Meadowland (9 page)

21 M
ARCH
Heavy rain. The horses in House Field stand back to the rain, the sheep and their lambs are either under the hedges or tight against the bales. The red-tailed bumblebee must be glad of the house that it has taken from the mouse. In Lower Meadow I see a small flock of forlorn redwings, the thrush with the fetching cream eye-stripe and orange flanks, in the hazel. At my approach, up into the air they go, slipping left, slipping right, drunkenly unsteady.

They loiter for a day. On the 23rd I hear redwings ‘zeeping’ in the starred night when I’m checking the
sheep. Next day there are no redwings on the farm. They have gone north, to home in Scandinavia.

With lambing done, we visit my sister-in-law in London for a night. On the return home I am exhilarated by how fresh and enervating the air is, how lovely is the taste of spring water compared to chlorine.

Then there are the benisons of the earth. In the uplifting sunshine I pick dandelions for dandelion wine, the cottage wine. They are the flower of the sun and their faces follow its course. They are nuclear furnaces in miniature.

Less given to whimsy, the French persist in calling dandelion
pissenlit
in honour of its diuretic capability. To me as a child they were ‘clocks’, whose seed heads were blown on to tell the time and tell the future. And in a sort of fashion dandelions do tell the time: like the white, fragile wood anemones, they close their heads at night.

Dandelions have not always been weeds. In the Victorian era they were cultivated in walled gardens and eaten by the aristocracy in dainty sandwiches.

Then there is the silence of the night, when the dandelions are closed up.

A dog barks somewhere down the valley, another takes up the call, then another. An aural chain
reaction of barks proceeds from Clodock to Michaelchurch Escley. Presumably they have all been watching
101 Dalmatians
.

25 M
ARCH
The first blackthorn blossom unfurls into delicate white crystals in the hedges around the field. But even such a picturesque setting for the field cannot distract from the drizzle that is centre stage. It is the sort of drizzle that seeps into everywhere, and everything. For an hour I sit under the hedge with constantly wiped binoculars watching a male wren making a nest in Marsh Field hedge, flying in with stalks of grass, doing a distinctive cocky tilt of the tail as he lands on the willow branch. Out he flutters and off. Although the hedges are not in leaf, far from it, the trapped leaves and twigs of yesteryear and of hedge-cutting give cover to his construction. He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow.

Mind you, he is no moral giant. As soon as he has ensconced one female, he will try to tempt another Jenny Wren into one of his spare nests, where she too will give birth to his progeny. The little cock then
travels between his families, a bigamous commercial traveller in a 1930s thriller.

‘Wren’ has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon word
wrœnno
meaning lascivious; the Anglo-Saxon is linguistically kin to the Danish
Vrensk
, meaning uncastrated. Slightly less fun is the Latin tag for the bird, which is
Troglodytes
. Typically this is translated as cave dweller, although hole-plunger (
trogle
being hole,
duo
to plunge in) would be a more tellingly accurate description of the furtive wren.

Curious how such a randy, though otherwise inoffensive little bird became an object of loathing. In parts of Ireland the tradition of Hunting the Wren is still played out. Groups of boys used to go out into the countryside to capture or kill a wren, which was then paraded around the December village with the youth chanting:

The wran, the wran, the king of all birds
,

St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;

Come, give us a bumper, or give us a cake,

Today an effigy of
Troglodytes troglodytes
is used.

This victimization of the wren seems to stem from the bird’s role in alerting guards to the attempted escape of the English Christian St Stephen from prison. Other folkloric tales about the bird’s indiscreet warnings abound; in the seventeenth century it is said
to have hopped up and down on a drum and warned Cromwell of a sneak attack by the Irish. The percussive sound of its alarm call gives rise to the bird’s Devon name of crackil or crackadee.

The wonder is that a bird so tiny can make so much noise. Scientifically speaking, birds have no larynx, having instead an organ known as a syrinx. The syrinx is far more efficacious at producing sound than our own larynx and its vocal cords. Whereas a syrinx is able to vibrate almost all of the air coming out of a bird’s lungs, human vocal cords utilize a mere 2 per cent of the air passing over them. Additionally, the syrinx can produce two different sounds simultaneously (one from each half), which goes a little way to explaining the complexity of birdsong.

Yet listening to the cock wren tune up is not a matter for science. Few other birds can lift the solitude of a damp March day when winter will not go away. On a similar day Wordsworth encountered a sweetly singing wren:

The earth was comfortless, and, touched by faint

Internal breezes, sobbings of the place,

And respirations, from the roofless walls

The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still

So sweetly ’mid the gloom the invisible Bird

Sang to itself, that there I could have made

My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there

Many wrens establish winter territories, as this one has. The long forceps bill of the wren is designed for picking the minutest of spiders and insects from the litter of woodland floors. (Reposed in death, a wren looks to be all beak.) Damp grassland with hedges is an acceptable substitute for woodland terroir, so while there is one male making des reses by the newt-ditch willow there is another toiling on the river side of the field, where the trees surround the promontory, and where the frost does not always iron-harden the earth.

The males are trilling against each other, despite the rain, and all the wrens of Britain are getting ready to nest, despite the rain. All 17 million of them.

26 M
ARCH
Plants under the Marsh Field hedge: rabbit ears of foxgloves emergent; ground elder; nettles; ground ivy, already with tiny violet flowers; dog’s mercury with white flowers; cleavers beginning to lick the trunks of hawthorn and hazel; basal starfishes of thistles; unfurled hoods of lords and ladies. In the dryness of the bottom of the hedge there are little colonies of holes for voles; because the hedge bottom is raised up by the litterfall of the decades, it is high and dry. In the copse and in the field the yellow lesser celandines are starting to shine.

‘Curleee. Curleee.’ The sound of the wild. I have been listening out for them for days, and they come on this afternoon of the 26th, planing down the wind as they make their plaintive cries to the souls of the departed.

The curlews are home. To my private amusement our curlews are inverse Herefordians, in that they spend the winter holidaying in west Wales; human Herefordians go to west Wales for their summer hols.

I fret eschatalogically about the curlews, as though it is their migratory wingbeats that turn the earth, and should they fail to appear we will have entered some ecological end time. But they are home, home to breed. Curlews are not gregarious in the breeding season, and each couple likes a great deal of space. Historically, we have had one pair nesting in the field by the road, and one pair down in the meadow – which is about as far apart as you can get on forty acres.

A male curlew glides around performing a vibrato bubbling trill. Within two days he has secured a mate and then the curlew pair circle round the bottom field, laying claim to their territory. We love the haunting piping of the curlew with fierceness. For us, it is not just the sound of the wild, or of spirits calling to the dead, it is our personal heralding of spring.

Curlews live for five years, and are creatures of habit concerning habitat. The likelihood is that one of the pair in the meadow was born here, as were its parents. They have taken to the air and are crying again. The elongated double note of their call is almost caught in the curlew’s name if the stress is placed on the first syllable.

Frost. Frost so hard that the grass is as white as fronds at the bottom of the ocean. A low struggling sun makes tall, flat shadows of the riverside trees that stretch almost across the field.

There are tracks in the frost, bright green lanes of animal traffic. The rabbits have advanced cautiously into the field, scraped into the grass, and back to their burrows on the bank.

But again not all of them were quick enough. In this scene of pearlescent perfection lie tufts of greeny-grey rabbit fur. And drops of blood. Walking towards the copse trees where the frost is still coldly bright I pick up the surreptitious pad marks of the fox, the hind foot placed precisely into the print of the fore foot.