Autumn Read online

  Oct. 3.

  Hirundines swarm around the Plestor, & up & down the street.

  Oct. 6.

  Many Hirundines: several very young swallows on the thatch of the cottage near the pound. The evening is uncommonly dark.

  Oct. 7.

  The crop of stoneless berberries is prodigious! Among the many sorts of people that are injured by this very wet summer, the peat-cutters are great sufferers: for they have not disposed of half the peat & turf which they have prepared; & the poor have lost their season for laying in their forest-fuel. The brick-burner can get no dry heath to burn his lime, & bricks: nor can I house my cleft wood, which lies drenched in wet. The brick-burner could never get his last makings of tiles & bricks dry enough for burning the autumn thro’; so they must be destroyed, & worked up again. He had paid duty for them; but is, as I understand, to be reimbursed.

  Oct. 9.

  Maser Hale houses barley that looks like old thatch. Much barley about the country, & some wheat. Some pheasants found in the manour. The sound of great guns was heard distinctly this day to the S. E. probably from Goodwood, where the Duke of Richmond has a detachment from the train of artillery encamped in his park, that he may try experiments with some of the ordnance.

  Oct. 11.

  Dr Chandler mows the church-litton closes for hay. Farmer Parsons houses pease, which have been hacked for weeks. Barley abroad.

  Oct. 12.

  Gathered in the dearling apples: fruit small, & stunted.

  Oct. 19.

  Made presents of berberries to several neighbours. Ring-ouzel seen in the Kings field.

  Oct. 23.

  Dr Bingham & family left Selborne.

  Oct. 26.

  Hired two old labourers to house my cleft billet wood, which is still in a damp, cold condition, & should have been under cover some months ago, had the weather permitted.

  Oct. 27.

  Some few grapes just eatable: a large crop. Housed all the billet wood. Leaves fall in showers. A curlew is heard loudly whistling on the hill towards the Wadden. On this day, Mrs S. Barker was brought to bed of a boy, who advances my nepotes to the round & compleat number of 60.

  Oct. 28.

  Thomas saw a polecat run across the garden.

  Oct. 29.

  Finished piling my wood: housed the bavins: fallows very wet.

  Oct. 30.

  Planted 100 of cabbages, in ground well dunged, to stand the winter.

  Reverend Gilbert White, The Naturalist’s Journal, 1792

  The October sky is bright, with a glowing film of city vapour. I live in a smoke-filled bubble, encircled by the M25. It’s a wonder anything survives here, let alone a nature junkie like me.

  I push my way past Caribbean hairdressers and food-and-wine shops to a spot around the corner that’s usually good for what ails me. The woods nearest (and dearest) to me are on a steep hill – though the view from the top makes up for the muddy climb.

  As the tarmac underfoot turns to earth I breathe a sigh of relief. The silence seems overwhelming. Just seconds ago I was in a concrete jungle, but now I stand surrounded by damp earth, wood and October’s sepia tones. I’m still in an urban bubble, but the air here seems clearer somehow.

  Summer’s warmth has long since left the wood and I’m beginning to wish I’d brought my coat. Fallen leaves crunch satisfyingly underfoot like breakfast cereal. I head into the undergrowth, the tang of leaf mould on my tongue. This secret woodland is always deserted. On an old wooden post an arrow points right, although I’m not sure what it’s directing me to. As far as I can tell I’m lost in the wild, just as I want to be.

  With a screeching ‘ki-ki-ki’, I’m no longer alone. The trees shake as dozens of neon-green parakeets sound their alarms. Cover blown, I stand and wait as the frenzy of beating wings quietens down to a simmer. This is their turf, and I’m an intruder. These woods, like many others in London, are home to rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri), and it feels as though this is their stronghold, the place they return to once all the cherry trees and bird feeders in the nearby gardens have been stripped bare. It’s hard not to love these garish invaders with their clown-like beaks and bold personalities. As I turn to walk away from their circus, one pops its head out of a hole to look at me with perfect comic timing.

  I take a detour via one of the wood’s barely used tracks. A speck shoots past me into the bracken: firecrest! The flash of orange on its forehead is the only way of telling it apart from its cousin, the goldcrest. These autumn featherweights are a highlight of the season. Due to their camouflage of yellow and orange, spotting one seems less likely than finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. Britain’s smallest bird is not, however, lacking in character – and likes to make itself known. Spending most of their time upside down as they flit from branch to branch, they are nature’s trapeze artists.

  At the top of the wood, in a clearing, stands one of South London’s iconic antennae. For something so massive and unnatural to be in the woodland feels jarring, but the birds don’t mind it at all; in fact several parakeets perch on its frame to enjoy the same view for which I’ve traipsed through mud and dead leaves.

  Having reached this vantage point I choose the least woodlouse-riddled log I can find and sit for a while. I love these city woods. Most are low-lying, with views no more than fifty feet in front, but here I can see for miles. Evergreens stick out through the mosaic of coppery deciduous foliage and brown earth. This is where the change in seasons can be best appreciated.

  When I think of the woods, I think of autumn, for woods are nature’s calendar. No other landscape is transformed so totally, and none more dramatically than by the annual autumn gilding. With the sepia tones comes an almost overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I’m cast back to my childhood, building dens and collecting pine cones. I was brought up a nature junkie – and I’ve found my fix, here in the heart of the city.

  Will Harper-Penrose, 2016

  I have been driving my little motorhome to the northwest of Scotland for ever and the silence when the engine’s switched off is almost shocking. There is no sound at all through the van’s open window. No traffic, no sirens, no service station cacophony. I let out my breath as if I’ve been holding it all journey long.

  After bumping along a track off a minor road across Rannoch Moor I’m at my first wild camping spot. I need to stretch, to breathe some clean moorland air, to just let go . . . let the impact on my senses soften the hard concentration of a day’s driving. I’ve been so windscreen-focused for the last hundred miles or so that the patchwork of autumn colours in the densely wooded Trossachs and the bedspreads of heathers beyond scarcely got a glance. I get out and look properly at the vast sweeping curves of moor and mountain surrounding me.

  It’s early October, before the clocks go back, so although it’s evening, there’s still some dusky light glowing in the western sky, turning the pinks and mauves of heather to deep purple. A distant lochan is navy blue. The view soothes and enfolds me.

  I stretch out my chest, arms and hands, put my head back and breathe in lungfuls of heather fragrance, dampness, a luscious earthiness. I feel like a wild animal newly released from captivity. Listening intently, there’s only the sound of a stream and the call of a distant bird of prey. I love this season in all its manifestations, but such a fresh, scented, darkening evening must be the best ever autumnal experience.

  Then, not far behind me, comes the sound of a cow making the strangest bellowing noise. I’m nervous around cows in general, and this particular one sounds in pain. I hadn’t seen any cows on the moor, or even suitable pasture for them, so I turn around, searching.

  The ‘cow’ is a magnificent red deer stag. He is, thankfully, further away than expected: the depth and volume of his rutting roar made it sound as if he was much closer. I can hardly believe it: the stag is a complete Monarch of the Glen cliché. He’s facing the same way as the painting, his head similarly angled to the right, and with the same shaped hills i
n the background. His antler rack looks identical too, and when seen through my binoculars, there’s even a small hillock with a tuft of vegetation to his left, as in Landseer’s original oil painting. He has the same thick, russety-brown neck mane.

  I am rooted to the ground, and he, fortunately, is unmoving too, though through the binoculars I can see his nostrils pulsing, and his massive chest lifting. As he raises his head and blasts out another roar, I suddenly become un-rooted, and head for the van, quivering with excitement and fear. Time to put the kettle on. Drinking tea and eating cheese and biscuits – too excited to bother with cooking – I keep checking through the van’s open door, but soon I can no longer see, or hear him, or anything other than the tumbling stream. The show is over; it’s time to make up my bed.

  Before settling down I step out into the night. A gibbous moon is rising in the eastern sky, and there are still a few sparse ribbons of light in the west. No stag noises, though there are tiny rustlings in the heather which make me almost as nervous. It will only be a mouse, or something similar, but in my imagination it’s a woman-eating Highland Black Panther. I love being outdoors at night, yet some primal fear always makes me want to head back to the cave. But it’s genuine tiredness too, and my sleeping bag calls.

  I have a wonderful dream. I’m autumn personified, fearlessly dancing inside a circle of glistening red fly agaric, watched by badgers, foxes, hares and other smaller creatures. I am an androgynous hybrid with the head of a stag, antlers threaded through with mossy fronds and autumn berries, yet I have a curvaceous woman’s body dressed in a diaphanous heather-coloured silk. Beyond the circle, rutting stags are parallel walking. The largest raises his head and roars . . . I wake up with a shock to an undreamlike stereophonic roaring, and scramble to the window.

  The moon is fully risen and flooding the moorland landscape with a sharp, silver light. In the distance, a group of hinds feeding. And here, right next to the van, is the Monarch . . . I’m sure it’s him. The window is open a fraction, and his smell floods into the van: it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Rich, peaty, ammonic, atavistic: perhaps it’s still the dream.

  But then I understand why the stereo effect: another stag roars from a short distance away, and Monarch responds. His sound is as deep and rich as his smell and so loud that the side of the van reverberates against my shoulder. Even in the safety of this metal box cave, I feel afraid. He moves around the front of the van and I watch, and wait.

  I was too tired earlier to put up my front windscreen cover, so now I can see him checking out the opposition. Although the other stag is further away, in the bright moonlight I can see it’s smaller than Monarch, and has fewer tines. One more van-shaking roar from Monarch, and the upstart turns away. After a brief bout of pawing the ground Monarch moves towards his females, his smell lingering on the night air.

  I watch the group for a while, but there is only a little sniffing of the females by Monarch, and soon they move off into the darkness. Clouds begin to cover the moon, so this time it’s the dark night which spreads out across the sky as I return to my sleeping bag and my dreams.

  Daphne Pleace, 2016

  On Monday evening, October 1st, the visitors slowly concentrated themselves at the Speech House, in the Forest of Dean, and were met on the following morning in the Forest, or afterwards at the Hotel, by the Hereford contingent. Cold it might be, for some of the party swept the snow from the grass into their hands at about 10 a.m.: but it was clear and bright. As for the fungi, truly they were few and far between, the oldest excursionist venturing the opinion that it was the worst prospect of a fungus foray which the Woolhope Club ever experienced, bad as it was in the previous year. The ground was moist enough, it is true, but so cold, that only on the sunniest slopes could the commonest species be found, and even these were scarce and scattered. Whether in anticipation of such a result, or from a combination of various circumstances, the company was much smaller than usual. [ . . .]

  No record was kept of the species observed, but nearly everything in moderately good condition found its way into the collecting baskets, and yet they were not full. Rarities and novelties were out of the question, and never, perhaps, were common species treated with so much care and consideration. Even Agaricus mellcus and A. fascicularis were treated with respect; one gentle-man actually took off his hat in the presence of almost the only specimen of A. rubescens encountered in the Forest. Last year Cantharellus aurantiacus was one of the commonest species, sometimes growing by hundreds, but this year not a single one could be found. There was no dearth of walking – naught but walking ‘on, on, for ever’ – to stoop and pick up a fungus was an event, but, alas! it was seldom worth the trouble of stooping for. It was worthy of note, that although the large genus Agaricus contains some 700 British species, the number seen was singularly few, the proportion being very far less than in most other genera, whilst, in the number of individuals, Lactarius and Russula exceeded it. Coprinus was seen but once or twice, and all the species of Cortinarius were extremely rare. Dinner at the Speech House Hotel, and a careful scrutiny of all the baskets, with the inevitable ‘nightcaps’, ended the first day.

  On the Wednesday the members proceeded by train to Park End, which proved so satisfactory last year; but here again they were doomed to disappointment, for although more prolific than any spot visited on the Tuesday, yet the best was very bad, nothing of interest being found except some very fine specimens of Russula inteora, and a few Hiigrophori. Strolling slowly back through devious ways to Speech House, soon after two o’clock, light refreshment and waggonettes carried the party a drive of eight miles to Newnham Station for Hereford, and completed the two memorable days of fungus hunting in the Forest of Dean. Like bears of the forest, in another corner of Europe, the fungi had retreated to the mountains, and would not be found.

  Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 1887

  Yellow alder, russet beech and sessile oak; broadleaf trees stand guard over the stream in this steep-sided Welsh valley. Sunbeams pierce a rising mist, hinting at the winter chills to come. A high amber ridge-line is just visible through the canopy, raised against a gun-metal sky. The wet smell of scarred earth is all-pervasive.

  As I stand here in the fold of a sliver of ancient temperate rain-forest, a tan sessile oak leaf falls gently to the river bank. I reach out to grasp it, but a squally wind whips it away and hurls it into the narrow headwaters we call Sgithwen.

  A leaf is not a leaf for ever. It is in a state of flux between leaf and particulates, living and dead. A leaf that falls in the stream is the beginning of a chain. Spin, yaw, pitch and submerge, it’s hurried away downstream in a thrum of fluvial energy and I lose sight of it. The leaf has abruptly entered an ancient dynamic system of motion and unrest. Yesterday, Sgithwen was in full red-clay spate after downpours. Today, the water is clear and forceful. Tomorrow, who knows. The stream is different and yet the same. The water is also a blend of Sgithwen ‘tea’ percolated from surrounding organic and nonorganic matter, a mix of nutrients so unique that salmonids remember the smell, homing from the ocean to breed. The stream is different yet the same.

  Heraclitus of Ephesus lived by the River Kayster in ancient Ionia. As I step into this stream, I hear his philosophy whispering down through two and half thousand years of algaeslippy boulders, ‘Upon those who step into the same rivers different and different waters flow.’ Heraclitus perceived, amongst nature’s constant flux and opposites, an entity or one-ness. This something, the source of everything, he called ‘Logos’. Life is an ever-changing continuum. Nothing remains the same, not least this stream in which I stand.

  The river is a universal feature. Sgithwen stream falls to the River Wye, flowing to the River Severn and is channeled out to the ocean. But rivers are never exactly the same from one moment to another because their systems are constantly fluctuating. Evolving habitats downward along the gradient are described in science as a ‘stream continuum’.

  The fallen leaf up
here in the hills is now food energy to be rationed downstream. As consumers in the food chain, freshwater insects called macro-invertebrates are great indicators of a healthy river ecosystem. They tend to follow this continuum in particular ways. Some, like the white-clawed crayfish, are keystone species and, being polytrophic, fill a multiplicity of roles in the river. Most are grouped to reflect their labours.

  Shredders, such as freshwater shrimp and the smaller stonefly larvae, begin by tearing away at coarse organic material like our sessile oak leaf. Not all the leaf is consumed and much floats away downstream together with faeces, later to be consumed by collectors such as midge larvae, nematodes and worms. More particles are scavenged in and around the sediments. Further downstream, the widening reaches open up to sky and sun, encouraging the growth of periphyton, a mix of algae, bacteria and other microbes. Grazers such as mayfly larvae, cased caddis-fly larvae and river snails scrape it from submerged rocks and roots for sustenance.

  Filterers like pearl mussels sift out still finer grains left in suspense, along with floating algae (including single-celled alga called diatoms), and nutrients washed from the flood plains. Invertebrate predators, such as dragonfly and large stonefly larvae, ambush other insects that have consumed our leaf. And in lower reaches and depths, the flow is laden with yet more life, in microscopic phytoplankton and zooplankton composed of dissolved carbon, the carbon that once embodied a veteran sessile oak. And so the unseen continue to be nurtured.

  Autumn gives rise to this annual pulse of life in the river; in time, leaves help to form a bounty of other living beings, way beyond the water’s edge. Predators move more easily up and down the continuum, feeding on in-stream and riparian life. There are pike, otters, the grey heron and, of course, humans, among others. Sand martins and Daubenton’s bats hunt adult aquatic insects just as they emerge from the water.