Meadowland (12 page)

Of all the summer martins, the swallow is the one which spends most time hawking the field, and on the
20th I see the first ruby-face of the year. Swifts and house martins all take their turn over the field, but they feed higher; it is the dearth of high-flying insects outside high summer that accounts for the shortness of the swift’s sojourn in Britain. Today’s rain has forced the insects low, and the first swallow of summer is doing what swallows do best; lacily, elegantly skimming over the sward-top after winged prey. (Male swallows with the longest tail streamers, incidentally, are the most attractive to the girls.)

The delicacy of the moment is ruined by the two Canada geese, who come honking over to land in the lake further up the valley. Vulgar, with absolutely no subtlety, they are irate drivers in an LA traffic jam.

The French call the yellow wagtail the ‘shepherdess’, and true enough the bird does follow on behind the sheep, hoping for insects turned up by ovine cloven hooves. It is much happier in Marsh Field, where there are not only sheep but acres of soft ground. A pair nest there among the sedge, and sometimes flit over into the meadow to explore the wet corner. The male enjoys perching on the hedge and singing. If it can be called singing. He may have the yellow plumage of the canary, he does not have its voice. All he can manage is an insistent ‘te-seep’.

They run as daintily as fairies, and the male is a tantalizing flash of gold in the grass as he hunts about. They arrived on a raw Friday at the end of March, but they bring warmth to every place they tread, hence their old local name of ‘the sunshine bird’.

Almost no birds today have vernacular names. Bird names have become standardized, homogenized, conscripted into what is considered proper by scientists for classification. A century ago a birder could have told what county, even what village, he was in by the folk name for a long-tailed tit. In his
Treatise on the Birds of Gloucestershire
, W. L. Mellersh collected no fewer than ten local names for
Aegithalos caudatus
, the long-tailed tit, among them long Tom, oven-bird, poke-pudding, creak-mouse, barrel Tom, and in the south of the county, long farmer. For John Clare in Northamptonshire the long-tailed tit was, delightfully, ‘the bumbarrel’.

18 A
PRIL
Bluebells out in force in the copse, making a blue gas mist over its floor, an uninterrupted mat of docks, celandines, wood anemones (alas, on the fade).

The meadow pipit launches off a fence post, and ascends flutteringly up to twenty metres, till it reaches damn near the top of the young oak, accelerating its
‘sweet-sweet-sweet’ song. Then it falls anxiously back down on half-spread wings, with a valedictory and tuneless trill. It’s an apology for birdsong against the neighbouring skylark’s joyful riot. But I sympathize: I can’t whistle a note either.

And then the mist descends to put a slate lid on the valley and its proceedings.

St George’s mushroom (
Calocybe gambosa
) is one of the earliest mushrooms to appear, traditionally making its creamy bow in the green grass on 23 April, the day commemorating England’s patron saint. Due to global warming it has cropped earlier and earlier, but the long cold of this spring has encouraged it to keep close to its historic calendar date. I notice a ‘fairy ring’ of the mushroom on 22 April in the usual place, about twenty feet in from the north, Bank Field, hedge. With its convex head and well-proportioned stem, all in Classical order, St George’s mushroom is handsome rather than pretty; it looks good enough to eat, and is. And its aroma, my nose to ground like a truffle hound, is alluring too. The mushroom smells of flour.

There was an unexpected visitor in the field today. As I walked down the bank in the morning haze the blackbirds were clamouring their liquid alarm. Then: dismissive wasp-yellow eyes. Scaly yellow legs. Black metal talons. All these things flashed before me.

I am not sure who was the more surprised, the female sparrowhawk or I as she came up over the hedge. I could feel the displaced breath from her wings as she flicked up over my head, then away, a sullen grey bullet.

Certainly I was the more scared; for malevolent verve the sparrowhawk is unrivalled. They are always coiled, ready, dangerous. When the first gunsmiths needed a name for a small firearm they settled on the falconry term for a male sparrowhawk. A musket. But if anything, the female of the species is more deadly still; at ten centimetres bigger than the musket she can take a speeding wood pigeon out of the sky.

Maybe five times a year I see a sparrowhawk on the farm, usually in summer, when they dash after an ascending skylark or meadow pipit, so beautifully but foolishly advertising their presence. Today the sparrowhawk has hunted low and swift around the hedges, and burst in among the chaffinches; there lie the remains of the bird on the grass in a crown of plucked feathers. Sparrowhawks sit on their grounded prey, so their talons pierce the body, and if this is not enough to administer murder they make darting stabs to the
back of the neck. The meal-bird is defeathered at the top of the chest, just as humans are shaved for surgery; into this bare flesh the sparrowhawk inserts its bill to begin its gluttonous surgery.

Sometimes a kestrel hunts the field, sometimes the red kite, and I once saw a merlin. Of the diurnal raptors, through, the field is truly the hunting ground of the buzzards from the quarry wood. One flies above me now, beating the bounds. His patch. My patch. This field is the space we share.

22 A
PRIL
There are now so many cuckoo flowers that the boggy corner looks like a city of lights. The arriving swallows no longer hunt a green sea, but are now skimming over a meadow of flowers galore. The field forget-me-not, with its startling yellow eye framed by blue, has also debuted. The wildflower days are here.

Night in the field. On the far horizon to the south there is an unsightly smear of urban light. Otherwise the night is the black of deep space, the original black of the universe.

A pair of car lights come along the lane which runs
along the spine of the hill. Cars, though, are still sufficiently uncommon to be romantic, as though the people inside were on their way to some secret assignation. Then comes the milk lorry, punctual but out of time. One by one the dairy farms in the valley have closed down. What price milk production at a penny a litre profit even on ‘intensive’ grass and Frankenstein cows with overdeveloped udders?

The night returns to its perfect pitch. A rabbit, across in the old quarry, pig-squeals as jaws clamp it. The foxes or badgers are about. I settle further down into the depths of the hedge.

In this state of blindness, hearing becomes more acute. (Later I can even hear the tawny owl making its hunting flight.) From the field comes the slightest scuffling. I turn on the torch, and there it is. A mouldywarp. A mole pup, wallowing through the grass and floral waves.

When mole young are five weeks old they are ejected from the nest by the sow to make their homes in nearby tunnels, either by taking over existing runways or by excavating their own. Soon the sow tires even of this proximity to her offspring, and there is a second diaspora at the end of the summer, when the mole young will take up home hundreds of yards from the maternal burrow. The dispersals are done overland, and leave the moles vulnerable to predation. Predators abound, and bound. Mole pups are a
favourite of owls, foxes, badgers, weasels, stoats and the polecat that lives down the lane.

It is not true that moles are blind; the light from my torch startles the mouldywarp, which stops and sniffs with its snout. I turn off the torch and let the mole go on its way. Black into black.

I must be this mole’s guardian angel. When I switched on the torch it picked up two amber eyes only yards behind the mole. The vixen. She turned and walked off, haughtily aware of her power. She only has to be lucky once; the mole has to be lucky always.

All the little mouldywarps sail forth on the following nights. The odd thing is that I never discover the fortress, the super-tump under which the sow has her nest lined with grass and leaves, which must be somewhere in the depth of Marsh Field hedge. Not all the field’s secrets will be given to me, it seems.