Spring

by Melissa Harrison

  At the farmsteads themselves there are considerations for and against. On the one hand, the house and the garden is much tidier, less uncouth; there are flowers, such as geraniums, standard roses, those that are favourites in towns; and the unsightly and unhealthy middens and pools of muddy water have disappeared from beside the gates. But the old flowers and herbs are gone, or linger neglected in corners, and somehow the gentle touch of time has been effaced. The house has got a good deal away from farming. It is on the farm but disconnected. It is a residence, not a farmhouse. Then you must consider that it is more healthy, sweeter, and better for those who live in it. From a little distance the old effect is obtainable. One thing only I must protest against, and that is the replacing of tiles with slates. The old red tiles of the farmhouses are as natural as leaves; they harmonise with the trees and the hedges, the grass, the wheat, and the ricks. But slates are wrong. In new houses, even farmhouses, it does not matter so much; the owners cannot be found fault with for using the advantages of modern times. On old houses where tiles were once, to put slates is an offence, nothing less. Every one who passes exclaims against it. Tiles tone down and become at home; they nestle together, and look as if you could be happily drowsy and slumber under them. They are to a house what leaves are to a tree, and leaves turn reddish or brown in the autumn. Upon the whole, with the exception of the slates – the hateful slates – the farmsteads are improved, for they have lost a great deal that was uncouth and even repulsive, which was slurred over in old pictures or omitted, but which was there.

  The new cottages are ugly with all their ornamentation; their false gables, impossible porches, absurd windows, are distinctly repellent. They are an improvement in a sanitary sense, and we are all glad of that, but we cannot like the buildings. They are of no style or time; only one thing is certain about them – they are not English. Fortunately there are plenty of old cottages, hundreds of them (they show little or no sign of disappearing), and these can be chosen instead. The villages are to outward appearance very much as they used to be, but the people are very different. In manners, conversation, and general tone there is a great change. It is, indeed, the people who have altered more than the surface of the country. Hard as the farmer may work, and plough and sow with engine and drill, the surface of the land does not much vary; but the farmer himself and the farmer’s man are quite another race to what they were. Perhaps it was from this fact that the impression grew up that modern agriculture has polished away all the distinctive characteristics of the country. But it has not done so any more than it has removed the hills. The truth is, as I have endeavoured to explain, innovations so soon become old in the fields. The ancient earth covers them with her own hoar antiquity, and their newness disappears. They have already become so much a part of the life of the country that it seems as if they had always been there, so easily do they fit in, so easily does the eye accept them.

  Intrinsically there is nothing used in modern agriculture less symmetrical than what was previously employed. The flails were the simplest of instruments, and were always seen with the same accompaniment – the interior of a barn. The threshing-machine is certainly not less interesting; it works in the open air, often with fine scenic surroundings, and the number of people with it impart vivacity. In reaping with the reaping-hook there were more men in the wheat, but the reaping-machine is not without colour. Scythes are not at all pleasant things; the mowing-machine is at least no worse. As for the steam-plough, it is very interesting to watch. All these fit in with trees and hedges, fields and woods, as well, and in some cases in a more striking manner than the old instruments. The surface of the ground presents more varied colours even than before, and the sunlight produces rich effect. Nor have all the ancient aspects disappeared as supposed – quite the reverse. In the next field to the steam-plough the old ploughs drawn by horses may be seen at work, and barns still stand, and the old houses. In hill districts oxen are yet yoked to the plough, the scythe and reaping-hook are often seen at work, and, in short, the old and the new so shade and blend together that you can hardly say where one begins and the other ends. That there are many, very many things concerning agriculture and country life whose disappearance is to be regretted I have often pointed out, and having done so, I feel that I can with the more strength affirm that in its natural beauty the country is as lovely now as ever.

  It is, I venture to think, a mistake on the part of some who depict country scenes on canvas that they omit these modern aspects, doubtless under the impression that to admit them would impair the pastoral scene intended to be conveyed. So many pictures and so many illustrations seem to proceed upon the assumption that steam-plough and reaping-machine do not exist, that the landscape contains nothing but what it did a hundred years ago. These sketches are often beautiful, but they lack the force of truth and reality. Every one who has been fifty miles into the country, if only by rail, knows while looking at them that they are not real. You feel that there is something wanting, you do not know what. That something is the hard, perhaps angular fact which at once makes the sky above it appear likewise a fact. Why omit fifty years from the picture? That is what it usually means – fifty years left out; and somehow we feel as we gaze that these fields and these skies are not of our day. The actual fields, the actual machines, the actual men and women (how differently dressed to the conventional pictorial costumes!) would prepare the mind to see and appreciate the colouring, the design, the beauty – what, for lack of a better expression, may be called the soul of the picture – far more than forgotten, and nowadays even impossible accessories. For our sympathy is not with them, but with the things of our own time.

  Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields, 1884

  The sound infiltrated my consciousness slowly at first. It took me a second or two to tune in to the insistent buzzing, more mechanical than natural; and another few seconds to realise what I was listening to: one of the rarest birds I have ever come across in Britain.

  I’ve always been captivated by warblers. Yet as a young birder, growing up on the outskirts of London, I hardly ever came across them. This was not, as I then thought, because they are particularly rare – they are not. It was simply because in those days I didn’t listen to, learn, or appreciate the importance of birdsong. I didn’t see warblers because you usually don’t – they are much easier to identify by their distinctive songs.

  Nowadays, on a typical walk around my local patch on the edge of the Somerset Levels on a fine spring morning, I might hear around fifty different warblers of at least half a dozen species. But I usually see just three or four – and even then, I only get a brief glimpse before they melt back into the reeds or disappear into the dense woodland canopy.

  Fortunately their songs are (mostly) pretty distinctive. The easiest by far are the chiffchaff, usually the earliest to arrive, which conveniently sings its own name, and the resident Cetti’s warbler. This elusive bird is as loud as it is skulking, and shouts its explosive song from deep inside the dense thickets in every month of the year.

  Early April brings the first blackcap, with a melodious, fluty song like a speeded-up blackbird; and then the willow warbler, whose plaintive descant of silvery notes runs down the scale like a mountain stream. Hearing my first willow warbler of the spring is always a special moment for me. Unlike the chiffchaffs and blackcaps, which overwinter in southern Europe, Spain or even here in southern England, these tiny birds have flown all the way from sub-Saharan Africa – a journey of five thousand miles or more.

  The willow warbler is swiftly followed by four more long-distance migrants. Two of these chunter from the reedbeds, the more plodding, repetitive reed warbler outshone by its more extrovert, excitable cousin, the sedge warbler. A lone whitethroat nests in the brambles along the path, occasionally launching himself into the air on long, slender wings, to reinforce his claim to his thorny territory. And one or two garden warblers – whose song sounds like an even faster, more rambling version of the blackcap’s –
occasionally sing from the wooded drove.

  And that, usually, is that: eight species of warbler should be enough for anyone, surely. But this year was a very special one, with two new warblers appearing on my patch for the very first time.

  One day in the middle of April, I was walking along when I heard a strange sound, rather like a fishing reel being unwound at speed, or perhaps a very loud insect. This comparison is apt, as it was a grasshopper warbler; the only British bird whose common and scientific names derive from an invertebrate: it belongs to the genus Locustella.

  Grasshopper warblers are skulking little birds, like a streaky version of the reed warbler, and rarely show themselves – though I did manage to get a reasonable view one day, as the bird perched momentarily in a low bush above the reeds.

  A couple of weeks later the bird had stopped singing, and I assumed it had gone; when a friend informed me that he thought he had heard it again. But as I stood and listened to the monotonous buzz, something was bothering me. The tone was somehow different – less metallic and more ‘wooden’ – and the pitch seemed lower.

  Then it dawned on me: I was listening to the grasshopper warbler’s much rarer cousin, Savi’s warbler. Named after Paolo Savi, the nineteenth-century Italian scientist who discovered the species, Savi’s warblers are incredibly rare in Britain, with only a handful arriving to sing in our southern reedbeds each spring. Yet here was one on my local patch.

  Over the next couple of weeks I visited at dawn and dusk, when Savi’s do most of their singing. I only glimpsed it once: a brief view of a plain brown bird, remarkably like a reed warbler. No wonder it took ornithologists so long to realise this was a new and separate species.

  Then it simply stopped singing. Either it had flown away, or had found a female and settled down to breed – I couldn’t tell. But I am hoping that Savi’s warbler will now, after several failed attempts, colonise Britain permanently as a breeding bird. Maybe, in a decade’s time, that strange, buzzing song will be as part of the Somerset landscape as the booming of another recent arrival, the bittern.

  But whatever should happen I’ll never forget the joy of hearing no fewer than ten different kinds of warbler singing on my local patch, during that unforgettable ‘warbler spring’.

  Stephen Moss, 2016

  Vernal Birds of Passage. The earlier or later appearance of our Spring Birds may be found to arise from accidental vicissitudes of the season in those countries from whence they come, and viewed in this light, the time of their arrival becomes an interesting phenomena to note down. Generally speaking, they arrive at the following times, on an average of many years:

  Wryneck

  Middle of March.

  Smallest Willow Wren

  March 25.

  House Swallow

  April 15.

  Martin

  April 20.

  Sand Martin

  April 20.

  Blackcap

  April 17.

  Nightingale

  April 10.

  Cuckoo

  April 21.

  Yellow Willow Wren

  April 20.

  Whitethroat

  April 16.

  Redstart

  April 16.

  Night Plover or Stone Curlew

  March 27.

  Grasshopper Lark

  April 15.

  Swift

  May 9.

  Lesser Red Sparrow

  April 30.

  Corn Crake or Land Rail

  April 25.

  Largest Willow Wren

  End of April.

  Fern Owl

  May 20.

  Flycatcher

  May 3.

  Other birds, Water Wagtails for instance, who only make partial migrations, are more uncertain in their times of appearance.

  Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827

  Beyond a quiet road bridge near Builth, Powys, a steep, shallow stream joins the Wye. If you peer down you’ll notice the clarity of the water, the rocks and wood on the riverbed, and living roots reaching into the flow for sustenance. The waters are full of calcium and magnesium ions, while dead leaves, washed from upstream, lie heavy on the bedrock; allochthonous material, key to nutrient cycling and food web dynamics. Rich stuff.

  This place, this rivers-meet, is perfect for white-clawed crayfish, the UK’s largest native freshwater invertebrate. The main channel runs north to south, and crays seek shelter here from strong sun, east to west. Sensitive to temperature, they also love oxygen. They’ll survive both running and still water, canals and quarry lakes, but like living litmus tests of alkaline waters they flourish in places like this, on calcareous and weathered rock. Here, they graze on aquatic green algae, charophytes to boost their calcium levels at moulting time. Here, when winter snow melts and April showers fall, the shallow meets the deep with such force one can hear it long before it is seen. They thrive on the oxygen-rich froth of hydrological turbulence. So do we.

  Rivers are maps for all living things, natural diviners of place. Freshwater travels from higher to lower ground, to estuaries and beyond, and the rivers’ strong presence in landscape changes only slowly over time. They guide us through life, with not a roadmap in sight, their angiological patterns etched deep within our minds.

  The female crayfish here will have mated with larger-clawed males in autumn, and have protected those fertilised eggs through winter spates in submerged, muddy burrows under thicker riparian vegetation. After the eggs hatch, the young have remained bonded with their mother, attached to her broader abdomen, through all the perils of spring floods, until eventually they separate and live an independent life in early summer. They become active at night to hunt, and, as well as algae, they’ll eat carrion, macro-invertebrates, worms and snails, small fish and larger aquatic plants. To a white-clawed cray, turbidity is like smog. Nothing much likes smog. Crayfish love clarity. So do we.

  The river-story continues. Freshly hewn stones and grit, gifted from the hills, sink into the depths. Twenty widths or so downstream, the waters are fully mixed. Any silt – though not much, one hopes, at this point in a river’s journey – is carried down to fertile plains. Meanwhile, up-flow, hidden signs exist at rivers-meets legible only to fish like Atlantic salmon, as they return to higher spawning grounds. Confluences are their signs, their directional arrows. Here, where the crayfish hunt, swim left. Now, swim right. Right again. Now lay eggs to hatch and eventually tumble back to the ocean.

  These rivers-meets, so often ignored, could instead be our meeting places, to bring our young in celebration or mourning of all that life involves. Light, dark, where geologies blend and fresh air is released in tiny bubbles for us to draw in deep. Let’s paint beautiful signs in celebration of the life that highlands bring to lowlands, symbols of respect and union. Let’s paint the rivers’ names, pay tribute to the headwaters and oceans they join together in ribbons. Use nearby boulders or windfall oak, gable ends, whatever suits. In spring, when the sun begins to burn off the cloud and creatures emerge from their winter quiet, let’s draw all manner of beautiful beings that live in and around the river: a blaze of shape, form and colour.

  The confluence on the Wye is a good place to make a sign. It’s a great spot for a picnic, too – pink lemonade moments under a canopy of beech and alder, newly unfurling leaves in spring – a time which grants that particular lightness of being from breathing in soft air. I’d choose a mother cray to represent this rivers-meet, with brood bonded to her abdomen. This would be our mutual place: shared, loved, with potential to begin a beautiful evolution of rivers-meet signs. This is where I bring my daughter.

  From the rivers-meets, on riparian paths, reconnected to nature, we could navigate upstream . . . downstream . . . to the bigger swell or finer flow. Our compass becomes a story. We remember stories and we follow signs, just as the salmon do. We know the sanctity of home, of clarity and sustenance, like the crayfish.

  North of
alder grove, south of small-leaved lime, east of broken willow, west of river cliffs. Here at the confluence, where the dead oak tumbles to nurse young life, when spring merges to summer, releasing them into adulthood. This is where the crayfish live. Home.

  Ginny Battson, 2016

  Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury

  Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

  And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

  Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

  Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

  Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

  The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

  Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

  And smale foweles maken melodye,

  That slepen al the nyght with open eye-

  (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);

  Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

  And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

  To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

  And specially from every shires ende

  Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

  The hooly blisful martir for to seke

  That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.