Meadowland (28 page)

The Anglo-Saxons knew the little goldfinch as
thisteltuige
or thistle-tweaker. They have a slightly sharper bill than other finches, made by Nature as a precision tool for extracting the seeds of thistles and teasels. The Latin for thistle is
carduus
, and informs the bird’s scientific name,
Carduelis carduelis
.

The craze for keeping caged goldfinches came to a peak in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860, in Worthing alone, 132,000 birds were caught and the de-goldfinching of the countryside was an early concern of the Society for the Protection of Birds. Bedridden at the end of his life, John Keats also found himself in a sort of cage. One enjoyment in his life was watching goldfinches still at liberty, and he wrote in ‘I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill’:

Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop

From low-hung branches; little space they stop;

But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek;

Then off at once, as in a wanton freak:

Or perhaps, to show their black and golden wings

In autumn, the goldfinch, long since set free, joins in sociable flocks. There are at least thirty on the thistle band in the meadow, which I have grown (or allowed to grow) for them. The collective noun for goldfinches, a charm, is derived from the Old English
c’irm
, describing the birds’ twittering song.

The autumn hawkbit, which is almost as yellow as a goldfinch’s wing bar, has flowered in the promontory.

15 O
CTOBER
It might be cold but it is dry. The ground is holding up unseasonably well and I put the horses in the meadow for a change of grazing regimen. At night I go to check them. I see a shooting star, and the Milky Way bands the celestial dome. The high stars are limitless, and surely it is impossible that such a staggering show is not for my benefit.

And the stars come out tonight for me.

The horses grind their teeth while eating, and take extraordinarily long pisses. The sheep’s eyes glisten green and jewel-like in torchlight.

Back in the house, I hunt out a verse from Thomas Traherne (1636–74), the Hereford-born metaphysical
poet, that has tried unsuccessfully to escape from the vaults of memory:

The skies in their magnificence
,

The lively, lovely air;

Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!

The stars did entertain my sense,

And all the works of God, so bright and pure,

So rich and great did seem,

As if they ever must endure

Traherne believed that man falls from a state of innocence because he turns from nature to a world of artificiality and invention. In
Centuries of Meditations
he advised: ‘You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it you are earnest to persuade others to enjoy it too.’

18 O
CTOBER
Now comes the full cruelty of autumn. The haws loom scarlet in the hedge like the blood-drops of my fingers, where I have caught them in the thorns of the bramble. I have picked about two pounds of blackberries from the eastern side of the
hedge straddling Marsh Field, with the green bottle flies to guide me. Flies always sign the ripest fruits. Some of the on-the-turn blackberries are producing alcohol, and there are giddily drunk small tortoiseshell butterflies.

Bryony threads through the hedge in glorious orange and green chains. The sloes are full, and the rose hips overhang in sprawling, tempting arms. There is a feast of hedge fruit for wintering birds. But where are they?

Some familiar, overlooked friends are here beside me though. In flight, the pied wagtail utters a high-pitched two-note ‘chiss-ick’ sound; hence its joke-name of Chiswick fly-over for its habit of leaping past and calling as it goes.

Like yellow wagtails, pied wagtails feed predominantly on insects that they find while searching lawns, fields and verges. The insects are typically flies and caterpillars. On a sunny day such as this the dung from the livestock offers a smorgasbord. The bird’s other names include molly washdish, nanny washtail and washerwoman, from its habit of feeding along the edge of ponds and streams. And, of course, because the tail bobs much like a laundress does when washing clothes. A finer or kinder eye describes their dainty femininity, and so they are
lady
dishwasher too. Their characteristic jerky gait rarely fails to bring a smile. As John Clare versed it:

little trotty wagtail, he went in the rain, and tittering, tottering sideways he ne’er got straight again.

Pied wagtails are a peculiarly British bird. Their close kin, the white wagtail of northern Europe, Russia and Alaska, has a definitely paler back.

21 O
CTOBER
Blowing an oceanic gale; it’s hard to walk upright, my breath is panickingly taken away from me. The wind strips the leaves off the willow so they lie in belly-up shoals across the far end of the meadow. Acorns from the oaks are bombing the ground. These are toxic to cattle and horses. In the storm I lead the white-eyed horses out to the calm of the stables.

23 O
CTOBER
A marauding flock of wood pigeons roosts in the trees along the river at night, clappering out and back, as they settle. They feed on the acorns, including those of the twin oaks at the corner of the field. Although the flock is thirty or more strong it barely makes an impression on the shiny green mass of oak fruits lying on the field floor. I rake two barrow-loads up and feed them to the pigs.

In the wind jackdaws scatter and blow away.

As soon as I have left the field I see the jay fly in and pick up two acorns in its beak, then flit to the thicket, its progress signalled by its light-bulb rump. The jay is burying the acorns; it can bury hundreds a day as a precaution against inclemency. Some jays have been recorded as burying three thousand acorns and hazelnuts in a month. Probably half the oaks in Britain have been planted unintentionally by jays. The bird is a tree planter on a national scale. The bird’s call is the sound of chalk being pulled down a blackboard.

26 O
CTOBER
While I seek shelter under the oaks from the rain, starlings fall like leaves on to the sodden earth, where the worms have been forced again to evacuate their burrows.

29 O
CTOBER
The first serious frost of autumn alchemises the field into an opaque white wasteland. There are perfect casts of ice in the old hoof marks of the cows. With numb fingers I pick mist-coated sloes for sloe gin.

Pheasant

THE RIVER IS
so low I can step across its spindly width. A nuthatch scuttles down the elder, tapping for insects behind the Jew’s ear mushrooms. At the back of Grove hedge, the crab apples have fallen into the ditch and gather slugs.

In medieval times it was believed that parent hedgehogs rolled on fruits and transported them home to their young. The hedgepiglets who lived under the pile of logs in the promontory will have no need of food. They are dead. Perfect scale miniatures of their parents, and grotesquely colourless in death. Only one has been eaten, scooped out of its spiny back; the other three seem to be unmarked. Presumably these died of cold. And a fox or badger is the perpetrator of the crime.