by Stephen Moss
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Naturalist and author Stephen Moss lives in one of the longest villages in England – Mark, on the Somerset Levels: a watery wonderland steeped in history.
This ancient country parish, dating from before the Domesday Book, has been reclaimed from the sea over many centuries. Today the landscape bears witness to its eventful past, and is criss-crossed with watery ditches and broad droves, down which livestock was once taken to market. These are now home to a rich selection of resident and visiting wildlife: rooks and roe deer; sparrows and snowdrops; buzzards, badgers and butterflies. Amongst these natural wonders are the ‘wild hares and hummingbirds’ of the book’s title: the iconic brown hare, and the spectacular hummingbird hawk-moth.
As the year unfolds, Moss witnesses the landscape as it passes from deep snow to spring blossom, through the heat haze of summer to the chill winds of autumn; from the first hazel catkins to the swallows returning from Africa; the sounds of the dawn chorus to the nocturnal mysteries of moths. But this is not simply the story of one small corner of the West Country; it also serves as a microcosm of Britain’s wider countryside, at this time of great change for both people and wildlife.
This is a very personal celebration of why the natural world matters to all of us, wherever we live. Wild Hares and Hummingbirds is nature-writing at its finest, expressed through the natural history of one very special place.
About the Author
Stephen Moss is a naturalist, author, broadcaster and television producer. In a distinguished career at the BBC Natural History Unit his credits have included Springwatch, Birds Britannia and The Nature of Britain. He writes a monthly column on birdwatching for the Guardian, and regularly appears on BBC Radio 4. His previous books include The Bumper Book of Nature, A Bird in the Bush, and A Sky Full of Starlings. Originally from London, he has travelled to all seven of the world’s continents in search of wildlife. He now lives with his wife and children on the Somerset Levels.
To Brett Westwood
a fine naturalist, colleague and friend
STEPHEN MOSS
WILD HARES AND
HUMMINGBIRDS
The Natural History of an English Village
Introduction
OF ALL THE creatures I have seen in my home village, the two most magical are wild hares and hummingbirds. Their lives rarely intersect with mine, so the times when they do are precious and memorable.
A glimpse of a long-legged animal disappearing into the night – a typical view of a hare – is something very special. No wonder our ancestors believed this leggy beast had magical powers.
A brief encounter with a hummingbird hawkmoth, as it hovers to feed on the buddleia bush in my garden, is even more exciting. Of course this aerobatic insect, a wanderer from the south, is not really a hummingbird at all. But it is still an extraordinary creature, whose mid-air manoeuvres match, and perhaps even surpass, those of its avian namesake.
These striking works of nature, the hare and the hawkmoth, are just two of the hundreds of different species – from swallows to snowdrops and badgers to bumblebees – that I come across in a typical year on my home patch.
THIS QUIET, COUNTRY parish lies on the edge of the West Country, roughly halfway between the Mendip and Polden Hills, on the misty, marshy land known as the Somerset Levels. The village at its centre is, according to local legend, the longest in England, though rivals elsewhere in the country have been known to challenge this claim.
On a clear day, if you climb the ninety-four stone steps to the top of the church tower, you can see Cheddar Gorge to the north and Glastonbury Tor to the south. The cathedral city of Wells is just out of sight to the east; while towards the west, beyond the M5 motorway, lies Bridgwater Bay, with the Quantock Hills and Exmoor beyond.
The landscape here is steeped in history: of both the natural and human kind. This is where King Arthur is said to be buried, King Alfred burned the cakes, and the last pitched battle was fought on English soil, at Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. This is a place of wide, open skies, warm summers and chilly winters, and, above all, water. The land may appear solid and permanent, but it has been reclaimed, more recently than you might imagine, from the sea.
As in most villages up and down the country, foxes chase rabbits, badgers grub up worms, and jackdaws potter noisily around the ancient churchyard. At the height of summer, the back lanes are lined with cow parsley and willowherb, and the meadows brighten with carpets of buttercups. In winter, snowdrops force their way through the hard earth to bloom, and the calls of lapwings echo over the pale, frosty fields. From spring to autumn, the skies ring with the twittering of swallows, welcome visitors from their ancestral home in Africa.
This is more or less the sort of wildlife you would expect in any rural parish. But there are more unusual creatures here too. The small fields, with their watery boundaries, create a unique environment, full of nooks and crannies where plants and animals can thrive. So reed warblers sing their rhythmic, scratchy song from the ditches, while exquisite small copper butterflies flutter along the nearby droves. Roe deer are also found here, though they often go unnoticed because of their retiring habits. And, at dusk, a barn owl floats over waterlogged fields, on soft, silent wings.
AS WELL AS the imposing sixteenth-century church, the village boasts two pubs, a post office, a village hall, a boarding school for dyslexic children, a cricket ground, a bowling green, a thriving youth theatre and a martial arts club. Well over a thousand people make their home here, many of them incomers; some from elsewhere in Somerset, others, like me and my family, from further afield.
Each year, in the middle of August, the village gathers to celebrate the traditional Harvest Home, tucking into cold meats, salads and cider, followed by games, a children’s tea party, and an evening concert – the nearest we ever get to the world of rock and roll. But the most important moment of the day takes place when the guest speaker proposes a toast, and the villagers stand as one to raise their glasses ‘to agriculture’.
The fields of this parish have always been productive, turning grass, fertiliser and sheer hard work into lamb, beef and strong, cloudy cider. And although nowadays far fewer people make a living from farming than in the past, the way the land is managed still has a profound influence on its natural history.
Another way we use the land, which also shapes the fortunes of the parish wildlife, is easy to overlook: the village gardens. These range from lawns the size of a pocket handkerchief, and mown to the consistency of a billiard table, to tracts of land more than an acre in size, whose owners’ benign neglect has turned them into a welcome refuge for wild creatures.
As with every other community in Britain – whether in the countryside, the suburbs or the inner city – our human influence is everywhere. So if wildlife here is to survive, and especially if it is to thrive, it must live cheek by jowl with people, in our houses, barns, gardens and fields.
In recent years, like everywhere else in this crowded little island, we have witnessed great changes to our natural heritage. Older villagers recall how cuckoos used to drive them mad each spring with their incessant calling; yet nowadays the sound of the cuckoo is hardly ev
er heard here. Other birds have seen an upturn in their numbers during the same period. Once buzzards were shot on sight; today, on a warm summer’s morning, you may see half a dozen of these broad-winged raptors floating together in the sky. Both the decline of the cuckoo and the rise of the buzzard mirror these birds’ fortunes on a national scale.
As a relative newcomer to the village, having moved down from London a few years ago, I must rely on local hearsay for evidence of these shifts in status. But even in my brief time here I have noticed changes. It was over a year before I saw my first raven, calling one autumn morning from the cider orchard alongside my home. Yet now I regularly hear the raven’s deep, harsh croak, as these huge, raggedy-winged birds soar high above the village, into the blue.
IT WAS GILBERT WHITE, author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), who first showed us that by closely studying the wildlife of a single country parish, it was possible to draw conclusions about our wider relationship with the natural world. Now, more than two centuries later, I am following in his footsteps. By looking in depth at what happens here, in one of more than 10,000 parishes in England alone, I hope to reveal a broader truth about the current fortunes of our countryside, its people and its wildlife.
I stay mostly within the parish boundaries, an area I can comfortably explore on foot, or by bicycle, from my home. I do occasionally venture out into the surrounding area, known (to the local tourist board at least) as the Avalon Marshes, which encompasses some of the finest wild countryside in the whole of Britain.
I don’t rely just on my own observations, but also enlist the help of expert naturalists, and hear from people who have lived in the village all their lives. During the course of the year I track the rhythms of the natural world: the comings and goings, the changes brought about by the seasons and the weather, and how these reflect what is going on elsewhere in the country.
This is not an easy time for Britain’s wildlife. Our plants and animals must compete with the many other ways we use our limited supply of land: to grow crops and raise livestock, to build roads and homes for a growing population, and as a place for leisure and recreation. So it is more important than ever that we recognise why we need the natural world: not just for its own sake, but also to enrich our own lives.
I may have chosen to focus on one little patch of the British countryside, in and around my home village. But ultimately this is a book about the nature of Britain as a whole: what the wildlife and the places where it lives mean to every one of us.
STEPHEN MOSS
Mark, Somerset
April 2011
JANUARY
AS THE OLD year gives way to the new, a hard frost grips the land, coating every surface with a thin layer of white. The rhynes – water-filled ditches that criss-cross this flat, wintry landscape – have frozen solid. But the broader, deeper channel opposite the White Horse Inn still contains a few patches of water and mud. A couple of moorhens are feeding, their long, green toes allowing them to walk across the broken shards of ice.
Nearby, a small, hunched, brown bird with an impossibly long bill is also looking for food, optimistically probing the half-frozen mud. It is a snipe: not a local bird like the moorhens, but an immigrant from northern Europe. Earlier this winter it flew across the North Sea from Scandinavia, in search of a milder climate. It must be wondering why it bothered.
A local cyclist pedals by. The snipe stops feeding, cocks its head to one side, and crouches back on its short legs. At the last possible moment the bird springs up into the air on powerful, pointed wings – its fast, zigzagging flight designed to confuse a chasing predator, or foil a hunter with a shotgun.
As it departs, the snipe utters a curious call, rather like the sound of a muffled sneeze, or perhaps a boot being pulled out of sticky mud – an appropriate image given the bird’s usual habitat. The moorhens, long used to the steady traffic of people along the edge of the rhyne, ignore the interruption and continue to feed.
AT THIS TIME of year, in the dead of winter, the wildlife of the parish is best defined by what is not here, rather than what is – not by presence, but by absence. Four months have passed since the swallows last twittered over the barns at Mill Batch Farm; even longer since the meadows along Vole Road hummed with the sound of bumblebees, and meadowsweet and willowherb blossomed along the narrow lanes towards Chapel Allerton.
This seasonal rhythm is the key to life here, as it is all across the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, from County Kerry in the west to Kamchatka in the east. Those swallows, bumblebees and wild flowers are not simply memories of the year now passed, but a distant promise of the spring and summer yet to come.
It is hard to believe, as I gaze over this monochrome landscape of frost, water and mud, that in just three months’ time the parish will be transformed into a scene of full, glorious colour. There will be myriads of birds and flowers, insects and mammals, all engaged in the frantic race to reproduce which defines spring. This scenario will be replicated, in different ways, across this little cluster of islands, lying just off the edge of the world’s greatest land mass.
But however hard I look now, in the dead of winter, I cannot see most of the plants and animals that make their home here in the village. Some, like the swallows and red admirals, have disappeared altogether, and are now many thousands of miles away. The swallows have travelled the farthest, all the way to the southern tip of Africa. As I and my fellow villagers shiver in the winter cold, they are swooping around the legs of elephants and giraffes, at a muddy waterhole alongside Kipling’s great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River. They will remain there until the time of the spring equinox, when they will begin their long journey northwards, back to our shores.
The red admirals – those visions of elegance in black, white and orange – have not travelled quite so far. They left us back in the autumn, and flew south to the shores of the Mediterranean. There in Andalucía, home of sherry, bullfighting and flamenco, they laid their eggs; then, their mission complete, they died. Now, in the midst of our winter, their caterpillars have already emerged under warm Spanish skies, and are feeding voraciously on fresh green nettles. Soon they will pupate, and eventually, in a month or two, emerge as the next generation of adult butterflies. These, in turn, will head northwards in April; and with luck, and a following wind, will be back here in the village gardens by the end of May.
But what of the badgers and beetles, slow-worms and small tortoiseshells, newts and bats? These creatures lack both the ability and instinct to make the epic global journey of the swallow or red admiral, and must stay put for the winter. Each is now well out of sight: either in full hibernation, or simply lying low until spring finally comes, and it can resume its active life.
The badgers hide away in their underground setts, occasionally emerging to grub up earthworms and beetles to keep up their energy levels. The slow-worms, frogs and newts are tucked inside log-piles, deep in hibernation, having slowed down their metabolism close to zero for the duration of the winter. And the small tortoiseshell butterflies? They have sought out nooks and crannies in woodsheds and garages, closing their wings to hide their colourful pattern, to avoid being found and eaten by a passing wood mouse. They will remain there, torpid and motionless, until a sunny day in March, when their wings will once again unfold and take to the air, delighting those of us who are searching for signs of spring.
Yet despite the temporary disappearance of these creatures, and the bleakness of the hard, frozen landscape, there are still some signs of life. Flocks of lapwings fly over the village centre, their strong, rounded wings giving them the look of butterfly swimmers as they surge through the still, cold air. And in the tall ash trees that emerge from this horizontal landscape like city skyscrapers, glossy blue-black rooks are already inspecting last year’s nests. Some carry twigs in their beaks, to make repairs, ready to lay their clutch of three or four greenish-blue eggs early in the New Year – well before the leaves are on the trees.
&
nbsp; Along the lanes leading out of the village, fieldfares and redwings throng the hedgerows, greedily gulping down the last remaining berries. These smart, colourful thrushes are winter visitors, who arrived last autumn from the north and east, in search of food. Food is also the top priority for the sparrows, robins, tits and finches congregating in the centre of the village, where my fellow parishioners generously provide kitchen scraps, nuts and seeds to keep the birds alive at this difficult time.
Whether these small birds survive the winter depends on two things: the prevailing weather pattern – either mild and damp, or cold and snowy – and the food and water we provide. Only when spring finally comes will we in the parish, and in towns and villages throughout Britain, discover the fate of these, some of our best-loved wild creatures.
THE PARISH CHURCH is by far the tallest and most impressive building in the village – a landmark visible from every corner of the parish, and often beyond. It is the oldest of our man-made structures: dating back to just before the Norman Conquest, when the village itself is first mentioned in historical documents, although the building was restored and rebuilt between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Today, the church tower sports a large clock, installed for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887; and a fine set of bells, which still ring for weddings and parish festivals.
Whenever the solid grey tower hoves into view, I imagine one of our ancestors using it to find his way through this flat, and often featureless, landscape. Walking the dozen miles from Brent Knoll to Glastonbury Tor, he would have passed just to the west and south of the church, before heading out across the bleak wastes of Tealham and Tadham Moors, his feet splashing through the flooded fields as he passed. Continuing through the ancient settlements of Meare and Godney, he would finally reach the safety of high ground, on the tor itself.
