Spring

by Melissa Harrison

  A recently half-eaten duck might lie in the shallows. A fish-bone. A small scrape of sand made by somebody with a heavy tail and a crescent of five webbed toes.

  As the waters enter gentler slopes and the current slows, wild garlic and wood anemone carpet the banks. Tall, gnarly oaks are showing buds, and in the glades where the weak spring light comes through, patches of dog violet splash and scatter through the spindly hazel coppices. From the edge of distant villages, beyond the mosaic of reedy wetland and boggy fields, the voices of song thrushes speckle the air.

  Where the first hint of an estuary begins, brackish creeks seep into the main river, and tributaries lined with copses of hazel and ash carry reflections of tight black buds. In its smooth sections the water absorbs all the brightness of filigree leaves just emerging. Where the light does not touch it, the water is musteline-black. In other stretches it turns to bottle glass, slow and green, with eel and bass swimming in its dreamy fathoms.

  At dawn there is still a frail tissue of frost on the riverbank. Ice crystals carry a sliver of tracks that soon melt into the sand. A small female has passed, leaving an ottery shimmy behind. It is hard to say which way she might have gone, and her soft scent trail drains quickly away into the water. Through the overhanging hazel branches, shadows and light catch on catkins and reveal the bright red of bare dogwood twigs.

  At the inter-tidal zone silty banks should make it easier to find otter tracks, but the tides can wash away any evidence. A little further seaward, salt marsh and mudflats spread into an oasis of sheeny openness. Wading birds, herons, water rail and moorhens might fall prey to the otters if they nest too close to the water. As the river’s wildness becomes tamed and controlled by urban encroachment the sounds and scents of the human Riviera take over. Groynes, flood banks, roads; salt and vinegar, ketchup and beer; bottles litter the banks and smokers mingle with seaweed. The water might be watched from windows, walls, bridges and balconies, and the otters must slide past in the half-light, their profile sleeking into quieter nooks of the river where no trail can be seen.

  There is something magical about the otter’s continual sinking into a world where we cannot follow. Its disappearances have fascinated writers ever since we first wondered if we might try to capture it. Kenneth Grahame’s childlike delight in this enigmatic side to lutrine behaviour is highlighted in Otter’s abrupt vanishings in The Wind in the Willows. Otter often melts away unexpectedly in the midst of conversation, and consequently is thought to have no proper manners. Amongst the other animals it is accepted that this is simply how otters are, they vanish and nothing can be done about it. But the otter’s riverine home also embodies an enticing mystery. For Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, the river could be a wraith-like creature, carrying memories of the land’s history in its swirls and silvery mists. In Tarka, sibilant waters steal into the otter’s holt and soothe him when he is afraid: wilder, fast moving stretches become creaturely at night, shiver to life and playfully tease and spar with Tarka, fighting him with watery teeth and star-streaming claws.

  The indivisible nature of water and otters also appears in Charles Kingsley’s childrens’ story The Water-Babies. The water baby Tom sees a family of otters ‘. . . swimming about, and rolling, and diving, and twisting, and wrestling, and cuddling, and kissing and biting, and scratching, in the most charming fashion that ever was seen’.

  In spring the river’s bright weed fronds swirl like the hair of enchanted beings; rain-coloured herons stand like statues amongst the tips of new flag iris; pools of wriggling toadlets glisten, and mounds of emerald moss are magic enough. But the possibility of diving into this unreachable world rouses further with the promise of warm weather and soothing waves. Where the river meets the sea, gradations of blue deepen into the far horizon, and the sparkling indigo reminds me of the splashed seascapes painted by Kurt Jackson. Beyond the old granite quays and pale yellow sprigs of wild daffodils on the shore, I catch wildness in the call of an oystercatcher, the mew of a curlew and the high circling of gulls. Alongside it all, the otter sleeks in and out of the water, travelling upstream and down nightly, and most of us have no idea it is even there; we overlap but are only dimly aware of one another.

  One evening, where the river pours into the estuary, I crawl dune-ward, crushing celandines in a curve of marsh scented by the tide’s underbelly. Streetlight leaks from the town and drifts over the moving water so that any ripple or wavelet is thrown into sharp relief.

  The otter’s contact call can sound like the whistle of a kingfisher but when coupled with the heart-stopping sighting of a familiar, whiskered muzzle, there is no mistake. Tilting its head upward, it floats, crunches awkwardly through the hard shell of a small crab. I hear one faint call, catch the curve of its back as it disappears, and then nothing more. As the light fades I wonder at the lithe beauty of this creature. It must travel to the sea because it is hungry, starving perhaps, after the long winter. Here on the shore there must be more reliable feeding. My feet slick through the silty mud of the estuary: I need all my senses to find my way back to the solid world of pavement and road. Here where the season’s edge blurs into another world, it’s still possible to lose yourself in the wild.

  Miriam Darlington, 2016

  Quiet lies upon the fields and the woods this morning. No one is ‘at plough’, no one is carting. One might wonder what has happened but the familiar humming noise comes up from the rickyard, and skeins of black smoke are blurring the outlines of the leafless elms. Let us walk down to the farm, for surely this means that they are threshing.

  As we come nearer, the humming noise is broken up into its parts; distinctly we hear the chug of the steam engine, the purr of the thresher and the clank of the elevator. These noises tell their tale of extreme activity long before we have turned the corner by the ash tree and can look down upon the rickyard.

  It is a dull morning. The sky is monotonous grey; there is no wind to give shapes to clouds: and well it is so, for any breeze would blow the dust of the threshing into eyes and throats unbearably. Even as it is, everything is dimmed and blurred by the grain dust. The rickyard is enveloped in a golden fawny mist. The men’s clothes may be blue, green or brown, but today they all look the same dust colour. The red of the threshing machine is muted by the dust. The men’s beards are full of it; the blue of the elevator is no clearer.

  And now, through this film one perceives the actors in the game, each in his place, like players in an orchestra. On top of the half-demolished grain stack five figures stand out dark against the sky, pitchforks at all angles as they pierce the sheaves of wheat that have lain packed there since last August, and throw them over to Ted Birkett, the ‘feeder’, who is huddled and squat inside the top of the thresher itself. Ted Birkett is over seventy and has been a ‘drasher’, as he calls it, his whole life. He travels about everywhere with the threshing machine as it moves with the steam engine and the engine man from farm to farm over the countryside; he is as much an attachment as if he were part of the machinery itself. With a rapid mechanical movement he cuts the binding straw of each sheaf as it is thrown to him, and liberates the wheat into the quivering, shaking maw of the thresher. He is a grumpy old man and has to be humoured by the entire threshing party. At the far end of the thresher, the machine throws out the straw, which rides up the elevator to the stack. Here pitchforks again seize it and spread it out flat on the ever-increasing straw stack.

  All this time sacks are fastened to the thresher for the grain and rapidly these gaunt, flabby shapes fill and swell and solidify. Everything and everyone moves. Let any one figure cease for a moment and the link in the chain snaps. Nothing is still. The steam engine shakes as it belches out its black smoke, while its tight-flung belting moves round the cog of the thresher; the threshing machine incessantly quivers and throbs like a person in a state of great emotion, as it consumes and discharges its winnowed grain; men remove and weigh the full sacks and hoist them across shoulders and take them up tiny wood
en steps to the granary, like figures in the background of a Dürer print.

  A dog, chained to its kennel in the yard, wriggles unceasingly with excitement. Are there mice and rats tumbling down from the disturbed grain stack? On the stack itself is an agitated terrier, dodging the pitchforks of men as it rootles among the straw; the farmer’s children are up there, too, with sticks, beating the stack to unearth the vermin. A mouse jumps over the edge of the stack and tumbles down the ladder. The dog in the kennel barks; the terrier whines. Life is surely worth living today, for man and dog and engine alike.

  So this chain of labour runs on, hour after hour, grain stack shrinking in size, straw stack swelling, the elevator raised higher and higher.

  On this March day dusk comes early, for the days are still short. The sky grows leaden in colour and the men on the ricks show up blurred against it. There is a flagging among the men. Dust has filled their noses and their throats; their muscles are tired. The grain stack is levelled to the ground. The straw stack towers above all else, loose and high. Jack is heard to grumble that he thinks he has done enough for one day.

  ‘Seventy-four sacks and I’ve gone and carried, I have – seventy-four; and full, too, every one of them.’

  Ted Birkett thinks it is time he knocked off work, too. It is he who insists on setting the pace. The engine is stopped; the smoke vanishes and gradually the chug of the engine and the purr of the thrasher grow slower and fainter, till the machines seem like large heavy animals falling asleep. Ted clambers doddering down the ladder, shaken by the diminishing tremors of the nodding thresher. His loose corduroy trousers flap as he climbs down, and he lands on the ground of the rickyard as the elevator chain gives its last heaving clank. In the sudden silence he shakes off the dust, and wipes his bowler hat with straw from the ground. It is a historic hat, worn by him each day for the past thirty years and cared for lovingly.

  And now the rest of them slow down and stop. The ladder against the high straw stack trembles as the men step down it, pitchfork in hand. The top of the threshing machine is closed and a tarpaulin is spread over it. Soon everything is quiet, and the murmur of the men’s voices grows fainter as they disperse to their homes for the night.

  But the gleaners have ventured into the rickyard. Three farmyard cats, kings now of their own domain, slink around, hunting for mice that have managed to escape earlier in the day from the dogs; on the circular carpet of brushwood that is all that remains of the morning’s grain stack, the farmyard fowls are busy, pecking at the wheat that has tumbled from the straw. What a scratching and fluttering there is in that small space.

  Soon everything is quiet in the rickyard and even the hard shapes of the threshing machine and the engine grow softened and indistinct and withdraw into the dark of the night sky.

  March is an unfriendly month, windy and rough and wet, with tantalising gleams of spring sunshine that encourage the little flowers in the coppice, only to let them be cruelly nipped by frosts. The fields are too wet for the plough and in this pause the farmer decides to thresh his remaining ricks. For several days now the air all around will be filled with the whirring, humming sound of the threshing machine. The ricks in the yard will have changed places as though a giant had been at play and had shifted them about. There is something eternal in this sound of threshing, even though it be made by machinery; it recalls the primeval songs of the women in the small islands of the Mediterranean as they chant in their strange Lydian mode to the horses and mules trotting round and round, blindfold, on a circle of sheaves, as they tread out the grain with their hoofs. For all sounds of the labours on the land date from the beginning of time.

  Clare Leighton, The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry, 1933

  It is a cold Saturday in March. Winter’s chill has returned with a biting wind and at the stream the bankside vegetation has been slow to start growing. So it is a joyful, totally unexpected and heart-warming surprise to see my first water vole of the year feeding on new celandine leaves. About fifteen feet away, it blends in with the bank so well that it is overlooked by most people crossing the bridge. It looks at me, having sensed that it has been spotted, as I begin to film it. Its blunt nose and charming, chubby face with hidden ears mark it out from a rat; but also, like all water voles, this one is very charismatic. It pauses for a moment before a dog barks and alarms it. Then it dives with a familiar plop and swims further downstream out of sight. The dive and ‘plop!’ is almost always a comical moment, and I walk back home on air.

  Water voles are the UK’s fastest declining mammal, so a sighting of one is always precious. Over the winter this one did not hibernate, but survived on protruding roots, and shoots it had stored in autumn in one of its burrow chambers. Each burrow complex will have nesting, food and latrine chambers with bolt holes positioned directly over water as a swift escape route. The male and female have separate chambers that they keep fastidiously tidy.

  Water voles’ contribution to a healthy wetland ecosystem is a vital one, increasing habitat diversity which in turn increases biodiversity. Having watched them for decades, I can immediately tell when a waterway is inhabited by voles as the plants will be species rich, lower in height due to their constant grazing, and looking healthy with little ‘lawns’ around their burrows. This grazing may even be deliberately done by breeding females as it leads to plenty of flowers and a pollen-rich source of protein for the period when they need to stay close to their young tucked away in the burrow.

  Just two weeks later, towards the end of March, verdant spring vegetation has begun to grow. A quarter of a mile downstream I find a water vole tucking into one of its favourite plants: Fool’s watercress. It is a veritable vegetable shredder and eats plants with amazing rapidity; no surprise, as they need to eat around 80 per cent of their body weight every day. Walking on, I find piles of their droppings, a sure sign that the breeding season has commenced. Females leave scent-marked droppings near their burrows to signal that they are in breeding condition; these are then counter-marked by males. A female will usually lay six latrines along her range. Their droppings are similar in shape and size to TicTacs and are usually blunt at both ends (unlike the rat whose droppings are larger and pointed at one end); colours vary depending upon what they’ve been eating. One autumn I found a pile of very red droppings, underneath a hawthorn bush laden with berries.

  In spring, territorial disputes may occur between females competing for a male, who will have at least two breeding females in his range. One April I watched a fierce, if brief dispute that resulted in one female having her eye seriously damaged. When voles mate in water, it looks much like a minor squabble with lots of squeaking before the male rides on the female’s back – though she will rebuff him fiercely if she is not ready. Just before her young are due to be born she will block the burrow entrance to protect them from predators; I usually see them around twenty-one days later, fluffy little chestnut-brown young chasing and play-fighting with each other while making high-pitched squeaks.

  Water voles are close to the bottom of the food chain and are taken by otters, foxes, herons, owls, grass snakes, pike, stoats, weasels, cats and American Mink. Mink have been blamed for the sharp decline in water voles; a breeding female mink can eradicate a water vole colony in one breeding season. Foxes, though, could be the key to helping water voles to survive. They are out-competing non-native mink for prey, and when foxes are culled, research has shown that mink move back in.

  On the last weekend in May I decide to visit Letcombe Brook, a much-loved childhood haunt. Here I saw my first water vole, sitting among water crowsfoot amid sparkling waters. Spring is in full swing, the voles have now had their first litter of the year, chiffchaffs and willow warblers are in full song and growth is burgeoning. The habitat along this crystal clear chalk stream looks ideal; a few steps more and there sits a vole in a hollow, almost hidden beneath thistle leaves. The bankside growth is now so lush and verdant that it is becoming difficult to spot them, so to see t
his one on the cusp of Summer is a joy. My first sighting was on a beautiful spring morning just like this one, and immediately I am a young, wide-eyed child again, looking with wonder at this delightful, charismatic animal. It is how my lifelong passion for water voles began; long may they live on our waterways and brighten our lives.

  Jo Cartmell, 2016

  And coming almost hand in hand with this catkin season there is another lovely aspect of spring, the phase of unopened buds. It is obscured again and again by the glories of crocus and primrose and daffodil, and if the weather is mild by the first blossoms of the flowering trees, which outshine it completely. The pink grace of the early almonds is not only lovely but easy to see. But the ruby buds of the birches are dark and obscure even in the March sunlight. The flowers of pyrus japonica on the south walls of houses open wide and flame crimson with all the delicacy and purity of single roses. But the golden buds of willows are golden only in sudden and accidental angles of light or against backgrounds of stormy cloud. They shine even then with a gold that has no counterpart in the colours of flowers, but with the soft and sombre light of polished wood, as though the buds were shining splinters of golden walnut.

  The phase, always brief, represents in a sense a prologue to spring and at the same time an epilogue to winter, belonging all the time to neither one nor the other. The buds are awake but not open; they are no longer dead but still not alive. They have lost the colourlessness of winter, but there is no greenness in them. They are part of a kind of vernal twilight, a between season, a little interlude between one large act and another, an interlude that is all over and obscured and forgotten by the time the cuckoo is calling in the flowering ash trees.