by Simon Barnes
So what would the augurs make of the moment on that day of the September equinox when I went to the barn to collect hay for the horses? I approached the barn – open at one side, with space for a vast double-door that we can’t actually afford – and as I was about to cross the threshold a silent white shape passed silently and purposefully over my left shoulder. Not quite brushing against me.
What did this sight mean? Tell me, sad augurs. Was it there to establish an appropriate mood for dealing with the new chunk of marsh? I had often seen barn owls hunting over the marsh – no doubt this individual most of all; and knowing wild creatures as individuals, rather than as members of a species, is a significant thing, as I was to understand with still greater intimacy in the course of the unfolding year. This barn owl had been using the barn as a regular roost for some time, acting all affronted when we paid visits to remove hay, the tractor or Eddie’s trike. The darker corners looked a trifle disgusting as a result, because his heaved-up collection of stout black pellets looked horribly like human turds, and there were probably 100 or more of them beneath his favourite perches.
Cindy, who has clever hands, and Eddie had several times dismantled pellets and teased out the contents: matted fur, pin-thin bones and a sinister little row of skulls: so many deaths in one great vomited slug of unwanted stuff. Posing the question: how many more little lives out there under the rank grasses and the clumps of vegetations? How many shrews on the marsh? How many more shrews than the barn owl needed? Without a vast superfluity, there is no future for a predator. It is a truism of ecology that the abundance of prey controls the numbers of predators, not the other way round. So in a sense, our job on the marsh was not owls but shrews, not shrews but insects, not insects but the plants on which insects feed, not plants but the earth itself. An elemental task then, involving earth, water, fire and air, the fire being the fire of the sun. The barn owls and the other predators were messengers: a top predator is prima facie evidence that everything else in the environment is OK, at least for now.
Dawn and dusk are when barn owls are at their best: not darkness but low light. They love the times of transition. Well, today between hunts he would have the opportunity for an equally long daytime and night-time doze.
This was supposed to be the first day of autumn, but it felt like nothing of the kind. The weather was making specious claims that winter would never come, that late summer would carry on forever: bright sun offering real warmth and a fleet of red admirals parading on the quarter-deck of the ivy flowers. Have you ever noticed that ivy has flowers? It was a relatively new concept for me. No one stops much for an ivy flower: only butterflies.
But to work, to work. I went to my hut and looked out over the marsh. Gannet woodcut above the desk but no thunderbox in the back. Yesterday from my desk I had had a very unsatisfactory glimpse of a large raptor; from my half-second glimpse it looked too dapper to be one of our regulars. What the hell was it? It had flown, dipped, and disappeared behind a particularly annoying blob of a bush. It was no longer Barry’s bush: I – or rather we – could make a decision about its future. We could decide all sorts of things.
In Norfolk we call this place a valley and do so without a shred of irony. Half a mile off you can find Hill Farm; a friend visiting from Herefordshire asked why they didn’t go the whole hog and call it Lookout Mountain. But out here in the Broads there are traditionally two kinds of pasture: hill and marsh. Our lower pasture is marsh: flat and prone to flooding. The higher one, slopey and easily drained, is therefore hill. Well, by the time you reach the top you are a good ten feet higher than marsh, so where’s the joke?
The lower meadow is next door to the garden, which is mostly orchard with a collection of rather odd shrubs; family conferences on their future always end up with them staying, despite my vote for a more bracing outlook. The boundary beyond the garden and the lower meadow is a dyke about six feet wide. Not so very deep, you can see the mud at the bottom when the light is right, but God knows how deep the mud goes. I tried to cross it once: I never found footing and hauled myself out in mild panic with the help of a tree.
The far side of this dyke is where the country goes wild. Wild and wet. This is the marsh proper. It’s grazing marsh that’s been let go: wet, scrubby, impassable, in many places too soft for easy walking. It’s as flat as the lower meadow, for we’re on a flood plain which stretches to the river that passes around 600 yards from us, not quite on three sides as it makes a great bend. The river wall has been built up as a sturdy green rampart. Part of me longs to see the river reconnected with the flood plain, a river runnin’ wild again. The part of me that owns the house thinks otherwise: we’re on the farthest edge of the flood plain and we’d be within the river’s range in what the Environment Agency calls an Event. On the far side of the river the plain extends for a while before rising in a gentle slope, which is, of course, the other side of the valley, if those in more lumpy counties can accept the term. To the left there is a stand of trees. The rest is dominated – overwhelmed – by a great stand of sky. We may not do great hills in Norfolk, but when we do sky we do sky.
A Cetti told us to buy as much marsh as we could when we bought the house, but we didn’t want to own a Cetti. We wanted a Cetti to own his own place. We wanted to hear that mad shout of song. We wanted to hear that mad shout of song and know that we would hear it again.
So when we moved in we took on the first chunk of marsh covering four or five acres, stretching as far as another fat and treacherous dyke. We set up the fence that divided our bit of marsh from Barry’s: a fence that told us that essentially our job was half-done.
Barry’s piece is more open than our first chunk, and drier. It has a different feel as a result; the transition wasn’t just a matter of fencing. Conservationists talk about ‘a mosaic’ of habitats; the more subtly different types of habitat, the more biodiverse the place. The richer the place, that means.
But then Barry’s piece became part of ours, the fence came down and was re-erected. It now divides our seven or eight acres – savour that, seven or eight actual acres of actual marsh – from our new neighbours’ garden. When the Chinese water deer make a mad charge across the marsh they don’t have to leap or dodge or – dreadful thought – crash into the wire mesh. They have a clear run at it.
So in the week of the September equinox there was a sense of completion. And with it, a sense of beginning.
Morning chores. The ivy is a-flower with butterflies.
Paths are full of meaning. The marsh is criss-crossed by paths, but not all of them are easy for humans to follow. The most obvious are those made by the deer. Like most of us, deer have preferred routes from A to B, and the more they walk them, the better the paths become. Use creates use. The paths link feeding spots and resting spots and other important places in cervine life. You can pick them out from what seem like faint shading across the vegetation: slightly darker with use, and following a logic of their own, which is not a logic as humans see it. Often the path has a roof of low trees or curving grasses, more tunnel than road, making it nice and cosy and secure for a deer, but hard going for humans.
Get closer to the ground and you can pick out lower and more subtle paths, used by smaller and still more secretive mammals, some of them carnivores. And more subtle even than these are the paths made by rodents and insectivores, often more like tunnels below the top of the rank grasses and sedges. The short-tailed field voles mark these secret paths with their urine, establishing ownership and reminding them of the way so they can travel along them at improbable speed. The kestrels that visit the marsh can pick out these urine trails because they can see them. They pick up the fluorescence of the urine because they can see ultraviolet light. They are tetrachromatic: they see in four colours, while we humans see only in three, as any television engineer will explain. (Most mammals see in only two colours; primates are the exception. Colour is not an objective fact about the object perceived but about the equipment of the perceiver. A col
our-blind human doesn’t see it wrong, he just sees it differently.)
Paths are important for humans too. First, they provide access. More than that: paths are welcoming. They invite a human into a place dominated by non-human life. A path makes you feel more comfortable, more at ease in a place. Obviously a path makes it possible to walk from one side to the other without looking at your feet with every footfall. But more than that: it says that humans have a place in this landscape. It passes on a message that the apparent neglect of this landscape is the result of human choice. It’s wild, but you have no need to feel alienated. You too, poor human, are welcome here. And in late September there was no sign of the vegetation dying back. Without paths, most of the marsh would be inaccessible or require strenuous effort to get anywhere.
Once a path is established, it gets used. After all, few of us object when life is made a little easier. So the paths that humans make soon become used by all the other local mammals. Drop your eyes every so often: you never know what the next corner will show you.
So when Cindy set off to make a path across the new section of marsh, it was an act of some significance. It was taking ownership, taking responsibility, adding an element of human participation and human pleasure to the life of the marsh. She did so in the toy-tractor we have: a game little Kubota with a cutter on the back. Cindy, as you will gather, is good at stuff. My job was to walk in front, like the man with the red flag, not to slow her down but to fall over any unexpected tree-stumps, tussocks, dips, pits and mounds, rather than waiting for the tractor to tip over.
So round we went, the roar of the engine in my ears and the scent of watermint and meadowsweet in my nostrils: ahead of me tangled banks of vegetations, behind me a new sweet-smelling and inviting path. Cindy, driving with immense competence, even relish, looked like a Soviet poster for the joys of collective farming.
Job done, Cindy put the tractor back in the barn. We then took a bench from the garden out to Barry’s pond. Eddie came too, and so did Joseph, our older son, aged 22 and studying music. We brought apple juice for Eddie, San Pellegrino for Joseph – he’s an abstemious chap despite paternal example – and for Cindy and me, a bottle of Tesco Premier Cru.
Pop! To Charlie! To the marsh!
In a few moments the sun had done an astonishing thing. It started to set in the east. I’m no expert in these matters, but something told me that was wrong. Perhaps it was the end of the world . . .
It was an illusion, of course, the result of a particularly odd cloudscape. And we’re good at cloudscapes here. The clouds in the east had picked up the last few rays of sun, which was now coming across almost at right angles to the flat terrain of the marsh, and they were lit up in a flamboyant array of salmon pink and blue – like a jay’s wing – mixed in with improbably lush shades of orange. And all that from the first glass.
A sound from Barry’s pond. ‘What’s that?’
‘A moorhen, Eddie.’
‘Show me.’ So I found a picture of a moorhen on an app on my phone, and played back the call. Prooop!
A little owl called, trying to hurry the dusk along. Eddie knew that one all right. Barry’s pond was now more of a reedbed. Joseph wondered how easy it would be to remove the colonising reeds. Using all his not inconsiderable strength, he managed to pull out a single clump and then collapsed theatrically. He does quite a lot of things theatrically. It was clear that if we wanted the pond to be a pond, we’d need a digger. And we’d want to take out some of those sallows over there in the winter, wouldn’t we? And get some of the scrub cleared. Yes, but not all of it. Maybe if we let the reed develop we’d get breeding reed warbler. Now that’s a thought. It was another of the God-decisions you have to make when you are managing any form of land, remembering that doing nothing is also a drastic form of action. You can be managing a window box or a field or a forest or Broads National Park: you have make decisions about what grows and what does not, and what species of animal can live here and what cannot.
Barry’s marsh seemed to be giving fresh life to the bit we already had. It was like New Year’s Eve: the same old life given a bracing new start. We sat for a while longer, finishing the champagne. One of those rare moments in family life when everything is still.
A furious bark. Eddie correctly identified Chinese water deer.
Sometimes ordinary moments go awfully deep.
Eddie wrote a poem when we got back.
on the marsh
it was nearly night
there was white mist
on the grass
it was lovely
we sat on the bench
by the pond
we had crisps
a moorhen house
in the reeds
the moorhen calls near me
and a little owl
a long long way away
maybe in the wood
it was misty cold and wet
I felt excited
the dead tree was dark
against the sky
grey clouds
and black trees
we walked back in the dark
home for a bath
2
A PLACE OF SMALL IMPORTANCE
Morning chores and a skylark. Two herons blot out the light.
It’s not much, this place. Have to accept that. But then it’s also the most important wildlife site in the country. I have to accept that, too.
It’s not hard to find a place with greater biodiversity, much greater bioabundance. There are many sites packed to bursting with superstars.
Drive half an hour to Hickling Broad and you can see cranes, gorgeous glamorous six-footers that were extinct as breeding birds in this country for 500 years. Or drive an hour south to Minsmere, where avocets, bitterns and marsh harriers all breed. Head north to Cley and you can find spoonbills and, in winter, sky-darkening flocks of geese. Or go west to Welney, with colossal numbers of whooper swans, or to Strumpshaw, just the far side of the Yare River, where in season there are swallowtail butterflies shining bright yellow and as big as bats. These are wildlife sites in the way that Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot are poets.
Three other sites. All a good bit nearer. I never knew they were there. Beck Meadow, Chedgrave Common and Hillington Low Common. All either in private hands or leased from the parish, and all managed with wildlife in mind, two privately, one by a local wildlife group. Three charming, unassuming places. I visited them with Helen Baczkowska, conservation officer of Norfolk Wildlife Trust. We saw a peregrine flying over one; in another, a grass snake pouring itself away from my boots with what I don’t suppose I can call a nice turn of foot. Helen and I dropped to our knees in delight at a turd – well, it was an otter’s, so who could fail to rejoice?
None of these places is a superstar. They are, if you like, the holding midfielders, the wicketkeepers, the spear-carriers, the members of the chorus, the corps de ballet – unglamorous but essential parts of something greater. They are called County Wildlife Sites in Norfolk; in other counties they are sometimes called Local Wildlife Sites. They get their designation from the local county Wildlife Trust, and must fulfil criteria that determine their – well, you can’t say ‘importance’ because they’re not important. Their relevance, then. They’re not really important at all. Merely essential. They work because they are many. They work because they join up the superstar sites and stop them being islands. They soften the brutality of the agricultural countryside. They make room for species other than our own; they make room for life.
They don’t have legal status – though legal status is a frail enough protection even for the most extravagantly categorised patches of land. The planning for the mad vanity project of the HS2 train seems to have been a matter of joining up the wildlife sites with the highest level of legal protection – Sites of Special Scientific Interest – much as you join up the dots in a book of puzzles. Why not? After all, there’s always less fuss about trashing an ancient woodland than putting a business c
oncern to mild inconvenience. Still, the status of the title of County Wildlife Site does at least – sometimes – add a certain moral force when it comes to questions of planning and can make it easier if you’re looking for grants to develop such a site for the benefit of wildlife. There are 1,300 of them in Norfolk: a quiet network that binds together places that people cross the country and the world to visit.
And I was at once filled with a crazed ambition. I wanted our bit of marsh to be a County Wildlife Site. Not to get a grant or to stop anyone building on it, but out of – well, a sense of vanity on behalf of the land itself. I didn’t want to say: look, we’ve got a County Wildlife Site and you haven’t. I wanted the land to receive an honour it deserved. I wanted the land to be able to say to itself, I’m a County Wildlife Site. I matter.
That’s a bit silly, I know. But I felt that the land – well, deserved it. So I asked Helen if she would take an informal look at the place. She very kindly accepted.
I have a fascination for people who can do difficult things that I can’t do at all. I like to watch mechanics, woodworkers, mathematicians, artists, pilots, musicians, farriers: people wholly confident in an unfamiliar skill. I especially like watching people with wildlife skills beyond my own. It’s an education to be with better birders than me. I love being with experts on invertebrates. Also botanists: people who see the land in ways quite different to my own and yet love it in the same way. Birders sometimes refer to botanists as ‘stoopers’: forever on their knees while we’re looking at the heavens. But that’s mostly an affectionate tease. It’s as if we’re looking at different worlds – but it’s the same world all along, and it all adds up: that sprig of green I ignore is as important as the distant shape in the sky I am gazing at.
