Meadowland (11 page)

Since the mound is above ground it catches the sun; the ants use it as maternity ward and nursery, and will even carry the eggs through the mound’s network of tunnels to the warmest side. Unfortunately for the ants, the fineness of the dome’s soil and its elevated
position make for poor protection against predators. Thin badger sows in spring sometimes break open the great mounds in Bank Field with frantic bear swipes in pursuit of ant larvae, or better still, the eggs.

But it is not a badger that has attacked one of the anthills in the meadow; the damage is too small. The culprit is a green woodpecker, which has stabbed into the anthill with its beak, wrecking about one half of the dome. In the spirit of scientific enquiry (though with a nagging sense of hooliganism) I dig a spade into the ruined earth, a couple of inches at a time, down through chambers and passages. I am too careless to begin with, and have to slow down to the speed of an archaeologist. The ants themselves robotically pick up disturbed eggs, as though a metal blade bisecting their home is an everyday, hey-ho, experience.

Eventually I locate my prize. In a cellar room about the size of a ten-pence piece is a small herd of grey soporific aphids. These are kept captive by the ants, and ‘milked’ for the sugar or ‘honeydew’ they excrete. The aphids themselves feed on the roots of plants in the dungeon’s roof and walls. This is intensive farming of a manner to make any agri-businessman green with envy because the aphids are selectively bred; in all probability the little herd of aphids in this chamber are clones of a good ‘milk aphid’, an insect Holstein cow.

Meadow ants are full of surprises. They can live for twenty years, and in dry downland areas they will take
the larvae of the chalk hill blue butterfly into their nests and raise them.

Meadow ants are not really yellow; they are the ginger colour of tea made by grandmas.

By 12 April the brightness of the flowering celandines means that to cross the meadow in the evening is to walk through a starfield.

The blossoming of the flowers is now unabated; the first bluebells burst out in the copse, and within the week the campion comes out under the hedge, and there is secretive stitchwort there too.

Flies waltz the warming air. The ground temperature is constantly above the 6 degrees Centigrade that grass needs to grow. There is another necessity for the greening of the grass; meadow grasses need, depending on the species, between ten and fifteen hours of daylight for the uprising.

Standing in the middle of the field at night: someone has stirred the clouds into milk pudding.

I am sitting on the bank of the existential river. Upstream of the tree-hung pool there is a dipper on an algae-glossed boulder. These members of the thrush
family are the riparian equivalents of canaries in a coal mine. In a pure river like the Escley, with its abundance of crustaceans, bugs and fishes, the dipper density is about as high as it gets, and the two hundred metres of river along the meadow support one dipper pair. It is the male on the stone. I know he has seen me, because he is ‘dipping’ – bobbing up and down to show off his startling white shirtfront. This is a signal from bird to predator that the latter has been seen and has no chance of a sneak attack.

The bird dives into the pool, more gainly than one might suppose from a blackbird lookalike, and pops up with a struggling bullhead. The death of the bullhead is brutal, seized by the tail to have its head bashed out on the green boulder.

When the prey itself is stone-still, the gentle dipper flips it up and swallows it head first. With one beat of its wings, the bird then glides downstream to the shallow water running glassy and cold over the shingle. The bird walks along into the current, peering mono-maniacally. A tyrannosaurus dart of the beak, and a caddis fly larva is extracted from the sheeny water. Its bristly catch in its beak, the dipper flies off low around the bend, to its moss-lined nest in the bank, where it will squeeze the caddis fly larva into the mouths of the waiting dipper babes. The dippers have used the same nest in a slit in the sandstone, swaddled by the elm’s roots, for the five years we have lived here. For all I
know, dippers have been using the nest for decades, even a century or more. They are birds of tradition, with successive generations using the same nest.

April: the month of greening, of greenshift, when everything bursts into leaf and growth. Squatting by Bank Field hedge, taking a spirit-level perspective towards the river, it looks as though the floor of the field has risen by two inches. Actually, my eye is not so far out. I have my ruler with me; the grass has grown in the spring flush by an inch a week over the last fortnight. Behind me in Bank Field the ewes and lambs are feasting on the verdancy, the lambs breaking off to play king of the castle on the fallen trunk of the elm, which lies like a tossed-away dog bone, and which nobody in thirty years has got around to moving. Such are the unintentional conservational benefits of laziness that the prone elm hosts beetle colonies galore; the foxes have been digging them out, and the wing cases (elytra) in their scat dumped on the tussock by the gate catch the last shards of sun.

After a while the unknowing lambs in their evening gangs realize they have become separated from their mothers, and start up with plaintive calling. All down the valley lambs take up the mayday, so it reverberates around the hills.

The Victorian naturalist W. H. Hudson would spend a whole day in spring just admiring grass, ‘to rejoice in it again, after the long wintry months, nourishing my mind on it . . . The sight of it was all I wanted.’

At twenty-four inches in length, with a preposterously long down-curved bill, the curlew is an outsize and distinctive wader. Put it down in a field, though, and it disappears in a Houdini piece of legerdemain. It takes several sweeps with the binoculars until I locate the female, who is pulling at a clump of dry grass. The male has already scraped a depression in tall sward about twenty yards out from the hedge; his DIY has been done half-heartedly in a manner a man would understand and a wife condemn.

Two days later she is sitting tight on her eggs. To help me locate the nest again I tie a white rag in the hedge directly behind it.

I have taken up observational residence in the bottom of the far hedge, the four-foot isosceles triangle where the hazel has broken down and nettles rampage and the sheep shelter from the sun. Every field should have a neglected corner. While I can peer through the shambles of decaying hazel across the field and see almost everywhere, it is sitting inside this gone-feral
space that I am most aware of the immediacy of beauty, the beauty of immediacy. The hazel screen obliges concentration on the things that are close. There is the cough-mixture whiff of ground ivy, and the whirling black flies so small that I can barely see them, whose name I do not know and never will. The vine of the ivy winds up in a faultless helix. Then I see the paradise blue hue of the dog violet (‘dog’ being an unkind reference to its lack of perfume), the pale-green towers of Jack-by-the-hedge, which might be better named as Jack-beanstalk. But rub a leaf, and you will know why it is also ‘garlic mustard’. Have you ever stopped to notice how perfect are the curves of an earwig’s rear pincer? Or how like amber an earwig’s body is?

I am transfixed by my own prison; through the bars of the branches, however, and past the skittering light I am not oblivious to the fox, because movement always gives the predator away, as surely as it gives the game away. The fox knows the curlew is there somewhere in the field. It stands intent, it sniffs and it stares. The curlew does not move. Curlew make good eating, and used to be as popular on the human table as in the fox’s den. According to poulterers’ prices fixed by order of Edward I in 1275, the curlew was 3d a curved head.

Neither by sight nor by nose does the fox locate the curlew. And it lopes away, disgusted at its failure.

16 A
PRIL
Note on piece of paper put in pocket on walk around the field with the dogs in the morning: ‘More primroses out on south side; blackcap singing, & the chiffchaff too.’ These are the first of the summer migrant warblers to reach the field. The chiffchaff does not stay, and moves on. The blackcap sings from the top of Bank hedge, and I cannot help but have my heart stumble in admiration. The complexity of the blackcap’s song was pinned perfectly by the French composer (and ornithologist) Olivier Messiaen, who used it as the musical symbol for the eponymous
Saint François d’Assise
. ‘I had to insert,’ wrote Messiaen, ‘chords of each note in order to translate the special timbre, which is very joyous and rich in harmonies.’

The blackcap deserves its title as the ‘northern nightingale’. Except for this: the bird’s alarm call is a crude ‘tak’, as though two pebbles were being chipped together. For the entire summer the blackcap ‘taks’ at me, at the sheep, at everything with the constancy of a dripping tap.