Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  A cow exerts about 1.5kg per square centimetre. I have had every bone in my feet broken by careless cows. What hope a naked newborn mouse?

  But a cow’s foot is not all bad news. The hoofprint provides a microclimate that specialized invertebrae such as the blue adonis butterfly require for oviposition.

  12 JUNE The blossom on the hawthorn in the hedges has decayed to a tentative cerise. White moths float around by day and by night. There are frogs in the grass, where it is deepest and retains moisture even at midday. Elderflowers are out on the east and south sides of the meadow hedge, as is the honeysuckle. Bird’s-foot trefoil blooms red-and-yellow in the understorey of the sward, the bacon and egg plant. Clouds of pollen hang above the meadow. When it is cool in the evening, brown and black slugs slide along the grass. The purple-headed thistles in the entrances where the cows like to stand and stare are a metre high.

  Keith Probert comes down the track wanting to know if I’d like to borrow his new Hereford bull. ‘Bought him last week. The lads been giving me stick about him.’ No one can believe that a cattle farmer has bought a Hereford. A Belgian Blue or a Simmental would be a much better commercial proposition.

  I can understand why. Belgian Blues are overdeveloped musclemen and Simmentals have the personality of a machine. A Hereford is tradition, is companionship, is a bit of the old ways.

  How lovely it is to lie in a field and dream. I lie on my back in a casual crucifix, which seems an instinctive shape, since it is both arms-wide welcome and submission before Nature. To lie with arms straight by one’s side is the posture of death, the attitude of the coffin.

  Above me the skylark flutters into the haze, all the while singing a silken tent over its territory, until it is a speck in my eye.

  The lark is a male defending his patch. But where is his mate’s nest?

  It takes earthbound me an hour to find the lark’s house, tunnelled into a clump of grass. With exquisite nervous care I pull back blades to uncover three brown speckled eggs. A sort of treasure.

  It starts young, the obsession with Nature. As a ten-year-old I remember roaming for hours with my cousins and a dog, climbing trees to reach the pure porcelain eggs of wood pigeons. The first school photograph of me shows a Young Ornithologists’ Club (YOC) blue cloth badge visible on my jumper, revealed by a seditious pull back of the blazer lapel. The first thing I ever had published was in the YOC magazine Bird Life. (The next was in the Guardian, but hey ho.) My long-suffering parents took me time and time again to Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust. My bedroom was a museum of preserved skeletons, beaks and feet, my proudest display being the beak of a puffin, found on the beach at Borth. In a clear plastic case, formerly used to pack the Timex watch that was obligatory for a boy in the 1970s, it looked like a particularly exotic brooch.

  The meadow brown, Maniola jurtina, is on the wing despite the lichen-dull weather. A medium-sized butterfly, the meadow brown is distinguished by orange patches containing one ‘eyespot’ on the forewings. The caterpillars feed on a variety of native grasses such as bents, fescues, cock’s foot and meadow grasses. They do not wander far afield if they can help it and the meadow browns mating and flying today may never leave these five acres.

  Two meadow browns are mating face to face, missionary style, head uppermost, on a nettle leaf. They make a perfect heart shape.

  The fox cubs are cautious now, neophobic, averse to daylight, wary of me. For a week or more I do not spot them. Then Edith flushes one of them out from the thicket, which is one of the usual fox places for lying up. Foxes spend very little time below ground, outside of birth and a hard winter. The slimness of youth allows the cub to speed under the fence into the field; the matronly Edith needs to find a larger hole, by which time the fox is nothing but a fading impression on the retina.

  A sharper image comes to mind, of Sniffy, our deceased miniature Jack Russell, who chased the dog fox out from the same spot on a declining dreary October afternoon years back. The little dog gave full chase to the big dog. Neither of them stopped to ponder the ridiculousness of it all. The fox was the bigger by a factor of ten.

  The fox family is not alone in lying above ground. Some of the young rabbits have made forms in the long grass by the Grove bank. They graze watchfully in the afternoon, before playing the chase games beloved of many mammalian young.

  19 JUNE It is almost midsummer, and the light makes one resist sleep. There is daylight seventeen hours a day, double that of midwinter. Eternity would not be long enough if it was composed of English summer eves like this. I decide to take a turn around the fields. Walking down Marsh Field I can make out the shape of two animals standing together on the far side of the grass-sea meadow. A fox and a badger have met on their shared path; the badger is motionless, the fox is jutting its head forward, its gravel-gargle of anger audible thirty yards away. The badger is unimpressed, and it is the fox that gives way, bounding off into the meadow and around the black-and-white Buddha.

  20 JUNE There is a dead velvety shrew near my lying-up place in the wild triangle. The body is still warm. On the neck I can just discern tiny bite marks in the wettened fur. Shrews are territorial to the death.

  Yellow rattle really does rattle. While some regional names for the plant point to the similarity the shaken seeds in their pods have to the sounds of child’s play (baby’s rattle) or money tossed about in a bag (shepherd’s purse), Herefordians have a bleaker aural association for Rhinanthus minor. Locally it is rochlis, the death rattle. And it does bring death of a kind. Strictly speaking, Rhinanthus minor is a hemi-parasite, and, while it can photosynthesize, it is happiest when its roots grasp those of grasses so it can suck the life out of them. In the creation of a wildflower meadow, yellow rattle is as close to indispensable as it gets. As well as controlling the vigour of grasses, yellow rattle produces springtime yellow flowers which are attractive to bees. It only grows intermittently in the field, in the bare dry patch in the middle, and the northern end.

  When I accidentally disturb the meadow pipits’ nest the female flies up and gives me the full works of distraction, fluttering along the top of the grass for five yards or so to a thin patch, where she lies prostrate with one wing held out ‘injured’ and her tail fanned to the ground. I don’t wish to disappoint her, and follow. At which point she flies over the hedge into Marsh Field with a tinkling laugh.

  Some years ago, I betrayed my own rule, which is you have to like your livestock. So I bought, to add to the Ryelands and Shetlands, twelve Hebridean sheep – small, black, horned, primitive. And cloned. Of the black dozen I have only ever managed to like Hilda, the lead sheep, she of the retroussé Michael Jackson nose and unsated stomach. A neighbour donated a ram, called . . . Rammy. The Hebridean is a productive little sheep; on halfway decent and varied grazing like Lower Meadow it breeds well, is healthy, is flavoursome in the flesh, and produces a lustrous coat which fetches a good price with the Wool Board and private purchasers alike. The breed also scores highly with landowners intent on environmentally friendly, subsidy-attractive ‘conservation grazing’.

  But they escape, and jump like deer. I have them in the shed for shearing and one leaps the holding pen into the pen where I am wielding the electric shears. She then tries to vault over me, and only by diving to the side do I avoid her head, which is made from tombstone.

  Shearing is fine in your twenties; in your forties it kills. The definition of ‘back-breaking’ should be ‘a prolonged period of shearing sheep in the New Zealand position’.

  Almost everyone shears the New Zealand way, which is to put the sheep on its arse, back to one’s legs, and shear down with electric clippers.

  I start off at a reasonable(ish) rate of a sheep every two minutes, the clippers neatly sliding under the line of yellow risen lanolin in the fleece; by sheep number 22 I am down to a sheep every five minutes, and starting to make ‘double blows’, or two shears, because the first isn’t close enough. I also nick one ewe’s skin badly, and have to blast her with purple
spray, or aerosolized gentian violet. By sheep number 26 I am 140 years old. By sheep number 31 I cheat. I park the tractor on the track so no one can surprise me, and shear the rest of the flock with the sheep standing up, a halter around their heads, tied to a gate. I sit down to do it.

  But I can never tell anyone about it because it is so seriously uncool.

  My back is broken, and the exertion turned me into the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic. My hands, though, are baby soft from the lanolin in the fleeces.

  On Midsummer’s Eve one of the strangest moments of my life befalls me. At ten, when I go out to shut the chickens in their hut in the paddock, the demi-light is alive with magick. But then Midsummer is always a night for Puck, fairies and wonder; I once heard a nightingale sing in the valley at Midsummer, the only time I have.

  No sooner have I closed the pop-hole than the three horses and donkey appear noiselessly out of the hedge-shadows, and start circling me in a carousel of prancing and rearing. They go round and round me, faster and faster. Wilder. Wilder. Frankly, I am frightened; the wind from George’s lashing hooves crosses my face. The trotting donkey is the slowest in the circle, the comma mark, and I dash in front of her and out of the paddock, over the field gate in a jumping style I last used on a school sports day decades ago. The Fosbury Flop.

  The equines continue circling the hut, until Zeb, my horse, breaks out of the circle and runs, with absolute deliberation, up to me. And gently tugs on the sleeve of my shirt. He pulls the sleeve again, with infinite courtesy.

  Animals can, of course, talk. In that moment he and I are one, indivisible. I can see inside his great impenetrable chestnut head, see every slow bestial process. I am a fellow animal and he wants me to play.

  I kiss his head in apology. And he is away back to the merry-go-round.

  The enchantments have not finished, for Snowdrop the donkey also trots up and pulls my sleeve with her lips, wanting me to play. She too gets a kiss, and then waddles back to join the fairground show in the lumined aethereality.

  There is a new noise in the field. The meadow grasshopper (Chorthippus parallelus) is coming into song, only here and there, a brief interference. The song of this little green locust is produced by stridulation, the rubbing of a file on the inside of the hind legs against the forewings. The grasshoppers ‘chirp’ – so much nicer a descriptor – to each other in the sun. The male is louder and more persistent than the female. The grasshopper is more than a musician; it is an important protein for meadowland predators.

  A crow is hopping about with evil intent. But the bird’s desire is not matched by its physique. The grasshoppers bend their knees so cuticles on the hind legs slip into springs; when the muscle is relaxed, the energy catapults them into a new part of the grass forest. All the crow can do is watch as grasshoppers spring past. Grasshoppers have lineage stretching back 300 million years to the Carboniferous period; they are another landowner with a prior claim to humans.

  27 JUNE Under the two old shading apple trees of Bank Field the cows are standing waiting for Constable to paint them.

  I am on my stock-checking round on a June day of Spanish heat, and pause to catch my breath by the river, which is running mountain-clean and clear over the green and pink pebbles. There is an attractive spread of golden-leaved saxifrage along the bank. On the red bank behind the water, kingfishers have dug a Chaco canyon of holes over the years; one orifice, the home in occupation, is spilling putrid black slime. The kingfisher’s notion of removing excrement from the nest is a slovenly push out of the front door.

  While I am in my trance, around the bend of the river comes a brown torpedo firing through the water, scanning as it comes. A lithe twist, an agile spin, a gymnastic roll, then the otter clambers out of the water on to the shingle directly in front of me.

  There is something about this twenty-yard stretch of river, with its red cliffette behind and its overlapping alder trees, that encourages us all to consider it our own private space. The otter is no exception. It nuzzles at its chest and performs its ablutions.

  On the ‘how’ of watching animals the nineteenth-century nature writer Richard Jefferies was correct when he stated in The Gamekeeper at Home:

  This is the secret of observation; stillness, silence and apparent indifference to some instinctive way these wild creatures learn to distinguish when one is or is not intent upon them in a spirit of enmity; and if very near, it is always the eye they watch. So long as you observe them as it were, from the corner of the eyeball, sideways, or look over their heads at something beyond, it is well.

  As a good student of Jefferies, I stare above the otter’s head; I am so close I can see each of its whiskers, each dripping bauble of water.

  Unfortunately, the Jefferies rule of observation of wild creatures is unknown to Rupert the Border terrier, tied to my hand by pink bailer twine. I can feel him tensing. In all likelihood he is staring. And baring his teeth.

  After a minute or two of toilet the otter suddenly stops and looks around. And sees us. With some considerable self-possession it ambles across the stones in the shallows, and clambers up the far bank. The otter has not quite run away; in the military euphemism it has retreated. In water the otter is menacing, powerful, intentional. On land it is a lolloping toffee-brown dachshund.

  I am strangely put in mind of dapper Edwardian gentlemen. (You can anthropomorphize otters as easily as moles.) And then, disturbingly, of Bristol Zoo, which is the only place where I have ever seen an otter so close. In a moment of unpleasant realization I understand that viewing the otter in the tank at Bristol Zoo diminished this sighting in the wild. I saw the copy before the real thing. I saw the manufactured spectacle before the natural sighting.

  Is this not what happens to us all today? Has Autumnwatch not killed the experience of being an amateur naturalist?

  Or perhaps I just read Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ too often when I was a History postgraduate?

  A black wolf spider creeps from a crack in the ground of the hedge bottom. And starts off into the grass with deliberation. A male Pardosa amentata, I think. Wolf spiders do not spin webs; they hunt. On its head there are eight eyes arranged in three rows, all the better to see with; the first row comprises four small eyes, the second contains two larger eyes and the third row has two medium-sized eyes. (The four small anterior eyes are difficult to spot without a magnifying glass.) His peepers are better than mine. He sees her before I do. He stops and taps the ground with his front feet; she stills. Over the next minute, he cautiously scuttles, stops, scuttles until he is facing her. Then he begins waving the palps to the side of his face as though he was a sailor particularly weak at semaphoring. So begins the courtship in the fetid, closed-in world of the sward bottom.

  His wariness is wise. Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off their suitors, post copula. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is actually sacrificing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, in becoming a meal for his paramour he somehow helps the offspring of their union.

  He taps with his feet. Although she stares malevolently, the vibrations he sends must be good. This shadow foreplay can take hours. Sometimes, like today, it takes minutes. She accepts him. He rushes off. Wisely. And, ridiculously, I breathe a sympathetic sigh of relief for him.

  Others have already mated. There are females basking in sun spots, where the grass has been parted by wind or animal activity, warming up their eggs which are attached to a hideous pod on their rear. A crusted molehill is much sought after for this pre-natal sunbathing.

  I decide to go on a spider hunt, armed with a magnifying glass Sherlock Holmes would admire. And find: in the newt ditch the walk-on-water wolf spider, Pirata piraticus; in the grass a
nd hedge there is also Pisaura mirabilis, a comparatively large wolf spider, the male of which woos his mate by offering her a dead fly or other insect, wrapped up in a silk parcel. Pachygnatha degeeri (large-jawed spider); Clubiona reclusa (silk cell spider); Clubiona lutescens (silk cell spider); Lepthyphantes ericaeus (money spider); Lepthyphantes tenuis (money spider); Dismodicus bifrons (money spider), which is a particularly common denizen of grasslands, found between the upper strata of field layer vegetation and litter at ground level; Gongylidiellum vivum (money spider); Meioneta rurestris (money spider). The money spider, in its various sub-species, is one of the commonest spiders living in grasslands. By my estimate I am sharing the meadow with over two million of these incy wincy spiders, few of which are more than 5mm long. They in turn are consuming over 230kg of invertebrates. For all the industry of the money spider in the meadow habitat, it delivers an elegant murder, tying up its victim in silken threads before dispatching it with a poisoned bite.

  The spiders travel on the self-same silk threads, a personal flying carpet.

  28 JUNE Under a chattering swallow-sky I run down the bank. Two of the Gloucester Old Spots have done a bunk from the orchard. Like the truant cow they have headed for the luxury grass of Lower Meadow, where they have snouted the entrance gate off its hinges, and are now energetically eating, their mouths an epileptic, frothy green. They are pigs in clover.

  When Freda was younger, I think about eight, we mislaid her. Forty acres is at its vastest when you cannot find your child, and there is a river all along the eastern boundary and a lane all along the western one. A lane with cars.