Dandelions

Dandelions are just coming into bloom, and, en masse, as they are around here, they're an undeniably handsome plant. 

The spring edition of Lapwing, the quarterly journal of the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside, has a feature on this ‘fine and dandy flower’ and tells me that dandelions provide a reliable source of food for pollinators; certainly the plants growing on the nearby verges are regularly visited by bumble bees and beetles.

The problem with dandelions, as every gardener knows, is that dandelion clocks are so effective in dispersing the seeds, meaning that the plants get everywhere. But, it helps to be told that dandelions are good at improving soil conditions for worms as well as for other plants – maybe I’ll just pull up the monstrous ones invading the lawn, and leave the others alone. And I do always root them out by hand, I never use herbicides.

Lapwing, by the way, is always well worth reading, and although my personal circumstances mean that I never get to any Wildlife Trust events, I enjoy the journal, and the Trust’s weekly newsletter. I’d encourage anyone with an interest in local wildlife to join.

Bud burst

Today was the day the trees came into leaf. Not the oak – although there are few of them around – but the hawthorn, the alder, the birch, and even the late-leafing ash. On the canal, geese, and a couple of mallards – lonesome males. The geese were not barking at each other, as they usually do, but miaowing; maybe a miaow is more comforting to unhatched chicks.

An unusual calm

Thanks to the Covid 19 pandemic, there's much less traffic around, and I hear sounds I don't usually hear. 

This morning, out doing a spot of gardening before rain sets in for the day, I realise that the odd scratchy, burbling sounds I had thought were magpies, are in fact heron chicks begging for food. The heronry is close enough for me to see the youngsters without using binoculars, but I've never before been able to hear them. 

And, bubbling up through a moment of silence - a curlew. Sheer magic!

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.

Poem: Snowdrops

Snowdrops        

in the bare earth

beneath the hazel,

a soft sleet that

can’t be swept away

Roe deer

It was a mild morning so I went for a walk in the half-dark. Although it’s only mid-December the birds were tuning up for Valentine’s Day, and in the hedgerows cock blackbirds were practising their skirmishing tactics. I stopped off at a shop to buy a loaf of bread and came home along the partially cobbled track that leads past a school and then below the slopes of Gorsey Hill wood.

I sensed her before I saw her, a gentle, nervous presence at the periphery of my perception. She was standing at the edge of the school playing fields. She watched me for a moment or two, ears and nostrils twitching. She decided I was a threat, and bounded gracefully away towards the shelter of the wood. A roe deer.

Poem: Writing what is to hand

It’s been a dull, flat day and I was walking more for exercise than in the expectation of seeing any wildlife, but as I stepped onto the towpath I saw a group of a dozen or so ducks on the canal. They were too slender to be mallards, and they were behaving oddly, alternately diving down into the water, and swimming very fast along the surface. They were moving faster than I could walk, and it took me a while to come level with them.

Goosanders, the females’ top-knots as auburn as the dead bracken on the opposite bank of the canal, the males spic and span as piano keys. I’ve seen goosanders here before, but only as lone individuals, and never as active as these, their ducking and diving now interspersed with short bursts of flight. I watched them until they'd skittered out of sight.

The towpath was slippery and I turned off onto the main road. Above the hill next to Gorsey Hill Wood a kestrel hung on the wind.

Writing what is to hand

A winter of illness

and the days still dwindling,

not lasting as long as I would like;

the field I walk is sodden with last night’s rain,

but ah, above it, a kestrel,

holding still on the wind.

Alder, birch, apple

Storm Atiya has stripped the last of the leaves from the trees and I notice things I haven’t noticed before – but that’s the point of a walk, to notice things. Opposite the old lock-keeper’s cottage a line of trees separates the towpath from the railway line; I’d always thought the trees were alders, but now I see that they’re a mix of alder, birch, and apple, the birch trunks not silver, but a pale sunrise gold. I wish I’d brought my camera; the bare trunks with their subtle metallic hues are unexpectedly beautiful.

I can understand why, in times gone by, people thought of apples as having magical properties, for there is something wonderful about the sight of perfectly round red-gold fruits hanging from bare branches. As a girl I was told that if you peel an apple in one go and throw the peel over your shoulder, it will land in the shape of your future husband’s initials, but as I wasn’t very good at peeling apples I never found out if this were true. I don’t think anyone is going to peel today’s apples, they look drab and not at all appetising. I wonder how they came to be growing high up on a railway embankment; were the apple trees planted at the same time as the alder and birch or did they grow from discarded apple cores?

Reading about the fox

It’s too wet and windy for a walk – Storm Atiya is on its way – so I’m reading up on foxes. The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand is not, as the blurb on the cover says, a lyrical love letter to the fox, but it is full of facts about foxes. How small they are (sometimes weighing in at less than a domestic cat); how keen their hearing is (yesterday’s fox had his head down because he was listening for earthworms); and how well they fit into whichever of the many and varied landscapes they inhabit.

One such ecosystem, notes Brand,  is Białowieża, a tract of near primeval forest in Poland. White booted eagles fly overhead, and if you are lucky (I wasn't!) you may see elk and bison. Fallen tree-trunks, supposedly dead,  are alive with mosses and thronged with woodpeckers, squirrels and invertebrates. The colour green is all around you. Oak, hornbeam, beech, lichens, sphagnum, and grasses; each tree, each plant, has its own particular aura of green. Białowieża thrums with life. If I describe the forest as magical I mean that in the two or three hours I spent there I felt more alive than I have done anywhere else on earth. My senses were sharpened, my skin became alert to the texture of the air around me.

In Białowieża foxes feed on wild boar carrion, the boar brought down by wolves and scavenged by their smaller relatives. English foxes too are scavengers, but it's unlikely that they would feed on wild boar; their teeth are not strong enough to deliver a killer bite, and there are no wolves to do it for them. So, our wild boar are safe, and free to roam - a reason, perhaps, to bring back the wolf?

Fox

Hoar frost hangs in the air. A robin greets me. A clatter of woodpigeons flies too close for comfort. Two crows, their black plumage bigged up against the cold air, fight over a chunk of bread. 

In the field next to the farm a fox, the fog dulling down his russet coat, meanders slowly across the grass. Head down, tail down, he is rootling for earthworms. Foxes eat a lot of worms. Rain, such as we had last night, brings them to the surface, but now the ground is almost frozen and it will be a while before he can unearth his breakfast. I am glad to be well-wrapped up. I am glad to have made it out this early.