by Stephen Moss
Further along Vole Road there is a much smaller baby moorhen, just a few days old and now faced with a race to grow before the autumn frosts make food more difficult to find, reducing its chances of survival. A kestrel flies low overhead, causing the chick and its parent to panic. Imagine what it must be like to live in this steep-sided rhyne, the only view a grassy bank on either side, and the sky above; a sky which can bring danger, even death, at a moment’s notice. No wonder the mother moorhen looks so nervous.
A WEEK OF rain towards the end of the month has produced a small, muddy puddle in the corner of the field behind our home. Despite the competing attractions of rhynes, ditches and, not so far away, lakes, the five cygnets that hatched out here at the end of June have chosen this as their playground. Under the ever-watchful eyes of their parents, they wallow and splatter about in the mud. This makes little difference to their appearance, as they still sport the deep, dirty grey of the proverbial ugly duckling. I am delighted, and not a little surprised, that the five have all survived, given the dangers they face. The parents have obviously done a good job guarding their precious offspring.
Autumn is beginning to show its face around the parish, like an unwelcome intruder getting ever more confident as each day passes. Mornings are cooler now, and sometimes quite misty, with the plaintive autumn song of robins flowing through the quiet. Evenings see little flocks of starlings passing overhead, occasionally stopping off to land on our roof, where they cause consternation among the resident sparrows.
Another sign of autumn: a small cluster of creamy objects on the otherwise green lawn. Three fungi: four or five inches tall, with long, slender stems and jagged-edged flat caps. On closer inspection I can see the subtlety of their colour: the cream cap is splattered with brown, shading more intensely towards the shallow dip in the centre, while beneath the cap the gills are yellowish-buff, and pleasingly soft to the touch. I sniff one, and get the whiff of a delicate mushroomy smell not very different from the shop-bought version. But given my lack of fungal expertise, I decide that prudence is the better part of valour, and I am not tempted to take a bite.
Families of goldfinches, the youngsters lacking the adults’ red faces, gather on the heads of thistles to feed, while swallows and house martins perch on the telegraph lines around the village centre, as if taking an inventory of their numbers before they depart. I shall miss them when they go.
On a clear night, at the start of the August bank holiday weekend, a full, round moon reflected in the long, straight rhyne turns oval in shape. This is caused by the unseen movements of small aquatic creatures just beneath the surface, making the waters ripple, and distorting the heavenly body above.
SEPTEMBER
SEPTEMBER OPENS WITH a cool, bright, misty morning. The dampness in the air is palpable in the hour after dawn, but soon burns off as the sun strengthens in the early-autumn sky. Phalanxes of swallows rise high in the air, the juvenile birds, with their short, stubby tails, testing their wings. I watch each day as they venture higher and higher, until they seem to reach the vapour trails of departed aircraft, growing fuzzy in the blue. From this aerial vantage point, the swallows can see into the next parish, and perhaps beyond, to Glastonbury Tor. But they cannot imagine what awaits them when they finally leave us, and the globe begins to unfold beneath their wings as they head south to Africa.
A pair of larger, darker birds passes swiftly overhead. From directly beneath, the falcons’ streamlined, swept-back wings, dark helmets and streaked underparts mark them out as something special. They are hobbies: a sleek sports car to the kestrel’s family hatchback. Like the swallows, these are young birds, not only testing out their flying skills, but their hunting abilities too. But this time, at least, the swallows are too quick for them, and they move on, their sleek arrow-shapes passing rapidly out of sight.
Soon afterwards, an adult hobby flies low overhead, seeking the benefit of surprise to nab a young swallow. But the parent birds are well aware of the danger, and pursue the falcon relentlessly. They take turns to peck at its back and tail with their sharp bills, until it is driven away, their urgent twitters of alarm echoing in its wake. It’s easy to assume that predators have the upper hand in any encounter with their prey; but these attacks fail more often than not. And at some point the hobby must make a kill; for it, too, has a long journey ahead, all the way to the wide open savannah of the Zambezi River basin. There it will spend our winter hawking for insects – and the occasional swallow – before returning to the skies of Somerset next April.
It is still cool at this early hour, and steam is rising from my neighbour’s compost heap. But one band of insects, the dragonflies, are already out and about, hunting their own prey with an equally ruthless efficiency. Ironically, dragonflies are often taken by hobbies, which have developed the ability to pursue this fast and furious insect, grabbing them in mid-air with their claws, before dispatching them with their hooked beak.
But today, the migrant hawker dragonflies are the predators, not the prey. They patrol just above the tops of the bushes and trees, dinking left, right, up, down, and sideways, on their wonderfully manoeuvrable wings, and grabbing any passing insect from a fly to a bumblebee with those fearsome jaws. Later in the day, as the sun warms the bramble bushes, I catch sight of one of these elegant creatures as it basks in the warm rays, its abdomen a delicate combination of brown, yellow and mauve. As its name suggests, the migrant hawker was once only a seasonal visitor to our shores. But in the past few years it has colonised southern and eastern Britain, and is now a familiar sight here in the parish during late summer and early autumn.
NOW THAT SEPTEMBER is here, the nights are gradually drawing in. By 8 p.m. the sun has set, and the sky is almost dark. Outside the Old Vicarage, a hundred yards or so east of the village shop, a bird is perched on the telegraph wires: those same wires where, a few months ago, the first swallow of the summer was sitting.
The bird is a tawny owl. It sits on the topmost wire, unnoticed by drivers passing beneath on their journey home from work. Occasionally it twists its head slowly from side to side; though even when a medium-sized bat passes close by it takes no notice. After a few minutes, it drops off the wire on soft, silent wings, disappearing into the dense foliage of a nearby sycamore. In an hour or so, when the remaining glimmer of light has finally been enveloped by darkness, it will go hunting, listening for the rustling of hidden rodents below.
Here in the village, tawny owls are not uncommon; yet, given our many regular breeding birds, this is the one we see least often. We hear them though, as they call to each other, famously chronicled by Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit, tu-whoo! A merry note!
Shakespeare, who was usually pretty accurate in his bird references, makes an elementary mistake here. For this sound is not made by a single owl, but by a pair, performing in tandem. Thus the female calls ‘kee-wick’, while the male utters the more familiar, hooting call.
From early autumn onwards, I hear the hooting male more than any other time of year. This is a signal that the youngsters, born the previous spring, are now trying to establish their own territories for the breeding season to come. Because tawny owls like their own patch of ground – they rarely stray more than a few hundred yards from where they were born – the parent birds are forced to defend their little patch of land against their own offspring. This explains the increase in hooting on cold autumn nights.
And even, on occasion, during the day. Two or three times every autumn, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, I hear a tawny owl hooting from the garden next door. The first time I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. But so strong is the impulse to defend its territory against incomers that our neighbourhood male does indeed hoot during daylight hours.
During the autumn and winter, I sometimes come across a tawny owl at its daytime roost. These are never easy to find: an owl is surprisingly
well camouflaged, despite its size, and can sit motionless in a hollow of a tree for hours on end, hidden to the world. Hidden, that is, until discovered by a curious passing bird. Then the unfortunate owl will find itself hassled from all sides, as the smaller birds join forces to see off this unwelcome predator. Usually the owl will tolerate the intruders until they back off, but if the harassment gets too much, it will be forced to move on and seek alternative daytime accommodation.
But they never go far: unlike the swallows, currently massing in the skies above the village shop, the tawny owl next door will never even see the next village, let alone Africa.
THE NEXT MORNING, a sheet of mist hangs low over the distant Mendip Hills, as an unseen buzzard mews in the far distance, towards Chapel Allerton. Thick, heavy dew soaks the grass, the hedgerows and my feet, and I notice another sign of autumn: the teasels that only a few weeks ago were a delicate greenish-purple are now a rich, warm chestnut-brown. The willowherb has gone to seed too: fluffy balls of grey fur where once there were purplish-pink flowers.
Tall clumps of hogweed, hollow ghosts of their former glory, still stand along the lanes and droves, while splashes of orange in the hedgerows signal the ripening of rose-hips. I remember that we used to mark the start of the new school year by collecting rose-hips, crushing them, and removing the yellowish pulp containing the tiny seeds. Placed down the back of a classmate’s shirt, they were remarkably effective as itching powder.
Just when I thought I had seen all the varying shades of purple, comes another: clumps of sloe berries studding the blackthorn bushes. One of Dylan Thomas’s best-known lines, from the opening of Under Milk Wood, refers to this autumnal fruit: ‘the sloe black, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea’. The pun reveals the Welsh bard’s preference for wordplay over accuracy: for sloes are never truly black. After the delicate pinkish-purples of the summer hedgerow flowers, this is a rich, deep, bluish-purple, more suited to autumn. In the early-morning air, each sloe has a whitish patina upon its surface. When rubbed gently between forefinger and thumb this disappears like the morning mist, revealing the smooth, grape-like fruit beneath.
Later in the year we harvest this purple bounty to make that time-honoured country beverage: sloe gin. There are almost as many recipes for this drink as there are blackthorn bushes: some people swear by picking the sloes after the first frost, while others simply pop them in the freezer for a day or two. They must then be pricked – either with a skewer or, traditionally, using a thorn from the blackthorn bush itself – before being doused with half a bottle of gin and a healthy serving of caster sugar. The resulting mixture is shaken up, then left forgotten on the kitchen windowsill until the following spring.
When the fluffy white flowers of the blackthorn come back into bloom, sometime in March, it reminds me to sample the result of last year’s labours. I prefer it over crushed ice, as a post-prandial digestif; others swear by it neat. But however it is taken, the bitter-sweet, almost medicinal flavour of the sloes is a pleasant reminder of bright autumn days spent gathering the hard, purple fruit.
THE INEXORABLE REDUCTION in day-length is having a profound effect on one village visitor. On the telegraph wires across Kingsway, a hundred or more swallows are gathering, responding to chemical changes in their brains which signal that it will soon be time to depart. From time to time, in response to some unseen alarm – false or otherwise – they all take to the air at once. Launching themselves off the wires, they plunge down towards the surface of the road before pulling steeply up, high into the sky; then scattering in loose, untidy flocks, their urgent twittering filling the cool air. Gradually, as the minutes pass and no danger appears, they calm down; gathering on the tops of the tall poplar trees by Lower Plaish Farm, before finally returning to their original perch.
During the whole performance, a pair of collared doves has stayed put on the adjacent wire, watching the scenario unfold with the bored nonchalance we associate with this familiar garden bird. Yet collared doves have a story to tell which rivals that of the swallows. During the middle decades of the twentieth century they spread inexorably westwards across Europe like some conquering army, finally crossing the North Sea in the mid-1950s. This small, pinkish-brown dove – a bird we now so take for granted we barely notice its presence – had never even been seen in Britain when many of the older villagers were growing up.
And now, having arrived in rural Somerset, and made their home here, our collared doves show absolutely no inclination to travel any further. For them, this village has everything they need: food, water and plenty of places to nest. Let the swallows be consumed by their migratory restlessness; the doves are content to remain British citizens all year round.
THE FIRST MIGRANTS to leave the village have already departed, taking advantage of a clear, moonlit night to do so. The dozens of reed warblers and handful of sedge warblers, whose songs were a constant chorus throughout May and June, first fell silent, then began to feed frantically on tiny aphids, almost doubling their weight. Finally they moulted in preparation for their journey, and headed off, under cover of darkness. For many, this is a leap into the dark in more ways than one: the offspring of those singing birds have never made the journey before and, if they are unlucky, may never get the chance to do so again.
After crossing the Channel they will head south through France and Spain, hopping across the Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar to avoid a hazardous sea crossing, then skirting the borders of the Sahara, ending up in Western or Central Africa. They travel by night, unseen by human eyes and, more importantly, unseen by predators. Flying at night also enables them to avoid overheating, as the air is cooler.
September is the peak month for autumn migration, though it may begin as early as July and go on well into November. But September is undoubtedly the high point of the single greatest mass movement on earth. Close to 5 billion birds, of more than 200 different species, leave their breeding grounds across Europe and Asia and head south, the vast majority of them ending up in sub-Saharan Africa.
This was such a mystery to our ancestors that many – including such experienced observers as Gilbert White – struggled to accept that it was possible, instead believing that the birds hibernated under the surface of ponds and lakes. With hindsight it is easy to mock their ignorance, but the truth about these birds’ journeys is hardly more believable. That a creature as small and delicate as a swallow can travel all the way to the southern tip of Africa and back – a return journey of over 10,000 miles – does appear to defy logic.
Nowadays we have solved many of the mysteries of migration, and know that these birds find their way using a combination of the earth’s magnetic field, the sun, moon and stars, along with visible landmarks such as rivers and mountain ranges. But this knowledge doesn’t stop us marvelling at the epic journeys these tiny birds take.
In spring, their arrival is fanfared by a burst of unfamiliar song, followed by the welcome sight of the birds themselves, but in autumn they make a quiet departure with no signal. Our wildlife, our parish and our countryside are diminished as a result.
SOMETIME DURING THE middle of the month, the first true autumn morning dawns over the parish. The air holds a new and unfamiliar chill, and early risers have the unaccustomed experience of seeing steam on their breath as they stroll down to pick up the day’s provisions at the village shop. A soft, low mist hangs over the fields, and the rhynes are giving off gouts of steam, obscuring the moorhens as they float along the still, glassy waters.
Habits are changing for people as well as wildlife. Winter clothes are being dug out from bottom drawers, central heating systems are bursting into life, and the children are back at school. And as if to remind us that the holiday season is well and truly over, some unseen hand has finally fixed the church clock, which proudly proclaims the time: five past seven.
Nature has risen earlier than us, as always, and our garden is thronged with neat, fresh-looking birds, showing off their spanking-new pl
umage after the summer moult. A pair of blackcaps has taken up territory on one of our elder bushes, and the male flits around, greedily feasting on the purple berries. From time to time his more timid, tan-capped mate pokes her head out too.
Along the damp, bumpy bridleway crossing Mark Moor, the last few clumps of daisies and red clover are wilting in the cool morning air. A robin calls loudly from a hawthorn hedge; and above it, on the topmost sprig, perches a plump, buffish-orange bird: a wheatear. This is unfamiliar territory: the closest place where wheatears breed is Exmoor or Salisbury Plain, though this bird could have come from as far afield as Scandinavia.
The wheatear may be the robin’s cousin, but there is little love lost between them. Having established his autumn territory along this hedgerow, the robin is not prepared to tolerate any intruder, however far it might have travelled. So when the wheatear flies down onto the stony track the robin follows, uttering a peevish warning call, in an attempt to see off the newcomer. But the wheatear takes no notice, running in short bursts along the track on long, rangy legs, and occasionally stopping to pick up a morsel of insect food, before flying up to another perch.
As I get closer, the bird’s fresh plumage and confiding nature suggest that this is a juvenile, probably only three or four months old. I appreciate the subtle pale, yellowish-buff of its belly shading darker on the upper breast, the jet-black tail, and as it flies a few yards along the path, the snow-white rump which gives the bird its name. For ‘wheatear’ has absolutely nothing to do with ears of wheat, but derives instead from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘white arse’.
