by Stephen Moss
The air is delicate.
Sadly the air is no longer so delicate for the house martin, whose fortunes are now on a downward path. In my own lifetime I have seen this familiar summer visitor disappear from many of its former haunts; perhaps as a result of hostile householders who don’t want to be woken at dawn by the cries of hungry chicks. Personally, I can’t imagine a better way to start a summer’s day.
AROUND THIS TIME of year, another seasonal sound fills the air: the noise of dozens of lawnmowers being fired up for the first time since the previous autumn. Birdsong is temporarily blotted out, as this metal army wreaks havoc across the village lawns, large and small.
Daisies and dandelions, which for a week or two have carpeted the grass with yellow and white, are hacked down in their prime by the mowers’ blades. By late afternoon, the air of this and a thousand other parishes is filled with the heady scent of new-mown grass; which smells, oddly, rather like a good Sauvignon Blanc.
The rising temperatures have brought another mass emergence: as two small insects, one orange and black, the other orange and white, take to the air. They are the comma and the orange-tip butterflies, both classic signs of spring.
The comma, named after the small white marking on its dark underwings, is one of a handful of British butterflies to overwinter here as adults. They hide away in garages, sheds and outbuildings, until they emerge on a fine day – some years as early as February or March; in others not until April. They remain on the wing throughout the spring and summer: their jagged wings, and bright orange-and-black markings, making them easy to pick out. Today the comma is a winner among our butterflies, having recently extended its range north to colonise Scotland. Yet bizarrely, a century ago it was one of our rarest, found only in a few places along the border between England and Wales.
The male orange-tip, too, is easy to pick out; and an even more timely sign of spring, appearing regularly as clockwork on the first warm, sunny day after the start of April. I usually find orange-tips at the bottom of our garden, where there is a healthy clump of one of their caterpillars’ main food-plants, garlic mustard. Elsewhere they flit delicately along the edges of the rhynes and lanes, their bright orange wingtips flashing in the sunshine. Females are far less conspicuous, as their lack of orange wingtips suggests one of the ‘cabbage whites’, but a closer look reveals a delicate greenish mottling on the underside of the wings.
Their subtle beauty conceals a dark secret. Unlike most other British butterflies, female orange-tips lay their eggs singly, flitting from flower to flower and carefully depositing a tiny greenish-white egg, barely visible to the human eye, beneath the buds. This is because when the caterpillar hatches, it will eat not only the food-plant on which it has emerged, but also any other caterpillars it finds there. This cannibalistic behaviour evolved because if several caterpillars tried to live on a single plant they would starve for lack of food.
But I can forgive them for this. For me, orange-tips symbolise that brief, heady period when spring is in full flush, and all is new and fresh. By late May they have usually disappeared, their luminous wingtips but a fading memory.
BY ST GEORGE’S Day, 23 April, everything is in full swing, springwise. From dawn to dusk the parish air is filled with the sounds of birdsong. In the ragged, untidy hedgerow bordering the rhyne behind our home, two tiny brown birds are engaged in a face-off: each attempting to maintain the invisible border between their equally tiny territories.
Their song – a series of notes, trills and whistles ending with a flourish – echoes around the whole parish, and indeed the whole of the country. For the wren is not only one of the most common birds here, but the most common species in Britain; a fact that surprises many people, as sightings of this little bird can be few and far between. But like so many of our songbirds, once you become familiar with their sound, you realise they are everywhere.
I have seen and heard wrens in city gardens and along country lanes; on coastal paths and remote islands, including the larger, darker race that lives only on the remote archipelago of St Kilda. There, as waves crashed against sea cliffs and the wind whistled through the drystone walls, I watched as these testosterone-fuelled little bundles of feathers sang even more loudly than their mainland cousins, to make themselves heard above the raging of the elements.
Back here in the parish, and indeed all across the northern hemisphere, the final pieces of the jigsaw of returning migrants are being slotted into place. Just along the hedgerow, deep inside the blackthorn foliage, another small bird is singing: a nondescript, scratchy little warble, hardly audible above the rival wrens. Occasionally it reveals itself, the morning sunlight catching its plumage. It is slender and clean-lined, with a grey head, chestnut-coloured wings, and the decidedly white throat which our ancestors chose for its name.
Just last night this whitethroat – along with tens of thousands of others – took advantage of a shift from northerly to southerly winds, and flew across the English Channel. It is an early arrival, the vanguard of almost a million pairs currently returning from Africa, to breed throughout the British countryside.
Like so many of our summer visitors, the whitethroat is very vulnerable to problems on its wintering grounds, as happened in the spring of 1969, when nine out of ten birds failed to return. The cause of this sudden population crash was a prolonged drought in the Sahel Zone of West Africa, where most British whitethroats spend the winter. Whitethroats have since made a comeback; but as climate change has led to the Sahara Desert extending its boundaries, the chances of history repeating itself would appear to be high.
Another summer visitor is also singing, this time from the blossom-filled apple trees in the village’s few remaining orchards. The willow warbler’s song is a plaintive, silvery run of notes, descending down the scale like water trickling down a slope. It is the classic sound of the birch and willow forests of northern Europe. Here in Britain it is, surprisingly, our most frequent summer visitor; a couple of million pairs comfortably outdoing more familiar and visible migrants such as the swallow and house martin.
Like the swallow, willow warblers are true long-distance migrants, with some British birds flying as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Once, on a visit to South Africa, I heard a familiar song, and assumed it was a local species that sounded like a willow warbler – only to realise that it was, of course, the real thing.
Every spring, sometime from the middle of April onwards, a small wave of willow warblers passes through our parish; stopping briefly to sing in our gardens and orchards. But although this seems as good a place as any to breed, most leave after a few days, heading on northwards to Scotland or Scandinavia. One or two pairs do linger, and I occasionally hear them in May and June; but the less tuneful sound of their close relative, the chiffchaff, is the dominant sound of spring in these parts.
One final member of this little group of summer visitors is usually the last to arrive. Sometime during the last week of the month, a quiet, modest warble can be heard, coming from thickets of bramble and hawthorn. The sound is so tentative it almost seems as if the bird is tuning up for a proper performance later on.
The singer is a lesser whitethroat; slightly smaller than the common whitethroat, and a lot less conspicuous. Like the whitethroat, it has travelled here from West Africa, but not, as one might imagine, by the most direct route across the Sahara and western Europe. Instead, it follows its ancestral migration path, which takes it the long way round, via the Middle East and the Balkans, before finally reaching its destination. No wonder the birds in this parish, and indeed across the rest of Britain, usually arrive a few days later than the whitethroats.
IN A NEIGHBOURING village, next to an ancient churchyard and rectory, stands a magnificent specimen of holm oak. Also known as the Mediterranean oak, this exotic tree was introduced from southern Europe in Tudor times, and now grows freely in the milder parts of the country, including here in the south-west. Dense and bushy, it sports dark green leaves rather like holl
y, and indeed shares the second part of its scientific name, Quercus ilex, with that plant. Its large size makes it an ideal nesting site for one of our biggest breeding birds, the grey heron.
The flapping of broad, heavy wings, and a deep, hoarse cry, signals the return of one of these great birds to its nest, high in the canopy. Herons are colonial breeders, and will return to the same tree, and indeed the same nest, year after year, simply adding a few twigs to the untidy structure in order to make repairs.
Herons are also one of our earliest nesters, and these came back in January or February, long before most birds begin to breed. So the evergreen foliage of this huge oak provides a safer home than any of our broad-leaved, native species, where the nests and eggs might be vulnerable to predators.
There is a score of heronries in the county, but this is one with a difference. For interspersed among the grey herons’ nests there are a dozen or so smaller structures, belonging to their close relative, the little egret. Through the branches I can just make out that the egrets are sporting the long, feathery plumes which almost led to their downfall. Back in the nineteenth century, before the RSPB managed to stop the grisly trade, these beautiful birds were killed in their tens of thousands to fuel the demand for feathers to adorn the fashions of Victorian high-society ladies.
The egrets breed later than the herons, so while the latter are now sitting tightly on eggs, their smaller cousins are still adding extra twigs to their flimsy-looking nests. It always surprises me that such a beautiful and graceful bird should make such a raucous sound, but this simply fits the usual laws of nature: birds with a striking plumage do not need a fine song, and vice versa. Just compare the kingfisher and nightingale.
I am visiting the heronry with David, a retired schoolmaster of the traditional kind. He is the sort of man by whom I would have enjoyed being taught, with just the right mixture of knowledge and enthusiasm. David is the acknowledged authority on the history of Somerset’s birds, and over many years has charted their fortunes with characteristic attention to detail.
The purpose of our visit is to count the nesting herons for the BTO’s annual census, the longest-running survey of a single species anywhere in the world. It was begun in 1928, by the great ornithologist Max Nicholson, and continues throughout Britain to this day. So it is that, more than eighty years after that first national count, David and I are peering through the foliage to try to ascertain how many nests there actually are. We find three, and are relieved that there are any at all, after the hardest winter for a generation, which killed off many herons here and elsewhere in the country.
BACK IN THE depths of that bitter winter, Tealham Moor was both beautiful and virtually lifeless. Beautiful, because plummeting temperatures had fixed the fluid, watery landscape into a permanent vision of white. A layer of ice had hardened the surface of the rhynes, and turned the water meadows into a skating rink, while a wafer-thin layer of frost coated every hedgerow, bush and blade of grass.
Lifeless, because with access to the water denied, the thousands of birds that usually feed here had fled south and west in search of ice-free landscapes. Only a single, solitary bird, a reed bunting, flitted along the edge of the frozen rhyne, in a vain attempt to find something – anything – to eat.
Now, towards the end of April, the scene has been utterly transformed: for with water and sunshine comes life. Skylarks sing their aerial song for hours on end, kestrels hover in search of voles, and dozens of mute swans graze the meadows. Meanwhile lapwings and redshanks perform their noisy aerial displays in the sky, above their tight clutches of eggs, safely hidden in the long grass below.
In a poll to find the most handsome wader in Britain, the lapwing would be hard to beat. At a distance, as they fly acrobatically above the wet meadows of the moor, they appear black and white. But when they land they reveal their true colours. As on an artist’s palette, these are not distinct, but a swirling mixture of shades: greens, browns and purples, their edges blurring into one another, and changing as the bird turns in the spring sunlight. These are set off by bright white underparts, an orange-ochre patch beneath the tail, and that slightly comical crest, which always looks as if it has been stuck on to the bird’s head as an afterthought.
The lapwing’s neighbour, the redshank, is not bad-looking at this time of year either. It has changed from the dull grey-browns of winter into a fine-looking creature: dark, almost chocolate-brown, spangled with paler spots, with orange-red legs and base to its bill. When it flies, it reveals telltale white flashes along the trailing edge to the wing, which together with the three-note alarm call have earned it the nickname ‘sentinel of the marsh’.
Where the lapwings and redshanks patrol along the edge of their territories, custard-yellow dandelions grow in their tens of thousands, while a more subtle plant, lady’s smock, also studs the grass with its pale lilac blooms. During the ice and snow this delicate little wild flower, a cousin of the watercress, retreated into the soil; but now, with the warmer temperatures and sunshine, it has emerged to add its contribution to the beauty of the scene. The name refers to its apparent resemblance to the smocks commonly worn by country women in Tudor times; while an alternative folk name, ‘cuckoo-flower’, nods to its appearing at the same time as that returning bird.
Butterflies love lady’s smock, as shown by the profusion of green-veined whites and orange-tips on the moor at this time of year. One green-veined white flutters on top of his mate, closing his wings to reveal the pattern beneath; delicate greenish stripes on a background of pale lemon-yellow. But he has become carried away in his eagerness to breed, and as he flies off, she remains stuck in the mud at the edge of the rhyne, vainly flapping her wings in an effort to escape.
Every now and then, a small, bright, yellow object appears to detach itself from the carpet of dandelions covering the moor, and flies through the air in a bouncing motion. The yellow wagtail is a beguiling bird, but its numbers are rapidly declining. Thanks to the wildlife-friendly farming here on the moor, a tiny population of yellow wagtails continues to find sanctuary here. Even so, they remain very vulnerable: a passing cow may tread on the nest, crushing the clutch of five or six tiny, pale buff eggs; or the dark shape of a passing merlin may grab this colourful bird clean out of the air, ending its brief life in a moment.
The male wagtail perches on a prominent twig, barely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He struggles to keep his balance in the breeze, fanning his broad tail, before flying off to grab a small insect. He always returns to the same perch, for as well as feeding, he must continue to defend his territory against incoming males.
Meanwhile a constant battle is being fought between the breeding waders and the local crows. A dark, brooding presence, they sit on fence posts around the periphery of the moor, or patrol overhead, alert to any opportunity to grab unguarded eggs. All day long, and every day during the spring, the sound of lapwings fills the air, as they try to drive away the much larger crows. In turn, the crows mob any buzzard that has the temerity to pass overhead, seeing it away with harsh, angry cries.
As a child, I remember finding a lapwing’s nest on a patch of waste ground near my home in the London suburbs. I can still see the neat clutch of four pear-shaped, olive-brown eggs with dark blotches, staring up at me from the grassy tussock where they were hidden. Today, lapwings have disappeared from there, and indeed from most of the wider countryside, and breed only on nature reserves or specially managed farmland such as here on Tealham Moor.
Some might wonder why it matters that lapwings, and many other once-common farmland birds, have declined. But as well as the loss to our natural heritage, lapwings are also part of our cultural inheritance. And just as, in the words of John Donne, ‘any man’s death diminishes me’, so the loss of the lapwing, the skylark and many other familiar birds of the British countryside diminishes us too.
ANOTHER SPECIES OF wader, the whimbrel, occasionally passes through the parish on its spring migration north. This is the smaller, ne
ater relative of the more familiar curlew, with a slightly shorter, downcurved bill, and a bold dark stripe above its eye.
One of the annual highlights here on the Somerset Levels used to be flocks of whimbrel, sometimes numbering in their hundreds, passing through at the end of April en route from West Africa to Iceland and Scandinavia. Today they still occasionally appear, but in far lower numbers than before. Their characteristic call, a rapid series of seven fluty notes, is often the first clue to the birds’ presence, as they float down onto the moor to feed and rest before setting forth on their journey once again.
Very occasionally an even rarer migratory wader also stops off here. The wood sandpiper is a bird of boggy swamps of the north, nesting from Scandinavia all the way across Eurasia to Kamchatka, with a tiny population in the far north of Scotland, and wintering in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Australia.
The pair of wood sandpipers feeding unobtrusively on Tealham Moor on a cool, damp, spring day have come, like the whimbrel, from Africa. Sleek and long-legged, they are very attractive waders, with a pale, spangled appearance. They use their delicate, slender bills to pick off insect food as they pass across the meadow. We are lucky to see them at all: although wood sandpipers sometimes stop off here as they travel south in autumn, in spring they are in a hurry to breed, so usually fly straight overhead.
Our country is important as a transit lounge for birds like these, passage migrants, birds which neither breed nor spend the winter here, but simply stop off on their way north and south each spring and autumn. So just as we have a responsibility for our resident birds such as the lapwing and skylark, our summer visitors, the swallow and house martin, and our winter visitors, the redwing and fieldfare, so we owe these passing creatures the same duty of care. The way we farm Tealham Moor, and other places up and down the country, doesn’t just benefit our local birds. It also helps those like the whimbrel and wood sandpiper, which stop off here for a few days – or even just a few hours – on their global travels.
