by Neil Ansell
Over the fern-draped, crumbling masonry of this bridge was a magical world. A whole row of fields here had been bought up long ago, only to be abandoned. The first of these was completely encircled by woods, it was like a forest clearing. It was boggy and waterlogged now, the grass grew in waist-high tussocks, and it was being invaded by bracken and scrub, mostly birch, always the first on the scene. In spring this field would be filled with common spotted orchids, the only place I ever found them here. The woods on the far side of the field were a jungle of impene-trable scrub and rhododendrons that teemed with life. Badger trails emerged from under the scrub and spread across the field in every direction, but I never managed to trace them back to their sett hidden somewhere within the wall of vegetation. There were more abandoned fields downstream beyond the alder woods to the east of this clearing, just as unkempt but more exposed. The farmhouse looked out over some of these fields, and it must have been hard for the farmer to be confronted daily by land so blatantly in need of sheep.
Mostly I stayed in the first of these fields; it felt like my own special place and was the favoured haunt of the winter woodcock. As I walked around the field, they would flush from beneath my feet. They were mysterious, wise-looking birds, with their steep foreheads and long straight bills that they held pointed almost straight downwards as they flew. I never saw them on the ground, their camouflage was so effective, their mottled russet browns a perfect facsimile of dead bracken. The second they touched down they simply disappeared. They trusted this camouflage implicitly too; they only flushed when there was a serious risk they would be trodden on. Often their wings would brush against me as they rose; hundreds of times I must have unknowingly walked within inches of them.
On my first winter at the cottage there were more wintering woodcock than there ever have been since, yet though I flushed them on every walk it was months before I finally saw one grounded. I was walking on the eastern side of my mountain. Here the flank of the mountain is almost sheer and there are great views of the river far below, though in the summer the bracken grows head-high and you see nothing. There are just a few precarious sheep trails along this hillside, and it feels as though if you slipped you would roll all the way to the bottom. I was picking my way along one of these trails on my way to one of my local badger setts, wanting to check if they had emerged from their slumbers yet. And then I caught a glint at my feet. It was an eye, and what I had seen was my own reflection moving in a shiny black eye. I leaned in closer. The eye was a perfect globe, and in it I could see the entire valley in miniature. Painstakingly, around this shining eye, I was able to reconstruct the shape of a bird in the litter of dead bracken. And then it suddenly flushed, without apparent alarm, only to drop back to the ground fifty yards ahead. It could have been five yards, but still I would never have found it again. It struck me that in all my walks on my hill, I only ever flushed woodcock here on the eastern side, even though there were lots of other places all around the fringes of the hillside that seemed on the face of it equally suitable. There was a certain logic to it. Woodcock are neither day-birds nor night-birds; they are crepuscular, creatures of the half-light, active only around dawn and dusk. At nightfall, these eastern slopes would be the first places to fall into a deep enough shadow for them to rise, and in the very early morning would be the first places on the hill to become light enough for them to wake and begin their inscrutable cycle once again.
My first two winters at Penlan were relatively mild. There may have been weeks of snow in total, but there were thaws between the snowfalls. It was the third winter that was the killer. The snow would drift down the hillside in the night, and when I opened my back door in the morning I would be faced with a waist-high wall of snow that I would have to break my way through. The top two inches of the water in my water-butts would have frozen solid, and I would smash my way through the ice with a half-brick before filling my water jugs for the day. The jugs would have to be completely immersed or else they would be filled with the detritus that floated on the surface, so I would plunge my arm into the icy water and my hand would instantly turn numb. It would wake me up for the day. Being snowed in was not really a problem for me; by this time I was pretty much self-sufficient, and in my larder I had stored nearly a year’s worth of vegetables and preserved foods.
Hitchhiking up from Abergavenny that winter, I got a lift with an elderly hill farmer with a long white beard that reached almost to his waist. He proudly professed himself a communist, and reminisced for a while about the glory days of the miners’ strike. But before long he turned to matters closer to hand — the struggle to make a living out of rearing sheep on these godforsaken hills. He told me about the winter of ’47, the worst winter in living memory. The snow fell so hard and fast and deep, and stayed so long, he said, that the farmers could not get out to tend to their flocks. And when the thaw finally came, months later, and they could at last reach the high fields, they found their dead sheep tangled in the topmost branches of the trees.
I was snowed in for nearly six weeks that winter. Each day I would dig a path out to my woodpile and chop wood. It was good to keep myself active and, as they say, a log fire warms you twice: once when you chop the logs; and again when you burn them. In a way I exulted in it. In my ramblings I seldom saw anyone at all, not even in the distance, though it could happen, and from time to time it did. But it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either. I was revelling in the experience of isolation and remoteness; more isolation, more remoteness, felt like a good thing. An uninhabited Scottish island, that would be good. The wilderness of northern Canada. Or Siberia, the Siberian taiga, why not? Deeper. Further.
The snow was too deep for me to go far from home, but each time there was a fresh fall of snow overnight I would walk around the fields just beside the cottage to see what the night had brought. If the daytime was for me and the birds, the night-time was for the mammals whose lives I seldom touched. I would have seen them more if I’d had a car and driven around the lanes at night, but seeing an animal pinned in your headlights is not what I call watching. The snow preserved an imprint of all I had missed in the hours of darkness, the wanderings of my local foxes, and more. The classic mammal of mid-Wales is the polecat, a handsome spectacled ferret. This was their heartland, and they were more common here than anywhere, yet I very seldom saw them. Partly, I think they preferred the other side of the river where there was a huge warren of rabbits, their main prey, but mostly it was because they were shy, and active almost entirely at night. Their preferred habitat was reputedly the hinterland where the hill farms met the moor, a precise description of where I lived, in other words, and the first one I ever saw conformed almost perfectly to this stereotype: he was bounding along the top of the very drystone wall that separated the topmost field from the bracken-covered moorland above. He looked back over his shoulder at me, then skipped on, leaped over a stile effortlessly, and was lost to view in the cover of a nearby stand of larches. Yet though seeing one was a special occasion, once I could read the signs I would find their trails everywhere, in snow and in mud.
But if I could not get out to see my birds while I was snowed in, I could still bring the birds to me. On the east side of the cottage was a big old fruit tree with branches that reached almost to the ground. I never knew what kind of fruit tree because it never bore me a single fruit. From January onwards the bullfinches would arrive and almost tenderly nip off every bud, stretching out slowly, sedately even, as they worked their way steadily through the tree’s bounty. I didn’t mind, I could forgive a bullfinch anything, they are such handsome birds with their black hoods and rosy breasts. To be honest, I doubt the tree would have fruited anyway, for beside this tree were the dead remains of a second, and I think it would have needed this second tree for its fruit to germinate. It was on the stump of this dead tree that I put my bird table, just a few feet away from the slotted window in the east wa
ll of my living room.
The birds were incredibly quick to take advantage of this new food supply. Within a day of my first putting out food it had been found by great and blue tits, by robins and chaffinches. Then came the tiny coal tits from the pinewoods. A pair of nuthatches arrived: dapper, long-billed birds like miniature woodpeckers, the only bird that can walk head first down a tree trunk. They would dart on to the nut-feeder, sometimes landing upside down, and send the smaller birds scattering. With their neat black eye-stripes they looked like little highwaymen, and for a short time at least they ruled the roost. Then came the local pair of great-spotted woodpeckers, much bigger birds altogether. At first they didn’t seem to know what to do, they had simply followed the little birds in to see what the fuss was about, and would just pick idly at the rotten log I had left out for them. But eventually they found my offering and made it their own. It was a pleasure to sit at my window and watch them demolishing my nut supply from such close range.
More visitors came. Towards the end of the winter when the seeds had all gone from the alder cones, the feeder would be invaded by troupes of hungry siskins. Squirrels that had woken early from their winter sleep would join the birds, and field mice too. A pair of marsh tits arrived, and a pair of willow tits. Marsh and willow tits look almost identical; there are subtle differences, but the differences between individuals can be greater than that between species. I could spend hours trying to work out who was who. Their habits vary though; marsh tits nest in any tree hole they can find, like most tits, while the willow tit is the only one that excavates its own nesting hole. With their tiny beaks they need very soft wood, so they tend to live in the wet and boggy alder woods, where there is rotten wood everywhere. They fill a different niche, and occupy different territories. And like other birds that look very similar, such as willow warblers and chiffchaffs, they have quite distinctive calls. It was through their calls that I finally learned to tell them apart, and in time I could recognize each of the four individual birds. The marsh tits took over the cotoneaster by my porch and worked their way through its berries; none of the other birds would touch them, not even the barely distinguishable willows. And every time I opened my front door the marsh tits would scold me loudly with their chickadee call.
There were some notable absentees. The bird tables in the village were dominated by greenfinches, but only a single one ever found its way to mine. Even closer at hand, down at the farm, the barns were raided by gangs of chattering house sparrows, but again only one single wanderer ever found its way to my table. A slight difference in altitude can change the whole ecology of a place; it could be another country. Down by the river the collared doves cooed, but I never once saw one up at Penlan. There were hedgehogs down on the valley floor too, but my cottage was above the invisible barrier for them as well.
The cold weather brought the birds in droves; they thronged to the table. Blackbirds and song thrushes, much shyer here than in the parks and gardens of the city, magpies and jays that dived in from the cover of the fruit tree, the new kings. Dunnocks picked in the snow for fallen morsels, and the garden wrens that usually ignored the table joined in too. The most surprising visitor was a treecreeper, a tiny mouse-like bird with a unique feeding style. Starting at the bottom of a tree, they work their way up the trunk in spirals, with little jerky hops, winkling out microscopic insects from the bark with their needle-thin bills. When they reach the crown they fly down to the bottom of the next tree and start again. They can work their way through an entire wood doing this, and they never pause to rest because their prey is so tiny. Little creatures like these must eat constantly to keep their energy up, like the common shrews that I sometimes found in my woodshed picking through my wood supply for insects, in a constant state of high excitement. It is the tiniest birds that are most vulnerable in the cold weather, not because they freeze but because they starve. The treecreeper took to the peanut-feeder, but its feeding style was ingrained; it would start at the bottom and work its way up in spirals.
So while the world around me was frozen and still under its deep blanket of snow, around my cottage was a hive of activity. It helped make the experience of being snowed in feel not like a chore but a privilege, a holiday. I wonder how many birds made it through that hard, hard winter solely because of my intervention. I could spend hours each day sat by my narrow slotted window watching their comings and goings, their battles for supremacy. But every now and then I would have to leave my post and stand by my fire, slowly turning, because in this cold the fire can burn your front while your back still freezes.
Inevitably, the sparrowhawks found the table too; such a congregation of birds would not go unnoticed for long. Whenever I looked out at the table and found it bare of life, I knew it was because the hawks were close at hand. One morning when I went out to replenish the food supply, I surprised the female lurking in the depths of the fruit tree. She burst out of the tree, with a clatter that would have done justice to a woodpigeon. Her wings clapped once above her back, and once below. On the downstroke her wings flicked the topmost strand of the sheep-fence that topped my drystone wall, and set it zinging. Then she raced down the front field in alarm, jinking wildly like a panicked snipe. Sparrowhawks live by the element of surprise; I don’t think she much liked having the tables turned for once.
Eventually the thaw came. I felt as though I had been through a rite of passage; I had experienced the worst that the elements could throw at me, and come through it unscathed. I looked forward to getting out and resuming my rambles, seeing how the wildlife had coped with the hard times just gone, but I hadn’t run out of anything I couldn’t manage without. I didn’t need to rush to town to replenish my stocks. Town could wait. A bit more alone time would do me no harm at all.
The sun was starting to set. I wrapped up warm and left the cottage, walking down the hill past the old crook barn, over the old bridge, and to my secret clearing in the woods. I had my own personal bench here. Twin oaks had grown too close together; as their canopies reached for the light they leaned away from each other so their trunks formed the shape of a V. Their roots had entwined and meshed together and made a comfortable seat, and this is where I stopped and waited. As the skies began to darken the first flock of redwings flew in, at least two or three hundred of them. They seemed to fly in perfect synchrony so their brilliant red underwings flashed on and off in unison. They were roosting in the jungle on the far side of the clearing, but they didn’t settle yet, they circled above the trees. More flocks arrived from every direction, in their hundreds. They must have been coming from miles away, from tens of miles away, until there were thousands of birds converging into one massive flock. They spiralled up into the sky, swelled into a huge bubble that suddenly burst, and scattered. They twisted and turned, shape-shifting, rising, falling, assembling, dispersing. Anyone who has seen the incredible massed aerial displays of starlings at their winter roosts will know the sight; this was like that but with added colour. It was an awesome spectacle; there were moments that made me want to gasp like people do at the grand finale of a firework display. And that is just what it was like; as the flock burst into a sudden explosion of crimson I could have been in a ringside seat at my own private firework show. Finally the last light faded away and the birds all settled into the trees. And then I left them, and trudged back up the hill in the darkness to where I hoped my fire was still burning so I could warm my bones.
4. My Familiar
The totemic bird of mid-Wales is the red kite. They are stunning, graceful birds with a wingspan greater than a buzzard’s, perhaps five feet across. Their narrow black-and-white wings have a characteristic kink, their little pigeon-like heads are pale grey, and their breasts and that distinctive forked tail are a glorious rufous orange. They sail effortlessly on the updraught, constantly flexing and torquing their tails, a rudder to finesse their every movement. We are lucky to have them; they were brought back from the brink of extinction. It is thought that every one of them may
be descended from a single female that clung to life here in my hills. Formerly they were widespread; notoriously they once long ago scavenged the rubbish tips of London, like the black kites that still feed on the rubbish tips of India in their thousands today. But centuries of persecution pushed them ever back, until they retreated to their last stand in the fastness of these hidden valleys. It is easy to understand why they were so vulnerable: when you see one floating by, as often as not it will approach and circle directly over your head to get a better look at you, in spite of all those generations of harassment. It was curiosity that killed the kite.
But the kites were silent birds, unlike the buzzards and ravens that called constantly and formed the soundtrack to my life in the hills. Both live here in population densities perhaps greater than anywhere else in the world. On clear, sunny days there would often be twelve or fifteen buzzards circling overhead, mewling and bickering like drunks at a wedding. When it was overcast or raining they would hunch in the trees or on fence posts as if sulking. Their staple diet was the carrion of dead sheep, but they were opportunistic feeders — they would eat whatever they could find. Often when I woke they would be out in the front field looking for any worms that had emerged in the night. I have seen them hovering almost like a kestrel, though with much less grace, then dropping into the grass to catch a vole; and they will kill a bird as large as a crow, and even kill a rabbit if they can catch it. I have only once seen a buzzard turn up its beak at the opportunity of a free meal.