddy, come quick, we've caught a tiny demon!' It did look pretty ferocious – the poor thing had rubbed its nose red-raw trying to get out. I always release the little demons far away from the house, having given them a good feed, but my efforts never seem to make any dent in the population. The edible dormice seem to be much gentler, with a beautifully thick fluffy tail; they are so large as to be easily mistaken for small, exceedingly cute squirrels. I cannot bring myself to evict them from the house.

The various mice are nervous, for barn owls roost in the attic, leaving huge piles of pellets, which are consumed by the grubs of clothes and skin moths, species adapted to feeding on the desiccated remains of animals. There is also another, mysterious beast that they should fear. Some years ago I installed some Velux windows in the old roof, and soon afterwards noted the footprints of a largish animal on the glass. I also found pungent, elongated scats, sometimes on the drive to the house, and once on an inside windowsill. Whatever this beast was, it could take on formidable prey; on one occasion I found a wing and the head of one of my barn owls strewn in the attic. On another occasion, when on an early-morning excursion, my young boys found a bleeding chunk of flesh on the drive, all that remained of a large whip snake. From its width I would guess the snake had been a good one and a half metres or more long, but everything had been consumed, apart from a fifteen-centimetre section of its midriff. The beast took on a mythical status in the family, with the children speculating wildly as to what it might be, and it was many years before I finally worked out what it was.

Let me take you for a stroll. We'll start at the top of the drive, to the north of the house, by the big horse-chestnut tree. It is late afternoon, towards the end of May, and the tree is in full bloom, the cones of frothy cream flowers attracting scores of bumblebees, whose bustling dislodges petals from the older flowers that rain down upon the drive. We amble down the old tarmac drive, its warm surface cracked by tree roots pushing through from beneath, sparse tufts of crested dogstail grass sprouting from the crevices. On the left we stop to admire the wood-ant nest, a gentle dome of cut, dried grass stems thronging with large chestnut-coloured ants. The nest has been in the same place for ten years now, to my knowledge. My boys love to watch and poke the ants, and occasionally, I suspect, they throw them insect prey. The slightest disturbance causes ripples of activity to spread across the nest as the ants release alarm pheromones warning of danger. The ant trails radiate from the nest across the tarmac, with incoming ants carrying all sorts of fragments of plants and insects to feed to their brood in the nest.

Beyond the ants' nest on our left is a thick hedge of gorse, five metres or more across. A male stonechat perches on the highest point, his trademark call sounding very much like two dry pebbles being struck together. The female is no doubt sitting on her cup-shaped mossy nest somewhere deep in the gorse thicket, incubating her clutch of sky-blue eggs. Peering through the thick gorse hedge, to the east of the drive we can just see my orchard: fifty well-spaced young apple trees that I grew from pips. The largest are now nearly four metres tall, and two of the trees bore fruit for the first time last year. My three boys are chasing butterflies fifty metres away amongst the trees, the two eldest, Finn and Jedd (now aged twelve and ten) leading the way through the long grass, chattering excitedly, each armed with a huge kite net. Behind them our youngest, Seth (aged three), is gamely battling to keep up, his white-blond shock of hair all that is visible of him amongst the greenery.

On our right I point out a bee orchid, its single purple flower mimicking the smell and texture of a female bee and thus luring male bees to attempt to copulate with it. All they get for their trouble is a ball of pollen glued to their heads, but they must be foolish enough to make the same mistake again or the bee orchid's strategy would not work.

Further down, the drive is shaded by a line of large oaks on the right, and a mix of elm and oak on the left. Brittle brown acorns from last autumn still litter the ground. The elms are repeatedly attacked by Dutch elm disease, which quickly kills the trees once they reach six or seven metres in height, but luckily the trees spread rapidly by suckers, so there is a constant crop of new saplings coming up. A territorial male speckled wood butterfly dashes up from a warm sunspot on the drive to chase away a brimstone that has dared to enter its domain.

I love the French names for butterflies, compared to which many of the English names are a little unimaginative; for example the English
orange tip
is simply descriptive, while the French
l'aurore
– the dawn – is rather more poetic. What do we call a speckled butterfly that lives in woods? The
speckled wood
, of course, while to the French it is
le Tircis
, named after a shepherd in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine. A few years ago I hit upon the idea of organising a guided butterfly walk at Chez Nauche for any interested locals. I sent posters advertising the walk to the mayor of Épenède, the local village, and also to the mayor of nearby Pleuville, asking for them to be displayed on the village noticeboard. I bought lots of lemonade for my visitors, and boned up on all the French names of butterflies and other insects, although I was somewhat worried that my inability to say much else in coherent French might be a handicap. On the day of the event I waited nervously outside the house, but no one arrived at the allotted time. Ten minutes late a car at last drew up; an English lady, and her young daughter, who lived nearby. I had not met them before, but was happy to take them for a walk in the meadow, though also a little disappointed by the turnout of the French contingent. Perhaps chasing butterflies is an eccentric English activity, and not something that appeals to French country-dwellers. It is certainly true that membership of conservation charities such as the RSPB and Butterfly Conservation is far higher in the UK than in any other country in the world. We had a pleasant walk, spotting bumblebees, butterflies and grasshoppers. Towards the end of the walk I took us past an old piece of corrugated tin that I had laid out on the edge of the field. Snakes love to bask under tin sheeting, and I had a pretty good idea that there would be something dramatic underneath, to form the perfect finale to the walk. Sure enough, there was a sizeable Aesculapian snake underneath, which I managed to grab with a flourish. We walked back to the car so that the mother could take a photo of her daughter stroking the snake, and finally we let it go. I hadn't quite anticipated what happened next. The snake shot under their car, then climbed up into the still-warm engine. We spent the next hour with the bonnet up, trying to find it – without success. In the end the poor lady and her daughter had to drive away reluctantly with a snake somewhere in their car. I very much hope they all survived the journey.

Returning to our stroll, we are coming towards the end of the drive. On our left is a rectangle of stout walls – the Alamo, as my father has christened it – all that remains of a very large barn. When I bought Chez Nauche this barn was in a terrible state, with gaping holes in the roof and the beautiful old oak frames well rotted. I couldn't afford to repair it, so I took the roof off and sold the remaining half-decent timbers to a reclamation yard. The old walls provide a suntrap for lizards and warmth-loving butterflies; teasels and thistles sprout up in profusion from the stony ground; and whip snakes are common amongst the stones and weeds.

On our right is a small hollow, overgrown with blackthorn and ash, once a shallow seasonal pond, which I mistakenly filled in with building rubble. I have since been slowly clearing it out, in the hope that the newts that once lived there will return.

Let us strike right off the drive, past the pond and across the open meadow. This western side of the meadow is where I have set up a large, long-running experiment to try to increase the numbers of flowers. I sowed squares of meadow with yellow rattle, eyebright, bartsia and meadow cow-wheat, all partially parasitic plants that sap the strength from nearby grasses by tapping into their roots and sucking up nutrients. Suppressing the grasses leaves a little more room for other flowers, or so the theory goes. The rattle is in full flower: a pretty annual with small yellow flowers tipped in purple, which has established itself in little clumps across the experimental plots. It is too early to say whether this has increased the number of flowers, but in any case the meadow looks pretty good at this time of year. After ten years without any fertilisers or pesticides, quite a lot of wild flowers have established themselves. The main grasses are cocksfoot, Yorkshire fog and false oat grass, large and dominant species that tend to smother all else, but over time they have been declining and have been partly replaced by the finer, less aggressive grasses typical of a proper hay meadow: fescues, sweet vernal grass and meadow foxtail. Amongst the grasses, some flowers have become common: wild geraniums, forget-me-nots, ragwort, white campions, hawkbit, clover and meddicks, to name but a few. Some of them tend to occur in distinct patches, either because their seeds do not spread readily or perhaps because some subtle variations in the soil properties suit them better in some places than others.