Meadowland (17 page)

19 J
UNE
It is almost midsummer, and the light makes one resist sleep. There is daylight seventeen hours a day, double that of midwinter. Eternity would not be long enough if it was composed of English summer eves like this. I decide to take a turn around the fields. Walking down Marsh Field I can make out the shape of two animals standing together on the far side of the grass-sea meadow. A fox and a badger have met on their shared path; the badger is motionless, the fox is jutting its head forward, its gravel-gargle of anger audible thirty yards away. The badger is unimpressed, and it is the fox that gives way, bounding off into the meadow and around the black-and-white Buddha.

20 J
UNE
There is a dead velvety shrew near my lying-up place in the wild triangle. The body is still warm. On the neck I can just discern tiny bite marks in the wettened fur. Shrews are territorial to the death.

Yellow rattle really does rattle. While some regional names for the plant point to the similarity the shaken seeds in their pods have to the sounds of child’s play (baby’s rattle) or money tossed about in a bag (shepherd’s purse), Herefordians have a bleaker aural association for
Rhinanthus minor
. Locally it is rochlis, the death rattle. And it does bring death of a kind. Strictly speaking,
Rhinanthus minor
is a hemi-parasite, and, while it can photosynthesize, it is happiest when its roots grasp those of grasses so it can suck the life out of them. In the creation of a wildflower meadow, yellow rattle is as close to indispensable as it gets. As well as controlling the vigour of grasses, yellow rattle produces springtime yellow flowers which are attractive to bees. It only grows intermittently in the field, in the bare dry patch in the middle, and the northern end.

When I accidentally disturb the meadow pipits’ nest the female flies up and gives me the full works of distraction, fluttering along the top of the grass for five yards or so to a thin patch, where she lies prostrate with one wing held out ‘injured’ and her tail fanned to the ground. I don’t wish to disappoint her, and follow. At which point she flies over the hedge into Marsh Field with a tinkling laugh.

Some years ago, I betrayed my own rule, which is you have to like your livestock. So I bought, to add to the Ryelands and Shetlands, twelve Hebridean sheep – small, black, horned, primitive. And cloned. Of the black dozen I have only ever managed to like Hilda, the lead sheep, she of the retroussé Michael Jackson nose and unsated stomach. A neighbour donated a ram, called . . . Rammy. The Hebridean is a productive little sheep; on halfway decent and varied grazing like Lower Meadow it breeds well, is healthy, is flavoursome in the flesh, and produces a lustrous coat which fetches a good price with the Wool Board and private purchasers alike. The breed also scores highly with landowners intent on environmentally friendly, subsidy-attractive ‘conservation grazing’.

But they escape, and jump like deer. I have them in the shed for shearing and one leaps the holding pen into the pen where I am wielding the electric shears. She then tries to vault over me, and only by diving to the side do I avoid her head, which is made from tombstone.

Shearing is fine in your twenties; in your forties it kills. The definition of ‘back-breaking’ should be ‘a prolonged period of shearing sheep in the New Zealand position’.

Almost everyone shears the New Zealand way, which is to put the sheep on its arse, back to one’s legs, and shear down with electric clippers.

I start off at a reasonable(ish) rate of a sheep every two minutes, the clippers neatly sliding under the line of yellow risen lanolin in the fleece; by sheep number 22 I am down to a sheep every five minutes, and starting to make ‘double blows’, or two shears, because the first isn’t close enough. I also nick one ewe’s skin badly, and have to blast her with purple spray, or aerosolized gentian violet. By sheep number 26 I am 140 years old. By sheep number 31 I cheat. I park the tractor on the track so no one can surprise me, and shear the rest of the flock with the sheep standing up, a halter around their heads, tied to a gate. I sit down to do it.

But I can never tell anyone about it because it is so seriously uncool.

My back is broken, and the exertion turned me into the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic. My hands, though, are baby soft from the lanolin in the fleeces.

On Midsummer’s Eve one of the strangest moments of my life befalls me. At ten, when I go out to shut the chickens in their hut in the paddock, the demi-light is alive with magick. But then Midsummer is always a night for Puck, fairies and wonder; I once heard a nightingale sing in the valley at Midsummer, the only time I have.

No sooner have I closed the pop-hole than the
three horses and donkey appear noiselessly out of the hedge-shadows, and start circling me in a carousel of prancing and rearing. They go round and round me, faster and faster. Wilder. Wilder. Frankly, I am frightened; the wind from George’s lashing hooves crosses my face. The trotting donkey is the slowest in the circle, the comma mark, and I dash in front of her and out of the paddock, over the field gate in a jumping style I last used on a school sports day decades ago. The Fosbury Flop.

The equines continue circling the hut, until Zeb, my horse, breaks out of the circle and runs, with absolute deliberation, up to me. And gently tugs on the sleeve of my shirt. He pulls the sleeve again, with infinite courtesy.

Animals can, of course, talk. In that moment he and I are one, indivisible. I can see inside his great impenetrable chestnut head, see every slow bestial process. I am a fellow animal and he wants me to play.

I kiss his head in apology. And he is away back to the merry-go-round.

The enchantments have not finished, for Snowdrop the donkey also trots up and pulls my sleeve with her lips, wanting me to play. She too gets a kiss, and then waddles back to join the fairground show in the lumined aethereality.

There is a new noise in the field. The meadow grasshopper (
Chorthippus parallelus
) is coming into song, only here and there, a brief interference. The song of this little green locust is produced by stridulation, the rubbing of a file on the inside of the hind legs against the forewings. The grasshoppers ‘chirp’ – so much nicer a descriptor – to each other in the sun. The male is louder and more persistent than the female. The grasshopper is more than a musician; it is an important protein for meadowland predators.

A crow is hopping about with evil intent. But the bird’s desire is not matched by its physique. The grasshoppers bend their knees so cuticles on the hind legs slip into springs; when the muscle is relaxed, the energy catapults them into a new part of the grass forest. All the crow can do is watch as grasshoppers spring past. Grasshoppers have lineage stretching back 300 million years to the Carboniferous period; they are another landowner with a prior claim to humans.

27 J
UNE
Under the two old shading apple trees of Bank Field the cows are standing waiting for Constable to paint them.

I am on my stock-checking round on a June day
of Spanish heat, and pause to catch my breath by the river, which is running mountain-clean and clear over the green and pink pebbles. There is an attractive spread of golden-leaved saxifrage along the bank. On the red bank behind the water, kingfishers have dug a Chaco canyon of holes over the years; one orifice, the home in occupation, is spilling putrid black slime. The kingfisher’s notion of removing excrement from the nest is a slovenly push out of the front door.

While I am in my trance, around the bend of the river comes a brown torpedo firing through the water, scanning as it comes. A lithe twist, an agile spin, a gymnastic roll, then the otter clambers out of the water on to the shingle directly in front of me.

There is something about this twenty-yard stretch of river, with its red cliffette behind and its overlapping alder trees, that encourages us all to consider it our own private space. The otter is no exception. It nuzzles at its chest and performs its ablutions.

On the ‘how’ of watching animals the nineteenth-century nature writer Richard Jefferies was correct when he stated in
The Gamekeeper at Home
:

This is the secret of observation; stillness, silence and apparent indifference to some instinctive way these wild creatures learn to distinguish when one is or is not intent upon them in a
spirit of enmity; and if very near, it is always the eye they watch. So long as you observe them as it were, from the corner of the eyeball, sideways, or look over their heads at something beyond, it is well.

As a good student of Jefferies, I stare above the otter’s head; I am so close I can see each of its whiskers, each dripping bauble of water.

Unfortunately, the Jefferies rule of observation of wild creatures is unknown to Rupert the Border terrier, tied to my hand by pink bailer twine. I can feel him tensing. In all likelihood he is staring. And baring his teeth.

After a minute or two of toilet the otter suddenly stops and looks around. And sees us. With some considerable self-possession it ambles across the stones in the shallows, and clambers up the far bank. The otter has not quite run away; in the military euphemism it has retreated. In water the otter is menacing, powerful, intentional. On land it is a lolloping toffee-brown dachshund.

I am strangely put in mind of dapper Edwardian gentlemen. (You can anthropomorphize otters as easily as moles.) And then, disturbingly, of Bristol Zoo, which is the only place where I have ever seen an otter so close. In a moment of unpleasant realization I understand that viewing the otter in the tank at Bristol
Zoo diminished this sighting in the wild. I saw the copy before the real thing. I saw the manufactured spectacle before the natural sighting.

Is this not what happens to us all today? Has
Autumnwatch
not killed the experience of being an amateur naturalist?

Or perhaps I just read Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ too often when I was a History postgraduate?