Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (6 page)

Unlike most properties in the village our home is well removed from any risk of flooding, being at the eastern end, a short distance from the boundary with the neighbouring parish of Wedmore, and about 50 feet above
sea
level. In this part of Somerset this qualifies as the uplands, and the wind certainly whips across our land with more ferocity than in the lower parts of the parish. Taking advantage of this, the mill which gives our property its name, Mill Batch, was built here in the early eighteenth century, though it was dismantled long before we arrived.

Viewed from the air, our 1½-acre plot is surprisingly long and narrow, approximately 300 yards long by 30 yards wide, running northwards alongside the lane to the hamlet of Perry. The house was once the main dwelling for the farm next door, whose yard is still in regular use.

Our garden is about as wooded as you get in these parts: with cider-apple trees along the west side, a row of pollarded willows along the east, and two majestic ash trees at the far end. It slopes downwards, becoming less like a garden and more like an unkempt meadow the further you go. At the very bottom there is a boggy area, with a small patch of shaded, stagnant water surrounded by bramble bushes and nettles.

The next-door garden has more mature ash trees, in the tops of which are a rookery, whose inhabitants provide the soundtrack to our lives from March through to August. Across the lane there is a large apple orchard: a mixture of cider-apple trees with their bitter yellow fruit, and fine eaters of a wonderfully deep shade of red. Sheep often graze here, wandering among the dappled light.

Overall, as with most gardens, the mixture of ‘mini-habitats’ combined with a plentiful supply of food – both natural and provided by us – creates a home for an extraordinary range of plants and animals. In our time here I have recorded almost eighty different species of bird, over a hundred different moths, and a score of butterflies – more than one third of all Britain’s species.

Badgers leave telltale trails across the meadow and deep holes on the lawn; foxes bask on the remains of a bonfire; voles and mice scurry through the long grass; and toads, slow-worms and grass snakes live unobtrusively in the hidden corners – occasionally revealing their presence, as when adventuring toads crawl purposefully into our hallway.

It is no coincidence that the British are a nation of wildlife watchers as well as a nation of gardeners, as the two go hand in hand. Our obsession with not only owning but planting and nurturing our little piece of land has created a haven for wildlife, and enabled us to enjoy watching it. Natural curiosity plays its part – and as a result, many of us now know the fauna and flora of our own garden by heart.

E
VERY YEAR, A
song thrush holds territory in our front garden, starting to sing sometime between the middle of January and early February, depending on the severity of the winter. Even before I open the bedroom curtains each morning, I can hear him.

The annual switch between the opposing states of silence and song is like a light coming on. For once he starts singing, he seems unable to stop, like a cyclist careering downhill without any brakes. Every day, from dawn until dusk, he perches high in the branches of an ivy-covered ash sapling, its twigs just about to come into bud. Sitting out in the open, in full view, he simply opens his bill and lets the flow of notes and phrases emerge.

A hundred yards to the north, at the other end of the garden, another thrush answers him. From now onwards, as I cycle along the parish lanes, just as the song of one bird fades behind me so the next starts up ahead; a relay of thrushes, continuing for hundreds of miles in every direction, throughout the British countryside.

As its name suggests, the song thrush is justly famed for its musical ability. Both Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning wrote poems celebrating this: Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’ and Browning’s ‘Home-thoughts, from Abroad’. Of the two, I prefer Browning’s, which uses the jagged metre of the verse to mimic the rhythm of the bird’s song:

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over
,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

But Hardy’s portrait is quietly evocative:

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
,

In blast-beruffled plume
,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom
.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion, however, that Hardy may be referring to a mistle thrush, a songster that begins very early in the year (Hardy’s poem is set at the close of December, rather than in Browning’s springtime), and is well known for continuing to sing, even during strong winter winds – hence its folk name of ‘stormcock’.

As I go about my daily chores I can hear the thrush’s song, the sound penetrating through the thick, ancient walls to reach my ear wherever I am in the house. Its repetitive, measured rhythm makes it one of the most characteristic of all British birdsongs, and among the easiest to recognise. To me, it always seems as if the bird is addressing the listener directly – conducting a conversation, if you like. But it is a fairly one-sided conversation: the thrush hardly stops to pause for breath, let alone allow me to answer him.

I am reminded of a story my grandmother used to tell me when I was a child. She recalled her father, Edgar Snow, telling her that when he was a young man in Devonshire a bird would call out his name, coupled with a
pecuniary
instruction: ‘Snowy, Snowy – Pay the rent! Pay the rent!’ The songster could only have been a song thrush – no other common bird is quite so direct and insistent in its vocal style.

So whenever I hear ‘my’ song thrush, or indeed any other, my mind is taken back almost a century, to the years before the First World War, when my great-grandfather was amused by the song of one of this bird’s distant ancestors.

I
N THE NEIGHBOURING
village of Blackford, half a mile to the east, the rooks are already checking out their nests in the churchyard. Rooks love churchyards, for one simple reason. In the past, these holy places would have been one of the few places these glossy blue-black birds would have been safe from the shotgun. Loathed for their habit of flocking together to feed on grain, and for their alleged attacks on newborn lambs, rooks have always been regarded as the farmer’s enemy.

In another sense, though, the farmer is the rook’s friend. For before the neolithic ancestors of today’s farmers first tilled the soil and grew crops, rooks must have been far less common and widespread. Today they are the quintessential bird of open fields, found throughout rural Britain. Generally ignored, by birdwatchers as well as by ordinary folk, they deserve more attention than they
usually
get; though I confess that I, too, often take them for granted.

Across the road from the churchyard stands the old school, founded in 1832, its function clearly declared on a plaque displayed inside the building:

The school has long since been converted into the village hall, where the locals gather for children’s birthday parties, ballet lessons and community events. But older villagers still recall that during particularly wet winters, some pupils used to arrive by boat; and although winter flooding is no longer as extensive as it once was, the route from the south may still sometimes be navigable.

Meanwhile, the season is advancing slowly but surely, in tiny, almost unnoticeable increments, marked by the marginally later arrival of sunset each day. So at four o’clock on a cold and windy afternoon in early February, there is just enough light for boys and girls from the local school to come and play before they catch the bus home. Full of pent-up energy, they chase each other around the playground, blissfully unaware that, close by, one of the first true signs of spring has already begun to emerge.

As I sit and watch my own children on the slide and swings, I notice something out of the corner of my eye. A
lone
hazel tree, in the hedgerow separating the playground from the next field, is covered with bunches of long, greenish-yellow catkins. They hang in groups of three or four, each catkin about the length of my thumb, and superficially resembling a rather thin caterpillar in shape. Like newborn lambs and Easter bunnies, hazel catkins are one of the key events of early spring – an association which, along with their drooping appearance, has given them the country name of ‘lamb’s tails’.

Although we call them catkins, they are in fact flowers – but flowers that don’t have to wait until later in the season to bloom. Because their pollen is carried by the wind, rather than insects, it is better for the catkins to appear when there are no leaves on the trees to block the pollen’s spread. Hence their emergence so early, often when there is still snow on the ground.

But these long, showy objects only tell half the story. They are all male, while the female flowers are so small and unobtrusive it is easy to miss them. I look more closely, and can just make out a tiny crimson tuft sprouting out of a swollen bud: the female flower. Once pollination has occurred, and the flower has been fertilised, it will begin to grow into a cluster of nuts. These will slowly ripen until early autumn, when they will fall to the ground below, providing much-needed food for woodpeckers, voles and wood mice.

Archaeologists have discovered that towards the end of the Middle Stone Age, about 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, the hazel spread rapidly north and west, far beyond its
original
home range. I imagine a hungry traveller grabbing a handful of hazelnuts to quell his appetite, picking some more to eat later, then heading off on his journey. Later on, he must have dropped or discarded them; and by this happy accident the tree spread northwards, so that today, it can be found throughout Britain.

F
ROM THE HIGH
point of the parish church, Little Moor Road winds slowly downhill towards the south-east. It runs past a modern housing estate, a field of alpacas and a sign selling horse manure, before reaching large, open fields, full of fieldfares and lapwings.

These birds, so dominant during this late-winter season, will not be here for long. Within a month the fieldfares will have headed back to Scandinavia. The lapwings do not go quite so far; indeed some will travel just a short distance to Tealham Moor, bouncing around in the warm spring air during their acrobatic courtship displays.

The fields here are bounded with thorny hedgerows, studded with rows of gnarled, pollarded willows, their trunks covered with ivy. In silhouette, each is shaped like a clenched fist holding a bunch of twigs – a characteristic feature of the landscape right across the Somerset Levels.

A little further along the lane, I stumble across a scene of pure carnage. A line of willows, each reduced to a crude, bare stump, the cut wood glowing with the freshness of
the
sap, its grain shading from off-white to a yellowish-brown. All around, there are untidy piles of withies – the long, slender twigs of the willow – while the roadway is strewn with offcuts.