21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Two springs later I was encouraged to gaze mindfully at some of the other, intact trees at Dartington as part of a meditative evening walking class I’d enrolled on. It was an excellent time of year and day to appreciate Dartington’s gardens, which are full of surprises and retain the messy-neat aesthetic established by the Elmhirsts, the philanthropic millionaires who rescued the estate from near-dereliction in the early 1920s. Oddly, dusk seemed to bring out the reds and pinks and golds more than ever, and there was a soft quietness to the air, which along with the sensitive company gave the impression that the whole world was taking a gentle break from itself. The evening, however, did not pass without incident. At one point I made the error of shoving a holistic scientist into a flower bed. I hadn’t intended to shove the holistic scientist into the flower bed; I’d just lost my concentration a bit and not quite got the steering bit of the exercise we were doing quite right. This was a trust exercise, in which the dozen people on the course got into pairs and wordlessly guided their partners around the gardens, using a light hand on the bottom of their spines and showing them objects such as fronds, leaves, grass and other stuff that had taken on interesting hues in the fading light. While being guided in this way, our partners – such as the holistic scientist, who had paired up with me – were required to keep their eyes shut until instructed to open them with a gentle double-tap to the shoulder, enabling them to look at some foliage. With a subsequent identical double-tap we could instruct them to reclose their eyes. It was vital that the whole procedure be conducted in complete silence. With night coming down fast, I wondered about the best way to get the holistic scientist out of the flower bed without speaking to her. In normal circumstances I’d have simply been able to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve inadvertently pushed you into some hydrangeas there,’ but that would have been cheating. Instead, I gave the holistic scientist, whose name was Joana, a frantic double-tap on the shoulder. This double-tap had a different meaning to my previous double-taps: less Gaze at the wonder of this primrose and more Quick! Stop right there or you’ll hit your head on a branch then possibly fall over! There was then an awkward moment when Joana realised she was in a flower bed. I flashed her an apologetic look and the two of us tried to conduct a three-point turn on the spot. We then continued on our mindful, peaceful way below a bank of bluebells, remembering at all times to experience the movement of our feet on the dampening ground.

  An evening like this, in the countryside, helps you to look up. Big cities condition us to look down. I lived in two big cities back to back for just three years, but it took me at least that long again to get out of the habit of looking down, and I only truly directed my gaze upwards on a regular basis a few years after that when, out of necessity, in that overrun garden in Norfolk I started to get more intimate with trees. Of course, that is what we tree-huggers do: our critics tell us we walk around in a daze, our heads in the clouds, unrealistic about what it means to live. But what is more unrealistic: being aware that trees predate us, that they are both more important than us and crucial to our survival, and celebrating all the joy and magic and additional life they encourage, or viewing a love of them as some kind of ditzy indulgence extraneous to the real business of survival? If you grew up in the eighties, as I did – a time of ruthless corrections to the flaws of the hippy era that were far more destructive than the actual flaws of the hippy era – you’d have often heard ‘tree-hugger’ being used as a term of derision. But there is nothing wrong with being a tree-hugger. Hugging trees is great. Even better is waking up the next day in a tree’s arms and telling it your dreams. I haven’t actually slept in a tree but I have climbed several over the last few years. I prefer the ones with moss on them, but it’s not a deal-breaker if they don’t have any. There is no left-brain thinking going on when I climb a tree. I am not at any point saying to myself, This branch looks a little weak; I’d better not stand on it. It all happens instinctively – probably because I have hundreds of ancestors who also liked to climb trees. Standing on the top step of a ladder and pruning my hedge, I am only semi-confident, a little untrustworthy of the metal rungs even though they’ve been built specifically to support me, but when I am twice as high as that, spread out along the branch of a mossy oak, high above the Dart gorge on Dartmoor, I feel entirely relaxed and secure.

  Because I look up more now, I am also more aware of the small soap operas being acted out in the branches above me. For a long time I was conscious of the deficiencies in my knowledge of birds and would say to myself, You really need to make an effort to take more of an interest in birds, but when I finally got around to taking more of an interest in birds it was less because I told myself, You really need to make an effort to take more of an interest in birds, and more because a greater interest in trees is a sensitising experience that leads organically to a greater appreciation of birds. I definitely do not exempt the more common birds from this appreciation: the wood pigeons who sexwrestle in the branches of the hawthorn beyond my garden hedge for example, or the jackdaws and gulls who helpfully hoover up the food that my cats are too spoilt to finish. Two beady-eyed gulls circle above my chimney every morning, watching for the scraps I put out. Their surveillance is done from an almost inconceivable height, twice as high as the highest jackdaw flight path and probably a dozen times the height of my house. They probably think they’re doing very well out of me, but in reality they’re doing me a favour. I can put any kind of food waste outside my back door, return moments later, and it will be gone. Chicken bones gnawed bare by the cats, stale quarter-loaves, beansprouts, old jalapenos: you name it, they’re totally into it. I have the notion that, when the time comes for my ailing, sluggish laptop to finally die, all I will have to do is leave it on my back doorstep for five minutes and never have to think about it again.

  If the gulls don’t get the scraps, the jackdaws do. Since I moved here, a family of them have lived at the top of my chimney. I have had a cage installed on the chimney now to protect them, but for a while their situation was a worry. In 2014 a fledgling dropped down into the empty grate then sat happily on my arm for an afternoon before I climbed onto the roof and placed him near his family, only for him to be annihilated by a sparrowhawk. Then there was the adult who fell into a roaring conflagration of my dad’s best logs two years later. I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea at the time, but my friends Rachel and Seventies Pat saw the jackdaw fall into the flames.

  ‘Tom! Tom! Get in here! Quick!’ shouted Rachel and Seventies Pat, who did not have fires, or jackdaws, in their houses. I rushed into the room, half-expecting to find the room ablaze, but instead found a confused bird flapping around the room’s perimeter. I dived and caught it then took the jackdaw outside, where it hopped around looking dazed for twenty seconds, before flying up into the boughs of the Scots pine in the garden. The situation could have been much worse, and everyone felt relieved – not least the jackdaw, I imagine.

  ‘Do you think it’s OK?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Yeah, it seems to be pretty much still a full jackdaw,’ I replied.

  ‘Full jackdaw,’ said Rachel. ‘Thank God.’

  We drank a little too much wine that night, and the next morning I asked Seventies Pat how he was feeling.

  ‘Surprisingly fine,’ he replied. ‘Pretty much full jackdaw.’

  The three of us were up before dawn the day after that, which was 1 May, to watch the morris dancers at Totnes Castle and the sun coming up over the hills near Brixham: the light, accompanying the singing of ‘Hal-an-Tow’, the old Helston May Day song, could hardly have been more perfect.

  ‘That was great,’ said Rachel. ‘Full jackdaw!’

  Later, the three of us planned a walk beside the river, where the footpaths were still muddy after heavy April rainfall, and I asked Seventies Pat – who is never out of 1971 dandy uniform – if he had brought any proper walking boots.

  ‘I’ve bought my walking cowboy boots,’ said Seventies Pat. ‘Does that count?’

  I l
et out a sigh.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he reassured me. ‘I’m full jackdaw.’

  Jackdaws are often written off as ruffians or villains, with their old-fashioned burglar cartoon masks and egg-stealing habit, but in flight they’re no less serene or beautiful than any other bird. They will dive-bomb down my chimney pot towards my lawn then flip and turn at right angles for the trees behind the hedge; air poetry delivered at speed. The collective noun for them is a clattering, which goes a fair way to summing up the busy, almost metallic sound they often make in full gang mode. When I was asleep last summer with my bedroom window wide open and one landed on the sill behind my head and squawked, the effect was not dissimilar to someone sneaking up behind me and clanging two iron poles together as a practical joke. Jackdaws are rarely alone, though. Not for them the spontaneous bohemian life of the unshackled blackbird. Their existence is centred around punctilious, community-based organisation. Groups are frequently known to fly into farmland, each pick an individual sheep to land on and delouse, then leave. Sheep are rarely heard to complain about this. When I round the corner of my house and startle three or four jackdaws eating the food I’ve left out for them they still make the effort to take off in formation, as if the allotted leader among them has said, ‘One, two, three . . . go!’ They also mate for life, even when they’re unhappy with each other or struggling to have children together, a trait that seems both admirable and a bit self-defeatingly 1950s of them. When I looked into the eyes of that fledgling I briefly befriended I saw a human intelligence that I’ve not seen in the eyes of any other bird with the possible exception of two or three particularly lugubrious parrots.

  A Scottish man called Norman who I met at an owl club in Torbay told me that in his 1950s boyhood on the edge of the Cairngorms he and his friends would often foster various types of orphan crows. The jackdaws were always the most responsive and bright of the lot. ‘One boy had a jackdaw who’d follow him to school, then wait on the roof for him until lessons were over,’ Norman said. Bending to kiss the beak of his African spotted eagle owl Ellie, he told me he now preferred to spend time around owls, and that doing so had aided his recovery after suffering a stroke a few years ago. I had been invited to owl club by Pete, who I first met in Totnes when he was walking around town with an owl called Wizard from the local rare breeds farm. Pete is one of two men regularly seen around Totnes walking owls, but it is genuinely perceived that he is the more authentic, since he was the first to take owls around the town, and the other man’s owls are smaller. Being invited to owl club felt like a privilege, especially as I was to be the sole person in attendance who didn’t have their own owl, so I thought it was the least I could do to wear my best shoes. Within a matter of seconds, however, the shoes were in jeopardy. An owl had defecated very close to the entrance to owl club, and I found myself weaving, last minute, to dodge the owl poo, swivelling and swerving in a move arguably more impressive than any I’d pulled while trying to mimic some of the nascent disco moves from early 1970s episodes of Soul Train.

  ‘I’ll just get that,’ said Pete, diving in with some kitchen roll to clean up the owl faeces. ‘Ooh, who’s THIS then?’ I asked, gesturing at the great grey owl a few feet away, but Pete’s head was dipped and he assumed I was referring to a tall pensioner in front of me. ‘This is Alby,’ Pete answered. ‘He’s our chairman.’ I’m not the kind of person who’d say ‘Ooh, who’s THIS then?’ to open a conversation with a stranger in his early seventies, but it was novel to be briefly mistaken for one. ‘Hello,’ said Alby. ‘I don’t have my owl with me today because I’m undergoing chemotherapy and cannot afford to get scratched.’ Behind him, an African spotted eagle owl baited excitably at a ringtone of the opening riff from the Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’. I’d been at owl club all of two minutes and already there was drama everywhere. A rumour circulated that, soon, flapjacks were to be served.

  Owl club – or Torbay Owls and Company, as it’s more formally known – is a splinter owl club from a bigger owl club. ‘We started our own because there was lots of backbiting at the other one,’ I was told by Norman, who with his wife Jan owns two other owls in addition to Ellie the African spotted eagle owl. Alby reassured prospective members of owl club that they wouldn’t get ‘any of that “My owl’s better than your owl” stuff here’. These possible members included Jamie, who’d brought his European eagle owl Boo along to owl club. Although only eight weeks old, Boo already weighed sixteen pounds and would eventually grow to twice her size. That is, if she did turn out to be a she. Many owls, I was informed, are ‘very hard to sex’ when they’re young, although one man sitting near me said he could do it with a 95 per cent success rate using magnets. Something made me stop short of asking how.

  Not everyone at owl club had brought their owls with them. Some had just come for owl advice. This was given by Alby and included ‘Never approach an owl from behind,’ the dangers of being ‘footed’ by an owl and food tips such as ‘Always have a plastic bag with you in case you see a car hit a pheasant.’ Alby explained he had been on steroids recently, which made him ‘feel like he could break into Paignton Zoo and feed the lions by hand’. He stopped short of demonstrating, but produced some large frozen rats from a cool box to feed to tonight’s owls. Authoritatively, he explained how to tie a falconer’s knot – ‘my way, the good way, not the way you see on YouTube’ – and that stroking an owl’s back feathers is bad, as it removes the natural oil from them.

  I was reassured that all the owls of owl club lived in spacious aviaries in the Torbay area, but I decided that my visit to owl club would be a one-off and that the owls I observed in future would be wild ones. Plenty of these were available in the trees beyond my garden, after all. ‘Are there any owls around?’ I would sometimes say to these wild owls and, usually within under a minute, one would reply in the affirmative. Contrary to what a lot of people will have you believe, no self-respecting individual owl actually says,‘T’wit t’woo.’ It is a statement that, to be delivered with authenticity, requires two owls. The high-pitched female tawnies say, ‘T’wit’ – which is really more like ‘Toooo-WEEEEEET’ – and the more bassy and insouciant male tawnies answer, if they’re in the mood, with ‘T’woo.’ The spinney immediately to the west of my house seems to be very female-dominated, sometimes apparently stiflingly so for its residents. Several lady tawnies will screech in the early hours, kind of casually at first, then with a growing hen-party intensity, until finally after an hour or so a lothario manowl will chime in with a low-key yet confident ‘Woo’ like the Owl Fonz quietly entering a room full of leather-clad rock and roll girls. ‘Do not panic,’ Owl Fonz appears to be saying at these junctures. ‘As you will soon discover, there is more than enough of me to go around.’ The owls here are especially vocal in early spring and early autumn, but they’re tough-nut all-year-rounders, like the jackdaws and the gulls. The most eager of the seasonal birds to get to work are the greater spotted woodpeckers, in late January. The sound these make is uncannily similar to the one the creaky wooden gate to my garden makes upon being opened by my postman. Ooh, I have mail, I will sometimes think, when in reality I just have woodpecker.

  It was once popularly believed that woodpeckers were bad for trees. In fact, the work they do is another kind of tree-hugging, their true agenda being not destruction but to contribute to arboreal health: they bore into decaying timber, feeding on the grubs of bark-munching beetles. In this way they are the antithesis of grey squirrels, whose cuddling of trees masks a true agenda of rampant nihilism. Dave has had terrible trouble with the greys at Dartington, who have chronically weakened many of his beeches and sycamores. ‘A lot of it is about sexual frustration,’ he told me. ‘The male squirrels get horny, and they can’t find a mate, so they attack some bark.’ Everyone I know who regularly walks in the Dartington area seems to have had a horny squirrel trash-talk to them at some point. It is a shocking noise when you first hear it coming from the branches of a nearby tree: birdlike, but t
ongue-flicking and not at all fluffy. I am sure one of the grey’s smaller, less destructive red counterparts would never be so uncouth. October to November tends to be the most high-spirited time for the grey squirrels of south Devon. They fling themselves about like flouncy teenagers with too much energy and dance across the canopy, sometimes appearing to balance dozens of feet above the earth on nothing but a gossamer sycamore leaf. Some have been seen riding on the back of sheep, although despite carefully studying them and even drawing a rough map of squirrel activity in my area, I have never witnessed this myself, and I sense the motive for doing so might be less altruistic than that of jackdaws. I don’t have a horse chestnut tree in or near my garden, but in October I often find numerous spiky, half-opened conker shells on the lawn, which I have realised is the work of picnicking squirrels. An especially bold one will sometimes barrel down the middle of the lane, creating a queue of cars behind, like a tiny furry tractor. Only a day of strong winds seems to slow down their autumnal high. Squirrels have, however, allegedly found ingenious uses for wind. In his 1607 book History Of Foure-Footed Beastes Edward Topsell writes of the squirrel, ‘for when hunger or some convenient prey of meat constraineth her to pass over a river, she seeketh out some rinde or small bark of a tree, which she setteth upon the water or goeth into it, and holding her tail like a sail letteth the wind drive her to the other side.’ This is a pleasing image but one which striketh me as bullshit.

  I have stood in the dense steep copses near my house in November storms and heard the fearsome creak of bending trunks above me, a far more fearsome sound, surely, if you are a foot and a bit long and covered in fur. A red oak ripped itself out of the ground on the hillside above the house during my first autumn here with a noise beyond thunder. In another storm, a holm oak behind my garden – a vast elevated maze of a tree over three hundred years old – came down on my phone line. Sometimes, when the leaves seem to be holding on a little too long, these storms apparently come along to do a kind of necessary industrial clean to hurry winter along. But the final deleafing of trees will often take place on the most windless of days, the pressure of icy still air sending the last crinkled brown survivors gently to the ground, defeated. There are long bony months ahead but it’s still a good time to be heavily into wood. Summer’s the big party season for trees, but winter is when you really get to know them as people. It’s when you see behind the green curtain to the detailed architecture of the branches of an elm or a maple. It’s when you see ivy’s roots stretching up a trunk like veins on the tensed ageing wrist of an arm-wrestler. Last winter I kept watch on a solitary, huge, two-century-old oak on the hillside near me – a wise but not wizened tree, confident in its loner status – and photographed it every few days, yet even in its barest months its moods still palpably swung. On a Wednesday it might be cloud-whipped and cantankerous, then sheep-sniffed, sun-kissed and soporific on Friday then greyly ice-glazed and impenetrable on Saturday. You could argue that late autumn and early winter are the most tree-dominated seasons of all in rural Devon as it’s when their aroma is most prevalent: the time of woodsmoke’s primal reminder of the woodier place we all come from. There’s nothing quite like the way woodsmoke cuts through cold country air, and even if you’re like me and seek it out and delight in it, summer is always enough to make you forget just how heady its aroma is. I climbed to the top of my favourite local mystic hill, Yarner Beacon, last December and caught a strong whiff of it: an invisible cloud of promise in the dead chill. The smell was initially confusing, as there is no house within a quarter of a mile of Yarner Beacon’s summit, and it took me a few moments to realise that it was in fact coming from one of the bandsaws in the woodyard at the foot of the hill.