by Stephen Moss
AT ABOUT THIS time of year, a far less welcome visitor turns up in the fields and gardens of the parish. It is a large, ungainly, black insect, named St Mark’s fly because it generally appears on or around 25 April, the feast day of St Mark.
It is a very common sight here, swarming en masse across any area of grassland it can find, its long legs dangling as if it has forgotten to lift them up towards its body. The males can, with a good view, be told apart from the larger females by their bulbous-looking eyes, giving them a rather unbalanced, front-heavy appearance, as if they are about to crash to the ground.
Having emerged in late April, St Mark’s flies usually stay around until May or June, though their numbers are depleted by the predations of birds which take advantage of this unexpected bounty of easily caught food. The flies also help to pollinate the many apple trees in the orchards of the parish, while their larvae aid the process of decomposition by feeding on decaying vegetable matter, often in compost heaps. So even though the St Mark’s fly is not a particularly attractive insect, it is certainly a very useful one.
ON THE FINAL day of the month, as dusk cloaks the lanes, fields and hedgerows, the air is still filled with birdsong. Above the rest of the evening chorus, one bird continues to reign supreme: the song thrush. He sits on our chimney pot, spotted breast and throat vibrating as he delivers his clear, strident and melodic tune, a full two months or more after he first began to sing.
From the garden next door, another thrush answers him, seeming to fill in the gaps in his tune with its own. To the east, south, north and west, in every corner of the parish, more song thrushes are singing too, so that the air above is filled with their sound.
Somewhere close to each singing male, a female sits tightly on her clutch of four or five sky-blue eggs, speckled delicately with tiny spots of black; those precious objects Hopkins called ‘little low heavens’. Underneath her body, cosseted by her soft feathers, the eggs stay warm. Inside each egg, a tiny thrush-to-be is growing. I like to think it is listening to the muffled song of its father, high above.
MAY
MAY BEGINS, AS April ended, with the sound of the song thrush, its clear, strident notes heralding the dawn, in the few seconds the sun takes to cross the parish from Poolbridge Farm in the east to the Watchfield Inn in the west.
Since the May Day bank holiday was first introduced in the late 1970s, we have come to associate it with a long weekend off work, but its origins go much further back in time. The pagan festivals of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, and the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, both marked the cross-quarter day: the mid-point between the sun’s progression from the spring equinox on 21 March to the summer solstice three months later.
For centuries the English have celebrated May Day with a range of traditional pastimes: from maypoles and morris dancing to the crowning of the May Queen. May baskets of flowers used to be left on neighbours’ doorsteps; a custom echoed today in the springtime appearance of hanging baskets on many of the village homes. And not so long ago, farmers would have chosen this time to move their livestock from their winter home on the surrounding hills, along the broad, muddy droves, to graze on the summer pastures of Tealham Moor.
We also mark this time of year because this is when we can finally leave the memories of winter behind, and celebrate the onset of summer; though even here in the mild south-west ground frosts can occur well into May. As is traditional on bank holidays, we sometimes get rain, and even though this might dampen the spirits of the morris dancers, it does supposedly foretell a fertile year ahead. And the maypole itself is a symbol of fertility, both for the men and women who dance around it, and for the land.
For our parish wildlife, May is also a time of growth and fertility. It marks the start of three months of frantic activity, during which time eggs will hatch, babies will be fed, flowers will bloom, and millions – perhaps billions – of insects will buzz, bite and sting their way through their brief lives, and indeed through ours.
The weather for this month, and for June, July and August, will be crucial to the success or failure of these attempts to breed and multiply. So the wildlife, the farmers and the rest of us are all hoping for a good season – not too wet, but not too dry either, with just enough rain, and plenty of warm sunshine. This will ripen the crops, let plants and animals thrive, and allow us to sit in our gardens or stroll along the parish lanes, enjoying the great British summer to the full.
ON THIS PARTICULAR May Day, I have come a few miles west of the parish, to the beach at Berrow. Showers are forecast, but for the time being a milky morning sun bathes the sand in a thin, yellowish glow. As I cross the sheltering dunes, I am buffeted by a cool, fresh breeze which blows the tidal pools into eddies, and whips up sand along the strandline.
Lying between the busy holiday resorts of Burnham and Weston, Berrow is quieter and less crowded than both, with only the occasional dog-walker, jogger or horse-rider disturbing the solitude. This is the nearest this part of Somerset gets to the seaside, though the sign warning of ‘soft sand and mud’, suggests that bathing here might not be a very good idea.
Beyond the sign, only a narrow strip of sand remains; sand mainly concealed by messy deposits of seaweed, driftwood, and the flotsam and jetsam of our throwaway society. As I emerge at the top of the beach I step across detritus washed up by the sea: broken branches bleached white in the sun, plastic bottles in a range of colours and shapes, and a child’s trainer left behind after a day on the beach.
This is where three rivers meet. The River Brue, which runs along the southern border of my parish, joins the estuary of the Parrett, which has already wended its way forty miles north from its source in Dorset. This in turn flows into Bridgwater Bay, adjacent to the much larger estuary of England’s longest river, the Severn. The mudflats provide a profitable feeding place for tens of thousands of waders at low tide, while the raised banks of Steart Point across the smaller estuary are a haven where they can safely roost as the waters rise.
At low tide the sea becomes invisible, having retreated almost to the horizon, so that the island of Steep Holm appears to rise straight out of the land. But now, on a high spring tide, the landscape – and seascape – is transformed. Steep Holm has regained its island status, and from Hinkley Point nuclear power station on my left, to Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on my right, all is under water.
Along the shoreline, black against the pale sand, is one of the beach’s permanent residents, a scavenging crow. He and the local gulls witness the seasonal movements of birds here: Arctic terns and ringed plovers in spring; gannets and Manx shearwaters in summer; clouds of knots and sanderlings in autumn; and huge, swirling flocks of dunlins in winter. Today, there are only a few late-returning swallows flying in off the sea, which apart from a hardy yachtsman taking advantage of the breeze, appears empty.
The twice-daily movement of the tides brings fresh supplies of seaweed to the higher parts of the beach, on which millions of tiny sandflies make their home. Behind the beach lie the dunes; and beyond the dunes a golf course; with a small reedbed sandwiched between. This morning, despite the grey skies and chilly breeze, the reeds and the bushes resound with birdsong, in particular the varied sounds of the warbler family: whitethroats and lesser whitethroats, blackcaps and chiffchaffs, and Cetti’s, sedge and reed warblers.
BACK IN THE parish, the reeds lining the ditches on both sides of the back lanes are reaching their peak. These are the common reed, Phragmites australis, found in wetlands not only throughout Britain, but across much of the world; here in the parish it grows in striking profusion in every watery ditch.
The tall, thick stems, with their feathery, plumed heads, often block the view of the fields beyond the lanes, especially in spring and summer when their growth is at its most luxuriant. They sway at any hint of a breeze, and when the wind strengthens they create a pleasing background murmur. Known locally as shalders, reeds were widely used for thatching on the levels right up to the present
century. Now that they are no longer harvested commercially, they are left uncut, providing the ideal habitat for a specialist wetland bird, the reed warbler.
The reed warbler is the classic ‘little brown job’: small, unassuming, and generally hidden out of sight in the reeds. In May and June the rhynes of the parish resound with its rhythmic and repetitive song, although I would be surprised if more than half a dozen of my fellow villagers were aware of the bird at all. Yet it has an extraordinary story to tell: of a global voyage to and from distant lands, in the very heart of Africa.
Reed warblers arrive back in Britain in the middle of April, though I rarely hear them here until the end of the month. This is when the males are seeking out their breeding territories, sometimes in a tiny patch of reeds hardly worthy of the name, where I can hear them singing from dawn until dusk.
Without their song, we would be probably not even realise they were here, for they hardly ever emerge from their hidden home. They build their nest in the reeds, expertly weaving together a neat, conical cup from strands of grass, lined with moss and feathers, attached to the stems. Into this fragile basket the female will deposit her clutch of four or five olive-coloured eggs.
Only later in the year, when the youngsters leave the safety of their nest, do I finally get a decent view of reed warblers. Even then they are not all that easy to see, as they skulk around the foliage of the bramble bushes and hedgerows, dashing back into their reedy sanctuary at the slightest sign of danger.
WHAT STRIKES ME as strange, as I walk, cycle, or drive along the village lanes, and hear reed warblers singing from virtually every corner, is that I am not hearing another summer visitor; one intimately connected with this species. In the time I have lived here, I have never once heard a cuckoo: a sound so closely associated with the coming of spring it is marked by annual letters to The Times newspaper.
Just after May Day, when the cuckoo’s call should have been echoing across every village green in England, I bump into a neighbour of ours, Mick. He has spent his whole life in the parish, and his keen interest in birds makes him an oracle on changes in our local birdlife. I ask him if there used to be cuckoos here. ‘Cuckoos?’ he replies incredulously. ‘Cuckoos! They used to drive us mad with their calling!’
Yet Mick hasn’t heard one in the village for a decade or more. ‘I suppose they’re down the road at that new nature reserve …’ he suggests. Sadly they are not: in half a dozen visits to Shapwick Heath this spring, I have heard just one.
The fate of the cuckoo in Somerset has been mirrored across much of lowland England, although the species does appear to be holding its own in Scotland, where cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of meadow pipits, rather than reed warblers. Why cuckoos have declined, and so precipitously, we are not entirely sure. There is clearly a problem on the bird’s wintering grounds, just south of the Sahara, which are rapidly turning into desert as a result of global climate change, which means that wintering cuckoos have nothing to eat.
It may also be because of a drop in numbers, here in Britain, of the larger caterpillars the young cuckoo needs in order to survive. And as with other late migrants such as the turtle dove and spotted flycatcher, a shift forward in the start of spring may be putting these birds ‘out of sync’ with their food supply; and in the cuckoo’s case, with the lifecycles of its hosts.
What is certain, though, is that if this decline continues, the cuckoo will eventually lose its place as the quintessential sign of the coming of spring. I doubt very much if the children at our village school have ever seen or heard a cuckoo. If they are aware of it at all, they probably place it in the same category as the dragon, the phoenix and other mythical creatures. In another decade or so, when cuckoos may well have disappeared from the whole of southern Britain, what will they mean to us then, beyond a set of old rural stories and sayings, growing less and less relevant as each year passes?
THE REED WARBLER’S close relative, the sedge warbler, can also be found in the parish, but in much smaller numbers than its cousin. If seen well, the two are easy to tell apart: the sedge warbler’s plumage is streaked rather than plain, and it has a prominent pale eyestripe, giving it a rather dapper appearance.
When I hear a sedge warbler singing, I am always struck by how different he sounds from his cousin. In contrast with the dull, repetitive and rather monotonous reed warbler, the sedge warbler is a manic little thing, the notes tumbling out of his bill as if, in his eagerness to deliver the message, he is tripping over his own tongue.
Sedge warblers – at least those I come across in Somerset – often sing from a high and prominent perch, giving me the chance to see their extraordinary orange gape. Sometimes, a singing bird will get so carried away he will launch himself into the air, fluttering momentarily against the summer sky before parachuting back down to his perch. Why the sedge warbler should be so confident, while the reed warbler is so shy, I have no idea. But as the reed warbler chunters away deep inside the reeds, it almost seems as if he is tutting disapprovingly at his relative’s exhibitionist tendencies.
Another big difference between the two species is the way each chooses to migrate. Watching a brood of juvenile reed warblers clambering tentatively around the reeds, I find it hard to believe they could fly much further than the next rhyne. Yet in three or four months’ time they will head off, hopping across the English Channel to the Low Countries, before turning south-west across France and Iberia, and then on to north-west Africa. From there they will continue south, travelling by night in short hops, until they end up in West Africa.
In keeping with their more extrovert personality, when it comes to migration, sedge warblers adopt an all-or-nothing strategy. They make more or less the same journey as the reed warbler, but do so in one or two giant leaps rather than a series of short hops. A naturalist friend of mine memorably describes the contrasting strategies as ‘trickle and bounce’.
To prepare for their marathon flight, sedge warblers must put on weight, and lots of it. As early as July they start feeding on reed aphids, an ephemeral but sometimes abundant source of food. They lay down fat deposits beneath their skin, which appear as thick, orange-yellow blotches on birds I have seen in the hand. Once they have reached a critical mass – having almost doubled their body weight to about an ounce – they set off, some flying the three thousand miles or so to their winter quarters in a single go, straight across the Mediterranean and Sahara Desert.
Once they have left our shores, it is another seven months before they return. But next April and May, as I cycle the lanes of the parish, I shall once again hear the excitable flourish of the sedge warbler, and the steady drone of the reed warbler, echoing from the watery rhynes. For me, the arrival of these two little miracles will be the final sign that winter is well and truly over. And once again, as I do every spring, I shall try to imagine an army of millions of these birds as they swarm northwards across Europe, arriving in communities from Galway in the west to the Urals in the east, and as far north as Varanger Fiord, on the edge of the Arctic. And here, to our village in Somerset.
ON THE CORNER of Perry Road and Blackford Road, next to Mill Batch Farm, a tumbledown brick building stands next to a small, unassuming tree, covered with small, curled, lime-green leaves. As they unfurl they reveal their rounded shape, coming to a shallow point at the tip, with a downy texture on the underside. For those of us who grew up before the 1970s, the shape and feel of these leaves is strangely familiar.
For this is the tree of my childhood: an elm. A row of elms used to back onto the garden of the house where I was brought up, creating a visual and aural barrier between us and the increasingly busy lane behind. But a few years later they began to wither and die, and were chopped down before they fell of their own accord. They were the victims of a scourge which all but removed this famous tree from the landscape of lowland Britain: Dutch elm disease.
Sadly the elm by Mill Batch Farm, despite its currently healthy appearance, will never grow into the magnifi
cent, full-sized tree I can still recall. In a few years’ time, a small beetle will invade the growing bark, and slowly but surely kill off its future. The same story is repeated throughout Britain, where the elm has become a ‘ghost tree’, present only in the form of these young saplings whose future is doomed. It is as if a whole generation of children has been blighted with some terrible inherited disease, which will never allow them to reach adulthood.
The reason for the elm’s universal susceptibility to Dutch elm disease lies in its reproductive method. The English elm does not spread itself by seeds dispersing on the air, but by using suckers. This may be a highly efficient method, but it creates an Achilles heel: genetically, the trees are virtually identical, which means they are unable to develop resistance to the foreign invader.
Elms were never celebrated as much as the oak, but they were always a part of village life, growing along lanes and field boundaries throughout the country. When they disappeared, it was as if the heart had been torn out of the British countryside. Today the full-grown elm survives mainly in the works of landscape artist Rowland Hilder, which my mother used to hang above the mantelpiece: majestic avenues of tall trees, disappearing into the autumn mist.
BY MID-MAY, the broad hedgerows along the back lanes are in full flush. Unlike those few hedges that remain on the plains of East Anglia, or the high banks down the road in Devon, these are low, broad and solid – often wider than they are high.