by Stephen Moss
But my favourite of these summer butterflies is the brown argus, named after the giant with a hundred eyes in Greek mythology. Small and neat, measuring barely an inch from one wingtip to the other, the rich, chocolate-brown of its wings is set off by a series of tiny, jagged orange arrow-heads along their sides, and the snow-white border beyond. When it closes its wings, as it usually does when feeding, it reveals a series of egg-shaped blobs, the tiny ‘eyes’ to which its name refers.
When I first saw a brown argus in my garden, one warm August evening a few years ago, I was surprised. This is a chalkland specialist, laying its eggs on the common rockrose, and I never imagined it could fly the few miles from the slopes of the Mendips to reach these low-lying lands on the levels. But males, in particular, have a reputation for ‘going flyabout’ on warm summer days; a strategy which has enabled it to colonise new areas of downland and grassland, and to extend its range north and west. Unlike some more sedentary species of butterfly, the brown argus looks set to take advantage of global warming during the coming decades.
ON A FINE, sunny day in early August, the breeze blows the thistledown up into the air, the croak of the raven and the mew of the buzzard echo in the distance, and on the lawn, a green woodpecker searches for newly emerged colonies of flying ants, picking up dozens at a time with its long, sticky tongue.
Small copper butterflies join the blues and browns, seeking out nectar on a clump of meadowsweet. Migrant hawker, emperor and common darter dragonflies patrol along the path through the meadow as efficiently as border guards, hunting down flying insects as they go. Grasshoppers and crickets forage for food in the long grass below, quietly humming to each other. And a single red-tailed bumblebee, whose furry black body looks like a guardsman’s black busby with an orange-red trim, floats from flower to flower.
The red-tailed is eye-catching among the several different kinds of bumblebee that ply their quiet trade in the hedgerows, gardens and roadsides of the parish, from early spring until late autumn. Other common varieties include the buff-tailed, usually the first to emerge on fine warm days in February or March, and the white-tailed. We are also home to several species of ‘cuckoo-bee’, which, like their avian namesake, lay their eggs in other bees’ nests. They can be told apart from their hosts by the lack of pollen sacs on their hind legs; they have no need of these, as they get the other bees to do the hard work of raising their young for them.
The name bumblebee is often assumed to derive from these bulky insects’ rather uncertain, bumbling flight-paths; but it actually comes from the sound they make. Indeed their original name, and the standard usage until at least the 1920s, was ‘humblebees’. ‘Humble’ has nothing to do with humility, but again refers to their low, humming sound. Like their domesticated cousin the honeybee, bumblebees have had a rough time lately. A combination of chemical farming, habitat loss, wet summers and climate change all threaten the survival of these vivid insects. But for the moment at least, on a warm August day, the gardens of the parish are alive with them.
THE FRUIT TREES and bushes around the edge of our garden are beginning to show the results of the summer’s fine weather. Plums and apples – for eating, cooking and making cider – ripen and swell on the trees, while the elder and blackthorn bushes are covered with inky-black berries and sloes.
But above all, it’s baby-bird time. I say baby, although the vast majority have long since left the safety and comfort of their nest, and begun to make their way in the world. At the far end of our garden, the dense foliage of the hawthorns and blackthorns, and the tall ash trees, provide excellent cover for these vulnerable youngsters. Fledgling great tits, their yellow cheeks giving away their youth, potter about the foliage, as do juvenile chiffchaffs, their neat, fresh plumage a sharp contrast to that tatty appearance of their exhausted parents.
A robin hops out and cocks his head, staring at me with one beady eye. His orange breast would mark him out as an adult, were it not for the state of his headdress; from the neck upwards he still retains the speckled brown of his juvenile plumage. A young blackbird also sports a cinnamon-coloured head above his black body, as he pecks away furtively at the ripening purple sloes.
Bramble, elder, hawthorn and blackthorn are all readily giving up their fruit as a crafty sacrifice to the birds. The fleshy fruit may be digested, but the hard seed remains intact, until the usual processes of nature see it coming out at the other end from where it went in. This increases the plants’ chances of spreading, as birds fly off to new places beyond their reach.
At this time of year, the berries attract not just thrushes and blackbirds, but a whole suite of species whose usual diet is insects. Migrants such as the whitethroat, willow warbler, chiffchaff and blackcap will soon be heading south for the winter, and now need fuel for their travels. So when the berries reach their peak, they supplement their diet with these fleshy, energy-rich fruits, enabling them to build up deposits of fat vital for the long journey ahead.
One small clump of elder and hawthorn bushes to the back of our house has, since we first arrived here, attracted more than twenty different species of bird. These range from wood pigeons, collared doves and great spotted woodpeckers, through thrushes, blackbirds, finches and sparrows, to no fewer than six species of warbler. We once even saw an escaped blue-crowned parakeet – originally from South America – until constant mobbing by the local jackdaws forced him to fly away.
Later in the month, my favourite berry-eating bird usually turns up: the lesser whitethroat. Having skulked away in the parish hedgerows all summer, the only evidence of its presence being that soft, almost inaudible song, this neat little warbler finally emerges in late August and early September. Two or three lesser whitethroats appear on the elder each year, sporting their neat, new shades of grey and white, and picking off the deep, blackish-purple berries one at a time. If I approach them carefully they may allow me momentarily into their lives. But they don’t stay long: within a few days they head off eastwards on that epic journey via northern Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East, to their wintering grounds in West Africa.
ANOTHER BIRD SMALL enough to overlook has also turned up in my garden. Slender and buffish-brown, with a distinctively upright posture and delicate streaks on his upper breast, it perches at the top of a cider-apple tree, occasionally flitting out on long, slender wings, in a tentative exploratory flight. It is a young spotted flycatcher, the first I have ever seen in the garden or, come to that, in the parish.
Arriving in mid-May, and departing in August or September, the spotted flycatcher is here for barely three months; its stay coinciding with the warmest, sunniest period of the year. Flycatchers were once the quintessential birds of the English rural summer, coming to breed in walled gardens and churchyards throughout the countryside. Here, amid flower borders and croquet lawns, they would build their nests, deep in the foliage of climbing plants or tucked into crevices in brickwork.
But since my childhood, spotted flycatcher numbers have dropped by well over three-quarters, so a bird that was once a common and familiar summer visitor has now become a very infrequent sight indeed. As with the cuckoo and the turtle dove, problems on its West African wintering grounds are the main reason for this precipitous decline, although a run of wet summers at home has not helped.
So will this turn out to be a valedictory sighting – my last in the parish, as well as my first? Will the spotted flycatcher follow the wryneck and the red-backed shrike into terminal decline, followed by extinction as a British breeding bird? And in a few decades’ time, will the fact that it was once a common sight in country villages everywhere seem bizarre? Or, perhaps, this unpretentious bird will win an eleventh-hour reprieve, and continue to delight us with its presence – its time here spanning, and in some ways symbolising, the brief English summer.
THE MIDDLE OF August also sees that vital event in the parish year, Harvest Home. Based on the traditional harvest suppers that have taken place since the land was first used to grow c
rops and raise livestock, the event we attend today is a late-Victorian invention, but more than a century of tradition has been enough to cement its place in village life.
The first signs of Harvest Home appear, like foxgloves, in the middle of July: home-made wooden placards giving the date (the second Saturday in August), the venue (Rick’s field, next door to my home) and, most importantly, the name of the tribute band scheduled to appear at this year’s concert. With a week or so to go before the big day, marquees are erected, food and drink prepared, and the schedule finalised. On the day itself, a combination of military precision, hard work and years of experience means things always run smoothly, no matter what.
Following a church service of thanksgiving, more than three hundred people from the village and beyond sit down to a simple but satisfying lunch, followed by a series of speeches, some commendably brief, others not. The afternoon is given over to the village children, who enjoy games, tea and mountains of buns; as well as the rival attractions of a small funfair. The next morning, hangovers not withstanding, clearing and dismantling begins; and by the following Monday you would hardly know the event had taken place at all.
The continued popularity of Harvest Home reflects the importance of farming to the parish. In 1791, John Collinson wrote:
The lands are rich, and in general valuable, and
there are many small dairy and grazing farms.
Five years later, the agricultural historian John Billingsley waxed even more lyrical about the fertility of this part of the country:
The plains are remarkable for their luxuriant
herbiage, which furnishes not only a sufficiency for its
own consumption, but also a considerable surplus
for other markets: London, Bristol, Salisbury, and
other parts of the kingdom, are annually supplied
with fat oxen, sheep and hogs, together with cyder,
cheese, butter, and many other articles, in great
abundance.
Today, although there are more than thirty farms marked on the most recent Ordnance Survey map of the parish, only about half are still working. Back in 1851, though, the census listed more than seventy farms in the parish, most of them less than fifty acres in area. These were, as you might expect from this lush, wet area, mainly dairy farms producing milk, butter and cheese; although sheep, pigs and poultry were also kept in good numbers. These animals – and the meat they produced – were fuelled by the main crop of the parish: hay. Even in the 1950s haymaking was still a common sight, and one villager recalls that any ricks left untouched the following spring would be colonised by nesting birds. Today, it’s almost all silage.
The other major crop was, of course, apples; still used to make Somerset’s traditional drink, cider. Cider-making dates back at least to the thirteenth century (and probably far longer). The boom time for planting orchards was the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth. In those days, cider was mainly for drinking at home rather than for commercial sale, using long-forgotten varieties of apple with wonderfully evocative names: Royal Wilding, Flood-Hatch, Woodcock, Red-Hedge Pip, Old Jerfey and Redstreak. Odd clumps of cider-apple trees still grow in gardens all over the parish, including my own. Their fruit is pale, bitter and, unfortunately, completely inedible.
A LIGHT SUMMER shower passes overhead, briefly heightening my forgotten sense of smell, as the dust on the lane is battered by raindrops and bursts into the air. It’s a hard scent to describe – with a warm, toasty quality, yet also a harsh, metallic top note that betrays its tarmac origins. The shower is not enough to stop the butterflies: speckled woods, large whites and common blues still bounce from flower to flower, only occasionally knocked off course by a particularly heavy drop of rain. The swallows and house martins also continue to fly, skirting around the edge of the shower as it passes across the parish.
Since my last visit in the early spring, the churchyard has burst into leaf, the trees providing ideal hiding places for many young birds, newly fledged from the various nesting places around the church. A quartet of pied wagtails flit across the smooth grass around the gravestones, stopping from time to time to pick off tiny morsels of insect food with their slender bills. One balances precariously on the crenellated rooftop of the old village school, still coming to terms with its new-found ability to use its tail as a rudder.
The calls of coal tits, goldcrests and chiffchaffs pipe unseen from the evergreen foliage of the yews, but there is no sign of the spotted flycatchers that bred here back in June. All has changed: most of these birds weren’t even alive at the start of this year. Yet one permanent feature, almost as old as the church itself, remains: the lichens. Grey, green and mustard-yellow encrustations throng every stone surface in sight, living at a different timescale to the frantic lifespan of the birds, and indeed at a different timescale to our own, comparatively brief, lives.
‘The Dead in Christ shall rise first’, proclaims one Victorian gravestone. Perhaps so; but if and when they do, the lichens will certainly be around to witness the miracle.
COLOUR AND SOUND have been seeping out of the countryside; so slowly and gradually I barely noticed until now. Along the narrow border between lane and ditch, where reed warblers sang until a few weeks ago, the colour has all but gone. The yellows and whites of April and May, and the pinks and purples of June and July, have mostly turned to browns, buffs and greens, as the plants of the parish set seed in readiness for the coming autumn. Only the odd clump of purple loosestrife provides a respite from this semi-monochrome vision, and even this majestic flower is gradually losing its shade as the flowers turn to seeds, from the bottom to the top of each long, floral finger.
If I am looking for colour, I must either search more carefully, or learn to appreciate more subtle shades: the deep magenta-brown of the drooping reed-heads, the pale grey-green of the underside of willow leaves as they turn in the wind, and the small splashes of red, and occasionally purple, on the low bramble bushes, the first ripe blackberries of the year. Aurally, our world is diminished, too. The spring soundtrack of birdsong and buzzing insects has given way to the persistent whistle of a south-westerly breeze. The occasional call of a chiffchaff, and the chacking of distant jackdaws, are the only natural sounds I hear.
The field alongside Mark Yeo, which only a month or so ago was filled with the tinkling calls of linnets and goldfinches as they stripped the seeds from the sorrel and meadow barley, has been cut, and is now being grazed by a herd of black-and-tan-coloured cattle. The water itself is surprisingly clear, apart from the usual carpet of blanket weed jammed up against the bridge by the prevailing winds. The pale green surface is broken only by the occasional discarded plastic fertiliser bag.
I search in vain for two elusive creatures of the parish waterways: the kingfisher and the water vole. Kingfishers I do occasionally see, usually in the winter months, when their need to feed during the short daylight hours makes them more active and conspicuous. Water voles remain a closed book to me; I know they are here, but have yet to see them. The sign that marks the beginning of Vole Road, which I pass frequently on my travels, mocks me for my efforts.
Today the only sign of life is a party of low-flying swallows, skirting an inch or so above the surface to grab unseen flying insects, before changing course at the very last moment with a whip of their long, blue wings, to avoid crashing into a low bridge. Then a strident, scolding sound from the vegetation at the edge of the rhyne is followed by the hasty appearance of a moorhen, jerking indignantly as it walks away across the surface of the duckweed, its long green toes just managing to bear its weight on this porridge-like surface.
The moorhen may be taken for granted but it is one of Britain’s most attractive waterbirds. It doesn’t have the grandeur of a swan, fly spectacularly like wild geese, or stage the breathtaking courtship display of the great crested grebe, but it is nevertheless a beauty. This is a particularly fine specimen: its bright red beak tip
ped with custard-yellow, and a snowy white flash beneath its tail, easily visible as it walks away from me. The bird’s body, although it appears black or dark brown at a distance, is a subtle mixture of deep blue, chestnut, purple and chocolate-brown, set off with a raggedy cream stripe along its flanks. A poet friend of mine called it the ‘single drop of blood in the darkest night bird’, which sums it up rather well.
One of two common British representatives of the rail family – the other being the equally ignored coot – the moorhen has adapted extraordinarily well to its chosen habitat of tiny patches of water. Ponds, puddles and, in this parish, rhynes are the moorhen’s favoured habitat; one it rarely has to share with any other bird. It is also a very sedentary bird: at the height of the hard winter, the furthest our local moorhens managed to move was to the top of the bank of the rhyne, a distance of a few feet. Perhaps it is this parochialism – the way the moorhen is faithful to these modest village watercourses rather than distant rivers and lakes – which so endears it to us.
Baby moorhens are even more appealing: little black balls of fluff with a hint of the adult’s red and yellow around their head and bill, and hilariously out-of-proportion feet. As they fledge, they turn into one of the gawkiest juvenile birds of all – a classic example of a cute baby turning into an awkward teenager – before finally attaining the subtle allure of the adult.
The name moorhen is, when you think about it, rather puzzling. It is actually a corruption of ‘mere-hen’: bird of the meres, or shallow lakes. It has occurred to me that the name for this part of the world, the Somerset Moors and Levels, may also have derived from this same root: ‘meres and levels’ certainly makes more sense in this flat, wet landscape. Local names for the moorhen include ‘water hen’, while a Somerset name no longer in use, ‘skitty hen’, refers to the bird’s habit of dashing off across surface vegetation when disturbed, as I have just witnessed.
