Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Gilbert White recorded thrushes eating the roots in severe snowy seasons, and the berries are devoured by several kinds of birds, particularly by pheasants. No animal will touch the leaves. They emit prussic acid when bruised.

  Drops of rain linger, glisten, cling to the sword-blades of grass. They do better than a bronze beetle that climbs a grass stalk, falls, climbs, falls, never achieving escape.

  A peacock butterfly is on the wing in the floating spring air, and nectars on the cuckoo flower. The butterfly spreads its wings as it feeds, advertising its garish eye-spots. They watch over the field, but really they are devices to deter predators. They are passable imitations of the eyes of a giant bird, of an avian monster. The pansy-coloured peacock is happily unmolested by birds, even when it provocatively warms itself on a flat stone.

  Birds are in and out of the hedges in a constant traffic of nest building. Chaffinch. Great tit. Blue tit. Robin. They still seek the innermost sanctums because the hedges are still not in leaf. A favoured material, I note, is dried stems of grass from the meadow. The nest building of the birds invisibly binds the field with the hedge. Passing sunlight rebounds off the smooth woman’s skin of the hazel.

  I am not the only farmer in the field. Away in the rough grass beside the Grove ditch are three tumps of yellow meadow ants. Estimating the age of anthills is approximate, yet not so vague as to be useless. Lasius flavus digs down into the earth and brings up its spoil at the rate of a litre or so a year; it is the spoil which makes the hill. The colonies beside the ditch are about five years of age; the home mounds in Bank Field from which the winged agates (in non-science speak, flying ants) flew on their drifty summer’s voyage of colonization are twenty. The steepest part of Bank Field burgeons with so many mounds it appears the earth has boils.

  There is no finer soil than the soil of the meadow ants’ nest, for each individual particle is dug out and then hauled by the worker ants to take its place on the mound top, all stones and debris left behind. A few select blades of grass grow from the bald earth dome, like hairs on the head of a venerable curate.

  Since the mound is above ground it catches the sun; the ants use it as maternity ward and nursery, and will even carry the eggs through the mound’s network of tunnels to the warmest side. Unfortunately for the ants, the fineness of the dome’s soil and its elevated position make for poor protection against predators. Thin badger sows in spring sometimes break open the great mounds in Bank Field with frantic bear swipes in pursuit of ant larvae, or better still, the eggs.

  But it is not a badger that has attacked one of the anthills in the meadow; the damage is too small. The culprit is a green woodpecker, which has stabbed into the anthill with its beak, wrecking about one half of the dome. In the spirit of scientific enquiry (though with a nagging sense of hooliganism) I dig a spade into the ruined earth, a couple of inches at a time, down through chambers and passages. I am too careless to begin with, and have to slow down to the speed of an archaeologist. The ants themselves robotically pick up disturbed eggs, as though a metal blade bisecting their home is an everyday, hey-ho, experience.

  Eventually I locate my prize. In a cellar room about the size of a ten-pence piece is a small herd of grey soporific aphids. These are kept captive by the ants, and ‘milked’ for the sugar or ‘honeydew’ they excrete. The aphids themselves feed on the roots of plants in the dungeon’s roof and walls. This is intensive farming of a manner to make any agri-businessman green with envy because the aphids are selectively bred; in all probability the little herd of aphids in this chamber are clones of a good ‘milk aphid’, an insect Holstein cow.

  Meadow ants are full of surprises. They can live for twenty years, and in dry downland areas they will take the larvae of the chalk hill blue butterfly into their nests and raise them.

  Meadow ants are not really yellow; they are the ginger colour of tea made by grandmas.

  By 12 April the brightness of the flowering celandines means that to cross the meadow in the evening is to walk through a starfield.

  The blossoming of the flowers is now unabated; the first bluebells burst out in the copse, and within the week the campion comes out under the hedge, and there is secretive stitchwort there too.

  Flies waltz the warming air. The ground temperature is constantly above the 6 degrees Centigrade that grass needs to grow. There is another necessity for the greening of the grass; meadow grasses need, depending on the species, between ten and fifteen hours of daylight for the uprising.

  Standing in the middle of the field at night: someone has stirred the clouds into milk pudding.

  I am sitting on the bank of the existential river. Upstream of the tree-hung pool there is a dipper on an algae-glossed boulder. These members of the thrush family are the riparian equivalents of canaries in a coal mine. In a pure river like the Escley, with its abundance of crustaceans, bugs and fishes, the dipper density is about as high as it gets, and the two hundred metres of river along the meadow support one dipper pair. It is the male on the stone. I know he has seen me, because he is ‘dipping’ – bobbing up and down to show off his startling white shirtfront. This is a signal from bird to predator that the latter has been seen and has no chance of a sneak attack.

  The bird dives into the pool, more gainly than one might suppose from a blackbird lookalike, and pops up with a struggling bullhead. The death of the bullhead is brutal, seized by the tail to have its head bashed out on the green boulder.

  When the prey itself is stone-still, the gentle dipper flips it up and swallows it head first. With one beat of its wings, the bird then glides downstream to the shallow water running glassy and cold over the shingle. The bird walks along into the current, peering mono-maniacally. A tyrannosaurus dart of the beak, and a caddis fly larva is extracted from the sheeny water. Its bristly catch in its beak, the dipper flies off low around the bend, to its moss-lined nest in the bank, where it will squeeze the caddis fly larva into the mouths of the waiting dipper babes. The dippers have used the same nest in a slit in the sandstone, swaddled by the elm’s roots, for the five years we have lived here. For all I know, dippers have been using the nest for decades, even a century or more. They are birds of tradition, with successive generations using the same nest.

  April: the month of greening, of greenshift, when everything bursts into leaf and growth. Squatting by Bank Field hedge, taking a spirit-level perspective towards the river, it looks as though the floor of the field has risen by two inches. Actually, my eye is not so far out. I have my ruler with me; the grass has grown in the spring flush by an inch a week over the last fortnight. Behind me in Bank Field the ewes and lambs are feasting on the verdancy, the lambs breaking off to play king of the castle on the fallen trunk of the elm, which lies like a tossed-away dog bone, and which nobody in thirty years has got around to moving. Such are the unintentional conservational benefits of laziness that the prone elm hosts beetle colonies galore; the foxes have been digging them out, and the wing cases (elytra) in their scat dumped on the tussock by the gate catch the last shards of sun.

  After a while the unknowing lambs in their evening gangs realize they have become separated from their mothers, and start up with plaintive calling. All down the valley lambs take up the mayday, so it reverberates around the hills.

  The Victorian naturalist W. H. Hudson would spend a whole day in spring just admiring grass, ‘to rejoice in it again, after the long wintry months, nourishing my mind on it . . . The sight of it was all I wanted.’

  At twenty-four inches in length, with a preposterously long down-curved bill, the curlew is an outsize and distinctive wader. Put it down in a field, though, and it disappears in a Houdini piece of legerdemain. It takes several sweeps with the binoculars until I locate the female, who is pulling at a clump of dry grass. The male has already scraped a depression in tall sward about twenty yards out from the hedge; his DIY has been done half-heartedly in a manner a man would understand and a wife condemn.

  Two days later she is sitti
ng tight on her eggs. To help me locate the nest again I tie a white rag in the hedge directly behind it.

  I have taken up observational residence in the bottom of the far hedge, the four-foot isosceles triangle where the hazel has broken down and nettles rampage and the sheep shelter from the sun. Every field should have a neglected corner. While I can peer through the shambles of decaying hazel across the field and see almost everywhere, it is sitting inside this gone-feral space that I am most aware of the immediacy of beauty, the beauty of immediacy. The hazel screen obliges concentration on the things that are close. There is the cough-mixture whiff of ground ivy, and the whirling black flies so small that I can barely see them, whose name I do not know and never will. The vine of the ivy winds up in a faultless helix. Then I see the paradise blue hue of the dog violet (‘dog’ being an unkind reference to its lack of perfume), the pale-green towers of Jack-by-the-hedge, which might be better named as Jack-beanstalk. But rub a leaf, and you will know why it is also ‘garlic mustard’. Have you ever stopped to notice how perfect are the curves of an earwig’s rear pincer? Or how like amber an earwig’s body is?

  I am transfixed by my own prison; through the bars of the branches, however, and past the skittering light I am not oblivious to the fox, because movement always gives the predator away, as surely as it gives the game away. The fox knows the curlew is there somewhere in the field. It stands intent, it sniffs and it stares. The curlew does not move. Curlew make good eating, and used to be as popular on the human table as in the fox’s den. According to poulterers’ prices fixed by order of Edward I in 1275, the curlew was 3d a curved head.

  Neither by sight nor by nose does the fox locate the curlew. And it lopes away, disgusted at its failure.

  16 APRIL Note on piece of paper put in pocket on walk around the field with the dogs in the morning: ‘More primroses out on south side; blackcap singing, & the chiffchaff too.’ These are the first of the summer migrant warblers to reach the field. The chiffchaff does not stay, and moves on. The blackcap sings from the top of Bank hedge, and I cannot help but have my heart stumble in admiration. The complexity of the blackcap’s song was pinned perfectly by the French composer (and ornithologist) Olivier Messiaen, who used it as the musical symbol for the eponymous Saint François d’Assise. ‘I had to insert,’ wrote Messiaen, ‘chords of each note in order to translate the special timbre, which is very joyous and rich in harmonies.’

  The blackcap deserves its title as the ‘northern nightingale’. Except for this: the bird’s alarm call is a crude ‘tak’, as though two pebbles were being chipped together. For the entire summer the blackcap ‘taks’ at me, at the sheep, at everything with the constancy of a dripping tap.

  Of all the summer martins, the swallow is the one which spends most time hawking the field, and on the 20th I see the first ruby-face of the year. Swifts and house martins all take their turn over the field, but they feed higher; it is the dearth of high-flying insects outside high summer that accounts for the shortness of the swift’s sojourn in Britain. Today’s rain has forced the insects low, and the first swallow of summer is doing what swallows do best; lacily, elegantly skimming over the sward-top after winged prey. (Male swallows with the longest tail streamers, incidentally, are the most attractive to the girls.)

  The delicacy of the moment is ruined by the two Canada geese, who come honking over to land in the lake further up the valley. Vulgar, with absolutely no subtlety, they are irate drivers in an LA traffic jam.

  The French call the yellow wagtail the ‘shepherdess’, and true enough the bird does follow on behind the sheep, hoping for insects turned up by ovine cloven hooves. It is much happier in Marsh Field, where there are not only sheep but acres of soft ground. A pair nest there among the sedge, and sometimes flit over into the meadow to explore the wet corner. The male enjoys perching on the hedge and singing. If it can be called singing. He may have the yellow plumage of the canary, he does not have its voice. All he can manage is an insistent ‘te-seep’.

  They run as daintily as fairies, and the male is a tantalizing flash of gold in the grass as he hunts about. They arrived on a raw Friday at the end of March, but they bring warmth to every place they tread, hence their old local name of ‘the sunshine bird’.

  Almost no birds today have vernacular names. Bird names have become standardized, homogenized, conscripted into what is considered proper by scientists for classification. A century ago a birder could have told what county, even what village, he was in by the folk name for a long-tailed tit. In his Treatise on the Birds of Gloucestershire, W. L. Mellersh collected no fewer than ten local names for Aegithalos caudatus, the long-tailed tit, among them long Tom, oven-bird, poke-pudding, creak-mouse, barrel Tom, and in the south of the county, long farmer. For John Clare in Northamptonshire the long-tailed tit was, delightfully, ‘the bumbarrel’.

  18 APRIL Bluebells out in force in the copse, making a blue gas mist over its floor, an uninterrupted mat of docks, celandines, wood anemones (alas, on the fade).

  The meadow pipit launches off a fence post, and ascends flutteringly up to twenty metres, till it reaches damn near the top of the young oak, accelerating its ‘sweet-sweet-sweet’ song. Then it falls anxiously back down on half-spread wings, with a valedictory and tuneless trill. It’s an apology for birdsong against the neighbouring skylark’s joyful riot. But I sympathize: I can’t whistle a note either.

  And then the mist descends to put a slate lid on the valley and its proceedings.

  St George’s mushroom (Calocybe gambosa) is one of the earliest mushrooms to appear, traditionally making its creamy bow in the green grass on 23 April, the day commemorating England’s patron saint. Due to global warming it has cropped earlier and earlier, but the long cold of this spring has encouraged it to keep close to its historic calendar date. I notice a ‘fairy ring’ of the mushroom on 22 April in the usual place, about twenty feet in from the north, Bank Field, hedge. With its convex head and well-proportioned stem, all in Classical order, St George’s mushroom is handsome rather than pretty; it looks good enough to eat, and is. And its aroma, my nose to ground like a truffle hound, is alluring too. The mushroom smells of flour.

  There was an unexpected visitor in the field today. As I walked down the bank in the morning haze the blackbirds were clamouring their liquid alarm. Then: dismissive wasp-yellow eyes. Scaly yellow legs. Black metal talons. All these things flashed before me.

  I am not sure who was the more surprised, the female sparrowhawk or I as she came up over the hedge. I could feel the displaced breath from her wings as she flicked up over my head, then away, a sullen grey bullet.

  Certainly I was the more scared; for malevolent verve the sparrowhawk is unrivalled. They are always coiled, ready, dangerous. When the first gunsmiths needed a name for a small firearm they settled on the falconry term for a male sparrowhawk. A musket. But if anything, the female of the species is more deadly still; at ten centimetres bigger than the musket she can take a speeding wood pigeon out of the sky.

  Maybe five times a year I see a sparrowhawk on the farm, usually in summer, when they dash after an ascending skylark or meadow pipit, so beautifully but foolishly advertising their presence. Today the sparrowhawk has hunted low and swift around the hedges, and burst in among the chaffinches; there lie the remains of the bird on the grass in a crown of plucked feathers. Sparrowhawks sit on their grounded prey, so their talons pierce the body, and if this is not enough to administer murder they make darting stabs to the back of the neck. The meal-bird is defeathered at the top of the chest, just as humans are shaved for surgery; into this bare flesh the sparrowhawk inserts its bill to begin its gluttonous surgery.

  Sometimes a kestrel hunts the field, sometimes the red kite, and I once saw a merlin. Of the diurnal raptors, through, the field is truly the hunting ground of the buzzards from the quarry wood. One flies above me now, beating the bounds. His patch. My patch. This field is the space we share.

  22 APRIL There are now so man
y cuckoo flowers that the boggy corner looks like a city of lights. The arriving swallows no longer hunt a green sea, but are now skimming over a meadow of flowers galore. The field forget-me-not, with its startling yellow eye framed by blue, has also debuted. The wildflower days are here.

  Night in the field. On the far horizon to the south there is an unsightly smear of urban light. Otherwise the night is the black of deep space, the original black of the universe.

  A pair of car lights come along the lane which runs along the spine of the hill. Cars, though, are still sufficiently uncommon to be romantic, as though the people inside were on their way to some secret assignation. Then comes the milk lorry, punctual but out of time. One by one the dairy farms in the valley have closed down. What price milk production at a penny a litre profit even on ‘intensive’ grass and Frankenstein cows with overdeveloped udders?

  The night returns to its perfect pitch. A rabbit, across in the old quarry, pig-squeals as jaws clamp it. The foxes or badgers are about. I settle further down into the depths of the hedge.

  In this state of blindness, hearing becomes more acute. (Later I can even hear the tawny owl making its hunting flight.) From the field comes the slightest scuffling. I turn on the torch, and there it is. A mouldywarp. A mole pup, wallowing through the grass and floral waves.

  When mole young are five weeks old they are ejected from the nest by the sow to make their homes in nearby tunnels, either by taking over existing runways or by excavating their own. Soon the sow tires even of this proximity to her offspring, and there is a second diaspora at the end of the summer, when the mole young will take up home hundreds of yards from the maternal burrow. The dispersals are done overland, and leave the moles vulnerable to predation. Predators abound, and bound. Mole pups are a favourite of owls, foxes, badgers, weasels, stoats and the polecat that lives down the lane.