Meadowland (13 page)

24 A
PRIL
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

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.

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 M
AY
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 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 Fallodon, 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.