by Stephen Moss
In his characteristically punctuation-free style, Clare perfectly captures a moment in time; a moment without any real drama, and yet rooted in this particular landscape. It is this ‘sense of place’, as one critic described it, which makes Clare’s writings on nature unique.
The poem ends with a scene which I might encounter on any winter’s day, here in my own parish – ‘bumbarrels’, incidentally, are long-tailed tits:
The fieldfare chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedge rows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.
Even after the long, cold spell in January, I am still seeing little flocks of long-tailed tits foraging for food along the hedgerows behind my home. These are the lucky ones; many other small birds, here and elsewhere in the country, did not survive the snow and ice. They now lie out of sight, stiff and still, their tiny corpses bearing witness to the coldest winter I have ever known.
MARCH
AS A COLD February gives way to a chilly March, the lighter evenings provide an extra hour of birdsong. A hesitant dusk chorus fills the heart of the village with sound, puncturing the twilight silence of the past few months.
In the churchyard, deep in the foliage of an ancient yew, a small, unassuming little bird pierces the air with its jaunty, rhythmic song. A coal tit; the monochrome cousin of the commoner and more colourful blue tits and great tits. Like the even tinier goldcrest, this is a bird that loves conifers; and like the goldcrest, the warmth and shelter provided by this ancient yew tree has been the key to its survival during the cold spell.
Beneath the yew, on the soft, spongy, newly mown grass, a song thrush tugs determinedly at a reluctant worm, finally pulling it out of the soil and swallowing it. His head is cocked to one side, as he listens to another thrush, then another, and yet another, echoing away into the distance.
I walk past the church door, guarded by two ancient, coppery-coloured lions, flecked with lichens. So far the only flowers I can see are those placed neatly on the graves; although clumps of green daffodil shoots have begun to sprout in the spaces between the stones.
Then I find what I’ve been looking for. On the far side of the churchyard, jammed tight against the red brick wall of the old schoolhouse, is a single clump of greyish-green stalks, each holding a white, drooping flower. Snowdrops have finally come into bloom – almost a month later than usual.
For me, snowdrops always mark that strange no-man’s-land between winter and spring. This is a time when the redwings still gather to feed in the muddy field by Mill Batch Farm, and clumps of starlings fly overhead each evening, towards their winter roost. Yet the days are beginning to lengthen, the grass is a little greener, and we wait expectantly for the first signs of migrant birds returning from Africa.
It is now a full month since the festival of Candlemas, 2 February, the date when snowdrops are traditionally meant to appear. I wonder if this will be like the seasons of my childhood: a snowy winter followed by a sudden onrush of spring, with birdsong, flowers and insects jamming up against each other in space and time. Meanwhile, I must be content with these pure white blooms, sitting chastely in a quiet corner of the churchyard.
Given our national affection for the snowdrop, it is perhaps churlish to point out that it is not actually a native plant, but was brought to Britain from southern Europe during Tudor times. Soon afterwards, in 1659, Sir Thomas Hanmer wrote this evocative description:
The EARLY WHITE, whose pretty pure white
bellflowers are tipt with a fine greene, and hang
downe their heads.
Rather like the hare, another ‘foreigner’ we have taken to our hearts, the snowdrop always seems to me as British as any of our native plants – even more so, given its iconic status as the earliest floral harbinger of spring.
In recent years, the unprecedented run of mild winters has meant that snowdrops are often appearing at the tail end of the old year, rather than at the beginning of the new. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, they will no longer be associated with the festival of Candlemas, but with Christmas.
Mild winters have also brought plants and animals from very different seasons together, in new and unprecedented ways. A few years ago a surprising photograph appeared in the press, featuring a red admiral butterfly perched on a snowdrop. Although many people assumed it was concocted on a computer, it was indeed absolutely genuine.
Red admirals were once unknown in Britain in winter, but some now appear to be hibernating here, and will take advantage of warm, sunny days in early spring to emerge and stretch their wings. But in this, the hardest winter for at least three decades, I have yet to see a butterfly at all.
WINTER MAY BE drawing to a close, but the prolonged cold spell is still taking its toll, as we discover for ourselves one bright morning. On a family walk along Perry Road, we come across the corpse of a heron, lying on the bank of the rhyne by a sharp fork in the road. There is a thin glimmer of frost on the folded wings, while the neck is bent, and the beak hidden beneath the body, as if the bird died in its sleep.
The prolonged cold, freezing the shallow water in the rhynes each night, meant that the heron was simply unable to catch enough food to replenish lost energy. Already thin – there is hardly any flesh on a heron’s skeleton in the first place – it became thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker, until it could no longer summon up the energy to find its prey. Then, one cold night, it simply gave up the fight for life.
The children crowd around, fascinated, as always, by a close encounter with death. Yet all around us, as we continue along the lane, life is bursting out with the energy of spring. On the ash trees, the bare twigs are now dotted with black, sticky buds; while the laughing call of a green woodpecker echoes from the distant orchard. And even without these subtler signs, who could ignore the dozens of lambs, leaping energetically around their weary mothers in the corner field?
The bleating of the newborn lambs is the backdrop to another sound of spring: the cawing of the rooks as they spring-clean their nests in preparation for the crucial business of the breeding season ahead.
On mild, calm evenings, the rookery is full of activity. The tall ash trees at the bottom of my garden are studded with angular black shapes, a dozen in all, perched high in the twigs above their untidy nests. The hour before dusk is a time for social interaction, and they chatter noisily to one another as if recounting the day’s gossip. Earlier in the day, they gathered in large, loose flocks, flapping their long, ragged wings, as they fed in the parish fields, just as they do all over rural Britain.
The rook’s closest relative, the carrion crow, is by contrast a solitary bird, seemingly content with its own company. Indeed the term ‘scarecrow’ is a misnomer: the device was invented to scare off marauding flocks not of crows, but rooks, intent on stealing the farmer’s precious seed.
Two fields away from the rookery, on the west side of Perry Road, a pair of carrion crows is sitting in the big oak; one carrying a long twig in its bill. I watch with interest, wondering if the bird will take it to its nest in the upper branches of a nearby tree, and weave it into the structure.
Instead, to my surprise, he flies away from both the tree and his mate, and lands near the edge of the field. It is only when the female flies off to join him that I understand what is going to happen. I am about to witness one of the most intimate moments in the lives of these big black birds.
As she lands, he offers the twig to her. Feigning indifference, she turns her body away from him; but then lifts her tail. It is the signal he was hoping for. Frantically flapping his wings with what looks like a mixture of sexual anticipation and triumph – but might simply be a device to keep his balance – the male crow mounts the female, and they begin to copulate.
Some half a minute later, he flies up in the air and lands a few feet away. Given that for some song
birds, mating lasts only a fraction of a second, I am impressed by his persistence. The two birds face away from each other; he digging his beak into the earth, she simply staring into space.
I am trying hard not to find human parallels in the scene I have just witnessed. Although I know this is simply instinctive behaviour, something about it seems eerily familiar. And just as with our own sexual act, this messy coupling is absolutely crucial to the crows’ lives.
Two hundred yards to the east, the rooks carry on chattering to one another, too busy to notice.
IN GARDENS THROUGHOUT the village, including my own, a far less conspicuous bird is also getting ready for the breeding season party. The dunnock is the wallflower of garden birds: ever-present, but hardly ever noticed. When seen at all, it is often mistaken for a sparrow; indeed the dunnock used to be known as the ‘hedge sparrow’, even though it is totally unrelated to the sparrow family.
Dunnocks usually forage on the ground, hopping about beneath bushes and shrubs, rather like tiny thrushes. A closer look reveals a subtle but attractive plumage: a purplish-grey head, neck and breast; with streaks of chestnut and black on the back and wings; and a slender bill, ideal for feeding on tiny insects.
For most of the year, the dunnock lives up to its reputation as a quiet, modest little bird. But for a month or two during the early spring, it undergoes a Jekyll and Hyde transformation. Gone is the shy skulker; welcome instead to the swinger of the bird world.
It starts, sometime in late January, with the occasional snatch of song, though the dunnock is never going to win any prizes for singing. Indeed it often takes a while for this stream of notes, neither high nor low, varied nor sweet, and with no clear start or finish, to permeate my consciousness.
By March, the chorus of dunnock song is building to a climax, as the males seek out high perches from which to broadcast their message. It is as if the bird, hesitant at first, has finally gained the confidence to shout to the world – or, at least, to any male or female dunnocks within earshot.
And in this village at least, there are plenty of those. Dunnocks, like many garden birds, find our shrubberies and flower beds an ideal substitute for their ancestral woodland home; and as a result, breed in far higher densities here than in their natural habitats. This leads to one of the most extraordinary displays of behaviour in the whole of the bird world, involving more extra-marital affairs than a TV soap opera.
Like all birdsong, that of the dunnock serves two purposes: to attract a mate and to drive off rival males. But whereas most birds, once paired up, can afford to relax a little, the dunnock must keep a close eye on his mate until all their eggs have been laid. This is because female dunnocks are, to put it bluntly, fond of a bit on the side. Given the chance, they will mate with any male in the neighbourhood, and as a result any one brood of chicks in a dunnock’s nest may come from several different fathers.
Not that the male is entirely blameless. He, too, hedges his bets, mating with as many females as he can find during this crucial period. Again, this maximises his chances of having the greatest possible number of chicks, and passing on his genes to future generations.
To guard against her infidelity, a male will follow his mate around as she feeds, to make sure she doesn’t hop over the fence and find another male. He also copulates with her constantly – as often as a hundred times a day – although each act lasts only a fraction of a second. More extraordinary still, before this brief act of lovemaking the male will peck at the female’s cloaca – the opening just beneath her tail – and remove any parcel of sperm left by a rival.
For our Victorian ancestors, such shenanigans would have seemed utterly bizarre. Not only did they believe that most birds were faithful to their partners, they even held up the dunnock as the epitome of modesty. The Reverend F. O. Morris, author of a very popular book on British birds, was especially assiduous in recommending that his parishioners should follow the dunnock’s example in their marital lives. If he knew what was going on in my garden, he would surely have changed his mind.
MEANWHILE, THE WAITING game continues. As the vernal equinox approaches, marking the date when the sun’s favours shift from the southern to the northern hemisphere, people all over Britain are expectantly awaiting a sign – any sign – that marks the arrival of spring. For some this is the sight of a bumblebee lumbering through the air; for others, the colourful wings of an early butterfly – a brimstone, peacock or small tortoiseshell – taking advantage of the first warm, sunny day of the year.
In our village, washed by winds from the Atlantic, we enjoy a milder climate than most of the country. So our bumblebees and butterflies sometimes emerge as early as the middle of February. But after a really hard winter they stay put for much longer; the bees curled up tight in their log-pile, the butterflies hidden away in the corner of one of the many sheds, barns and outhouses dotted around the parish. Warmth is the key to their appearance: as soon as the temperature rises, and the sun shines, they will emerge to feed. But for the real stars of the spring show, another factor is just as crucial: light.
In the brains of billions of birds wintering south of the equator, a chemical change is now being triggered – a change that will make them feel restless and uneasy. It was a German scientist who named this Zugunruhe. This can be translated as ‘migratory restlessness’: the impulse to travel vast distances across the surface of the earth, to reach their natal home.
So even now, as I listen to the resident chorus of tits and finches throughout the parish, many thousands of miles to the south a mass movement is just beginning. Even the phrase ‘mass movement’ seems inadequate, for this is the greatest natural phenomenon on earth. Not just tens or hundreds of millions, but billions of migratory birds are involved. Swallows and martins, chats and cuckoos, warblers and flycatchers, are all embarking on their epic journeys, heading back to the vast Eurasian land mass from their winter quarters in Africa.
Like some massive, unseen wave of energy, they pulse slowly across the surface of the globe towards us. With such vast numbers involved, it is easy to forget that each bird is an individual, undertaking an extraordinary journey; a journey many will fail to complete.
Predation, heat, cold, storms and sheer exhaustion are just a few of the ways a bird may meet its death while on migration: a falcon powering down out of the blue, sinking its talons into soft feathers and flesh; rain battering onto delicate wings, forcing the bird down into the sea; or simply a failure to get enough to eat, to replenish lost energy resources expended during this epic flight.
But for those birds that survive all the hazards the journey can throw at them, and do make it through, there is a prize at the end of the journey. They have won the chance to breed and raise a family, in the barns of the parish farms, under the eaves of the houses by the village hall, or in the tall ash tree at the bottom of our garden.
Now, in every village, town and city in Britain, far beyond our shores, throughout Europe and Asia, and across the Atlantic Ocean in North America, we await the return of the first migrant. It is this single, precious encounter between human and bird that will, for tens of millions of us, mark the exact moment when the cold, grim northern winter finally gives way to the warmth and joy of spring.
A MONTH OR so ago, that crucial chemical trigger went off in the brain of a small, sleek, swallow-like bird, as it swooped down to feed on insects beside an African waterhole. Soon afterwards, it left behind the elephants, zebras and other big game, and headed northwards.
By mid-March this little bird had passed over the jungles of Central Africa, flown across the Sahara Desert (stopping every now and then to grab precious fuel in the form of flying insects), and then crossed the Mediterranean Sea, eventually reaching the shores of the English Channel. Here it now waits, checking the skies for the right weather conditions to fly across this short stretch of water. Very soon, around the time of the spring equinox, it and its travelling companions will finally reach our shores, and the sanctuary of their s
ummer home.
The bird is a sand martin: the smaller, browner relative of the more familiar swallow and house martin. Not much more than 4 inches long, and weighing barely half an ounce, the sand martin is among the first migrants to return each spring. Given that it feeds exclusively on flying insects, this has always seemed a bit of a mystery to me; but the key to the sand martin’s survival is that it lives and breeds near water, making its nest in holes in the sandy banks of rivers or gravel diggings.
As soon as sand martins arrive they make straight for lakes and reservoirs. Here they can replenish their energy levels, by feeding from dawn to dusk on the tiny aerial plankton which float unseen above the surface of the waves. And so I too have travelled a few miles to the north, to a vast, round bowl of water in the shadow of the Mendip Hills: Cheddar Reservoir.
The scene is remarkably spring-like, as families, accompanied by noisy children and even noisier dogs, wander around the perimeter while the sun glints off the surface of the water. The winter population of ducks, coots and other waterfowl has dropped from a few thousand at its peak to a few hundred now; though the usual gaggle of mallards remains, jostling to be the first to grab morsels of bread thrown from the bank.
And yet, despite the apparently perfect conditions, there are still no sand martins. Perhaps they have been held up by bad weather further south; or perhaps the skies are so clear that they have pressed on further north. I recall the last time I came here in March to see them, on a grey, blustery day, when several hundred of these sleek little birds were feeding low over the water.
DAYS PASS, AND still no spring migrants have arrived. Frustrated with waiting, I head out to Tealham Moor, a mile or so south-east of the parish. This is the finest wildlife site within easy reach of my home: a carefully managed patchwork of grassy meadows, flooded in winter and damp in summer. Intelligent planning has created a replica of how the whole of the Somerset Levels must have looked in our grandparents’ day.
