Meadowland (25 page)

22 A
UGUST
Evening. The hills and mountain are smoked white by haze. I am standing in the field with my shotgun, eyeing the rabbits. There are about twelve of them, mostly grazing, one or two cleaning their faces with their paws. One of the first to come out, a heavy buck, has defecated on top of the ant mound closest to the warren, a signal of territorial intent.

I am unsure about the current kinship pattern in the warren, or its relation to other warrens nearby. There is quite a lot of rabbit fur around the anthills, the residue of rabbit in-fighting. In a Gerald Ratner moment Richard Adams, the author of
Watership Down
, declared that real rabbits were ‘boring’. Animals have what I term a ‘danger diameter’; the
rabbits consider that at forty yards I am too far away to kill. Animals can also detect motive; as soon as I level the shotgun, they will be alert, then they will scram.

Playing God with a gun is not always fun; I settle on a luckless young rabbit (but not a baby) nearest me, push the safety catch off, advance five yards and fire. Whether it has been with a bow and arrow, a falcon or a gun, killing game in a meadow is as old as the meadows.

27 A
UGUST
Note on paper, scrawled during the day. ‘Squirrel in hazels pulling the trees apart to get at the not yet ripe nuts. Not very eco.’ I should have added that the chandeliers of elderberries are almost blackly ripe. Plants are a calendar marking the days, the seasons.

In the afternoon, driving down the lane, I get a fright when a polecat pokes its head out of the ditch to give me a malevolent look. I stop the car. Through the open window the rosebay willow herbs tremble under the weight of the sucking bees, and a hidden yellowhammer raps out its hard call of ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’. For a minute the ferret-faced polecat and I are lost in mutual suspicion. There is no need for me to observe the Jefferies rule of observation; at two feet in length the polecat is all too aware of its own
power. I tire first, and drive off. In the rear-view mirror I see the polecat staring after me. Despite the heat, I shiver.

29 A
UGUST
The distance is veiled in amaranth vapour; the mountain heather an inferno. After a day in the tractor topping weeds on some land we rent about six miles away, I lie for five minutes’ bliss in the field. I see a fox (one of the young from the den) eat a blackberry in Marsh Field, by standing on its legs and plucking with its mouth. A lovely moment for a lazy man.

30 A
UGUST
A robin is singing in the copse. Past the August moult, it is laying early if wistful claim to a winter territory. A great tit provides accompaniment, with its ‘teacher, teacher’ refrain. There’s a tiredness in the air.

Damselfly

THE MONTH OF
half summer, half autumn. Half sophistication, half barbarity.

I have put the cows in the simmering field. Under the shade of the Grove hazels, only their candy Ermintrude noses betray them. When the Red Poll deign to advance into the meadow to graze on the aftermath, their coats shine like conkers. Cattle are good for flowery meadows because their grazing creates a variety of sward heights, important for providing suitable nesting and feeding conditions for birds.

Despite the lingering tones of summer, you can tell autumn is on its way. The thistles and nettles along the Marsh Field hedge are bowing over, elderly and huddled, unable to support their own weight.

A crow rows through the sky.

Wasps soporifically suck on blackberries.

3 S
EPTEMBER
I suddenly realize that the swifts have gone. No fanfare. Just a prestidigitator’s trick, a disappearance into the morning’s mist. Inside I
sigh a little. One of life’s allotment of summers is over.

As I take the morning walk to check the sheep, three mallard whistle down out of the sky and alight, skidding on the river; I stalk them later with binoculars. I am near certain it is the mallard mother with two of her offspring; the pair have the grey beak of youth.

6 S
EPTEMBER
An azure damselfly in the meadow, a slender jewel kept aloft on the gauze wings of fairies. Damselflies, along with their cousins the dragonflies, make up the scientific order Odonata and are almost unchanged since prehistoric times. They are marvels of engineering, able to alter the angle and beat of each of their four wings so they can fly up, down, sideways or backwards and hover for up to a minute. Some dragonflies can reach speeds in excess of 30mph. Voracious predators, the adults locate their flying meat meal by use of their bulbous outsize eyes, which can see in almost all directions at once. They will eat almost any insect with wings, even bees. And crane flies.

Masses of crane flies or daddy-long-legs are now hatching in the field, their jerky, marionette motion a constant loathsome intrusion. One flies into my face, its limbs trailing across my cheek. I’d like to brush it away, but know the movement would scare the
adolescent fox across the field. Her coat has lost its baby grey, and she is a resplendent starlet in her red fur.

She is sitting, transfixed.

A female spotted flycatcher (a notoriously late nester) is repetitively launching herself off the top strand of barbed wire under the copse, seizing a gangling crane fly from the air before returning to her vantage point on the fence. She is a shooting sylph of silver. Her solitary offspring, also sitting between the barbs, is Bunteresque, with a silent, insistent sense of entitlement.

The teenage vixen moves closer to the flycatcher, and sits again.

I have presumed too evil an intention to the fox. She leaps not after a flycatcher but after a crane fly. For over twenty minutes of this sultry, languid evening fox and flycatcher leap at crane flies side by side.

Crane flies, the hatched adult of the leatherjacket, are not an entirely satisfactory meal for a fox. The vixen realizes this, and slopes off.

Crane flies are feast enough for a flycatcher. The next day, fuelled up, it flies south for winter. The youngster also disappears. Of the summer migrants only the chiffchaff, blackcap, house martins and swallows now remain.

Fish-scales of yellow moonlight fall on the river. The hedges have the unmistakable liquorice smell of dying leaves that signals autumn.

Cows might be domesticated, but wild habits die hard. They lie tonight in a circle, facing out, to see the danger that might come from any direction. Something about the angle of the moonlight increases both their antiquity and size. They might be mastodons, the black beasts I am crouching behind, hiding.

I have come down to the meadow, alarmed at the unholy noise in the night. But the cattle are quiet; the villain of the peace is twenty yards away on the silver sward. The old boar badger is in the meadow, making the throaty gargle that passes for wooing in the
Meles meles
species.

After an agony of cramp for me, the dominant sow, who has been his wife for two years now, deigns to make an appearance, coquettishly slinking under the wire.

A few moments of half-hearted kiss-chase follow; badgers, though, are not big on foreplay. Grunting furiously, the boar clambers on the back of the sow, clamps her neck between his teeth to keep her in place. The light is too indistinct to make out more; my mind, for reasons not difficult to fathom, recollects that Victorian fathers of the bride gave tie pins made of badger penis-bone to the new son-in-law to ensure fertility.

It is not the sight or sound of badgers mating that is remarkable. It is the cloud of rank musk, overpowering at even twenty yards downwind, that the act unleashes. If you have smelt it you will know why badgers are related to skunks.