Gaudy daffodils of poster-paint yellow shine from front gardens like Easter craft daubed by small hands. On the house that marks the entrance to the woods jackdaws are nesting in an old Victorian chimney pot. One stands sentinel as its partner comes and goes.
From the woodland path we can hear great spotted woodpeckers drumming the trees, their way of finding a mate and marking territory in the absence of an adequate song. The pecking comes at different pitches and I wonder if this is in part due to the thickness of a particular tree trunk, to differing degrees of hollowness. The sound leads us on like the Pied Piper, with one beat seeming to come from inside the tallest beech tree at the badger sett. We stop beneath it and the bird is quiet. My daughter uses her binoculars, but I’m more focused on inspecting the holes around and about, the badgers’ welfare being the main reason that I come to the woods throughout the year. All is well here, they are being left alone for now, though the cull in other parts of the country has been taken by some as a green light to interfere.
My local badgers have been dragging out their bedding to air for a number of weeks, a sure sign they’ve been nesting. Cubs are usually born between January and March, and most will be getting used to their network of tunnels, perhaps approaching the exit holes to investigate the intriguing sounds and smells that reach them from outside.
We continue our circuit, which takes us along the field edge, and spot a Brimstone butterfly dancing over the crop of barley, our first this year. They are known to be a marker of spring, their emergence from hibernation a signal that the seasons are turning. Soon they will blend in with the barley as it ripens, but for now they are easy to follow. A pair of chaffinches fly in unison, rising and falling together like dolphins before diving into the wood. Out across the field a kestrel is soaring, enjoying the sun on its wings while we admire its pink-brown markings from below.
The path leads us into the woods again, and here the birdsong is intense. With them all singing together it is hard to pick out one voice, the all-familiar robins, blackbirds and pigeons now mixed in a chorus of sound. The simplicity of their song throughout the winter has helped the children learn some of the native species, but I had forgotten what a joyful crescendo this season brings.
Across the woodland floor anemones are opening up, tentatively unfurling as they begin to trust the show of early warmth. The canopy of beech in this small spinney has yet to reappear and block out their light.
Back home the family will be getting up and we haven’t eaten breakfast, so we head for the village. I’m reassured that the woodland is waking from its winter slumber, but if I’m honest it’s the badgers I really want to see.
Soon the month turns into April and Easter Sunday brings a day of sustained sunshine. Days like this usually encourage the badgers out early and by 7.30 in the evening I’m walking into the woods again with my husband and thirteen-year-old daughter. It’s our first attempt at badger-watching this year, aside from the night footage caught on my Nature Cam when we’re fast asleep in bed.
There is a spiritual feel to the wood tonight that I don’t think I’m imagining. Perhaps it’s expectation, and awe that this recently denuded scene is now bursting into life again. The winds have stopped and our sense of anticipation seems to be shared by nature, waiting with us. A blackbird shrieks an alarm call in front of us, as if to dispel such romantic notions. Then a young rabbit hops down the badger hole that we’re looking at. I wonder if it’s disused now – though the sett is still active the badgers may adopt other holes as their main entrances and exits. I can hear a faint mewing noise coming from underfoot; it’s not impossible that we may hear the badgers below ground, and wild animals are no more able to keep their children quiet than we are. Our youngest is keen to start badger-watching this spring, but I’m not sure she’ll be able to stop talking for long enough.
My daughter is nudging me. ‘Look!’ she hisses. ‘Badgers.’ I just catch a glimpse of an adult walking behind a tree twenty metres away, but it’s enough to savour for a while. The evening is getting colder; though I’m wearing gloves the winter chill is still to be felt, throbbing in my thumb with the intensity of a deep cut. But it’s worth it. Before long we are all experiencing it and catch each others’ eyes.
‘One cub was tiny. Its head was the size of a jacket potato – like this,’ says Maddy as we turn to leave, stretching out her hand. I believe her – and I’m always relieved when the children have had sightings. I’m just happy to be out here, and badger moments are an added bonus. And there will always be next time.
Caroline Greville, 2016
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gavelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.
‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.
‘Hold up!’ said an elderly rabbit at the gap. ‘Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!’ He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the row was about. ‘Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!’ he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. ‘How STUPID you are! Why didn’t you tell him——’ ‘Well, why didn’t YOU say——’ ‘You might have reminded him——’ and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case.
It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting – everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.
He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and
when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water’s edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling-place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.
A brown little face, with whiskers.
A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.
Small neat ears and thick silky hair.
It was the Water Rat!
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908
Butterflies, when they appear early, are some times forerunners of fine weather. The first sort which appears in spring is the sulphur butterfly Papilio sulphurea proecox, whose wings are of pale greenish yellow. These come in March if the weather be fine and warm. The next sort are the tortoiseshell butterflies, early in April. And in May come the common white or cabbage butterflies. Moths and Sphinxes are also signs of fine weather, when they are common in an evening.
Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827
Spring arrives differently in the night garden. Much of the action happens while humans are tucked up inside with the curtains drawn shut against the chilly dark. But around the time frogs spawn – or perhaps a little earlier if we’ve had a balmy spell – the hedgehogs wake up.
‘I remember hedgehogs,’ people say. ‘You used to see them all the time, but not now. There are none left round our way.’ It’s true that the population’s suffered a dramatic decline, from 36 million in the 1950s to less than one million today. And yet for all that there are still tens of thousands of us who share our lives with hedgehogs. We just don’t always realise it.
Because hedgehogs are nocturnal, they’re easy to overlook. They’re unassuming animals, not given to draw attention to themselves unless caught up in the throes of grunty sex. When the crocuses shrivel and flop like deflated balloons and the forsythia comes into bloom, I go searching for scat on the lawn. Hog poo consists of small, neat, inoffensive chipolatas that are black or dark brown and often glittery with beetle remains. You’ll find them deposited in the borders or tucked away against the hedge. As soon as I spot the first one, I set up my Bushnell trail cam and break out the peanuts. Monitoring can begin.
‘We have a hedgehog who visits,’ a girlfriend told me. Does she – or does she in fact have several? Variations in size apart, it’s very difficult to tell one individual from another. The only reason I realised I had multiple hogs was because I happened to catch them on film together. Four at once has been my record. But if they come separately, how are you supposed to count them? I did some research and found out the British Hedgehog Preservation Society endorses careful marking of hogs for recording purposes. Humbrol enamel paint is what the BHPS recommend, the sort you buy in a model shop, applied with a small brush and extreme caution to the tips of the spines only. I chose Brilliant White because I knew it would show up on film.
The first few times I marked a hog I did it on the lawn while the animal carried on feeding. If you approach cautiously and with due respect you can easily get within touching distance, as hedgehogs are of a phlegmatic disposition. However, as my confidence grew, I began to pick them up and bring them inside for a once-over. They never minded as long as I was quick. Ecologist Hugh Warwick, author of A Prickly Affair, taught me how to sex a hog: boars have what looks like an ‘outie’ tummy button, and sows don’t. I would also pop the animal on the kitchen scales to record its weight, and check for ticks and flesh wounds. Oven gloves are useful here.
Once you can identify specific hogs, then reviewing a spring evening’s footage becomes like watching a soap opera. Familiar characters display particular traits, and a pecking order becomes clear. For instance L, a hog I was asked to foster by a rescue centre, turned out to be a massive bully. He’d been shy and compliant whilst I was feeding him up in the shed. Once released, though, he’d charge onto the scene so aggressively that the other hogs would curl in fear. He’d then take a run and bowl them away, one after another, into the flowerbeds. Only when his field was clear would he go back and eat.
Y-Boy’s single mission in life, on the other hand, was to mate. He couldn’t have cared less what the rest of the boars were up to. Most evenings he was to be found circling a sow and huffing at her, a performance that could last up to an hour. Several times he got as far as climbing on top, only for her to walk off, distracted. Some nights even he himself would pause for a snack. What an effort it all looked. No one seemed to be having much fun. It made me wonder how baby hedgehogs ever get conceived.
Spring’s become the time of year I walk down the street and neighbours call out to me, ‘I see your hedgehogs are out of hibernation! I had one in the back last night.’ ‘Rainbow’ lives across the road behind a broken wall-grating. ‘Smallbum’ moved all the way up to the corner, twelve houses away, and settled there. ‘Diagonal’ comes from somewhere across the back lane. All humans in the road have been leafleted with a Hedgehog Wishlist (dish of water, meaty cat food or mealworms, holes in the fence) and Potential Hazards (ground netting, uncovered drains, slippery-sided ponds, strimmers). We’re becoming the kind of joined-up-garden community where hedgehogs really thrive.
After dark, though, it’s just me and my little patch. The night world wakes up and it’s a world independent of me, secretive and urgent. Early moths take wing in the cold air while wood mice hop through the tree roots. Frogs gather, and newts kiss the surface of the pond. Somewhere above me is a small bat. And now the hedgehogs come. Here they are, trundling down the lawn on their cabriole legs, to tell me we’re off! We’re up and running, the year’s begun again and we all have our business to attend to.
I turn on the camera, and go inside.
Kate Long, 2016
It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird’s song; there is something in it distinct and separate from all other notes. The throat of woman gives forth a more perfect music, and the organ is the glory of man’s soul. The bird upon the tree utters the meaning of the wind – a voice of the grass and wild flower, words of the green leaf; they speak through that slender tone. Sweetness of dew and rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn touched with breadths of open bud, the odour of the air, the colour of the daffodil – all that is delicious and beloved of spring-time are expressed in his song. Genius is nature, and his lay, like the sap in the bough from which he sings, rises without thought. Nor is it necessary that it should be a song; a few short notes in the sharp spring morning are sufficient to stir the heart. But yesterday the least of them all came to a bough by my window, and in his call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is there – a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, the first colour of spring appears in their bark. The delicious wind rushes among them and they bow and rise; it touches the top of the dark pine that looks in the sun the same now as in summer; it lifts and swings the arching trail of bramble; it dries and crumbles the earth in
its fingers; the hedge-sparrow’s feathers are fluttered as he sings on the bush.
I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me – how they manage, bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it so carefully and lovingly, day by day, the seed-leaves on the mounds in the sheltered places that come so early, the pushing up of the young grass, the succulent dandelion, the coltsfoot on the heavy, thick clods, the trodden chickweed despised at the foot of the gate-post, so common and small, and yet so dear to me. Every blade of grass was mine, as though I had planted it separately. They were all my pets, as the roses the lover of his garden tends so faithfully. All the grasses of the meadow were my pets, I loved them all; and perhaps that was why I never had a ‘pet,’ never cultivated a flower, never kept a caged bird, or any creature. Why keep pets when every wild free hawk that passed overhead in the air was mine? I joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of his pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland; it was happiness to see his unchecked life. What more beautiful than the sweep and curve of his going through the azure sky? These were my pets, and all the grass. Under the wind it seemed to dry and become grey, and the starlings running to and fro on the surface that did not sink now stood high above it and were larger. The dust that drifted along blessed it and it grew. Day by day a change; always a note to make. The moss drying on the tree trunks, dog’s-mercury stirring under the ash-poles, bird’s-claw buds of beech lengthening; books upon books to be filled with these things. I cannot think how they manage without me.
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