Summer Read online

  It’s only May, and yet it feels as if summer is well under way. I find it hard to imagine the woods in winter as they were just four months ago; now there is noise and activity all around. The long-tailed tits can be heard chatting again, and swallows are diving over the fields. The badgers are out in force, too: a patch of fading bluebells – or wood bells – has been trampled in the beech spinney, and a stampede line through the meadow grasses shows their route between main locations. The green barley crop now provides them with enough cover in the field – a small patch is already flattened. We’re about to begin badger-watching again in earnest. It is my favourite month at the sett, for the cubs often put in an appearance and haven’t yet learnt the ground rules: Don’t go anywhere without mother and always act with caution. They will know soon enough, but for now we welcome their ignorance.

  We settle in the field at eight-thirty one evening. There is a strong breeze but we’re sitting downwind from the sett, so unless the wind changes it won’t be a problem. Sometimes we stand looking into their wooded area, but nettles are shooting upwards and the elderflower branches drooping down with the weight of new growth, making it harder for us to catch sight of anything. That area won’t see the full light of day again until November, so our only hope is that they’ll come close to the fence, or up through their hole in the field to take a look.

  Before long I’m watching one large cub come up and sniff the air just beside the fence. As expected, the mother is nowhere to be seen. The cub disappears down the tunnel and emerges into the field, soon followed by two smaller cubs. Once out of the ground they change their minds in unison and head back down the hole. I don’t think they were frightened by us, but perhaps they smelt something a little different on the air, and their natural wariness is beginning to kick in.

  There is no time to gaze off into the distance, as now a cub is ambling towards me. Has she really not noticed that I’m here? Her coat is in glossy, pristine condition, and she is without all the knocks and scrapes I’m so used to seeing on the older badgers – she could have stepped off a shelf in Hamleys, or from the screen of a Disney film. Her eyes are wide open and bright and she has a clownish tumbling gait. She comes within a metre of me, but then, feeling spooked, she runs away.

  I don’t like to come every night. I fear we may interrupt their foraging, and my own routine can’t afford a nightly vigil. We stay little over twenty minutes, but see at least four cubs – more than many people will see in their lifetime. It is a privilege, but part of my reason in coming is to make sure all is well.

  The footpath is turning pink, pale with chalk and lack of rain; the sunset is hidden behind a deep layer of cloud tonight, but some of its warm glow must be seeping through. There is still time to wander on; darkness won’t come fully until we reach the village. On the way back I spot some blossom on the holly: simple white buds with a delicate blush, opening into four small waxy petals. I have never noticed its flower before; it bears no resemblance to the fiery winter berries. It reminds me again that each season is evident somewhere in the others, if only in the residue of fallen leaves, the dead seed-heads or empty nutshells. It feels now as though nature is racing towards the high point of the year, birds nesting, fruit growing in the hedgerows and trees, and young foxes, rabbits and badgers venturing further afield. Early summer is a time of nourishment and growth, not just survival. In some ways it saddens me that this phase is so brief – the longest day of the year is only a month away.

  Caroline Greville, 2016

  June

  June 1. Dames violets, double, blow finely: roses bud: tulips gone: pinks bud. Bees begin to swarm. Tacked the vines the first time. Began to plant out annuals in the basons in the field. Ponds & some wells begin to be dry.

  June 2. Sultry, & heavy clouds. Smell of sulphur in the air. Paid for near 20 wasps: several were breeders; but some were workers, hatched perhaps this year.

  June 3. Soft rain. Grass & corn improved by the rain already. The long-horned bees bore their holes in the walks.

  June 5. Boys bring me female-wasps. Apis longicornis bores its nests & copulates.

  June 7. Fly-catcher builds. Farmers cut clover for their Horses.

  June 8. Elder begins to blow. Many hundreds of annuals are now planted-out, which have needed no watering. Wheat begins to shoot into ear. Hardly any shell-snails are seen; they were destroyed, & eaten by the thrushes last summer during the long dry season. This year scarce a thrush, they were killed by the severe winter.

  June 9. Forest-fly begins to appear. Grass & corn grow away.

  June 12. Drones abound round the mouth of the hive that is expected to swarm. Sheep are shorn.

  June 13. Martins begin building at half hour after three in the morning.

  June 14. I saw two swifts, entangled with each other, fall out of their nest to the ground, from whence they soon rose & flew away. This accident was probably owing to an amorous dalliance. Hence it appears that swifts when down can rise again. swifts seen only morning & evening: the hens probably are engaged all the day in the business of incubation; while the cocks are roving after food down to the forest, & lakes. These birds begin to sit about the middle of this month, & have squab young before the month is out.

  June 17. Snails begin to engender, & some flew to lay eggs: hence it is matter of consequence to destroy them before midsummer.

  June 20. Cut my St foin; a large burden: rather over-blown: the nineth crop. Libellula virgo, sive puella. Dragonfly with blue upright wings. Footnote. As the way-menders are digging for stone in a bank of the street, they found a large cavern running just under the cart-way. This cavity was covered over by a thin stratum of rock: so that if the arch had given way under a loaded waggon, considerable damage must have ensued.

  June 24. Hay makes well. The wind bangs the hedges & flowers about.

  June 25–28. [Bramshot] Vine just begins to blow: it began last year June 7: in 1774 June 26. Wheat begins to blow. Thomas’s bees swarm, & settle on the Balm of Gilead fir. first swarm.

  June 26. No young partridges are flyers yet: but by the deportment of the dams it is plain they have chickens hatched; for they rise & fall before the horses feet, & hobble along as if wounded to draw-off attention from their helpless broods. Sphinx fortè ocellata. A vast insect; appears after it is dusk, flying with an humming noise, & inserting its tongue into the bloom of the honey-suckle: it scarcely settles on the plants but feeds on the wing in the manner of humming birds. Omiah, who is gone on board the Resolution, is expected to sail this week for Otaheite with Capt. Cook.

  June 28. [Selborne] Flowers in the garden make a gaudy appearance.

  June 30. Wheat generally in bloom. The beards of barley begin to peep.

  Reverend Gilbert White, The Naturalist’s Journal, 1776

  It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops’ croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint, – like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite, – snow-white ladies’-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter’s night-shade, and the black-petalled doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal, the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray, the fourth shearer, Susan Tall’s husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as general supervisor. None of these were clothed to any extent worth mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of lineament, and a fixity of fac
ial machinery in general, proclaimed that serious work was the order of the day.

  They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts. It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings, nobody seemed to be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained. The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to the highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed, chesnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves and diagonals, was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions the precise requirements of beauty and ventilation.

  One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age or style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediævalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder. Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout – a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up. The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers. For once mediævalism and modernism had a common standpoint. The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten arch stones and chamfers, the orientation of the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed. The defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion and a desire.

  To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers’ operations, which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state room floors of an Elizabethan mansion. Here the shearers knelt, the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms and the polished shears they flourished, causing these to bristle with a thousand rays bright enough to blind a weak-eyed man. Beneath them a captive sheep lay panting, quickening its pants as misgiving merged in terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.

  The picture of to-day in its frames of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast of ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The citizen’s Then is the rustic’s Now. In London, twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face and tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider’s ancient times are only old; his old times still new; his present is futurity.

  So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in harmony with the barn.

  Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874

  June began with a storm in Bristol. The temperature was several degrees lower than average for the time of year and I certainly felt it, my skin exposed to the wind battering me over my handlebars. Trees shook, swayed and shed their weakest branches, littering the footpaths. My body was rain-soaked and tense from the brief, uphill cycle home and I soon regretted having mounted my too-small-for-me bicycle.

  Unexpectedly, through the rushing of tyres on wet tarmac and shuddering exhausts, a noise pierced the city’s soundtrack. In an instant I was taken away to deciduous woodland at dawn, away from the reality of dusk on the A37. I knew what it was. Perhaps no other bird would have the courage to perform a solo in the storm, nor have the power to produce notes that could compete with the roar of the traffic.

  I’ve only recently come to appreciate the wren. Small and stout, this little brown ball bounces between bushes, pausing to probe with its needle-like bill, quite overlooked. I rarely spot them since they stick so close to cover, flying low to the ground and rapidly flapping short, broad wings. Every so often, I notice them rustling beneath hedges like mice, foraging for insects beside my feet as I pound along the pavement.

  The wren is indifferent to our daily commute. Its pale, straight eyebrows give it a determined gaze as it busily darts between patches, relentlessly searching for food. Inconspicuous maybe, but although the wren is the most numerous bird in Britain, with over 8.5 million breeding territories, you are much more likely to hear than to see one. Calling from cover, this seasoned musician executes a rapid, cascading song from its narrow bill, finishing with a loud and clear trill. Despite the wren’s tiny stature its voice is astonishingly loud.

  Males continue to sing throughout the year, unlike many other members of our avian choir. If you close your eyes for a few moments and let yourself become aware of the sounds around you, you’ll soon pick out a wren’s song from the urban soundscape. Once you learn the tune, you’ll hear it everywhere. That day, I was especially grateful for its notes as they carried me, through wind and rain, the last 200 yards to my door.

  In stark contrast to the miniature, enigmatic wren, the city’s most conspicuous residents produce the other sound you’ll notice. Urban gulls are relatively recent residents. Since the 1970s, increasing numbers of both herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls have set up home here. These large and robust birds are certainly not overlooked in Bristol, particularly in the summer months. Lesser black-backs have a slate grey back, and a fisherman’s jacket yellow beak and legs. They tend to be a little smaller and slimmer than the herring gull, our quintessential ‘seagull’, snow white with a silver back, black tail feathers tipped with white, pale pink legs and the same bright yellow beak. Its call is a flamboyant affair. The herring gull throws back its head and emits a loud cackle, seemingly laughing at passers-by. Vocal birds at the best of times, during summer they are at their noisiest while defending their newly hatched chicks.

  In contrast to the highly unfaithful wren, herring gulls are almost exclusively monogamous and can mate for life. Their success in the city is partly down to their urban parenting style. They choose to raise their young on the vast, flat roofs of tall office blocks, or perched atop Victorian chimney pots – both far from the reach of foxes and other predators. Despite an effective camouflage of mottled fluff, chicks are very vulnerable. Gulls are protective parents and we’re a perceived threat.

  The UK’s breeding population of herring gulls has declined dramatically in recent years, though you wouldn’t know it. Every summer the local papers report on the necessary pest control measures because, you know, gulls have been attacking beloved pets or whatever accusation has been levelled at them. Perhaps the negative reporting is not helped by the bird’s mugshots, the steely look in their gold-rimmed eyes as though suggesting an intention to take over the world.

  These attractive, intelligent and adaptable birds are resourceful opportunists that have learnt to profit from our greed. First following fishing boats and making use of wasteful discards at sea, then picking through our excess food in la
ndfill sites, now they work as late night street cleaners by removing kebab left-overs dropped outside clubs and bars.

  From my window I watched as a group of gulls soared gracefully above the city skyline, painting patterns in the clouds in a display of freedom. With the summer storm over and my bike safely stowed, I could clearly hear the soundtrack of the calling seagulls, which to me gives Bristol’s maritime history a wonderful authenticity. I hope we learn to live with our wild neighbours before they move out for good. Not everyone has a nature reserve on their doorstep, but we do have miniature versions in road verges, playing fields, urban rivers and back gardens, as the presence of wrens and gulls gives witness. Summer in the city really can be wild.

  Jennifer Garrett, 2016

  Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten train to S—— and walked across the meadow (buttercups, forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge. Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks, and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But I cared not a tinker’s Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted woods.