Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (8 page)

While the old heron from the lonely lake

Starts slow and flaps his melancholly wing
,

And oddling crow in idle motion swing

On the half-rotten ash tree’s topmost twig
…

In his characteristically punctuation-free style, Clare perfectly captures a moment in time; a moment without any real drama, and yet rooted in this particular landscape. It is this ‘sense of place’, as one critic described it, which makes Clare’s writings on nature unique.

The poem ends with a scene which I might encounter on any winter’s day, here in my own parish – ‘bumbarrels’, incidentally, are long-tailed tits:

The fieldfare chatter in the whistling thorn

And for the haw round fields and closen rove
,

And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove

Flit down the hedge rows in the frozen plain

And hang on little twigs and start again
.

Even after the long, cold spell in January, I am still seeing little flocks of long-tailed tits foraging for food along the hedgerows behind my home. These are the lucky ones; many other small birds, here and elsewhere in the country, did not survive the snow and ice. They now lie out of sight, stiff and still, their tiny corpses bearing witness to the coldest winter I have ever known.

AS A COLD
February gives way to a chilly March, the lighter evenings provide an extra hour of birdsong. A hesitant dusk chorus fills the heart of the village with sound, puncturing the twilight silence of the past few months.

In the churchyard, deep in the foliage of an ancient yew, a small, unassuming little bird pierces the air with its jaunty, rhythmic song. A coal tit; the monochrome cousin of the commoner and more colourful blue tits and great tits. Like the even tinier goldcrest, this is a bird that loves conifers; and like the goldcrest, the warmth and shelter provided by this ancient yew tree has been the key to its survival during the cold spell.

Beneath the yew, on the soft, spongy, newly mown grass, a song thrush tugs determinedly at a reluctant worm, finally pulling it out of the soil and swallowing it. His head is cocked to one side, as he listens to another thrush, then another, and yet another, echoing away into the distance.

I walk past the church door, guarded by two ancient, coppery-coloured lions, flecked with lichens. So far the only flowers I can see are those placed neatly on the graves; although clumps of green daffodil shoots have begun to sprout in the spaces between the stones.

Then I find what I’ve been looking for. On the far side of the churchyard, jammed tight against the red brick wall of the old schoolhouse, is a single clump of
greyish-green
stalks, each holding a white, drooping flower. Snowdrops have finally come into bloom – almost a month later than usual.

For me, snowdrops always mark that strange no-man’s-land between winter and spring. This is a time when the redwings still gather to feed in the muddy field by Mill Batch Farm, and clumps of starlings fly overhead each evening, towards their winter roost. Yet the days are beginning to lengthen, the grass is a little greener, and we wait expectantly for the first signs of migrant birds returning from Africa.

It is now a full month since the festival of Candlemas, 2 February, the date when snowdrops are traditionally meant to appear. I wonder if this will be like the seasons of my childhood: a snowy winter followed by a sudden onrush of spring, with birdsong, flowers and insects jamming up against each other in space and time. Meanwhile, I must be content with these pure white blooms, sitting chastely in a quiet corner of the churchyard.

Given our national affection for the snowdrop, it is perhaps churlish to point out that it is not actually a native plant, but was brought to Britain from southern Europe during Tudor times. Soon afterwards, in 1659, Sir Thomas Hanmer wrote this evocative description:

The EARLY WHITE, whose pretty pure white

bellflowers are tipt with a fine greene, and hang

downe their heads
.

Rather like the hare, another ‘foreigner’ we have taken to our hearts, the snowdrop always seems to me as British as any of our native plants – even more so, given its iconic status as the earliest floral harbinger of spring.

In recent years, the unprecedented run of mild winters has meant that snowdrops are often appearing at the tail end of the old year, rather than at the beginning of the new. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, they will no longer be associated with the festival of Candlemas, but with Christmas.

Mild winters have also brought plants and animals from very different seasons together, in new and unprecedented ways. A few years ago a surprising photograph appeared in the press, featuring a red admiral butterfly perched on a snowdrop. Although many people assumed it was concocted on a computer, it was indeed absolutely genuine.

Red admirals were once unknown in Britain in winter, but some now appear to be hibernating here, and will take advantage of warm, sunny days in early spring to emerge and stretch their wings. But in this, the hardest winter for at least three decades, I have yet to see a butterfly at all.

W
INTER MAY BE
drawing to a close, but the prolonged cold spell is still taking its toll, as we discover for ourselves one bright morning. On a family walk along Perry Road,
we
come across the corpse of a heron, lying on the bank of the rhyne by a sharp fork in the road. There is a thin glimmer of frost on the folded wings, while the neck is bent, and the beak hidden beneath the body, as if the bird died in its sleep.

The prolonged cold, freezing the shallow water in the rhynes each night, meant that the heron was simply unable to catch enough food to replenish lost energy. Already thin – there is hardly any flesh on a heron’s skeleton in the first place – it became thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker, until it could no longer summon up the energy to find its prey. Then, one cold night, it simply gave up the fight for life.

The children crowd around, fascinated, as always, by a close encounter with death. Yet all around us, as we continue along the lane, life is bursting out with the energy of spring. On the ash trees, the bare twigs are now dotted with black, sticky buds; while the laughing call of a green woodpecker echoes from the distant orchard. And even without these subtler signs, who could ignore the dozens of lambs, leaping energetically around their weary mothers in the corner field?

The bleating of the newborn lambs is the backdrop to another sound of spring: the cawing of the rooks as they spring-clean their nests in preparation for the crucial business of the breeding season ahead.

On mild, calm evenings, the rookery is full of activity. The tall ash trees at the bottom of my garden are studded
with
angular black shapes, a dozen in all, perched high in the twigs above their untidy nests. The hour before dusk is a time for social interaction, and they chatter noisily to one another as if recounting the day’s gossip. Earlier in the day, they gathered in large, loose flocks, flapping their long, ragged wings, as they fed in the parish fields, just as they do all over rural Britain.

The rook’s closest relative, the carrion crow, is by contrast a solitary bird, seemingly content with its own company. Indeed the term ‘scarecrow’ is a misnomer: the device was invented to scare off marauding flocks not of crows, but rooks, intent on stealing the farmer’s precious seed.

Two fields away from the rookery, on the west side of Perry Road, a pair of carrion crows is sitting in the big oak; one carrying a long twig in its bill. I watch with interest, wondering if the bird will take it to its nest in the upper branches of a nearby tree, and weave it into the structure.

Instead, to my surprise, he flies away from both the tree and his mate, and lands near the edge of the field. It is only when the female flies off to join him that I understand what is going to happen. I am about to witness one of the most intimate moments in the lives of these big black birds.

As she lands, he offers the twig to her. Feigning indifference, she turns her body away from him; but then lifts her tail. It is the signal he was hoping for. Frantically flapping his wings with what looks like a mixture of sexual anticipation and triumph – but might simply be a device to
keep
his balance – the male crow mounts the female, and they begin to copulate.

Some half a minute later, he flies up in the air and lands a few feet away. Given that for some songbirds, mating lasts only a fraction of a second, I am impressed by his persistence. The two birds face away from each other; he digging his beak into the earth, she simply staring into space.

I am trying hard not to find human parallels in the scene I have just witnessed. Although I know this is simply instinctive behaviour, something about it seems eerily familiar. And just as with our own sexual act, this messy coupling is absolutely crucial to the crows’ lives.

Two hundred yards to the east, the rooks carry on chattering to one another, too busy to notice.

I
N GARDENS THROUGHOUT
the village, including my own, a far less conspicuous bird is also getting ready for the breeding season party. The dunnock is the wallflower of garden birds: ever-present, but hardly ever noticed. When seen at all, it is often mistaken for a sparrow; indeed the dunnock used to be known as the ‘hedge sparrow’, even though it is totally unrelated to the sparrow family.

Dunnocks usually forage on the ground, hopping about beneath bushes and shrubs, rather like tiny thrushes. A closer look reveals a subtle but attractive plumage: a purplish-grey head, neck and breast; with
streaks
of chestnut and black on the back and wings; and a slender bill, ideal for feeding on tiny insects.

For most of the year, the dunnock lives up to its reputation as a quiet, modest little bird. But for a month or two during the early spring, it undergoes a Jekyll and Hyde transformation. Gone is the shy skulker; welcome instead to the swinger of the bird world.

It starts, sometime in late January, with the occasional snatch of song, though the dunnock is never going to win any prizes for singing. Indeed it often takes a while for this stream of notes, neither high nor low, varied nor sweet, and with no clear start or finish, to permeate my consciousness.

By March, the chorus of dunnock song is building to a climax, as the males seek out high perches from which to broadcast their message. It is as if the bird, hesitant at first, has finally gained the confidence to shout to the world – or, at least, to any male or female dunnocks within earshot.

And in this village at least, there are plenty of those. Dunnocks, like many garden birds, find our shrubberies and flower beds an ideal substitute for their ancestral woodland home; and as a result, breed in far higher densities here than in their natural habitats. This leads to one of the most extraordinary displays of behaviour in the whole of the bird world, involving more extra-marital affairs than a TV soap opera.

Like all birdsong, that of the dunnock serves two purposes: to attract a mate and to drive off rival males.
But
whereas most birds, once paired up, can afford to relax a little, the dunnock must keep a close eye on his mate until all their eggs have been laid. This is because female dunnocks are, to put it bluntly, fond of a bit on the side. Given the chance, they will mate with any male in the neighbourhood, and as a result any one brood of chicks in a dunnock’s nest may come from several different fathers.