Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (27 page)

A
NOTHER BIRD SMALL
enough to overlook has also turned up in my garden. Slender and buffish-brown, with a distinctively upright posture and delicate streaks on his upper breast, it perches at the top of a cider-apple tree, occasionally flitting out on long, slender wings, in a tentative exploratory flight. It is a young spotted flycatcher, the first I have ever seen in the garden or, come to that, in the parish.

Arriving in mid-May, and departing in August or September, the spotted flycatcher is here for barely three months; its stay coinciding with the warmest, sunniest period of the year. Flycatchers were once the
quintessential
birds of the English rural summer, coming to breed in walled gardens and churchyards throughout the countryside. Here, amid flower borders and croquet lawns, they would build their nests, deep in the foliage of climbing plants or tucked into crevices in brickwork.

But since my childhood, spotted flycatcher numbers have dropped by well over three-quarters, so a bird that was once a common and familiar summer visitor has now become a very infrequent sight indeed. As with the cuckoo and the turtle dove, problems on its West African wintering grounds are the main reason for this precipitous decline, although a run of wet summers at home has not helped.

So will this turn out to be a valedictory sighting – my last in the parish, as well as my first? Will the spotted flycatcher follow the wryneck and the red-backed shrike into terminal decline, followed by extinction as a British breeding bird? And in a few decades’ time, will the fact that it was once a common sight in country villages everywhere seem bizarre? Or, perhaps, this unpretentious bird will win an eleventh-hour reprieve, and continue to delight us with its presence – its time here spanning, and in some ways symbolising, the brief English summer.

T
HE MIDDLE OF
August also sees that vital event in the parish year, Harvest Home. Based on the traditional
harvest
suppers that have taken place since the land was first used to grow crops and raise livestock, the event we attend today is a late-Victorian invention, but more than a century of tradition has been enough to cement its place in village life.

The first signs of Harvest Home appear, like foxgloves, in the middle of July: home-made wooden placards giving the date (the second Saturday in August), the venue (Rick’s field, next door to my home) and, most importantly, the name of the tribute band scheduled to appear at this year’s concert. With a week or so to go before the big day, marquees are erected, food and drink prepared, and the schedule finalised. On the day itself, a combination of military precision, hard work and years of experience means things always run smoothly, no matter what.

Following a church service of thanksgiving, more than three hundred people from the village and beyond sit down to a simple but satisfying lunch, followed by a series of speeches, some commendably brief, others not. The afternoon is given over to the village children, who enjoy games, tea and mountains of buns; as well as the rival attractions of a small funfair. The next morning, hangovers not withstanding, clearing and dismantling begins; and by the following Monday you would hardly know the event had taken place at all.

The continued popularity of Harvest Home reflects the importance of farming to the parish. In 1791, John Collinson wrote:

The lands are rich, and in general valuable, and

there are many small dairy and grazing farms
.

Five years later, the agricultural historian John Billingsley waxed even more lyrical about the fertility of this part of the country:

The plains are remarkable for their luxuriant

herbiage, which furnishes not only a sufficiency for its

own consumption, but also a considerable surplus

for other markets: London, Bristol, Salisbury, and

other parts of the kingdom, are annually supplied

with fat oxen, sheep and hogs, together with cyder,

cheese, butter, and many other articles, in great

abundance
.

Today, although there are more than thirty farms marked on the most recent Ordnance Survey map of the parish, only about half are still working. Back in 1851, though, the census listed more than seventy farms in the parish, most of them less than fifty acres in area. These were, as you might expect from this lush, wet area, mainly dairy farms producing milk, butter and cheese; although sheep, pigs and poultry were also kept in good numbers. These animals – and the meat they produced – were fuelled by the main crop of the parish: hay. Even in the 1950s haymaking was still a common sight, and one villager recalls that any ricks left untouched the following spring
would
be colonised by nesting birds. Today, it’s almost all silage.

The other major crop was, of course, apples; still used to make Somerset’s traditional drink, cider. Cider-making dates back at least to the thirteenth century (and probably far longer). The boom time for planting orchards was the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth. In those days, cider was mainly for drinking at home rather than for commercial sale, using long-forgotten varieties of apple with wonderfully evocative names: Royal Wilding, Flood-Hatch, Woodcock, Red-Hedge Pip, Old Jerfey and Redstreak. Odd clumps of cider-apple trees still grow in gardens all over the parish, including my own. Their fruit is pale, bitter and, unfortunately, completely inedible.

A
LIGHT SUMMER
shower passes overhead, briefly heightening my forgotten sense of smell, as the dust on the lane is battered by raindrops and bursts into the air. It’s a hard scent to describe – with a warm, toasty quality, yet also a harsh, metallic top note that betrays its tarmac origins. The shower is not enough to stop the butterflies: speckled woods, large whites and common blues still bounce from flower to flower, only occasionally knocked off course by a particularly heavy drop of rain. The swallows and house martins also continue to fly, skirting
around
the edge of the shower as it passes across the parish.

Since my last visit in the early spring, the churchyard has burst into leaf, the trees providing ideal hiding places for many young birds, newly fledged from the various nesting places around the church. A quartet of pied wagtails flit across the smooth grass around the gravestones, stopping from time to time to pick off tiny morsels of insect food with their slender bills. One balances precariously on the crenellated rooftop of the old village school, still coming to terms with its new-found ability to use its tail as a rudder.

The calls of coal tits, goldcrests and chiffchaffs pipe unseen from the evergreen foliage of the yews, but there is no sign of the spotted flycatchers that bred here back in June. All has changed: most of these birds weren’t even alive at the start of this year. Yet one permanent feature, almost as old as the church itself, remains: the lichens. Grey, green and mustard-yellow encrustations throng every stone surface in sight, living at a different timescale to the frantic lifespan of the birds, and indeed at a different timescale to our own, comparatively brief, lives.

‘The Dead in Christ shall rise first’, proclaims one Victorian gravestone. Perhaps so; but if and when they do, the lichens will certainly be around to witness the miracle.

C
OLOUR AND SOUND
have been seeping out of the countryside; so slowly and gradually I barely noticed until now. Along the narrow border between lane and ditch, where reed warblers sang until a few weeks ago, the colour has all but gone. The yellows and whites of April and May, and the pinks and purples of June and July, have mostly turned to browns, buffs and greens, as the plants of the parish set seed in readiness for the coming autumn. Only the odd clump of purple loosestrife provides a respite from this semi-monochrome vision, and even this majestic flower is gradually losing its shade as the flowers turn to seeds, from the bottom to the top of each long, floral finger.

If I am looking for colour, I must either search more carefully, or learn to appreciate more subtle shades: the deep magenta-brown of the drooping reed-heads, the pale grey-green of the underside of willow leaves as they turn in the wind, and the small splashes of red, and occasionally purple, on the low bramble bushes, the first ripe blackberries of the year. Aurally, our world is diminished, too. The spring soundtrack of birdsong and buzzing insects has given way to the persistent whistle of a south-westerly breeze. The occasional call of a chiffchaff, and the chacking of distant jackdaws, are the only natural sounds I hear.

The field alongside Mark Yeo, which only a month or so ago was filled with the tinkling calls of linnets and goldfinches as they stripped the seeds from the sorrel and meadow barley, has been cut, and is now being grazed
by
a herd of black-and-tan-coloured cattle. The water itself is surprisingly clear, apart from the usual carpet of blanket weed jammed up against the bridge by the prevailing winds. The pale green surface is broken only by the occasional discarded plastic fertiliser bag.

I search in vain for two elusive creatures of the parish waterways: the kingfisher and the water vole. Kingfishers I do occasionally see, usually in the winter months, when their need to feed during the short daylight hours makes them more active and conspicuous. Water voles remain a closed book to me; I know they are here, but have yet to see them. The sign that marks the beginning of Vole Road, which I pass frequently on my travels, mocks me for my efforts.

Today the only sign of life is a party of low-flying swallows, skirting an inch or so above the surface to grab unseen flying insects, before changing course at the very last moment with a whip of their long, blue wings, to avoid crashing into a low bridge. Then a strident, scolding sound from the vegetation at the edge of the rhyne is followed by the hasty appearance of a moorhen, jerking indignantly as it walks away across the surface of the duckweed, its long green toes just managing to bear its weight on this porridge-like surface.

The moorhen may be taken for granted but it is one of Britain’s most attractive waterbirds. It doesn’t have the grandeur of a swan, fly spectacularly like wild geese, or stage the breathtaking courtship display of the great
crested
grebe, but it is nevertheless a beauty. This is a particularly fine specimen: its bright red beak tipped with custard-yellow, and a snowy white flash beneath its tail, easily visible as it walks away from me. The bird’s body, although it appears black or dark brown at a distance, is a subtle mixture of deep blue, chestnut, purple and chocolate-brown, set off with a raggedy cream stripe along its flanks. A poet friend of mine called it the ‘single drop of blood in the darkest night bird’, which sums it up rather well.

One of two common British representatives of the rail family – the other being the equally ignored coot – the moorhen has adapted extraordinarily well to its chosen habitat of tiny patches of water. Ponds, puddles and, in this parish, rhynes are the moorhen’s favoured habitat; one it rarely has to share with any other bird. It is also a very sedentary bird: at the height of the hard winter, the furthest our local moorhens managed to move was to the top of the bank of the rhyne, a distance of a few feet. Perhaps it is this parochialism – the way the moorhen is faithful to these modest village watercourses rather than distant rivers and lakes – which so endears it to us.