Meadowland (16 page)

Then the rain comes, heavy raindrops crashing
through the tiles of oak. The fluorescent florets of the hogweed and cow parsley are beaten down; it is night at mid-evening. A fox – one of the young ones – emerges from the Grove ditch, and I think it is going to hunt rabbits but instead it rushes along the rain-lashed edge of the meadow to the earth and the dry. The fox cubs are roaming further and further afield. But on a day like this, home calls.

In the wreckage of the evening a heron lands and stabs at something at the Grove end of the field. I cannot see what it is, only that it is being eaten; only that it is large; a baby rabbit or a rat, something of that order. On its outsize wings the heron lifts into a sky still angry, to continue on its stately patrol. The newt ditch is swollen with rain; a common newt (
Triturus vulgaris
) cruises in slo-mo eating tadpoles; one outsize tadpole jams in the newt’s mouth, and only after terrier-type head-shaking can the spotty aquatic lizard gulp its cousin down.

The ripe grass, heavy with seed, has been flayed flat by the violence of the wind and the rain. Somehow the grass, or most of it, lifts its head from its battering. The thin lance heads of the rye are most dismissive of wet; the fluffy heads of the cock’s foot and vertical pagodas of crested dog’s tail take longer to rise.

9 J
UNE
I am reading Viscount Grey’s 1927
The Charm of Birds
. Grey is the Foreign Secretary who took us into the Great War, the man who provided the epitaph for the prelapsarian continent: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Grey was a reluctant politician, and was always happier birding than engaging with matters of state. On 9 June 1910, however, Grey managed to mix business with pleasure, taking Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-President of the USA, on a ‘bird walk’ down the Itchen valley. During their walk they saw forty separate species of bird.

I am troubled by the obvious question: how many would the walk provide today?

10 J
UNE
One of our cows has escaped into the meadow; she is not anxious to return to the leaner pickings of Marsh Field, and displays some tantrumy head-tossing when I start herding her back. There is a funny art to cow-herding: if you stand behind a cow and stick your left arm out it will go right, and vice versa. After some windmill signalling she steadies into a sensible line of passage. Cows are not stupid; she has been caught playing truant, and knows the game is up. She walks deflatedly towards the gate into Marsh Field, me behind her, the lonely wight in the eternal picture of
a man herding a cow. We are acting out time-honoured roles, and there is a kind of unspoken companionship in our journey. I pull up a grass stalk (timothy) to chew, to make the rustic simplicity complete.

A desperate squealing in the grass. A field mouse’s nest, a ball of grass, absolutely dry despite the morning’s rain, has been spliced open by the cow’s hoof to reveal three blind, brown, sugar mice. One baby has been squashed open, and squeezed from its skin. I cover the nest as best I can, and flick away the bloody corpse with my wellington.

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 J
UNE
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.