Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  A hundred years ago, when the cottage was a family home, the place would have been better equipped for living. In the kitchen at the back of the house was an old copper for heating water, but it was rusted beyond repair now, and the fireplace beneath it had been bricked in, as had the bread ovens beside it. Even the chimney had been blocked off. I say kitchen, but perhaps scullery is a better description for a room with no water and no cooking facilities. But it was where I stored my jugs of water for the day’s use, and my pots and pans, and there was a stone sink and a walk-in pantry that here at the north of the house never saw a ray of sun and so kept things reasonably cool throughout the year. There was another copper in the woodshed where once laundry would have been washed, but this too was no longer usable.

  It was spring and there was life all around me as I worked. A pair of starlings nested in the corner of the gable, and all day long they perched at the very top of the ash immediately in front of the house and mimicked everything they heard, so I would keep rushing out to look for things that weren’t there. They did a particularly fine curlew. The jackdaws had steered clear of the smoking chimney, and built their nest in a hollow in the ash at the back of the house. This ash tree grew straight out of the rock of my quarry wall; it never seemed to have enough leaves and looked as though it might come crashing down at any time. But it never did. Pied wagtails had tucked themselves away in the drystone wall that separated my garden from the track. This is a bird whose nest is notoriously hard to find; the feeding birds would land on a rock some distance away, their beaks stuffed with insects, their tails bobbing, then scurry along the track in the lee of the wall to throw predators off the scent. It took several days of watching closely to locate the exact spot, in a little niche in the rocks not a foot above the ground. The parent birds were never out of sight, they found enough food in the field within fifty yards of the nest. I felt protective of these birds; they were the welcoming committee to my new home, and in the Gypsy tradition they are a bird of good omen. Two of the chicks left the nest long before they were ready, when they were just nine days old, two tiny bundles of innocence huddled together on a nearby rock, cheeping for their parents. Lots of young birds leave the nest days before they can fly, and it seems like a risky survival strategy; they are just so vulnerable to predators. But I suppose that when the young are competing against one another for a limited supply of food, it is the birds that leave the nest first that get fed first. When I heard the alarm calls of the parent birds and saw them fluttering in distress, I went out and chased away the squirrel that had come too close and was sniffing around with interest, and took the two little feather-balls back to their nest. They stayed there all day but by nightfall they were out again. I was relieved to find them alive in the morning, and in fact the whole brood fledged successfully. It doesn’t pay to get too attached to the fate of individual birds though; it’s a brutal life out there in the fields and forests. Small birds like blue tits will lay a clutch of thirteen or fourteen eggs, and if things go well will try for a second clutch, which gives some idea of their life chances; if mortality was not so high they would be everywhere, swarming like locusts.

  On an unexpectedly warm spring day I threw open the doors to air the place. A swallow flew in through the open front door, circled me three times where I stood in the centre of the living room, then exited through the back door as suddenly as it had arrived. For a moment inside became outside, my cottage became a part of the landscape, not a self-contained unit that separated me from the natural world beyond its windows.

  In the loft was a small breeding colony of bats, and it was a pleasure on a mild evening to sit out in the garden at dusk and count them out. They would dart out from invisible crevices under the eaves and head straight for the trees; these were long-eared bats that specialize in picking insects off leaves, rather than concentrating on flying insects. There were sometimes one or two Natterer’s bats too, slightly larger and rarer, that zoomed off into the distance. It is not easy to identify bat species, even in the hand, let alone as they dart around at frantic speed in the half-light. Only a decade ago experts finally realized that the pipistrelle, our most numerous and familiar bat, was actually two distinct species. Usually their manner of flight was my best clue that most of my residents were long-eareds, but sometimes I would catch the silhouette of ears that looked half the animal’s body length and made them look like tiny flying rabbits. I stayed away from the loft in season; these colonies are so vulnerable that you need a licence to visit them. I generally counted about twenty or thirty bats emerging from my loft; come the summer the numbers would rise as the year’s young began independent flight. Bats may look to us like winged mice, but their life cycles are very different: mice have just a year to breed a new generation, while bats can live for thirty years and occupy the same summer and winter roosts for the whole of their lives. That is why it is so important to protect their chosen sites; long-eareds in particular don’t take kindly to new homes. They didn’t leave the cottage only at dusk and return at dawn, but came and went all night, and when I stepped outside in the dark they would often be chasing each other in circles around and around the house. They would fly incredibly close, so that I could feel the breath of their wings on my skin, but they would never touch me, their reflexes were so fast. Sometimes at night I could hear the faint rustle of them moving around in the roof-space, and it felt like a privilege to know they were there, living out their unfathomable lives just above me.

  Less welcome as house guests were the mice that invaded the house in the spring. Only once did I find I had house mice, which are something of a rarity in these parts. No, these were country mice rather than town mice, long-tailed field mice and their larger and less common cousins the yellow-necked mice that overflowed into the cottage from the fields. They were cute little critters with big black eyes, but they made a terrible mess and ate everything. There were five sturdy ham hooks embedded in the living-room ceiling, and I would hang vulnerable packages of food from these in carrier bags, but the mice had a remarkable propensity to find something, anything, that I had overlooked. They would gnaw their way happily through plastic containers and bottles, eat their way through corks, and were partial to a little nibble of soap. I didn’t want to kill them so I got myself some live traps and released them back into the wild. They would make their way straight back from a surprising distance, so to be on the safe side I usually took them all the way to the far side of the river.

  The daytimes I spent getting to know my patch. Though I took occasional forays further afield, to all intents and purposes my home turf was anywhere I could walk to and from in a day, and so it expanded in summer and contracted in winter. Loosely, it formed a rough circle with a perimeter five miles from the cottage. It was skewed though; I spent much less time on the east side of the river. This was not because of accessibility; although it was miles north or south to the nearest road bridges, at my nearest point on the river was a footbridge, a beautiful old suspension bridge that swayed and rolled as you walked across it, which was a fine place to pause and watch the dippers and grey wagtails for a while, and was a handy short cut to the main road beyond. But I was in the remotest northern reaches of Breconshire, while east of the river the Radnorshire Hills grew steadily smaller and more populated as you headed towards the Marches and England beyond. I was drawn inexorably to the wild, and to the west.

  The sheep-grazing fields immediately around the cottage, in spite of the vast views they afforded, felt secluded, flanked to the west by Penlan Wood, a fully grown plantation of Norway spruce, and to the east by a small oak wood long preserved as pheasant cover, misty with bluebells in the spring and above which loomed the rocky crags of the mountainside across the valley. The top field behind the house was capped by a long thicket of Scots pines, and a hundred yards downhill, as the hillside fell steeply away, was a scattering of massive oaks, many hundreds of years old and hollowed out with age. The top of Penlan Wood ran almost level with the cott
age, and apart from that uninterrupted view directly west on to the moors the cottage was encircled by trees, as if in a large forest clearing. The only other person who came here was the farmer, to tend to his sheep, otherwise this was my own personal domain. Sometimes it felt as though I didn’t need to go anywhere else, that if I just waited here patiently, every wild creature there was to be seen in mid-Wales would eventually come and visit me.

  Penlan Wood was my shelter; it gave the cottage a modest amount of protection from the prevailing south-west wind. These conifer plantations have been vilified for despoiling natural habitats and being generally lifeless, and Penlan Wood seemed this way too. It was hard to get into, fringed with a tangle of rhododendrons that overhung its fence, and once you got inside it was dark and gloomy and still. No birds sang, and the ground was bare, just a thick mulch of pine needles. Nothing grew there, save in autumn when bright white eggs would emerge from the ground, from which would burst the other-worldly flyblown phalluses of stinkhorn toadstools. The wood had never been thinned, presumably because it was small, obscure, in an awkward location, and was easily forgotten. The trees were fully grown now, perhaps forty years old, and stood shoulder to shoulder so little light could penetrate the dense canopy. It was only a small plantation, just a few acres, and seemed totally unpromising, but it was there right beside me and it felt like mine. The place took time to give up its secrets, but this apparent lifelessness turned out to be an illusion.

  Owls called each night from the edge of the wood. At its nearest corner was a single ancient oak. They say that oak trees take two hundred years to grow, two hundred years to live, and two hundred years to die. This tree was dying; its topmost branches were leafless antlers. I wondered if this tree might be the owls’ home, but when I inspected it there were no holes I could see that could possibly be used for nesting. And then one sunny day I was walking across the field past the tree, and the sun cast a perfect shadow replica of the oak on to the grass at my feet. I saw the shadow of an owl on the ground below me, and before I could even look up the ghost owl disappeared into the very heart of darkness. I watched the tree constantly after that, and in the evenings I would sit on a nearby tree stump and watch the owls’ comings and goings. They didn’t seem to mind; the female even paid me a return visit one afternoon. I was in the garden weeding when she flew over for a closer look, calling softly. The male and female were quite distinct, the male a pale grey bird, the female a dark rufous brown. When I knew for sure that both birds were out hunting, I shinned up the tree trunk to where the boughs spread, navigating my way around a clump of bramble that was growing from the fork. It was important to be sure they were both away; one early bird photographer lost an eye to a tawny owl, right here on this estate. They will attack anything they see as a predator after their chicks. The tree was completely hollow, the hole was a vertical chimney almost all the way down to ground level, over six feet deep. I didn’t have a torch so I lowered down a storm lamp on the end of a length of string. And there at the bottom was a single comical-looking chick, with oversized feathered feet and the long tail of a half-eaten mouse emerging from its beak, which peered up at me and hissed at the light. Tawny owls’ main prey is the field vole, but vole numbers fluctuate wildly from one year to the next. The size of the owls’ clutch will depend on the availability of prey, and this was evidently not a good year for voles, as this solitary chick was far smaller than it should have been this late in the season.

  In the heart of the wood nested woodpigeons, and a pair of magpies, while the carrion crows always chose an old oak in the fields near by. Along its bottom edge nested the buzzards, looking down over the oak and alder woods around the stream at the bottom of the hill. It was always the same pair; buzzards’ markings vary hugely and it would have been possible to get to know every one of the local buzzards individually were there not so many of them. Often there would be twelve or fifteen of them circling over the hillside, squabbling over their territorial rights. For two or three years I would regularly see a buzzard that was all white apart from some brown on its wing feathers, it would often be out in my front field in the early morning, hunting for the night’s worms. The Penlan Wood pair had been here for years, and there was a whole row of old nests along the flank of the wood. When the young lost their infant down and fledged they would loiter around the trees in the bottom field for a couple of weeks, mewling piteously for food. And then one year my home pair of buzzards elected to move nest, to the thick horizontal bough, strewn with polypody ferns, of a streamside oak, with the nest directly above the rushing mountain stream. It was a pretty spot, and much more conducive to watching the young as they grew.

  Penlan Wood was not quite square. It had a fifth corner facing west, almost directly south of the cottage just fifty yards downhill, and right on this corner was a small fox earth. There was another earth too in the pine wood above the cottage, and the two were evidently connected as I frequently saw foxes commuting between them. A direct route between them would have taken the foxes right past the cottage, but their path always followed a loop that kept them a safe distance away. These were shy animals; country foxes are much harder to watch than city foxes, and with good reason. The hunt began in earnest every autumn. These were farmers’ hunts, not horseback hunts. They would bring the pack up the lanes in their Land Rovers, and follow them on foot with walkie-talkies. They never seemed to make it to my charmed clearing in the woods, but I would sometimes run into them while I was out walking, and they would eye me with suspicion, and after they were gone I would find the blooded corpses hung from trees. Seventy per cent of the year’s young would be killed each year; if a fox made it through its first year it was probably too wily to be caught.

  One day as I was walking past the wood and took a peek over the fence at the fox earth I noticed a broken shell right by the earth, and this was how I discovered that jays were nesting in a tree directly above the foxes’ heads. Jays are beautiful birds, with their lilac breasts, barred hackles, and that incredible jolt of electric blue on their wings. They are conspicuous birds that clatter through the woods in family troupes, screeching raucously, and seem weak on the wing, loping from tree to tree as though they can barely keep themselves aloft. But in the nesting season they change completely, becoming secretive and silent and seemingly disappearing from view. I was able to watch closely as the nest site was in full view of my window. They would slip silently out of the wood almost at ground level, and dart straight for the cover of the nearest tree, like a different bird altogether.

  One year rooks moved into Penlan Wood. The nearest rookery was a mile away at least, in a beech wood the other side of the river and up-valley. These rookeries are occupied for generation after generation. Some sites are hundreds of years old, so I don’t know what induced these birds to form a breakaway colony this particular year. There were six pairs nesting close together in the nearest corner of the wood. The young all left their nests before they were fully fledged, and sat in the fields close to the fence all around the wood, their heads hunched into their shoulders. It was a bonanza for the foxes; every one was doomed. I watched a fox prancing across the front field on its way to its young in the pine wood above, the young rook still flapping in its jaws, the parent birds calling in protest and diving repeatedly at the fox, but not too close. The rooks never returned.

  And then there were the sparrowhawks. I saw a sparrowhawk on my very first visit, down on the lanes skimming fast alongside a hedgerow, then suddenly flipping over the hedge to surprise unwary birds feeding in the field beyond. A couple of seconds and it was gone. Here one moment, gone the next; that is the way of the sparrowhawk. There is a ferocity in their burning eyes, and they live life at a different pace to the rest of the world; they never seem to rest, not for a moment. There can be no doubt that here is a creature whose heart beats twice as fast as ours. They seemed to me to epitomize the wildness I had come to seek, and I wanted to get to know them. It would not be easy, for they have good reas
on to be wary. They are the least favourite bird of the gamekeeper, and an old estate rule here was that nothing could be shot on a Sunday that wasn’t for the pot, save for the sparrowhawk. I started to create a mental map of where and when I saw them, but there was no method to it; I might see them several times in a day, and then not for a week, and they could turn up anywhere at any time. My mental map was without trends, without clusters. But once I shifted my focus away from places and numbers and towards what they were doing when I saw them, it all started to make sense. I began to unlock their secrets, and eventually I would get to know every nesting site in the area. And the nearest of these was in Penlan Wood.

  It was early spring and a female hawk was circling the wood. It is easy to tell the males and females apart: like many birds of prey the female is almost twice the size of the male, not in length but in bulk. The male bird is much more lightly built and falcon-like, with red barring on his pale breast and a slate-grey back, while the female is a dark grey-brown with broad short wings and a heftier build all round. There is good sense to this size difference as they don’t compete for prey. The little males tend to concentrate on small birds like finches, while the female will take on bigger challenges such as pigeons. I first saw the female from my window beating her way up the hillside close to the edge of the wood, in a flight that was utterly distinctive and quite unlike the hawk’s normal dash. Her wingbeats were slow and measured and she was just four or five feet above the ground; she looked like she had all the time in the world. Her tail was fanned almost like that of a hovering kestrel, and as she flew she rose and fell, undulating like a woodpecker. When she reached the corner of the wood she turned sharply and proceeded along its top edge, and a few minutes later, in a shaft of sunlight, she reappeared from around the bottom again, preceded by a little flock of panicking redwings. This carried on for hours, it was as if she was wrapping the wood up in a parcel. This is not a behaviour I have ever heard of before, but she did it every year without fail, and it was one of the many things I looked forward to seeing each spring. She was totally consistent, and this in a bird that I first took to be unpredictable. She always, always, circled the wood anticlockwise.