Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  It is not true that moles are blind; the light from my torch startles the mouldywarp, which stops and sniffs with its snout. I turn off the torch and let the mole go on its way. Black into black.

  I must be this mole’s guardian angel. When I switched on the torch it picked up two amber eyes only yards behind the mole. The vixen. She turned and walked off, haughtily aware of her power. She only has to be lucky once; the mole has to be lucky always.

  All the little mouldywarps sail forth on the following nights. The odd thing is that I never discover the fortress, the super-tump under which the sow has her nest lined with grass and leaves, which must be somewhere in the depth of Marsh Field hedge. Not all the field’s secrets will be given to me, it seems.

  24 APRIL There is something intensely uplifting in seeing the house martin, who twice a year undertakes a dangerous migratory journey to build his house here, as though this place was perfect.

  Shakespeare too had a particular liking for the ‘martlet’, which he identified as a symbol of beneficence:

  This guest of summer

  The temple-haunting martlet, doth approve

  By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath

  Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,

  Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

  Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.

  Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed

  The air is delicate.

  Birds have a Proustian capacity for making remembrance. I only have to see a house martin and I am in my childhood home, the windows of my bedroom open, head out, watching the chattering, surveying house martins build their intricate mud cups under the white-painted eaves.

  April showers? I would settle for April showers, I would settle for anything short of heavy rain in this soaking fag end of the month. Fortunately Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush is made of cheery stuff and sings matins from the top of the elder. Perhaps he knows of better weather. The field is more than sodden; it is inch-deep in water. In such times as these farmers make poor jokes about planting rice in paddies. To remind me of the wateriness of the world, two mergansers land on the river, and when walking up from the field with Freda a strange bird flies at head height past us. ‘A flying chicken!’ jokes Freda. No, not a chicken; a web-footed great crested grebe, the first I have seen here.

  Real seasons with real weather do not progress smoothly. They stop, they start.

  MAY

  Curlew

  MAY IS NAMED for Maia, the Roman goddess of growth. And the increasing heat of the sun does bring on life. The greening suddenly becomes unstoppable, overwhelming, deliciously frightening. By the 3rd the grass in the meadow, in all of a rush, has reached a foot high, and if I lie on my elbows I am floating on a pea-green sea into which someone has thrown a confetti of blooms. Now I too have Hudson’s ‘spring grass mood’. I let the cows out of their winter paddock, into Marsh Field, only two days after the traditional day for moving cattle on to summer pastures. Quite taken with the mood of the moment, they run around throwing up divots. Dancing cow day we call it, this day when the cattle are released to munch their way through knee-high Maytime flowers.

  And the cowslips unfurl their Regency-bonneted heads in the meadow. As flowers they have benefited from a useful historical amnesia; the ‘slip’ in their name derives from the Old English cu-sloppe, meaning cow slop or cow shit. The charming, antique yellow Primula veris does indeed grow best in meadows where cows lift their tails.

  The air screams. The swifts, on their mechanical bat wings, vortex around the house until it is time for bed. They arrived yesterday.

  5 MAY For weeks my ears have been straining for the sound of the cuckoo from Africa. ‘Was that a cuckoo?’ I say to myself, to everybody, every time I catch a half-bar of a particularly tuneful cooing wood pigeon. But today I do, without doubt, hear a cuckoo, down the valley, while I am swimming on my ocean.

  I only hear the cuckoo once. But a century ago, on the hills above Buxton, Hudson found:

  From half-past three they [cuckoos] would call so loudly and persistently and so many together from trees and roofs as to banish sleep from that hour. All day long, all over the moor, cuckoos were cuckooing as they flew hither and thither in their slow aimless manner with rapidly beating wings looking like spiritless hawks.

  The resistible decline of the cuckoo has come to this: I hear a solitary cuckoo on a single occasion in a whole valley in a spring. The cuckoo is now on the red list for Birds of Conservation Concern. Welcome to the cuckooless spring.

  At least the meadow pipits in Lower Meadow will be pleased with the demise of the cuckoo. The meadow pipit’s nest is often the favoured choice for the cuckoo to lay its Trojan egg. Indeed, so closely associated is the meadow pipit with its role as the unwitting foster parent of the parasitic cuckoo that in Welsh the bird is Gwas y Gog (cuckoo’s knave).

  Meadow pipits are the mugs of the bird world, the victims of the malevolent con artist cuckoo and prey for charismatic merlins, hen harriers and sparrowhawks. Foxes and weasels predate their eggs. But I agree with Hudson that no one who sees the speckled bird ‘creeping about among the grass and heather on its pretty little pink legs, and watches its large dark eyes full of shy curiosity as it returns your look and who listens to its tinkling strains . . . as it flies up and up, can fail to love the meadow pipit – the poor little feathered fool’.

  There are two meadow pipits’ nests in the field, both with four dark brown eggs in their cup of dry grass. These are incubated for thirteen days. In both cases my attention was drawn to the nests by the courteous males bringing food to the sitting hens. Meals were mostly spiders, moths, grubs and caterpillars, almost all hunted within the confines of the field.

  Like the cuckoo, the meadow pipit is in decline. Indeed, the national loss of meadow pipits is one of the many reasons for the decline in the cuckoo. So many of the really common birds of my country boyhood are in crisis. In England, tree sparrows have declined by 71 per cent, lapwings by 80 per cent, and those huge murmurations of starlings, which I used to watch heading north to the night warmth of Birmingham, are a thing of the past.

  April and May are the months to listen to the dawn chorus, when male birds sing to attract females and mark out territory. By and large, the bigger and more tuneful the song the more likely the male bird is to attract a mate.

  The concert begins at around 4.15, before dawn breaks over Merlin’s Hill. To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious. I am in my dressing gown and wellingtons, unshaven, though none of the performers seem to care that I am inappropriately dressed, casual but unsmart. The birds sing in this order: the song thrush goes to the top of the ash and sings, to borrow Browning’s words:

  each song twice over

  Lest you should think he never could recapture

  The first fine careless rapture!

  The song thrush is followed by a robin and a blackbird, also on the riverside, then the brown-barred wren by the newt ditch, the blue tits, the chaffinch, a dunnock, the blackcap, a pheasant, all against the persiflage of jackdaws who are cavorting in the sky above the derelict barn at the Grove. A skylark takes to the air, and two male meadow pipits also make singing ascensions.

  I will proselytize on behalf of the dawn chorus. If you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.

  There is now an International Dawn Chorus Day, which was founded courtesy of the Urban Wildlife Trust in Birmingham. This is international in the way the American football World Series is global. It’s a British thing. As the journalist Henry Porter once pointed out, ‘Whatever our self-denigration and decline, you cannot take away from the British a genius for the appreciation of nature, particularly birds.’ We do seem to have been especially well appointed with birdie authors: Hudson, BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), Peter Scott, Viscount Grey of Fallo
don, and J. A. Baker, the author of one drop-jaw classic, The Peregrine. Of course, some science Puritan will aver that British nature writing is diseased by ‘species shift’, or what W. H. Hudson (a leading practitioner) termed ‘extra-natural’ experience – the placing of the author inside the head and body of the being described. The same lab-coated lobby invariably sign off with the dig that ‘nature writing’ and, by extension, ‘nature reading’ are the habit of metropolitans detached from the real Nature of the red teeth and claws.

  Every time I hear this argument I wind back my memory more than thirty years, to the little second sitting room of my grandparents’ house in Withington. They had impeccable country credentials stretching back centuries, although admittedly in my grandfather’s case only to the early 1600s. There were no parish records before then.

  In the second sitting room, there are only three shelves of the dark wood bookcase; on them are a few respectable novels in paper polka-dot jackets (led by Du Maurier and Somerset Maugham), at least ten books about Herefordshire (I must have read Where Wye and Severn Flow twelve times by the age of twelve) . . . and an awful lot of books by Romany, aka the Reverend George Bramwell Evens, a BBC radio broadcaster and writer on nature. There was Out with Romany, Out with Romany Again, Out with Romany by Meadow and Stream, Out with Romany Once More, Out with Romany by the Sea . . .

  There was nothing unusual about that little library. Everybody in the country had books on nature, farming and shooting, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald for knowledge, James Herriot for laughs. And the worst anthropomorphizers of all are country people. I have never known a sow badger to be anything but an ‘old girl’, and when the gender of an animal is unknown it is always ‘he’, and never ‘it’.

  And I wonder, is it really so difficult to enter, in some slight degree, into the mind-frame of an animal? Are we not all beasts?

  There’s an evening chorus too, and it is best enjoyed on a day like this, when the light is seductive in white veils, and there is enough moisture in the dusk air to intensify the floral incense of the spring meadow. Two male blackbirds, on opposite sides of the field, one in the Grove hedge, one in Bank hedge, sing against each other in an ecstatic proclamation of their stake in the world.

  Oh, the joy to be alive in England, in Meadowland, once May is here.

  If merry May is the month for listening to the dawn chorus, it is also the time for fox-watching because the adults, with hungry cubs, are forced out in daylight, and the cubs themselves are up above ground playing. They are wholly incautious this evening, having slunk under the fence from the copse to rough-and-tumble in the mattress grass of the field. Their turquoise eyes watch me approach until I can be no more than thirty feet from them; only then do they scamper back to their earth.

  Such unwariness will not last. In a month they will be nervous of me, a human, and they will have an awakened atavistic liking of the night. There are three of them, weaned and about eight weeks old.

  I’m aware that the vixen is watching me watching them. She has emerged from the thicket with a mallard duckling dangling out of the corner of her mouth. A spiv with a fag would look less shifty.

  Mallard ducklings are mainly brown with pale faces. Of the eight hatchlings born to the female who sat under the Elephant Tree just upstream, one was a garish Tweety yellow, which was the same as a death sentence.

  The duckling is for the cubs. Their mother has been scoffing voles or rats, dug out from the river bank at the bottom of the thicket.

  We are old acquaintances, the vixen and I, and she recognizes my face or maybe my smell. Anybody else and she would have warned the cubs minutes ago. As, indeed, she would have done if the dogs had been with me.

  The cubs should make the most of their duck. Such are the difficulties of cubs’ lives that by August insects and worms will be staple items of their diet. Carabidae (beetles), Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), grasshoppers and crickets, slugs and snails, arachnids (spiders) and maggots will also be taken. And the lowlier the status of the fox, the more lowdown invertebrates it will eat.

  By 7 May the hawthorn hedge on the track at the top of the farm is in full creation-green leaf. Three days need to pass before the hedges around the meadow, at the bottom of the valley where the frost likes to live, are wholly green.

  Only once do I venture to look at the curlew’s nest, on this slow, close afternoon when she flies to stretch her wings. I have stared at the spot for hours, and know its location down to a yard, and still it takes me a minute to actually spot the eggs. But there they are, four of them, pear-shaped, a gorgeous avocado green blotched with brown. It’s been three weeks since they were laid; they are only a week off hatching.

  Little patches of foam are glued to the taller grass stalks. Cuckoo spit. On gently smearing out the foam on my outstretched fingers, I uncover the pale greeny-yellow naked being that lives inside – the nymph of the common frog-hopper, Philaenus spumarius. The so-called ‘spit’ is produced by the larva blowing bubbles from its anus, and serves to keep the creature moist and hidden from predators. After all, stripped from its frenzied foam the frog-hopper looks a tender treat to a carnivore. The frog-hopper is one of the true wonders of meadowland: the adult Philaenus spumarius is, millimetre for millimetre, the world’s greatest jumper, leaping as high as 70cm – the equivalent of a human jumping over the Great Pyramid of Giza. To do this the bug attains an initial acceleration of some 4,000 metres per second.

  John Clare was convinced that frog-hoppers had more attributes still:

  They begin in little white nottles of spittle on the backs of leaves and flowers. How they come I don’t know but they are always seen plentiful in moist weather and are one of the shepherd’s weather glasses. When the head of the insect is seen upward it is said to token fine weather; when downward, on the contrary wet may be expected.

  Right in the bottom of the sward, in the tangly bases of perennial grasses and the accumulation of vegetative debris, there is another mighty jumper. This is the springtail, a tiny terrestrial jumping shrimp. Parting the grass to the red earth, I find one and touch it. The springtail does what it says on the label: it vaults, using a hydraulic piston on its underside which it drives into the ground for lift-off. There are about 250 Collembola species in Britain, and they represent an ancient group of primitive insects that bounded on the Earth 400 million years ago. Like the red soil, they are Devonian.

  Down here, where my fingers are exploring hidden micro-universes, and the soil is always moist to touch, the invertebrates exist in daunting numbers. Each acre of the meadow contains several hundred million insects. Together they weigh 0.2 tons. Or thereabouts.

  10 MAY The doily leaves of buttercups are ever more evident. The blossom of the wild apple tree in the Grove hedge is pretty in pink. I can almost ignore the brutal rain. After days of mellow living, when I hubristically settled into the certainty of spring turning to summer in linear progression, May does its trick of turning down the thermostat. There is a dead lamb in a neighbour’s field; the ravens and their one child are red-capped with blood from their gorging.

  12 MAY The seeds in the grasses are thickening; the grass and flowers in the field are a crop, they have purpose, so I confine myself to walking the edges to avoid trampling. There is dew, luscious and anointing on the grass this morning. I am standing under the oak tree in Marsh Field hedge, in its cast tapestry of light-and-dark, when I see the caramel stoat, sitting up, looking at the hedge. He is in another time frame, playing the ancient game of killer. He twines into the hedge, and twines out with a fledgling blackbird in his mouth. He never sees me.

  14 MAY Another uproarious morning of birdsong to greet the rise of the light. The dawn chorus is also an aid to determining who is nesting and where. Male birds proclaim their ownership by singing from a conspicuous vantage point. In the field’s hedges this morning there are three pairs of blue tits, two robins, two wrens, one song thrush, one long-tailed tit, two blackbirds, one great tit, one chaffinch, one hedge sparrow.<
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  No fewer than thirty-four species of British birds commonly nest in hedges, the most typical of which is the hedge sparrow. Its name in Old English was hege-sugge. Today, it is called the dunnock, but it remains the little bird of the hedges. A hedge sparrow’s sky-blue eggs huddled in a nest is one of the prettiest sights of spring; the picture the broken eggs make in the grass below Bank hedge is ugly. All the contents have been sucked, pecked or licked clean away. Two magpies have taken to loitering in the field. They nest in the solitary oak upstream of the quarry. One of them had its beak dipping in the egg as I walked in on the scene.

  15 MAY The first red clover flowers appear, on which several species of bee are feeding, late into an evening of Tuscan light, with the desperation of Titanic survivors clinging to life rafts. The sorrel heads are already turning into rusty-red towers.

  Sorrel, an upright perennial member of the dock family, likes pastureland untreated by chemicals. The plant’s Latin name says it all: rumex was a type of Roman javelin; acetosa means roughly ‘vinegar’. In other words, sour spear-shaped leaf. And tart it is. A kind of masochistic pleasure comes in chewing it. When haying, agricultural workers of old would bite on the leaves to stimulate saliva in their mouths. Used in medieval cooking the way we use lemon and lime, the plant’s high oxalic content gives it its characteristic sharpness. Until the time of Henry VIII it was cultivated as a herb and used in ‘green sauce’ for fish. And now the spires of its flowers, which reach 60cm in height, impart a red mist to the field.