Wild Hares and Hummingbirds

by Stephen Moss

  AFTER A BRIEF thaw, comes another big freeze. A week before Christmas a cold front arrives overnight, and dumps a good 6 inches of snow on every available skyward-facing surface. Trees, power lines, roofs, chimneys, goalposts, bushes, reeds, hedgerows and the rock-hard earth are all completely covered with this increasingly familiar white substance. With the coming of the snow, the yews and gravestones in the churchyard are trimmed with white, making this timeless scene even more beautiful than usual. A mistle thrush chatters as he defends the scarlet yew berries against all comers, while beneath his perch discarded ones lie like drops of blood in the snow.

  Inside the church, there is, rather appropriately, a white wedding. As the bride and groom emerge into the sunlight on their new life together, they are accompanied by a joyful chorus of bells from the church tower. There is something familiar, yet strangely odd, about this classic scene. Familiar, because when we were growing up snow was a regular occurrence, even here in the milder south-west of the country. Odd, because over the past few decades we have grown to assume that snow, along with short trousers, playing kiss-chase and collecting stamps, was something we had left behind with the passing of childhood. So to see it in such all-encompassing glory, taking over the land like an invading army, brings a strange clash between nostalgia and reality.

  Meanwhile, amid this unreal scene, we all face the reality of the inconvenience the white stuff has brought along with it. We are unable to complete our Christmas shopping, travel to friends or relatives, or even drive to the supermarket; so Tom and Anne at the village stores are doing a roaring trade in essential supplies. We are all confined to barracks for the duration, making last-minute mince pies, wrapping presents, or simply slumped in front of the television, enjoying its festive offerings.

  IT IS AN hour or so before dusk, on Christmas Eve, and the landscape has turned completely monochrome. Far away to the north-east, at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, a lone chorister is singing the opening notes of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, a moment that for me always marks the true beginning of Christmas. Feeling the need to escape the warm fug of central heating, and get some cold, fresh air back into my lungs, I take a late-afternoon walk, accompanied by my youngest son George, my brother-in-law Luke, and his two very energetic dogs.

  Apart from the dogs’ frenzied activity, the world is almost lifeless: with no sound, and hardly any movement. Yet wildlife always retains the capacity to surprise, and as we trudge across Blackford Moor, a large, heavy-looking bird flies out of the hedge right next to us. It is a short-eared owl, one of the few members of its family to hunt by day. The owl flaps low across the field, its browns, blacks and greys standing out vividly against the white; perches briefly on top of a broad hedge, and turns to stare back at me with its piercing yellow eyes. It then flies high towards the east, briefly hassled by a passing crow; its deep, powerful wingbeats reminding me of a huge, slow-motion moth.

  Short-eared owls were once a regular winter sight, not just here in Somerset, but across much of Britain. In recent years they have declined, and nowadays any sighting, especially one as close and intimate as this, is a special event. An unexpected and delightful present, just before the sun sets on Christmas Eve.

  As we wander home, I reflect on the dramatic shift in our expectations of the nature of winter. Only a few years ago, I remember thinking that my youngest children would probably never have the thrill of making a snowman, or enjoying a snowball fight. Now they simply assume that with the coming of winter, there will be snow. And although the lack of falling snow means this does not technically count as a white Christmas, try telling that to the village children, as they play gleefully in the thick white stuff on Christmas morning.

  WE HAVE REACHED that strange no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year; what a friend of mine calls the ‘Winterval’. Turkeys, mince pies and Christmas puddings have been consumed; presents opened, played with and discarded; relatives welcomed, fed and dispatched. A few miles up the M5, at the Cribbs Causeway shopping mall, the ‘January sales’ are in full swing, even though New Year is still several days away. Thankfully, the natural world provides an alternative, and rather more satisfying, experience.

  A couple of miles beyond the River Brue, the southern boundary of the parish, another winter dawn breaks over Catcott Lows. As the mist rises from the cold ground, revealing the silhouette of Glastonbury Tor, I begin to lose any sense of feeling in my fingertips. All around me, a shrill chorus of whistles pierces the chill air. It is the unmistakable sound of hundreds of wigeon, the most striking and handsome of all our dabbling ducks.

  Today, a thousand or so wigeon, together with smaller flocks of teal, mallard and shoveler, are crammed in and around a small hole in the ice. Looking more closely at the plumage of a male wigeon, I am reminded that so many colours and patterns in the natural world defy my powers of description.

  From a distance, the overall impression is of a grey body framed with black and white, and a brown head. But when I take a closer look, I can see that the ‘grey’ is made up of a series of narrow, wavy black lines on a white background. Duck aficionados call these vermiculations, from the Latin for worm, as they are supposed to resemble the wavy pattern of a worm’s trail. Close up, the ‘brown’ head is a deep, rich chestnut, set off with a broad stripe of yellow-ochre, as if someone has casually run a paintbrush down the front of the bird’s face. And what colour is that breast – pink? Not quite, but not quite orange, either.

  The wigeon’s shape is pleasing, too: with its pointed tail, high forehead, and short, grey bill tipped with black, ideal for grazing. For unlike most other ducks, the wigeon finds most of its food not in the water, but by walking slowly and deliberately across the wet meadows, using its bill like a pair of nail-scissors to cut the tips off the short, sweet grass.

  Of all the birds here before me, the wigeon have travelled the furthest. Although a few hundred pairs breed in northern Britain, their numbers are massively swelled each autumn, when close to half a million birds arrive here from their breeding grounds in Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia. Because these areas freeze up during the winter, the wigeon must travel southwards and westwards, seeking out the more benevolent, maritime climate of Britain and Ireland.

  Here on the Somerset Levels we have our fair share of these engaging ducks, but another winter visitor from Siberia, Bewick’s swan, has all but disappeared. Named after the nineteenth-century engraver, publisher and political radical Thomas Bewick, small flocks of these wild swans have always spent the winter here, filling the air with their yelping cries. But in the past decade numbers have fallen away, and nowadays only a handful overwinter on the levels. Most are well to the south, in the vast waterlogged fields around the villages of Muchelney, Stoke St Gregory and Curry Rivel, whose very names reflect the long and fascinating history of this unique landscape.

  Even without the Bewick’s swans, though, the sight and sound of more than a thousand dabbling ducks lifts the spirits. My encounter with them reinforces the continuity of this place and its wildlife over time, much in the same way as the distant backdrop of Glastonbury Tor reminds me of our human presence here across the centuries.

  A DARK SILHOUETTE materialises out of the grey sky; its sheer power marking it out as something different from the crowd. It is a peregrine: the fastest living creature on the planet. Ever alert, the ducks take off, rising as one organism from the ice. Each individual bird sticks as close as possible to its nearest neighbour, trying desperately to avoid being singled out by this mighty predator. At first, this looks like an unequal contest: surely the hunter’s speed, power and strength will triumph? But the battle between predator and prey is far more equal than it looks: each has co-evolved in a constant ‘arms race’ to outwit the other, and more often than not the hunt ends in failure for the hunter.

  The peregrine – a big female – has a very short timespan to make a crucial decision: which individual duck will she go for? She singles out a straggling w
igeon on the edge of the flock, and zeroes in with her piercing dark eyes, up to ten times sharper than my own. As she approaches, the ducks perform their own evasion strategy: twisting and turning to confuse their attacker. Each time the peregrine swoops low over the surface of the water she must take great care: unlike the wigeon, she does not have an oil gland with which to waterproof her plumage. Should she inadvertently land on the water, she may become waterlogged and drown.

  Time is on the ducks’ side, too. For like a cheetah pursuing a gazelle, the peregrine is a sprinter, able to channel her energy into a sudden burst of speed in order to make the fatal blow. But as each second passes without a kill, the muscles in her wings begin to tire, and the chances of the wigeon escaping increase. Eventually, with a rapid twist of a wing, she makes a sudden change in direction, heading upwards into the sky. She has given up, and the wigeon sense it, their whistles becoming gradually less agitated as they float gently down to earth.

  Minutes later, and it is as if the drama never happened. The wigeon are back on the ground, waddling across the frosted grass and getting down to the business of the day: feeding. The peregrine is long gone, in search of other targets to chase. But as I lift my binoculars, I realise my heart is beating much faster than usual.

  DECEMBER HAS BEEN, according to the Met Office, the coldest since records began a century ago. Following three hard winters in a row, this return to a traditional pattern of seasons – cold winters, late springs and warm summers – appears to have been a tonic for Britain’s wildlife. Nature, so the theory goes, works best when our weather patterns revert to normal. So hibernating creatures stay put instead of waking too early; birds nest at the right time; flowers bloom, insects buzz and migrants arrive when they should; and all is right with the world.

  It would be easy to assume that this suggests that the planet has somehow pressed the reset button, and that from now on we shall experience more typical weather patterns. But I’m not so sure. Even as we have shivered in the snow, much of the rest of the world has been experiencing far higher temperatures than usual. Taken as a whole, all the evidence points to the conclusion that the earth is undergoing its most rapid period of warming since the end of the last Ice Age. Ironically, even the recent heavy snowfalls are an indicator of this: extreme weather events, including droughts, storms, floods, and freezes, are all signs of an unstable and rapidly warming climate.

  As are the changes we are already seeing in our fauna and flora, especially here in the south of Britain; changes I have witnessed during my own lifetime. When I first became interested in birds there were just two different kinds of heron breeding in Britain: the common and widespread grey heron, and the much rarer bittern. Today, there are up to half a dozen species living within a cycle ride of my home, including those we used to see only on holidays to the Mediterranean.

  Once, any white object in the fields of the parish was either a swan, or a plastic tub containing food for sheep. Today it is just as likely to be a little egret, whose elegant posture and Persil-white plumage have become a regular sight. One winter no fewer than four egrets took up residence in the rhyne at the back of our house, each standing poised and still before striking out like a hunter with a spear, to grab a passing fish with that sharp, pointed bill.

  Taking the children to school one day, I saw a lone egret flying overhead. Something about its slow, deliberate wingbeats made me realise that this was the little egret’s much larger relative, the great white egret. Not so very long ago this huge white bird – the height of a grey heron, with a wingspan of almost 6 feet – was an extreme rarity in Britain. But in the past few years it has become a permanent resident here on the Somerset Levels. With as many as half a dozen birds living here, it will surely breed in the next year or two.

  Another species of small, white heron already has. A few years ago, on a fine sunny day in May, I was driving across Tealham Moor with the children when we spotted three egrets feeding among the grazing cows. Something about their small size and hunched shape struck me as different; sure enough, they were cattle egrets. That very same year they bred in a heronry close by; the first ever breeding record for Britain.

  At first sight this seemed extraordinary, for this is the bird we usually see perched on the backs of elephants and buffaloes in nature films about the African savannah. But this wasn’t a chance occurrence, for of all the birds in the world, the cattle egret is among the most skilled at adapting. Originally native to the warmer regions of Europe, Asia and Africa, it has, during the past century or so, managed to colonise South America, North America and Australasia. Now the species is surging northwards through Europe, and in the next few years is likely to become a permanent member of Britain’s birdlife.

  Birds aren’t the only creatures taking advantage of global warming: insects such as moths and dragonflies are also able to move northwards as the climate heats up. Here in Somerset we are well placed to receive the expected influx of continental European species, such as that hummingbird hawkmoth I saw on my buddleia bush back in July. And during the next few decades, if the warming trend continues, I confidently expect exotic, colourful birds such as the hoopoe and bee-eater to breed regularly here in southern Britain.

  But there’s a downside to global warming, too. In the longer term, we know that any rise in temperatures is likely to have catastrophic consequences. Extreme weather events, and a change in the timing of the seasons, will seriously affect the wildlife of this parish, and indeed the whole of Britain, in unpredictable ways. We may assume that adaptable species such as crows and magpies, dandelions and daisies, cabbage whites and foxes, will all thrive. Predators and scavengers are also likely to do well. But any plant or animal that requires a specialised habitat, and those that migrate, will almost certainly struggle to survive in the longer term.

  For me, one of the greatest pleasures of living in the English countryside is the way we ourselves become part of the natural cycle of the seasons. We celebrate the coming of the swallows in spring, and witness their departure in autumn; our hearts leap when we see the first snowdrops; and we look out for the budding of the trees followed, a few months later, by the falling of their leaves. All these experiences bind us tightly together with the living world. In the case of a global migrant like the swallow, they also connect us with people we shall never see and never know; people who live thousands of miles away from this little country village.

  But if the pattern of the seasons is broken – if what we are seeing now is not a return to the status quo but a final, valedictory farewell – then the connections between us and the natural world may also be shattered, perhaps for ever. If swallows fail to adapt, then we will not simply have lost a wild creature, but also everything that creature means to us. For some icons of the natural world, this has already happened. As I noted earlier, across much of Britain, the cuckoo has now become a mere folk memory, its sound dying away as the years go by.

  AS NEW YEAR’S Eve dawns, the natural world has come full circle, and we are back where we began. Yet even in the depths of winter there are signs of life, if you know where to look for them.

  In the corner of an old wooden railway carriage in my back garden, a small tortoiseshell butterfly is hiding among the spiders’ webs, wings closed to conceal its bright colours. It will stay here all winter, before emerging again on the first warm day of the year, to suck nectar from the early-spring flowers.

  Underneath the railway carriage, the toad that wandered into our home a few months ago is also hibernating; just like the slow-worm in the compost heap, the bats in the rafters of the barn, and any hedgehogs that managed to survive the annual burning of the log-piles on the Fifth of November.

  Small mammals such as voles, mice and shrews stay active, though well out of sight. Snow is no problem for them, as they make burrows beneath its soft white layer, and continue to search for morsels of food.

  But the predators that hunt these little creatures – the barn owls and kestrels – are having a l
ean time of it. The resident kestrel by Lower Splott Farm can still be seen perched on his telegraph pole or, occasionally, hovering in search of food; but the barn owls along the lane to Chapel Allerton, those at the top of Kingsway, and the pair south of the River Brue, have all disappeared.

  Waterbirds are having a tough time, too. The village moorhens still potter about in the rhynes; herons stand statuesque on the ice; and a snipe, just arrived from the north, probes his bill into the half-frozen mud. Further downstream, a kingfisher sits, a beacon of blue and orange against the white, patiently waiting for a fish to appear.

  The fields of the parish are quiet. The occasional buzzard and lapwing accompany small flocks of rooks and jackdaws, while the high-pitched trill of a wren pierces the heavy silence. By night, hares, roe deer and badgers roam these same fields. When morning comes, the only evidence of their nocturnal wanderings is a few prints in the snow.

  Soon after the break of dawn, vast squadrons of starlings fly low towards the north-west, on the way from their night-time roost to feed on the mudflats of Bridgwater Bay. As dusk falls, they make the return journey, the soft whoosh of their wings reaching my ears a fraction of a second before they appear overhead. Seconds later, they are gone.

  Everywhere I look, colour has drained from the landscape, and the pinks, purples, yellows and greens of earlier in the year are but a distant memory. I struggle to recall the spring chorus of birdsong, the gentle summer buzzing of bumblebees, and the last, autumnal flicker of butterflies’ wings.

  I find it hard to believe that many of the birds that hatched out just a few months ago in the barns, among the reedbeds and deep inside the hedgerows of the village are now half a world away, under African skies. But soon they will respond to an unseen signal, and begin their long and arduous journey north.