Poem: Butterfly

The first butterfly of the year - here it is always a Peacock. They overwinter in the garage, and I must have woken this one up when I went to get some gardening tools.

Butterfly

the peacock on

the ice plant,

does it know

how beautiful it is?

Heronry

Simon Barnes, in his fascinating book The Meaning of Birds, informs me that 'heron' is one of the words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make space for terms such as 'voicemail' and 'database'. A pity. I think the heron has a particular appeal to children. They are easy to see – you couldn’t possibly miss a heron. They are also undeniably weird – and children love weirdness. 

My herons (they’re not mine of course, but because I can see them from my desk, I think of them as mine) are few in number this year. Before 'the beast from the east' there were as many as seventeen nests in the wood opposite but now there are only three, and they're smaller than usual. Perhaps the big old platforms blew down in this year's winter gales, and new ones have had to be built.

The very wet February we have just had, with its fierce winds and squalls of torrential rain, will not have helped, and the field at the back of my house, which provided the herons with a plentiful supply of frogs, has recently been partially built over and a dozen or so aviaries installed. 

There are plenty more frogs in the valley - up at Summit the ditches are oozing with spawn - and I often see solitary herons fishing in the Roch, so these great birds will not go short of food, but the field was a sort of corner shop, convenient for a quick gullet-full for a hungry youngster. The new aviaries house pheasants and peacocks and other exotic species, but I'd rather have the herons. 

Voles

There are voles in the wood next to the house, and this morning the black cat which regularly visits my garden caught one, a plump, chestnut coloured bank vole. Unlike most cats, this one didn't play with his victim, for which I was grateful.

It’s been estimated that there are 75 million field voles in the UK. That might sound a lot, but it’s not only cats who like to eat voles, they are also predated by foxes, stoats, weasels, buzzards, kestrels and owls. Poor voles! Voles have four to six young, and give birth to between three and six litters in the breeding season, which runs from March to September.

The Orkney Vole, which you may have seen on television, sitting on Chris Packham’s fist, is a separate species. The Orkney Vole was one of Orkney’s first settlers, many thousands of years ago, along with the builders of the archipelago’s stone circles, and many years ago I had an encounter with one.

I was standing in the centre of the Ring of Brodgar when I had the feeling that I was being watched. I should not, of course, have been inside the circle, but I was on my own, and I wanted to know what it felt like to stand at the centre of such a large monument. I looked around. The heather was riddled with vole runs and there at my feet was a little Orkney Vole. Its eyes twinkled for a moment in an “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t tell anyone” kind of way. I felt immensely privileged and I have never forgotten my tiny co-conspirator.

Poem: Hellebore

Hellebore

Rain has loosened 

a flag on the patio,

making it rock like a raft.

For weeks we’ve had

nothing but rain;

the yard, the field, the far-off hill.

I am the Christmas hellebore,

hiding my pale flowers
under sodden leaves.