Autumn Page 10

  Besides these, note the broad hedge-parsley leaves, tunnelled by leaf-miners; bright masses of haws gleaming in the sun; scarlet hips; great brown cones fallen from the spruce firs; black heart-shaped bindweed leaves here, and buff bryony leaves yonder; green and scarlet berries of white bryony hanging thickly on bines from which the leaves have withered; and bunches of grass, half yellow and half green, along the mound. Now that the leaves have been brushed from the beech saplings you may see how the leading stem rises in a curious wavy line; some of the leaves lie at the foot, washed in white dew, that stays in the shade all day; the wetness of the dew makes the brownish red of the leaf show clear and bright. One leaf falls in the stillness of the air slowly, as if let down by a cord of gossamer gently, and not as a stone falls – fate delayed to the last. A moth adheres to a bough, his wings half open, like a short brown cloak flung over his shoulders. Pointed leaves, some drooping, some horizontal, some fluttering slightly, still stay on the tall willow wands, like bannerets on the knights’ lances, much torn in the late battle of the winds. There is a shower from a clear sky under the trees in the forest; brown acorns rattling as they fall, and rich coloured Spanish chestnuts thumping the sward, and sometimes striking you as you pass under; they lie on the ground in pocketfuls. Specks of brilliant scarlet dot the grass like some bright berries blown from the bushes; but on stooping to pick them, they are found to be the heads of a fungus. Near by lies a black magpie’s feather, spotted with round dots of white.

  Richard Jefferies, ‘Just before Winter’ from Field and Hedgerow:

  The Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, 1889

  Watchers in the Woods

  Under trees, mushroom-moist air lingered,

  Movement in the murk revealed two watchers:

  Roe deer lifted heads and skittered in gloom.

  In stretching shadows, we held our spots, slowed

  Our breaths. Watching, deciding our next moves.

  Fawn moved to mother – comfort, connection

  Both so delicate, I paused, sure a shift

  Would send them tripping in decaying scrub

  Snapping graceful slender thoroughbred legs.

  Birds called again and still we stood, heads up.

  Russet-smooth coats, leaf-dappled, ears fine-tuned.

  They took a step on ballerina toes,

  At first stiff-legged, then grazing as they went.

  We travelled the woods on parallel paths.

  Brush barred us from full view, letting them keep

  Their offended-cat pretence of not spotting me,

  Until they passed from sight.

  Had they watched, deciding to ask me in,

  As I was finally leaving?

  Julia Wallis, 2016

  ‘It’s alive!’ announced the older boy.

  Mum, ruddy-cheeked, lips pursed in concentration, looked into the pan of limp, grey lifeless worm-like creatures in simmering milk; stared at the elver on the kitchen floor, turned back to the pan on the stove and gave its fishy mixture a stir.

  ‘I said it wasn’t dead.’

  My brother carefully scooped up this remarkable creature, slipped it into an empty coffee jar he fished out from underneath the sink and filled it with water straight from the tap.

  Such was my first encounter with the European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Many species exhibit incredible survival tendencies, but the eel’s pertinacity – whether the European, American, African, Asian or Australasian member of the family Anguillidae, is a wonder of the natural world.

  Elvers once caught off the western shores of Europe in their hundreds of millions were sold at Gloucester fishmongers in 1970 for as little as ten pence per pound. They had already crossed several thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean from their nursery grounds of the Sargasso Sea in the Gulf of Mexico. Drifting through the North Atlantic’s Gulf Stream for a year, maybe three, each larva undergoes a gradual metamorphosis from a tiny oval leaf shape into a transparent miniature version of its parents.

  Glass eels begin to appear in estuaries of Europe and North Africa from December onwards, but in Britain are most strongly associated with extreme high tides of the spring equinox and Easter; synonymous with tidal bores of the Bristol Channel, that push the translucent tiny eels (as they darken they are called ‘elvers’) further into freshwater. From large, muddy lowland rivers to rivulet mountain streams, the eel rarely considers anything off-limits: rocky waterfalls dripping with mosses and liverworts, shallow pools, abandoned mill-leats, farm ponds, isolated reservoirs, lakes stocked with hefty carp, ditches seemingly devoid of life or large canals used by container ships from the Far East are all sought out.

  I know this because these are the places I went to find them, to catch them; the waterways and water-bodies of western Britain. Wherever I went, I searched; whatever the occasion, they were never far from my thoughts. Eels played with my imagination. I thought of their haunts and longevity; their diet and how to catch them.

  Eels didn’t feel like an obsession at the time, but they must have been, especially when my friends banned me from talking about them. At nineteen I moved to Wales and eels fell off my radar, along with the people who teased me about this fishy preoccupation.

  Except every October, when diminishing daylight coincides with one final blast of heat, giving rise to a nearly sultry night. Nights when eels slide out from under sunken logs and boulders, underwater lairs that might have been home for a few years, or perhaps decades. Time enough for the yellow belly of its post-elver life to transform into a shiny, silvery ventral colour, the hallmark of an adult eel as it prepares itself for an out-migration to the sea.

  Intrinsically linked to the seasons, the pattern of movements of eels seems unaltered for millennia, but all has not been well with A. anguilla. A collapse in catches of glass eels in the 1990s pointed to a catastrophic decline in populations of the species throughout its natural range. They became like eel gold, with elvers of the European eel fetching prices of £1,000 per kilogram in the fish markets of Tokyo and Beijing. On rivers in the West Country there was a frisson of tension as more and more fishermen used their traditional boat-shaped dip nets to scoop out the fewer and fewer eel larvae that rounded the muddy promontories of rivers Parrett, Usk, Wye and Severn.

  Elver fishing drew attention to the eel’s plight, but the increasing multitude of obstacles posed by the modern world are perhaps the greatest reason for its fall. A polluted world where adult eels are found with highly elevated levels of the insecticide dieldrin in their body tissues, where a parasite of the swim bladder – Anguillicoloides crassus – endemic in the Japanese eel, wormed its way into the wild European population. Combined with massive losses of wetland habitat, canalisation of once wild rivers and streams, concrete weirs, pumping houses and cooling water intakes at power stations where enormous numbers of eels perished, it seemed as if humans had cooked up a cocktail of recrimination against this ancient species.

  Counter-intuitively perhaps, it was the loss of adult silver eels rather than their Sargasso offspring that gave greatest cause for concern. At Llangorse Lake (Llyn Syfaddon) in the Brecon Beacons National Park there had been immense numbers of silver eel caught at the eel-trap and sent to be smoked and sold to upmarket restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Llangorse Lake, a place of mythical aquatic beasts and monster pike, is the largest natural lake in southern Wales and nestles under peculiarly shaped mountains and a landscape that harks back to a wilder, medieval time; turning up time and again in Welsh folk tales of slain heroes and villains and drowned prehistoric citadels. It is also a place for eels.

  Documentary evidence has been found of eels being trapped here as long ago as 1584, which probably means they have been hunted and caught in the same two or three weeks at the end of October into November for many hundreds, if not thousands of years – a date in the seasonal calendar that existed long before our current concept of calendars.

  What was it that made Llangorse such an attractive place fo
r those in pursuit of eel? The answer lies along the tiny stream, the Afon Llynfi, a small river which flows from the lake until it meets the River Wye at Hay-on-Wye. It is the only way in and the only way out for a migratory eel (unless elvers are put into the lake, as has happened in recent times). Silver eels would have had to run the gauntlet of the small, narrow stream when our ancestors would have competed with bittern, otter and other fish-eating predators that would have congregated to reap some of this autumnal harvest leaving the great lake.

  The trap came later and must have been devastatingly effective as it blocked the way of all the silver eels heading out under a full moon in late October. In just a couple of weeks in October 1989, over 2,500 lbs of eel were caught by operating the sluices of the trap. By the late 1990s the numbers were down to a fraction of that and the trap fell into disrepair.

  However, it is now possible to use the trap to monitor how many of these juveniles reach adulthood and pass through it in the direction of the sea each autumn. We will never know the exact number that make it back to the Gulf of Mexico but the data collected at Llangorse could provide timely information to help introduce conservation measures for a species that has been declared as endangered as the giant panda.

  My own odyssey with the eel began with a slippery elver that leapt out of a saucepan of milk; I have sometimes wondered what happened to that survivor that my brother helped into a coffee jar.

  He kept it for several years in much the same way as you might have kept a goldfish won at a travelling fair; feeding it occasionally and leaving it bored and stunted in a windowsill in the dining room until, perhaps under instruction from a higher authority to tidy things up, or maybe through tedium, he took it down to the local river one afternoon and we watched it disappear into the silty bottom. It may not have lasted a day, but I like to imagine that it continued to survive and started to grow until it went from gold into silver and set off downstream to the sea one balmy late October evening.

  Julian Jones, 2016

  Bats flitting about late in the evening in spring and autumn, at which seasons they are most commonly seen, foretell fine day on the morrow, as do dorbeetles, and some other insects.

  Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827

  For most naturalists, autumn is a time to gently slow down; to rest, reflect and prepare for winter; to embrace a sense of mellow fruitfulness, by easing into life in the slow lane. Not in my experience. Hardcore birders see it differently. For us, autumn is the time to ramp it up. As the weather intensifies and Atlantic depressions batter the country, so birding ambitions heighten. Our willingness to travel vast distances increases, driven by a determination to see lost or migrant birds that seek shelter and sustenance on our shores.

  Everything seems possible for the birder at this time of year. Nature, in all its mystery and diversity, can be neatly categorised, reduced down to a tick on a list. Speed of reaction and planning is key. Watch the weather charts mid-week like a hawk. Fill the car with petrol Friday evening, ready to rush to Aberdeen in time for dawn on a Saturday and on to Felixstowe by Sunday, all the while glorying in the deeply unsustainable and collectively selfish behaviour serviced by our burning need to connect with birds.

  All across Britain’s wild Atlantic edge, birders converge on lonely islands set in churning seas, on clustered archipelagos and notable promontories, be they spits, points or headlands. These places are indelibly carved into the psyche of the modern British birder. The birding geography and topography of autumnal Britain is a mix of venerable tradition, pioneering discovery, eternal hope – and catastrophic folly if you are trapped in the wrong place, personal agony setting in, knowing the rarities are elsewhere. These coastal landforms speak to us of past triumphs, drives through the night with expectations riding high, of camaraderie and a shared fellowship as another bird tumbles onto a cherished life list.

  We gather but twice a year, this national ornithological tribe: first, rather tamely at the thronged British Birdwatching Fair in August at Rutland Water, mainly to swap stories and buy paraphernalia; again in the autumn, in a more disparate, loose but more purposeful way, smaller gangs out a-hunting rarities from Shetland to Scilly, captivated by the spectacle of migration.

  The Isles of Scilly still offer a magical autumn birding season, where east meets west in a heady mix of species vagrancy from the USA to Siberia, attracting 450 or so birders from late September through to early November each year. That crowd is small compared with the invading army we once were back in the mid-1980s (1,500 visiting birders on islands with a resident population of just 2,200). By the hallowed month of October 1999, remembered fondly as almost birding perfection, numbers were down to 900.

  We’re still there, extending the tourism season by an extra month, bringing welcome income and endless bird news chatter from island to island on our handheld radios, but we no longer carry as much economic clout. For a host of reasons ranging from Scilly-fatigue, cost of travel and accommodation, prevailing weather systems, a slavish nervous fixation with the autumnal position of the jet stream, information technology and cheaper foreign birding trips, the meteoric rise of Shetland (yes, all of it, not just mythical Fair Isle!) over the past decade has put nails in the coffin of the much-loved Scilly season. Now, more than 500 visiting birders spread themselves thinly across that northern Viking landscape, bringing ornithological expertise, a crusading spirit and the tourist pound. Shetland lacks the intimacy and warmth of Scilly, but it offers exciting frontier birding in places. Birdforum (our gossip hub with over 147,000 members and 3.3 million posts) now runs an annual autumn Scilly-versus-Shetland competition for birders online in which each rare bird is ascribed a ‘rarity value’ based on previous occurrences. The battle lines are drawn in late September. Competition is fierce, often scornful or resentful.

  Meanwhile, out east, the North Sea-fronting coastline of Britain from the Northern Isles to Dungeness is littered at weekends with folk kicking Suaeda bushes along Blakeney Point; thrashing about in dunes at Spurn; assiduously working stone walls on Fair Isle; extricating waifs from Heligoland traps; or gazing longingly into Shetland geos looking for a brief flash of movement to bring cheer to an overcast autumn day – perhaps even bestow some degree of ornithological immortality on the finder.

  For an entire season your personal geographical and social (or anti-social) life is governed by the vibrations and beeps of a Rare Bird Alert (RBA) pager attached to your belt like some sort of life-affirming pacemaker. At times it even seems to be in tune with the beating of your heart. RBA send out nearly 110,000 messages annually to subscribers about scarce and rare birds. Some days in the autumn, if the weather is right for epic falls of migrants, 750 messages are sent out: a dizzying one message every minute and a half. That’s frantic. The keyboard is on fire. The pager has a ‘mega’ override programmed in so that I can be summoned insistently at all times of the day. It urges me to drop everything, to get in the car and go. It once went off at a conference in September. I delivered my paper, at speed, and dashed off, at greater speed, to Flamborough Head. I missed the lunch, but I did see the brown shrike.

  Autumn can make or break the birder. Reputations are won and lost, often in a serendipitous instance. It can be stressful in the extreme. This is raw, exhausting, elemental, and grim at times. It is riddled with jealousy, intrigue and competitiveness. Hard-won local patches close to the sea are defended like a fortress. Sharing at times seems unthinkable. Autumn is also a brutal time for lost young birds driven onwards by their inbuilt migratory instinct. If that misfires, they may end up in the drink.

  I used to think that there was a certain rhythm to all this, but there isn’t. Autumn is the most unpredictable and tumultuous of times, for birders and the birds; truly life in the fast lane. It is all order and chaos. But then, so is nature.

  Dr Rob Lambert, 2016

  To one who loves the hills at every season, the blossoming is not the best of the heather. The be
st of it is simply its being there – is the feel of it under the feet. To feel heather under the feet after long abstinence is one of the dearest joys I know.

  Scent – fragrance, perfume – is very much pertinent to the theme of life, for it is largely a by-product of the process of living. It may also be a by-product of fire, but then fire feeds on what lives or what has lived. Or of chemical action, but if there are obscure chemical processes at work in the dead stuff of the mountain, they give little indication to my nose. The smells I smell are of life, plant and animal. Even the good smell of earth, one of the best smells in the world, is a smell of life, because it is the activity of bacteria in it that sets up this smell.

  Plants then, as they go through the business of living, emit odours. Some, like the honey scents of flowers, are an added allurement to the insects; and if, as with heather, the scent is poured out most recklessly in the heat of the sun, that is because it is then that the insects are out in strength. But in other cases – as the fir trees – the fragrance is the sap, is the very life itself. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils. Pines, like heather, yield their fragrance to the sun’s heat. Or when the foresters come, and they are cut, then their scent is strong. Of all the kinds that grow on the low reaches of these mountains, spruce throws the strongest perfume on the air when the saw goes through it. In hot sun it is almost like a ferment – like strawberry jam on the boil, but with a tang that tautens the membranes of nose and throat.

  Of plants that carry their fragrance in their leaves, bog myrtle is the mountain exampler. This grey-green shrub fills the boggy hollows, neighboured by cotton-grass and sundew, bog asphodel and the spotted orchis, and the minute scarlet cups of the lichens. Its fragrance is cool and clean, and like the wild thyme it gives it most strongly when crushed.