by Stephen Moss
EACH DAY NOW, in woods, hedgerows and gardens throughout the parish, and right across Britain, one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena in the world is occurring. The dawn chorus is in full swing. Yet because it reaches its peak around daybreak, most of us are too lazy to get out of our beds to witness it.
Here in the Somerset countryside, the earliest bird is not usually the blackbird, as in more wooded parts of Britain, but the rook. Shortly before the sun begins to glow in the eastern sky, their harsh croaks can be heard from the tops of the tall ash trees dotted around the village centre. Soon afterwards, the rooks are joined by the soft, repetitive cooing of wood pigeons, and then by the first true songbirds: the delicate, plaintive lilt of the robin, and the stronger, deeper tones of the blackbird.
The traditional harbinger of daybreak, the cockerel, often wakes up later than his wild relatives. He is sometimes beaten to it by the peacocks kept by one of our neighbours, whose haunting cries pierce the cool morning air, lending an oddly exotic ambience to this very English scene.
Half an hour after the chorus begins, it accelerates, both in variety and volume. Other resident species – dunnock, wren and song thrush – start up, swiftly followed by great tits and blue tits. The first migrant to sing is, appropriately, the earliest to arrive, the chiffchaff; soon followed by the sweeter tones of the blackcap. Half an hour after sunrise, almost all the local birds have joined in, creating a wall of sound from which it can often be difficult to pick out individual species, let alone a particular songster. Finally, the finches bring up the rear, along with the distant, laughing call of a green woodpecker.
At this stage I stop bothering to try to identify every bird, and instead am content to let the chorus flow over me, like a wave surging up a beach. Hearing the whole orchestra in full flow, it is easy to forget the true purpose of this springtime phenomenon. The birds are neither trying to entertain us, nor to compete with the other species singing around them. Instead they are singing for two very specific biological reasons: to attract a mate, and to repel rival males, of the same species. So although we hear up to twenty different songs, the birds only listen to their own kind, in a kind of avian audio apartheid.
As I stand and listen, though, I can’t help but ignore this, and simply revel in the privilege of being able to witness one of the greatest natural wonders in the world. What is so extraordinary is that it takes place all over Britain, from the most far-flung islands to the heart of our cities. And yet by the time we 60 million Britons have stirred from our beds, the show’s over.
DURING THIS SEASON, and indeed at most other times of year, the vast majority of our encounters with wildlife are with birds. And yet there are probably as many mammals as birds in the British countryside. But because so many of them are nocturnal, or simply very good at keeping hidden, we hardly ever see them. When we do, the meeting between us is often so brief that we rarely get any real sense of their lives.
Take the field vole. This is not simply the commonest mammal in Britain; it is also, with upwards of 75 million individuals, the only one to outnumber the human population of these islands.
To have a chance of finding a field vole at all, we need to resort to the rather underhand method of catching them. Fortunately Alison, a stalwart of the Mammal Society, lives along the Yarrow Road less than a fifteen-minute walk from my home. She has kindly agreed to bring along her collection of traps, hopefully to reveal the secrets of those mysterious creatures known as ‘small mammals’, including mice and shrews as well as voles.
One fine April evening Alison and her nine-year-old twins Lewis and Harriet pay us a visit, to set the traps. The mechanism is wonderfully simple: once the creature has run along the narrow tunnel, lured by the presence of seeds (for voles and mice) and blowfly larvae (for the insectivorous shrews), a trap door shuts behind it, so it cannot escape. Inside, it is more like a hotel than a cage: packed with straw for them to keep warm, and plenty of food, as these tiny creatures must eat almost constantly, devouring their body weight every single day, or they will die.
We spend an entertaining half-hour placing the traps in suitable locations where a small mammal might stumble across them, gaining scratched hands from the many brambles around the edges of our garden in the process. Alison warns us that we might return the next day to find all seventeen traps empty – the process is very hit and miss. But for me, that’s all part of the fun.
Bright and early the following morning we are up, dressed and ready for our mammal encounters. The children are suitably excited, and I worry about how soon they might get bored if we have no luck. But of the first three traps we check, two of the doors are shut, a good sign; although rain, slugs and bad luck can all cause the door to close without a mammal inside.
Alison tips up the trap and empties what appears to be an entire haystack into a large polythene bag. There are animal droppings, then chopped pieces of grass … then, finally, a small, round, furry creature falls unceremoniously into the bottom of the bag. It is definitely a vole, but which one? Bank voles are a possibility – Alison often catches these in her own garden – but they have a more russet tinge to their plumage than this little beastie. Then we see the tail; or, at least, what there is of it: a short, stumpy protuberance, only an inch or so long. This, together with the greyish-brown fur, confirms that this is indeed a field vole.
After all the children have taken a good look at the animal, Charlie is chosen to release it. As soon as the vole lands on the ground it disappears into the long grass, melting away, before surfacing again a foot or so further along; then with two or three short, jerky hops, it is gone.
We also strike lucky with the next trap: another field vole, swiftly followed by a third. And at the bottom of the garden, two more rodents: smaller and more slender, white below and yellowish-brown above, with long, oval-shaped ears. These are wood mice: the quintessential wild mouse of our countryside.
When released they dash away even more quickly than the voles, this time on the surface of the grass rather than burrowing underneath. The second mouse entertains the children by momentarily dancing across their wellington boots; a second later it has also disappeared.
Over a cooked breakfast, the children chatter excitedly about their experience. They, and we, will never look at our back garden in quite the same way again.
TWO ROADS – ONE ancient, one modern – skirt the north-western boundary of the parish. The more obvious of the two is the M5, whose six carriageways weave across the flat landscape on its journey south from Birmingham to Exeter. This is the main holiday route to and from the south-west, bringing hordes of holidaymakers from the Midlands to the nearby beach resorts of Burnham-on-Sea and Weston-super-Mare. The latter seaside town is known affectionately as ‘Weston-super-mud’, due to the sea’s extraordinary tidal range here.
Shadowing the motorway is a much older road: the A38, which has been described as ‘the longest country lane in England’. It may be smaller and quieter than its six-lane counterpart, but it is almost twice as long, running for more than three hundred miles from Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, to Mansfield in the heart of the East Midlands.
If you are stuck in bank holiday traffic on either road, it is always worth looking out for wildlife. And today, in the shadow of Brent Knoll, a slender, long-winged creature hangs motionless, some 30 feet above the hard shoulder. It is a kestrel: the classic bird of our motorway system; though now, sadly, a far less frequent sight than it used to be.
When I was growing up, the kestrel was by far our most common bird of prey, but it is now down to third place, behind the buzzard and the sparrowhawk. These are enjoying a population boom, while the kestrel is currently the only British raptor in decline. This may be to do with a shortage of its favourite food, the field vole; another casualty of modern farming.
I watch as the bird performs its hunting ritual, hovering motionless – apart from its winnowing wings – for a few seconds, before dipping one wing in order to change position and
begin hovering again. Slow-motion film has revealed that although the hovering kestrel makes constant tiny adjustments to the position of its body and wings, its eyes stay locked in place, focused intently on the ground below. The bird is searching for the tiny movements which will reveal the presence of a vole.
The kestrel also has a secret weapon. As field voles swarm through the dense grassy verges, they leave a constant trail of urine to mark their tiny territories. But this convenient messaging service has deadly consequences. The urine is visible in ultra-violet light; and kestrels, like other birds, are able to see light at wavelengths invisible to us. So the hovering kestrel isn’t simply watching for the voles to move, but can also follow their telltale urine trails, and use these to locate its prey.
Once it has spotted the vole, the kestrel folds up its wings in an instant and drops like a stone to the ground, feet first, to grab the unsuspecting rodent in its needle-sharp talons. Using this hovering technique to hunt may be highly effective, but it also takes up precious energy resources. So during the winter months these little falcons employ a different strategy. Instead of hovering, they perch on the many telegraph poles that line the back lanes of the parish, and simply drop down onto their prey.
The kestrel’s main hunting method gave it the folk name ‘windhover’, made famous by the nineteenth-century Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Characteristically, the rhythm of the verse appears to mimic the actual movement of the bird:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, As and gliding a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind.
Dedicated ‘to Christ our Lord’, the poem is perhaps the best-known example in the English canon of a wild creature being used as a religious image. But whatever your own beliefs, surely no one can fail to be stirred by the sheer energy and power of the verse.
As a devout Catholic, Hopkins might have been shocked by an even older name for the kestrel: the wind fucker, as in this observation from the late sixteenth century:
The kistrilles or windfuckers that fill themselues
with winde, fly against the winde euermore.
In The Oxford Book of British Bird Names, Professor W. B. Lockwood discusses the origins of this apparently vulgar folk name. He explains that when it was first used, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the word was only just beginning to acquire its modern connotations. So it is simply being used in its original sense, meaning ‘wind beater’.
But whatever we call this stunning bird, for the next few months, motorists here and across the whole of the country will enjoy a fleeting glimpse of this most effective hunter, hovering above the byways and trunk roads of lowland Britain.
I HAVE, ON my bookshelf, a small, squat volume entitled A Field Guide to Birds’ Nests. Published in 1972, and written by the late Bruce Campbell and the doyen of living ornithologists, James Ferguson-Lees, it has long been out of print. Which is a pity, for this is the bible of the long-forgotten art of nest-finding; a skill that, having been built up over hundreds of years, vanished in a couple of decades. This was thanks to the Bird Protection Acts, which meant the death knell for egg-collecting.
Of course, collecting birds’ eggs is not only illegal, it is immoral too. To interfere with nature’s most important process – the ability of a wild creature to pass on its genes to future generations – is not something anyone can or should condone. Thanks to our bird protection laws, egg-collecting is now dead and buried, apart from a tiny hard core of obsessive and misguided individuals who continue to rob the nests of rare birds.
But sadly, the opprobrium heaped on egg-collecting had unintended consequences for the innocent pastime of finding birds’ nests. This now is not just deeply unfashionable, but has disappeared off the radar of almost all birders and naturalists, including myself.
It wasn’t always so. Mine was the last generation of schoolboys who dabbled in the dark arts of nest-finding. I can still remember my sheer joy on discovering a song thrush’s nest, complete with its clutch of sky-blue eggs speckled with black. Most years a blackbird would nest in the thick clematis by our kitchen window; while great tits would regularly occupy the nestbox I put up by the pear tree.
Later on, I would search the edges of the gravel pits near my home, looking for the nests of coots, swans and great crested grebes. The grebes would build a low, floating platform out of aquatic vegetation, which always appeared empty. But closer inspection would reveal a clutch of three or four elongated eggs, carefully hidden under a layer of water-weed, staining them pale green.
Now, armed with my little guidebook, I am determined to relearn the skills I had as a child; and rediscover the joys of ‘birds-nesting’, as it used to be called. I get the opportunity to do so sooner than I thought. Blackbirds usually build their nests in dense foliage, so when I disturb a female in the upper floor of one of our outbuildings, I do not immediately realise the significance of her presence.
The second time this happens, as she perches on the brickwork and chatters frantically at me, I realise there must be a reason why she does not immediately fly away. Then, an arm’s-length in front of me, I notice an untidy nest, jammed against one of the roof beams. I tentatively feel inside the cup, and there, nestled among a lining of mud and fine grass, is a clutch of five eggs. They are warm to the touch, so I rapidly retreat, allowing the female to resume her incubation duties.
Our workshop, where the blackbird has chosen to breed, is unexpectedly popular this year, with baby robins emerging from the back door, and a pair of blue tits nesting in a gap by the outflow pipe of the washing machine. Given the availability of natural sites, and the many nestboxes I have put up around the garden, it seems perverse that they should choose such peculiar places to raise a family. But it is also comforting that these wild creatures should make their home in ours.
SOME TIME AROUND the middle of April, earlier in some years than others, a ridge of high pressure builds out in the Atlantic Ocean, blocking the usual series of depressions that sweep up the Bristol Channel and over our heads. Clear skies bring chilly nights, and the risk of frost for the village gardeners. But once the sun is up, the days turn warm and pleasant; and each evening, drinkers sit outside the White Horse Inn enjoying a pint, and the unexpected feeling of spring sunshine on their faces.
High above them, in the clear blue sky, millions of tiny insects buzz unseen, like plankton floating in the vast expanse of the ocean. And into this sea of blue sails a creature: dark blue-black above, snow-white below, uncannily reminiscent of a killer whale.
Like the killer whale it is an extraordinary traveller; capable of covering thousands of miles on its global journeys. Unlike the killer whale, it weighs less than an ounce, making its voyaging and navigational abilities even more impressive. It is a house martin, whose slender, streamlined body cuts easily through the cool air, its beak hoovering up the tiny insects it uses to fuel its passage.
I’d like to tell you where it has come from, but the truth is we have very little idea where house martins spend their time when they are away from our shores. We do know that they head somewhere south of the equator. Yet of more than 300,000 house martins ringed in Britain in the past hundred years or so, just one has been ‘recovered’ – trapped again or found dead – on its wintering grounds.
The maths is sobering: twenty million European breeding pairs and their young – upwards of a hundred million birds in all – more or less disappear, with only small numbers being seen at scattered locations around the continent. Some have speculated that they live high above the densest jungles, feeding on insects dislodged by heat or forest fires; others that they fly low over the open savan
nah. But whatever the truth, the paradox remains: how can a bird so familiar that we name it after our homes (and the French after their windows – hirondelle de fenêtre) vanish so effectively for half its lifespan?
The bird’s scientific name, Delichon urbicum, is both an academic joke and a misnomer: Delichon is an anagram of the Greek word for swallow, Chelidon; while urbicum refers to the bird’s supposedly city-dwelling habits. In fact this name would be better applied to the true bird of summer in the city, the swift; for the house martin is primarily, in England at least, a bird of small towns and villages.
Of course this cannot always have been so. Like the house sparrow, the house martin must once have nested in natural structures. A few years ago, while walking along a beach in West Wales, I discovered three or four mud nests, carefully constructed under the overhang of a cliff. If cliffs and caves were its only dwellings, the house martin must have been a scarce bird before we came along, as there would have been far fewer sites where it could nest.
Shakespeare not only knew the house martin, but mentioned it in one of his most memorable passages, in Macbeth. The lines are uttered by the doomed Banquo, as he arrives at the castle near which he will meet his terrible fate. But for the moment, at least, all is fine with the world:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,