Meadowland (14 page)

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 M
AY
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 M
AY
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 M
AY
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.

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 M
AY
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.

The red seeds are a food source for finches (goldfinches in particular), and the leaves make a meal for the caterpillars of the small copper butterfly.

At night, under gleaming stars, I stand at the edge of the meadow and inhale. I can smell the grass getting sweeter.

Mid-May, and the curlews have stopped their singing. I miss it so.

The curlews in the meadow are wise to keep their quiet; they have two chicks, black yarmulkes on their heads and some fancy black stripes across their eyes. They are being fed by both parents who, with meadowlife smarts, land about twenty yards from the nest and creep inconspicuously in on foot, only their crouched heads visible above the screen of rippling grass. Soon only the male will feed the gaping-mouthed young; the female curlew has done her bit. Curlews only have one brood per year.

On occasion, I realize, the curlew adults are not flying off for food but walking to the nearby newt ditch. From under the hedge I cannot see past the thistles to the ditch; on my next visit to the field I hide, standing still, in the shadows and the stands of hazel of the copse. A human tree. The wait is worth it for the joy of seeing the curlews’ private dining: the curlews almost upend in the ditch, pulling out worms and taking insects off the surface, presumably skaters. More than once I see squiggling frogs and newts in their forceps of bills.

While I am watching the curlews feed their young I note that the foolish meadow pipit is not entirely without guile. The female is carrying the faecal sacs of the recently hatched young and dropping them under the hedge, so the smell of the excrement will not attract predators to the nest.

In a lazy-aired evening I dig up pignuts, whose feathery white heads gawk above the grass. The pignut is a member of the carrot family, and its tuber – which is round and cobnut-sized – is sweetly edible underneath its black husk. The knack in harvesting pignuts is to trace the thin stem down to ground level, then follow the immensely fragile long single root down to the tuber itself. Break the root thread on your 10–15cm journey down into the earth and you lose the tuber treasure. Caliban in
The Tempest
dug up the ‘fairy potato’ with his bare fingers; the red Devonian clay of Lower Meadow requires a spade to get through it.

By the time I have twenty pignuts in my carrier bag, it is getting dark and the swifts are screeching around the roof of the house, and the tawny owlets are wheezily demanding food in the old quarry. I’m about halfway back up the bank when there is an almighty whirring of wings in the grass. A red grouse rockets off. Only the bird brain of the grouse knows what it was doing here, a mile or more from its mountain-top home.

Another evening: I sit under the twin oaks, the sunlight creating Japanese willow pattern shading on the bank. I’m smelling the old brown brook, which is glugging in a noise curiously akin to water going down the plughole of the bath. Edith is swimming, head out of the water, as matrons of a certain age do. And
mayflies are dropping by the dozen on to the water surface around her, spinning crazy circles, spinning themselves to death. Downstream in Periscope Pool I can hear the trout jumping. Edith emerges with sealskin shine, shakes herself and lies down beside me. It is warm, and the comfort of dogs is always reassuring.

I’m jerked to attention from my dozing by squeaking. Daubenton’s bats are chasing down the mayflies, picking them off the water with their hobbit-hairy claws. On the brook’s edge some red-faced, out-late swallows are collecting mud for their nests.