Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (35 page)

A
FTER A BRIEF
thaw, comes another big freeze. A week before Christmas a cold front arrives overnight, and dumps a good 6 inches of snow on every available skyward-facing surface. Trees, power lines, roofs, chimneys, goalposts, bushes, reeds, hedgerows and the rock-hard earth are all completely covered with this increasingly familiar white substance. With the coming of the snow, the yews and gravestones in the churchyard are trimmed with white, making this timeless scene even more beautiful than usual. A mistle thrush chatters as he defends the scarlet yew berries against all comers, while beneath his perch discarded ones lie like drops of blood in the snow.

Inside the church, there is, rather appropriately, a white wedding. As the bride and groom emerge into the sunlight on their new life together, they are accompanied by a joyful chorus of bells from the church tower. There is something familiar, yet strangely odd, about this classic scene. Familiar, because when we were growing up snow was a regular occurrence, even here in the milder south-west of the country. Odd, because over the past few decades we have grown to assume that snow, along with short trousers, playing kiss-chase and collecting stamps, was something we had left behind with the passing of childhood. So to see it in such all-encompassing glory, taking over the land like an invading army, brings a strange clash between nostalgia and reality.

Meanwhile, amid this unreal scene, we all face the reality of the inconvenience the white stuff has brought
along
with it. We are unable to complete our Christmas shopping, travel to friends or relatives, or even drive to the supermarket; so Tom and Anne at the village stores are doing a roaring trade in essential supplies. We are all confined to barracks for the duration, making last-minute mince pies, wrapping presents, or simply slumped in front of the television, enjoying its festive offerings.

I
T IS AN
hour or so before dusk, on Christmas Eve, and the landscape has turned completely monochrome. Far away to the north-east, at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, a lone chorister is singing the opening notes of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, a moment that for me always marks the true beginning of Christmas. Feeling the need to escape the warm fug of central heating, and get some cold, fresh air back into my lungs, I take a late-afternoon walk, accompanied by my youngest son George, my brother-in-law Luke, and his two very energetic dogs.

Apart from the dogs’ frenzied activity, the world is almost lifeless: with no sound, and hardly any movement. Yet wildlife always retains the capacity to surprise, and as we trudge across Blackford Moor, a large, heavy-looking bird flies out of the hedge right next to us. It is a short-eared owl, one of the few members of its family to hunt by day. The owl flaps low across the field, its browns, blacks and greys standing out vividly against the white;
perches
briefly on top of a broad hedge, and turns to stare back at me with its piercing yellow eyes. It then flies high towards the east, briefly hassled by a passing crow; its deep, powerful wingbeats reminding me of a huge, slow-motion moth.

Short-eared owls were once a regular winter sight, not just here in Somerset, but across much of Britain. In recent years they have declined, and nowadays any sighting, especially one as close and intimate as this, is a special event. An unexpected and delightful present, just before the sun sets on Christmas Eve.

As we wander home, I reflect on the dramatic shift in our expectations of the nature of winter. Only a few years ago, I remember thinking that my youngest children would probably never have the thrill of making a snowman, or enjoying a snowball fight. Now they simply assume that with the coming of winter, there will be snow. And although the lack of falling snow means this does not technically count as a white Christmas, try telling that to the village children, as they play gleefully in the thick white stuff on Christmas morning.

W
E HAVE REACHED
that strange no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year; what a friend of mine calls the ‘Winterval’. Turkeys, mince pies and Christmas puddings have been consumed; presents opened, played with and
discarded
; relatives welcomed, fed and dispatched. A few miles up the M5, at the Cribbs Causeway shopping mall, the ‘January sales’ are in full swing, even though New Year is still several days away. Thankfully, the natural world provides an alternative, and rather more satisfying, experience.

A couple of miles beyond the River Brue, the southern boundary of the parish, another winter dawn breaks over Catcott Lows. As the mist rises from the cold ground, revealing the silhouette of Glastonbury Tor, I begin to lose any sense of feeling in my fingertips. All around me, a shrill chorus of whistles pierces the chill air. It is the unmistakable sound of hundreds of wigeon, the most striking and handsome of all our dabbling ducks.

Today, a thousand or so wigeon, together with smaller flocks of teal, mallard and shoveler, are crammed in and around a small hole in the ice. Looking more closely at the plumage of a male wigeon, I am reminded that so many colours and patterns in the natural world defy my powers of description.

From a distance, the overall impression is of a grey body framed with black and white, and a brown head. But when I take a closer look, I can see that the ‘grey’ is made up of a series of narrow, wavy black lines on a white background. Duck aficionados call these vermiculations, from the Latin for worm, as they are supposed to resemble the wavy pattern of a worm’s trail. Close up, the ‘brown’ head is a deep, rich chestnut, set off with a broad stripe of
yellow-ochre
, as if someone has casually run a paintbrush down the front of the bird’s face. And what colour is that breast – pink? Not quite, but not quite orange, either.

The wigeon’s shape is pleasing, too: with its pointed tail, high forehead, and short, grey bill tipped with black, ideal for grazing. For unlike most other ducks, the wigeon finds most of its food not in the water, but by walking slowly and deliberately across the wet meadows, using its bill like a pair of nail-scissors to cut the tips off the short, sweet grass.

Of all the birds here before me, the wigeon have travelled the furthest. Although a few hundred pairs breed in northern Britain, their numbers are massively swelled each autumn, when close to half a million birds arrive here from their breeding grounds in Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia. Because these areas freeze up during the winter, the wigeon must travel southwards and westwards, seeking out the more benevolent, maritime climate of Britain and Ireland.

Here on the Somerset Levels we have our fair share of these engaging ducks, but another winter visitor from Siberia, Bewick’s swan, has all but disappeared. Named after the nineteenth-century engraver, publisher and political radical Thomas Bewick, small flocks of these wild swans have always spent the winter here, filling the air with their yelping cries. But in the past decade numbers have fallen away, and nowadays only a handful overwinter on the levels. Most are well to the south, in the
vast
waterlogged fields around the villages of Muchelney, Stoke St Gregory and Curry Rivel, whose very names reflect the long and fascinating history of this unique landscape.

Even without the Bewick’s swans, though, the sight and sound of more than a thousand dabbling ducks lifts the spirits. My encounter with them reinforces the continuity of this place and its wildlife over time, much in the same way as the distant backdrop of Glastonbury Tor reminds me of our human presence here across the centuries.

A
DARK SILHOUETTE
materialises out of the grey sky; its sheer power marking it out as something different from the crowd. It is a peregrine: the fastest living creature on the planet. Ever alert, the ducks take off, rising as one organism from the ice. Each individual bird sticks as close as possible to its nearest neighbour, trying desperately to avoid being singled out by this mighty predator. At first, this looks like an unequal contest: surely the hunter’s speed, power and strength will triumph? But the battle between predator and prey is far more equal than it looks: each has co-evolved in a constant ‘arms race’ to outwit the other, and more often than not the hunt ends in failure for the hunter.

The peregrine – a big female – has a very short timespan to make a crucial decision: which individual duck will she
go
for? She singles out a straggling wigeon on the edge of the flock, and zeroes in with her piercing dark eyes, up to ten times sharper than my own. As she approaches, the ducks perform their own evasion strategy: twisting and turning to confuse their attacker. Each time the peregrine swoops low over the surface of the water she must take great care: unlike the wigeon, she does not have an oil gland with which to waterproof her plumage. Should she inadvertently land on the water, she may become waterlogged and drown.

Time is on the ducks’ side, too. For like a cheetah pursuing a gazelle, the peregrine is a sprinter, able to channel her energy into a sudden burst of speed in order to make the fatal blow. But as each second passes without a kill, the muscles in her wings begin to tire, and the chances of the wigeon escaping increase. Eventually, with a rapid twist of a wing, she makes a sudden change in direction, heading upwards into the sky. She has given up, and the wigeon sense it, their whistles becoming gradually less agitated as they float gently down to earth.

Minutes later, and it is as if the drama never happened. The wigeon are back on the ground, waddling across the frosted grass and getting down to the business of the day: feeding. The peregrine is long gone, in search of other targets to chase. But as I lift my binoculars, I realise my heart is beating much faster than usual.

D
ECEMBER HAS BEEN
, according to the Met Office, the coldest since records began a century ago. Following three hard winters in a row, this return to a traditional pattern of seasons – cold winters, late springs and warm summers – appears to have been a tonic for Britain’s wildlife. Nature, so the theory goes, works best when our weather patterns revert to normal. So hibernating creatures stay put instead of waking too early; birds nest at the right time; flowers bloom, insects buzz and migrants arrive when they should; and all is right with the world.