Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (26 page)

AUGUST MARKS THE
height of summer: long, hot, sunny days, the hum of bumblebees, and the daily traffic jam along the motorway, as holidaymakers head south-west on their annual migration to the beaches of Devon and Cornwall. During the evenings and weekends, the sportier villagers gather to bat and bowl at the cricket club to the rear of the White Horse Inn. Preparations are also well under way for the main event in the village calendar: Harvest Home.

But although we still have a month or more of fine weather to look forward to, one of our star summer visitors has already headed away from the parish airspace, to new oceans of blue. The swifts, which cut through the summer air like test pilots, have gone; leaving only an echo of their banshee screams, the memory fading with every passing day.

Almost all of Britain’s 80,000 pairs of swifts are now well on their way south, crossing the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert before spending the winter in Central Africa. For a bird that habitually flies 500 miles or more a day when here in Britain, this journey presents few problems. Feeding on tiny flying insects as they go, they spend more than half the year under African skies, before returning at the end of April or in the first few days of May.

Given that swifts are with us for just three months, it is extraordinary what a hold they have on our consciousness.
This
is a bird of superlatives: a bird that can catch 100,000 insects in a single day, stay airborne for as long as four years, and travel more than a million miles during its lifetime. We think about swifts even during their long absence, so that on a warm, sunny day in late April I find myself gazing at the skies, willing them to return.

Now that the swifts have departed, the end of the summer is in sight. The days are getting imperceptibly shorter, birdsong is beginning to fade, and intimations of mortality are all around us.

Not that our other iconic summer visitor would endorse this view. Over to the west of the parish, in a cluster of industrial units, half a dozen pairs of swallows are busily collecting food for their second broods. Every minute or two, they bring little balls of tiny flying insects back to the nest. I duck as the birds swoop low past my head, even though I know their piloting skills mean there is no danger of a collision. From inside I can hear the soft twittering of the youngsters, whose volume rises each day, as they begin to outgrow their flimsy nest of mud, straw, grass and feathers. It won’t be long before this brood leave the nest and join their well-grown siblings on the telegraph wires outside. And in less than two months they will flick their wings, drop off the wires and float away, south, to join the swifts in Africa.

O
F ALL
B
RITAIN’S
butterflies, my favourites are the blues. They are a dazzling array of beauty in miniature – even the large blue is small by butterfly standards. Many of our blue butterflies can only be found on what is confusingly called ‘unimproved’ grassland – habitats that have never been ploughed, sprayed, or planted with crops. Such places – mainly on chalk and limestone soils – are as rare as hen’s teeth in the modern British countryside, so the ranges of most of these butterflies are fairly limited.

But on warm, sunny days in August, two species of blue butterfly do visit my garden, sometimes in good numbers. The common blue and the brown argus are never very obvious, being so much smaller and less showy than the peacocks, red admirals and commas that dominate this late-summer season. They are also less active, perching to feed on a thistle-head or clump of meadowsweet, rather than flitting about like their more exhibitionist cousins.

Take a closer look, though, and their appeal becomes clear. The larger of the two, the common blue, has a slightly looser, floppier flight than its relative. When it lands, it may momentarily open its wings to reveal a fine, pale blue shade, as if someone has sprinkled a thin layer of microscopic particles over their surface. The female is less striking than the male, and browner in hue, though a bluish tinge can usually be seen as she turns towards the sun.

But my favourite of these summer butterflies is the brown argus, named after the giant with a hundred eyes
in
Greek mythology. Small and neat, measuring barely an inch from one wingtip to the other, the rich, chocolate-brown of its wings is set off by a series of tiny, jagged orange arrow-heads along their sides, and the snow-white border beyond. When it closes its wings, as it usually does when feeding, it reveals a series of egg-shaped blobs, the tiny ‘eyes’ to which its name refers.

When I first saw a brown argus in my garden, one warm August evening a few years ago, I was surprised. This is a chalkland specialist, laying its eggs on the common rockrose, and I never imagined it could fly the few miles from the slopes of the Mendips to reach these low-lying lands on the levels. But males, in particular, have a reputation for ‘going flyabout’ on warm summer days; a strategy which has enabled it to colonise new areas of downland and grassland, and to extend its range north and west. Unlike some more sedentary species of butterfly, the brown argus looks set to take advantage of global warming during the coming decades.

O
N A FINE
, sunny day in early August, the breeze blows the thistledown up into the air, the croak of the raven and the mew of the buzzard echo in the distance, and on the lawn, a green woodpecker searches for newly emerged colonies of flying ants, picking up dozens at a time with its long, sticky tongue.

Small copper butterflies join the blues and browns, seeking out nectar on a clump of meadowsweet. Migrant hawker, emperor and common darter dragonflies patrol along the path through the meadow as efficiently as border guards, hunting down flying insects as they go. Grasshoppers and crickets forage for food in the long grass below, quietly humming to each other. And a single red-tailed bumblebee, whose furry black body looks like a guardsman’s black busby with an orange-red trim, floats from flower to flower.

The red-tailed is eye-catching among the several different kinds of bumblebee that ply their quiet trade in the hedgerows, gardens and roadsides of the parish, from early spring until late autumn. Other common varieties include the buff-tailed, usually the first to emerge on fine warm days in February or March, and the white-tailed. We are also home to several species of ‘cuckoo-bee’, which, like their avian namesake, lay their eggs in other bees’ nests. They can be told apart from their hosts by the lack of pollen sacs on their hind legs; they have no need of these, as they get the other bees to do the hard work of raising their young for them.

The name bumblebee is often assumed to derive from these bulky insects’ rather uncertain, bumbling flight-paths; but it actually comes from the sound they make. Indeed their original name, and the standard usage until at least the 1920s, was ‘humblebees’. ‘Humble’ has nothing to do with humility, but again refers to their low, humming
sound
. Like their domesticated cousin the honeybee, bumblebees have had a rough time lately. A combination of chemical farming, habitat loss, wet summers and climate change all threaten the survival of these vivid insects. But for the moment at least, on a warm August day, the gardens of the parish are alive with them.

T
HE FRUIT TREES
and bushes around the edge of our garden are beginning to show the results of the summer’s fine weather. Plums and apples – for eating, cooking and making cider – ripen and swell on the trees, while the elder and blackthorn bushes are covered with inky-black berries and sloes.

But above all, it’s baby-bird time. I say baby, although the vast majority have long since left the safety and comfort of their nest, and begun to make their way in the world. At the far end of our garden, the dense foliage of the hawthorns and blackthorns, and the tall ash trees, provide excellent cover for these vulnerable youngsters. Fledgling great tits, their yellow cheeks giving away their youth, potter about the foliage, as do juvenile chiffchaffs, their neat, fresh plumage a sharp contrast to that tatty appearance of their exhausted parents.

A robin hops out and cocks his head, staring at me with one beady eye. His orange breast would mark him out as an adult, were it not for the state of his headdress;
from
the neck upwards he still retains the speckled brown of his juvenile plumage. A young blackbird also sports a cinnamon-coloured head above his black body, as he pecks away furtively at the ripening purple sloes.

Bramble, elder, hawthorn and blackthorn are all readily giving up their fruit as a crafty sacrifice to the birds. The fleshy fruit may be digested, but the hard seed remains intact, until the usual processes of nature see it coming out at the other end from where it went in. This increases the plants’ chances of spreading, as birds fly off to new places beyond their reach.

At this time of year, the berries attract not just thrushes and blackbirds, but a whole suite of species whose usual diet is insects. Migrants such as the whitethroat, willow warbler, chiffchaff and blackcap will soon be heading south for the winter, and now need fuel for their travels. So when the berries reach their peak, they supplement their diet with these fleshy, energy-rich fruits, enabling them to build up deposits of fat vital for the long journey ahead.

One small clump of elder and hawthorn bushes to the back of our house has, since we first arrived here, attracted more than twenty different species of bird. These range from wood pigeons, collared doves and great spotted woodpeckers, through thrushes, blackbirds, finches and sparrows, to no fewer than six species of warbler. We once even saw an escaped blue-crowned parakeet – originally from South America – until constant mobbing by the local jackdaws forced him to fly away.

Later in the month, my favourite berry-eating bird usually turns up: the lesser whitethroat. Having skulked away in the parish hedgerows all summer, the only evidence of its presence being that soft, almost inaudible song, this neat little warbler finally emerges in late August and early September. Two or three lesser whitethroats appear on the elder each year, sporting their neat, new shades of grey and white, and picking off the deep, blackish-purple berries one at a time. If I approach them carefully they may allow me momentarily into their lives. But they don’t stay long: within a few days they head off eastwards on that epic journey via northern Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East, to their wintering grounds in West Africa.