27 Winged interlude no. 2

& a very small shrew

Mist
Brume spreads muslin over the early field, and every one of the hundreds of cobwebs glitters with raindrops. Summer arrived late, but already it seems late-summer: I associate such a density of little tunnel cobwebs on the low grasses as well as the bigger ones on taller grasses and hedges with August.

Of birds
Horizontal in the wild front garden is a great granite wheel, like a mill-wheel, in six sections. Sadly, it’s part of an apple-press (I say ‘sadly’ as, intact, it would be so much use to us now with so many fruit trees). On it sits my small stone Buddha, a beautiful facsimile of the labyrinth in my family hometown of St Just in Penwith, in Cornwall, and given to me as a house-warming present by my friend Pat, who like me lived on Dartmoor and is now in Tasmania, a little ceramic bowl of water for the birds and a shallow dish of water for bees and butterflies. Until today, the shallow dish bore white pebbles. These came from the shore on the Isle of Iona, and in the winter live in a wide glass jar. I balance indoor hyacinth bulbs on them.

Originally – not very long ago – there were about a dozen white marble pebbles in it, so that bees didn’t drown sipping water. Gradually over weeks the stones have disappeared until today not a single one is left. Either one of our dogs has a stomach dangerously full of pebbles – please no – or one of the young magpies has been squirrelling them away. (Magpies are known for their avarice in relation to pretty things. But wouldn’t a nest full of pebbles, no matter how smooth, be an uncomfortable bed?)

We frequently hear woodpeckers, both greater spotted, and the green variety cackling away in the holloway or the adjacent woodland. Now, I’m on the phone and watching from the rose-framed window where I cannot be seen but can see, at a distance of just a few yards, a green woodpecker stabbing and stabbing at the tufts of weedy grass that punctuate the sections of the granite wheel. The woodpecker, close to, is larger than it seems in flight, and its beak is long and sharp. I watch for five minutes. I can’t see what its prey is, but I suspect an ants’ nest.

I have to be in a nearby town early for an appointment. I wait outside in the sun and the air around me and sky above is thick and loud with martins and screaming swifts. I don’t see any swallows, but still, this is a joy. In Huelgoat, on a grey day of mizzle and near the lake, the few swallows and house martins swoop and swim almost too swiftly to follow at a few inches off the ground, between legs and car wheels.

One swallow may not a summer make; but my summer has definitely been made by the fact that a pair has not only taken up residence in my stone barn, but reared two youngsters.

Perhaps I should say that I live in TM’s house, but own a small traditional stone cottage in the Forest, currently inhabited by family. Having always been a tenant in the UK, I was overjoyed to be able to buy this cottage with a legacy of exactly the amount needed. I already knew it, and loved it, from walking past it on a few occasions over decades. (I write about this in my most recent book, Spell.)

That in itself is a long story, but here what’s relevant is that in the summer of 2015, just after I bought it and when it was obvious that swallows were checking it out, I cleared the entrance to a tiny stone glass-less window that was blocked by bramble, nettle and rambling rose, for access for them. Right up until this year they have completely ignored it; but now, to my distress and presumably their greater distress, their two nesting places in the hamlet have gone. Neighbours have closed the access on one barn in their gîte because they didn’t like the mess; and another neighbour has converted his barn, formerly home to half a dozen pairs, into a gîte. I like both neighbours and can’t blame either. But I am so very happy that at last the swallows have taken me up on my offer.

Here, on the other hand, a wren has not been so lucky. We have a few residents, fortunately; and one had built a nest deep in the hole of a bank – on the ground, which given that we host raptors, magpies and also – not out of choice – sometimes feral cats, seems foolish. (It was probably an inexperienced male wren who built it, also probably along with two or three other nests for potential other female mates, male wrens being philanderers.) However, her eggs had survived, presumably, for a little while until TM needed to strim that bank, not knowing about her nest (yes, that is one ethical dilemma: to strim or to scythe? Of course we’d prefer the latter, but trying to do what we are doing from scratch does have some time constraints while we’re setting it all up, and there is an awful lot of land. Much of it can be left to itself – much of it is left to itself, but we are working some areas.)

I saw her and her nest; and the next morning the six eggs, arranged so beautifully in a rosette, had gone and the nest was strewn all over the bank. Sad, sad. And the more so because just after that I found a newly-fledged wren from a different family floating drowned in the horse trough, still warm.

On a brighter note, I’m delighted to report that our mostly-unmown meadow, the North Field that I’ve written about and in which we are planting the forest-garden trees (next winter we start on the shrub layer) and coppicing willow, and where we have our meditation bench, in addition to its many species of flora, voles, moles and hedgehogs, and the odd pine marten, now also hosts skylarks. The male is up above somewhere singing that slender silver-chain melody, and presumably somewhere below in the tall meadow grasses, among the purple vetch, deep blue bugle, pink mallow, yarrow, lesser stitchwort and yellow trefoil his mate is sitting on a nest.

This one is I think a marshmallow, a guimauve in French; also in the field

Frequently and incongruously, at a few miles’ distance, comes the haunting arcing call of a peacock. It took me a while to place the cry, unexpected as it was.

With the woodland, the various untouched meadows or parts of meadows and our eco-friendly practices here, the steading has a fabulous population of birds, from warblers to goldfinches, many jays, woodpeckers, buzzards and sparrowhawks, blackcaps and whitethroats, plus the robin who comes indoors at any opportunity. What a privilege. There are days here, many days, when we hear nothing but birds; most raucously the crows and magpies.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that birds have saved, if not my life, then certainly my sanity on more than one occasion. I was brought up in Cornwall, Wales and then mostly on the wild Atlantic coast and in the just-inland hills of North Devon where I, as they say, ran free as a child, and where the coastal skies are swiftly ever-changing. (I’ve mostly lived since on or near Dartmoor, until now.)

It was a shock, then, to go to the flatlands of the southeast for university where the sky so often, certainly that first winter, was a piece of static grey-white cardboard with maybe a hole punched out of it to a slightly lighter grey, where we might have had sun, clouds, rain, sun, clouds, rain in a single morning. My room in hall was a tiny dark box-room. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so confined and unbelonging anywhere since, albeit in what was a beautiful city, architecturally. I came to rely on the sighting of just one bird, blackbird, pigeon, jackdaw, for any kind of uplift at all.

Birds. Little feathered gods.

That shrew
A few evenings ago one of the hounds lifted his head from his usual couch-pooch slouch and stared fixedly at one of the kitchen windows. We looked too, and were astonished to see a tiny shrew slaloming around vertically on the windowpane. We were even more astonished to see that it was inside the double-glazing, allowed by a nick out of the glass on the outer pane, something we haven’t yet been able to fix. The depth between the two panes can’t be more than 1 cm, and the aperture not much more than that. The inner space has several small carapaces of dead insects in it, including tiny snails: ones that have crawled inside and not been able to escape. A shrew needs to eat its bodyweight in insects in 24 hour period; whether it thought this might be an easy meal, who knows. But it eeled out as fast as it had eeled in.

Thank you my friends, old and new, for reading. Like everyone else, I also love comments…