Autumn Page 14
We go quietly along until we see the fourth wader we’d hoped was here. The ruff took us completely by surprise when we first saw them. We disbelieved our own eyes, seeking reassurances from each other, knowing them to be rare and unlikely up here.
It took several nights and much leafing through books and spending time online to be certain, but they are here in plain view. Out of breeding season, ruff are unremarkable, longlegged brown waders. Stockier than the snipe, they have long necks, small heads and a shorter, faintly downcurved bill. Their demeanour and movement as apologetic as a muntjac’s.
In flight, these ostensibly similar birds are testing our ID skills tonight, and I’m a beat behind my companion. The snipe fly fast, calling and zig-zagging on narrow, boomerang wings, white undercarriages to the frosty ground. If we are lucky, a diagnostic white wing-edge gleams in the beam. Bulkier woodcock go straight up, just once, to hover like winged angels before landing close by. But the ruff are still a new species for us both, complicating and thrilling the night. Their flight is slower, lower and more hesitant.
For several nights now, we have been up to see them, guessing and speculating at where they go in the day. It is both wildly exciting and poignant. There is an air of ‘last chance to see’ about these waders, and discovering them here brings a particular sense of responsibility.
Because there are plans to mow, tidy and intensively graze this field, to remove the scrub thorns from the ramparts and within. It hurts. What impact will it have on these birds people either do not know about, do not care for, or do not believe are here? But there is a line I must toe and not cross. This is a working farm and my family are tenants. My co-discoverer is both employee and tenant. On the nights when I’m not up there, I hatch plans and cannot sleep.
Nicola Chester, 2016
Two hours and forty-two minutes. A reasonable time. Not the quickest by any means, but this was not a day for haste; today was meant for reflection, it was to be savoured and made the most of. It was the last good day of the year.
A hundred or so acres to survey around the London Wetland Centre. Reclaimed reservoirs and managed habitat nestled against the Thames, passed by university rowing crews and pleasure boats. Their shouts and cries accompany any trip down the remote east path, masking my swearing and cursing as the vegetation, grown wild as the year progressed, fought to bar the way ahead. Heathrow-bound jets and helicopter traffic rumbled above me. Over- and underground train whistles mixed with sirens pierced the air. In summer these sounds competed with chattering martins, screaming swifts and the rattling of warblers who filled the reeds and also called this place their home; without them the sky seems quiet and chilling.
I had shied away from the centre for years, displaying the London indifference to any attraction; it’ll be there next week, or the week after . . . It can wait. That first visit – the year now hazy, but the clear, cold day not – a council-estate life forgotten within moments of entering. The concrete crumbling on each visit, allowing room to learn and see new things. Walks, talks, events, I went to them all, gradually discovering more. I bought binoculars and the long forgotten joy of photography bloomed again.
As others looked skyward, I looked down and saw basking lizards. I would lie close to them for minutes, hours at times, to take pictures and establish some level of trust. More than once a passer-by would think I had met some terrible fate as I lay still on the ground, enquiring if I was OK. My solitary world was opened up, the fascinating little animals my release, talking gently to them as I took portraits.
I can’t remember exactly how, or even when, I ended up with a name badge. I had fallen in with staff and volunteers due to my frequent visits and knowledge of lizard locations. I dabbled with some events and helped out where I could, overcoming my dislike of humans. One day I chanced upon friends armed with a clipboard: ‘We’re doing a reptile survey, want to join us?’ They may even have explained the risks – nettles, biting ants, mud, brambles, electric fences, cows and more – but I had heard all I needed.
A map showed the refugia dotted around the centre: thirty-eight pairs of them, one tin, the other a square of roofing felt. They were mainly far from prying eyes, over-inquisitive hands and disturbance. Their positions soon became fixed in my mind, the routes automatic, the paths my own. A lone meandering to find reptiles – and myself, at times.
The season started in April, with weekly surveys until the end of June, and had begun again in September. Throughout the year, weather beat the felts and tins down; they became blockaded by nettles and brambles, blanketed by leaves and fallen fruit. Two survey points were gone now, choked by thick, thorny vines streaked with ballooned gossamer, full autumnal black fruits shining in the low sun, taunting, waiting for early winter migrants.
Regulars were missing too. That dark female slow worm under E1A, curled in a hollow every week until one visit when the survey sheet was empty and has remained so. I hope she is OK.
Then there was the long girl under the tin at A2. Her tail intact, unlike many on site. She was swollen and lethargic after the summer break, heavier the following survey and last week she was gone. The felt next to her regular spot was lifted to reveal a mass of bronze and metallic black strands of spaghetti, curled together, making a count tricky. Staying immobile long enough for us to spot nine of them and then bursting in every direction for the grass, proving one of the first things I was taught about these reptiles: they’re neither slow nor worms. This week the number was up to eleven, with five more under the tin, but still without the mother. She may have headed to winter quarters now, or to feed up beforehand. The young were on their own from the start, scale replicas of the parents, tiny blinking eyes and notched tongue, pure instinct driving them. I always hoped to see these new arrivals the following year, to greet them after their first hibernation. I worried about broods born so late.
Some of the common lizards had shown up only in the last weeks too; clusters of deep bronze, jewels, not much larger than a thumbnail, huddled on sun-warmed wooden bridges, posts and benches, blissfully ignored by passers-by who, like me years before, didn’t know the little creatures existed, let alone in London. My fingers were crossed for them in the months ahead.
Grass snake hatchlings had been seen in early September. Tiny, no thicker than a bootlace, full of tricks already; playing dead, musking and hissing. A few inches of comical theatrics that would grow to be the UK’s largest reptile. Now, the scent of their musk remained a heady memory to last through the months of hibernation, to be refreshed in the spring. The smell would stay on your skin for days, no matter how hard you scrubbed.
The picnic area provided a good spot to finish the paperwork, a tin and felt hidden nearby. The benches quiet now, allowing time to write and think of past months as well as those ahead, when there would be nowhere to hide.
The pen hesitated. The numbers double, triple checked and then totalled.
In the office, the folder was closed for the last time this year. A stack of survey sheets, crumpled in places, wrinkled from rain, streaked with mud, were the evidence of all the hours and miles walked. The name badge removed. It was hibernation time.
Laurence Arnold, 2016
Murmuration
You are speaking in a flight of starlings,
in words that have the sheen of metal, a flash
of green or purple, an iridescence
on your tongue.
Starling words, once spoken, fly up
in swarms through a calm sky, through
the long light of evening,
and can never be unspoken or forgotten.
Imtiaz Dharker, 2014
Two autumns in a row, hares came and bred in the overgrown field in front of the cottage, around my well. Hares were not at all common here; they didn’t like the closely cropped improved grassland of the hill farms, and although hares are active in the daytime and therefore easier to see than most mammals, sometimes weeks would go by without my seeing a single one. They are tough
creatures that live out in the open all seasons, all weathers. They don’t rely on burrows or nests for shelter and protection but on their ability to outrun predators. And they are fast; if they lived in town they could easily break the speed limit. As a child I would see them in large numbers when I walked on the marshes. In spring I would make a point of going to look for them so I could watch them boxing: the traditional spectacle of the mad March hares. At that time their fights were thought to be between the males, known as jacks, competing for the attention of the females, known as jills; now it is believed that it is actually the females, to our eyes indistinguishable from the males, fighting off the premature or unwanted attentions of the males. But here the jack was in no danger of getting his crown broken. The problem for the females here was not fighting off unwanted suitors but finding a mate, any mate, in the first place.
Hares can breed at any time of year, and the young leverets have to be as hardy as the adults, for they are left in a form, a hollow in the grass that offers no more protection than the bare scrape of the nest of a wader. Their defence from predators is to stay very, very still until they have no alternative but to run. The fields of sheep-grazing didn’t offer enough cover for them, but the field around my well was becoming visibly more and more overgrown year on year, as bracken spread from the edge of Penlan Wood, along with banks of sedge where the field was boggy, and nettles and thistles in the drier ground around the rocky remains of Penlan Farm. Sheep still passed through, but the field was growing steadily more marginal and unappetizing for them, and steadily more attractive for wildlife. I had no idea how many leverets were in the field, for they were all hidden in separate spots, for safety’s sake, but for a whole month of each of those two successive autumns it seemed as though whenever I walked down to my well, little hares would explode from every stand of nettles, every clump of sedge.
They didn’t all make it. One year, on the twenty-foot slab of exposed rock beside my fruit tree, where the mosses and liverworts grew, I found the bloody stump of a young hare’s hind leg. Dropped there by a buzzard, I supposed, or perhaps by hawk. I was fairly sure it had been carried there rather than killed there, as there was no sign of plucked fur, or any other remains. Just that one solitary paw. The next year, I found a skinned leveret on the track in front of the cottage. The skin was inside out, with the fur facing inwards like the wool on a sheepskin coat. The head had been eaten, but all four paws were snapped off and still attached. It was a neat job, the work of a badger, I thought, rather than a fox. Badgers didn’t often approach this close to the cottage – only once had I gone out at night and surprised one at my fence – but this drama had taken place right outside my window, in the deep darkness while I slept, and I had not been disturbed.
One late-autumn day I opened a back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared back at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world. I tried to imagine what might be going on in its mind, whether it might be ill or injured, and considered what might happen if I tried to pick it up. It seemed like a risky survival strategy, to trust in your camouflage when you are sitting on a doorstep, and I wondered if its sibling had done the same when it had been caught out by a badger on my track. As I touched the little hare, it burst into life and raced away at incredible speed, turning on a pin at the corner of the cottage. I dashed after it and was in time to see it clear my drystone wall, fence and all: a perfect arc of perhaps twenty feet. The next day the young hares had gone from my front field, scattered. They were so close to adulthood now, ready to begin their wandering, and I wouldn’t see a single hare again until Christmas.
Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills, 2011
Redbreast or Robbin Redbreast Sylvia rubicolay, migrates from the groves and thickets towards the habitation of man in November, and in the frost of the hybernal season comes close to our windows, and even our firesides, when it can find entrance, in search of food.
Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827
Warming
The seasons’ course seems strange to me,
more strange than I remember.
Wild flowers bloom unseasonably:
primroses in November.
The young pretend to blame us all.
Well, youth’s a great dissembler:
May was forever, I recall,
and there was no November.
These days I’ll take what Nature sends
to hoard for dour December:
a glow of warmth as autumn ends;
primroses in November.
David Gwilym Anthony, 2012
Author Biographies
Nick Acheson grew up in wellies, watching bog bush-crickets in North Norfolk. A year spent in the Camargue during his degree inspired him to seek wilder landscapes and for ten glorious years he lived in Bolivia. Since returning to the UK he has worked the world over, from Arctic tundras to the Antarctic. He proudly works closely with Norfolk Wildlife Trust, for whom he regularly features in local press and media.
Jane Adams grew up in an overcrowded London suburb with an unexplained love of all things wild. It took forty years before her passion properly surfaced after moving to an old house on the south coast with a rambling, wild garden. Now a self-confessed middle-aged wildlife nerd, her interests include photography, social media, writing, trail running and nature conservation. @wildlifestuff
Neil Ansell left London to live alone in the remote wilds of the Welsh countryside without electricity, gas, water, transport or a phone. After five years of semi-isolation, he wrote Deep Country (2011), recounting his experiences and reflecting on man’s relationship with nature. He is now an award-winning journalist, working with the BBC, Guardian and New Statesman among others.
David Gwilym Anthony, author of three books of poetry including Passing through the Woods (Matador, 2012), was born in Ffestiniog, North Wales, brought up in Hull and studied modern history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He lives in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, near the churchyard where Thomas Gray, author of Elegy in a Country Churchyard, is buried.
Laurence Arnold has an affinity for the misunderstood creatures in nature and escapes the day job by volunteering to count bats and reptiles at the London Wetland Centre and eels on the Hogsmill. He enjoys photography and using old film cameras, cycling, pretending to be Basque and once appeared on Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out.
Paul Ashton is currently head of Biology at Edge Hill University. A native of Lancashire, previous study and employment saw him happily exiled to Scotland and Norfolk before returning to the North West. For over twenty years he has striven to fire an enthusiasm for plants, evolution and conservation in his students, a mission he is still energetically engaged in.
Louise Baker is the granddaughter of a naturalist, a mother to two small, curious boys, and a freelance writer with an interest in childhood and the natural world, and how the two collide. As well as writing for a variety of clients Louise volunteers her services to the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, and keeps a blog, ‘The Many Adventures of Lexi and Tubs’, to document the family’s wild adventures.
Ginny Battson is a professional nature and landscape photographer with a lifelong love of wildlife, especially that of woodlands and watery habitats. Her passions include environmental ethics, ecoliteracy and being a mother. She enjoys walking, wading, observing and writing her blog seasonalight.wordpress.com. She lived in the US and New Zealand before returning to live in Wales.
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sp; Adrian Bell (d. 1980) was a Suffolk farmer and journalist who wrote over twenty-five ruralist books, including Corduroy (1930) Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932), which together form his farm trilogy. He was the first person to compile the now legendary Times crossword, setting over 5,000 puzzles and helping to develop the cryptic clue style.
Kate Blincoe is a nature-loving mother of two and freelance writer for publications such as the Guardian. She is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Parenting and is never happier than when exploring the countryside with her family.
Alison Brackenbury is the author of seven collections of poetry, for which she has been the recipient of several awards. Born in Lincolnshire, she was educated at Oxford and now lives in Gloucestershire.
Will Burns was brought up in Buckinghamshire. He is the Poet-in-Residence at Caught by the River and in 2014 was named as a Faber New Poet. His pamphlet was Number 10 in that series.
Brian Carter (d. 2015) was a Devon-based author, artist and conservation columnist with a deep affection for the landscape and wildlife of his home county. Many of his writings featured his beloved Dartmoor as backdrop, including A Black Fox Running (1981) and Jack: A Novel (1986).
Jo Cartmell is a lifelong naturalist with a special interest in water voles and wildflower meadows. She runs the Twitter accounts @WaterVole and @NearbyWild and also blogs for nearbywild.org.uk about her local wildlife.
Nicola Chester writes about the wildlife she finds wherever she is, mostly roaming the North Wessex Downs, where she lives with her husband and three children. She has written professionally for over a decade. Nicola is particularly passionate about engaging people with nature and how language can communicate the thrill of wild experiences. You can read her blog here: nicolachester. wordpress.com