Despite all the lushness and the ripening apples and the huge winter squash and the prospecting queen ants and egg-laying dragonflies, I’m worried about my house sparrows. Despite everything I’ve achieved in my garden, it will never be enough.
The great yellow bumblebee carves out a niche existence in the wilds of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It used to exist all over Britain but has declined by 80 per cent in the last century, squeezed north due to habitat loss and possibly climate change. It likes wild flowers, red clover in particular, and lives now only in areas where traditional crofting practices are maintained. I want to see it, and invite my friend Matt to join me on a trip to the Outer Hebrides to find it. He agrees; he’s up for anything is Matt.
From Oban the journey to South Uist takes six hours. We board the ferry in shorts and flip-flops, arrive in the dark with headaches and empty bellies. We’re picked up by Sandy, South Uist’s only taxi driver, a short, round man who speaks Scottish but gets by with English. Born and bred in Uist he hasn’t strayed far from the Outer Hebrides and has never been to London. My name is written on a scrap of paper which he holds in his hand and points at – he can’t pronounce the word ‘Kate’.
Sandy drives us haphazardly down the middle of the road that rolls right out to the sea. We tell him we’re here to see the great yellow bumblebee. He’s never heard of it, but teaches us Gaelic for ‘bee’ as well as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and tells us to go down the machair. Machair is Gaelic for the type of wildflower habitat that clothes the coast of the Outer Hebrides. There’s a particularly good stretch in South Uist, which is why we’re here.
We travel for ages, eventually pulling up at the campsite on the far south of the island. We pitch our tents in the dark, drink beer and eat crisps before stumbling to bed.
In the morning we wake to white sand and giant sky, a landscape I had never seen or imagined before. I’ve never seen such beautiful beaches. They’re perfect, untouched, littered only and occasionally by an abandoned stone cottage or a barnacled rowing boat. Everything else is seaweed and razor clams and slate and rock pools, plus the heady smell of sea. We fill our lungs and dip our toes. We feel like we’re at the end of the earth. No one can get in touch with us as we walk, sometimes in silence and other times sharing stories and making each other laugh, me pausing to stare at patches of red clover or knapweed, towards the next island on the Hebridean archipelago.
We cross the bridge to Eriskay and happen upon a huge patch of machair. Matt goes off to meditate; he has downloaded an app on his phone and sits on a bench looking out to the Atlantic, following soothing instructions played out to him. Sometimes I look over and see him stretching or chanting. Other times the words of the Meditation Phone Man float over on the breeze.
You are important.
I walk around, looking at flowers. There are good numbers of the moss carder bee, Bombus muscorum, the strain that has a wonderful burnt-orange coat, rather than the one that looks similar to the brown-banded carder, Bombus humilis, which looks similar to the common carder, Bombus pascuorum. My interest in bumblebees wanes when I have to go looking at tergites and leg hairs and face length just to tell one closely related species from another. I’m happy to see a burnt- orange moss carder and know I have seen a new species without having to trouble myself with detail.
There are no great yellows.
Matt continues to meditate. I sit among clover and look out to sea. Oystercatchers call to each other endlessly, flies buzz, bumblebees hum. I try hard to bottle the moment.
Eventually Matt returns, feeling better for his meditation. We walk on as he sings Aerosmith’s ‘Love In An Elevator’.
Have you seen your bee?
Not yet.
What about that one? Is that it?
No.
How do you know?
Because it’s a moss carder bee.
What’s a muscarder bee?
Etc.
I try to describe the great yellow to Matt but it’s hard as I’ve never seen one. I just know that I will know it when I see it. Something will click. Telling Matt it’s a large bumblebee with an unusually long and mostly yellow abdomen doesn’t really help. How do you know you haven’t already seen it? He says. Because I do, I reply.
We come to a smattering of houses, Matt telling me why ‘Love In An Elevator’ is the perfect rock song. We find the pub, the Politician, named after the 1941 Whisky Galore shipwreck, where 260,000 bottles of whisky ended up on the beach. There’s a scrap of machair in the garden. Matt orders beer and food while I scour flowers for bees. Nothing. Am I doing something wrong?
We eat burger and chips and sink two pints of beer. We continue walking, by now a little sluggish. We get lost in the hills, find sheep, boggy areas, we lose the machair. We head back and find the pub again. I feel guilty about dragging Matt around and so we sit, again, with more chips and more beer. Matt finds the juke box. The locals are watching football; Matt plays Queen three times to annoy them.
The five miles back to our campsite feel like ten as the sky rusts around us. We see a seal and some birds of prey that might be sea eagles but probably aren’t and I curse myself for not doing more research. Outside the campsite we join others up a little hillock to watch the sun sink into the blue. We drink Tennents Super and cheer dolphins. It’s been a nice day but for the most part I feel we have failed. We have one day left to find our bee.
The morning is Sunday and the campsite cafe is closed. We sit in the doorway looking out to sea, and fill our bellies with dry cereal bars and crisps. We don’t really know where we’re headed, except that yesterday we took a left and so today we should take a right. We head out, avoiding the beach in case we get lost, and stick to the road. On the verge is a dead hedgehog mown down recently, and next to it is a great yellow bumblebee feeding on a tired bit of knapweed.
Are you kidding me, is that our bee?
That’s our bee.
I can see now, it’s different, isn’t it?
It sure is.
Are you going to keep the hedgehog?
I want to keep the hedgehog, but we are flying home and I’m not sure if it’s legal to carry such things on a plane.
The bee hangs around a while. I photograph it with my phone, so I can text the image to my friend Ben, who confirms my sighting: my first great yellow bumblebee, a slightly sun-bleached male.
What now? It’s still early. We head to the machair anyway. One great yellow bumblebee isn’t enough for me.
We walk for miles, down endless roads, at the sides of which we pause for crisps and water, me looking for bees. We take a road to the beach. On the left is a pub and on the right is our machair. It’s separated from the beach by a little wooden fence; there’s a sign directing us in.
We stand at the crossroads and decide to reward ourselves with the pub after the machair. So we turn right, head into the flowers. Matt goes off to meditate.
It’s windy here, salty and barren. But it’s beautiful and there are plenty of flowers – huge patches of red clover. I walk around a bit, looking at patch after patch. Nothing.
I sit down next to the freshest patch of clover, which is sheltered slightly by a pebbly dune. It’s cold and I think of the pub. Then, ever so briefly, a great yellow bumblebee pops up from nowhere, feeds on the clover and disappears again. I watch another do the same, too quick for me to identify it, but its shape is so distinctive I instantly know it. I’m ready for the next one, which I follow after it has fed, and it disappears into the grass. Ohhhh. Machair is grassland, albeit wind-flattened, hardened, pebbly grassland. And its huge hummocks of flattened grass are sheltering bees, which emerge from them to feed and then return, instantly, to shelter. So this is how they survive here. They hide in the long grass, emerging on still days and breaks in the wind.
I look up from my little patch of clover and scan the horizon. We were told last night that we have been blessed with exceptionally good weather. The sky is cloudless and the water calm. B
ut can you imagine, they asked, what it’s like here otherwise? They tell us that the road to Eriskay is closed in bad weather, and that various islands are cut off from the world until the storm passes. You might take the ferry to Oban and not be able to return for a week. The people, buildings and trees here are squat, battered from years of wind and rain. But they have worked out how to live here. So too has the great yellow bumblebee.
Voices, commotion, people. Next door there are builders, estate agents, all sorts going on. I can’t get into the garden because of the noise. I can’t be alone when there are men on scaffolding, Juice Radio drowning out the sound of my starlings.
I open the back door and every fear is realised. There’s a boy, can’t be more than eighteen, hacking away at the buddleia. Most of it is gone now, in its wake is a view of broken fence panels, the bluest house, a huge satellite dish. I ask him if he’s removing it completely and he tells me he is, but he’s annoyed because it’s taking so long to dig out and his boss paid him for only half a day. He keeps calling it a lilac. This bloody lilac, he says, as he hacks and chops and digs and bags up. The house sparrows are nowhere to be seen or heard. I hold back tears as their home is destroyed.
Are you paving it? I ask, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. We’re getting rid of everything, he replies, the builders are coming next week, I think. We’ve got to get it ready for them but I can’t get this lilac out and my boss won’t answer the phone. I look at him, this child destroyer, with maybe £50 in his pocket for prepping some land to be drowned in cement. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, what he’s done.
I go inside, close the door on him. I can hear him talking to his boss on the phone. She’s coming round, now, with someone else. They’ll bag it all up together. Plastic bags, no doubt, bags for landfill. Dear house sparrows, I love you but I couldn’t stop them putting your home in the bin. I couldn’t stop them bagging it up and chucking it out, to rot anaerobically with half-empty tins of beans and broken irons. Will you forgive me? Will you ever come back?
I can’t be here, in this flat, this garden, this street. I need to get out, be gone with all this. I pack an apple, grab my jacket and binoculars, leave my phone. And I get into the car and I drive and I cry and I don’t even know where I’m going but I end up on the Downs and then I turn off to my little place where I walk sometimes, where I feel happy and safe, where I can be alone. It was here I gathered haws and saw my first yellowhammer, where I watch swallows and tree bumblebees in summer and cower under trees knocked together by autumn winds. Ashurst. It’s familiar and comforting and fresh and alive. Maybe I can be calm here.
I park at the pub and cross the road, climb over the stile. My neck and shoulders stiff and sore, my body shaking. Yet as I land and my boots sink into the mud beneath me, the call of a buzzard rallies above. It’s OK it’s OK it’s OK.
The sky is a picture postcard, the odd cumulus cloud mirroring sheep on the Downs. A crow soars, a cuckoo calls, a woodpigeon clap-claps into a tree. A woman stands, an apple in her pocket, her world torn apart. Again.
I wish it wouldn’t affect me so much, that it didn’t matter so much. The loss of land and gardens I take so personally. Why? Why care so much about little brown birds that live in a toppled tree? Is it the tennis court, the buttoned-up childhood?
I tramp through the field, to the path bisecting a hedge and stream, with each step a little more free, a little more angst left behind me. I’m at the top of a hill and the land unfolds like a present unwrapped. I’d last been here in early May and everything has grown. Cow parsley towers above me, nettles brush my legs. It’s like being small again in the wilderness of Dad’s part of the garden. Now there’s barely a path at all – the stream edge and hedge have nearly knitted together, like closed doors, opening just for me and closing in my wake.
Gardens I loved and lost. Gardens where I learned to love, where I cut my teeth in the natural world, where I first saw sparrows and blue tits and worms and caterpillars. Where I scattered seed, made compost. Where, when everything inside was falling apart, I could go, I could be. I could dig soil and bash cow parsley, I could lie under the oak tree staring through its branches at the changing sky. I could cope. And if I could just speak to people, if I could just say that the only way I have ever dealt with anything is via this wonderful world outside our back doors, and that I can’t be the only one to acknowledge this, then maybe, maybe they would realise how big a deal this loss is. The cumulative loss. Not of one buddleia but the loss of front gardens to driveways one after the other, the loss of mature trees and parks and ponds because councils can no longer pay to look after them. The loss of a high-maintenance hedge for a build-and-leave fence. The loss of native wildflowers, of caterpillar food plants and nectar and pollen. Of birds and bats and hedgehogs and frogs. Every day a little bit more, another chip, another slice taken from our collective pie. Who killed Cock Robin? We did. Who killed the sparrows? We did. When will we realise that there is nowhere else for these creatures to go because we have paved over every last drop of our country. That, once it’s gone, we will have only ourselves. And how boring would that be?
At the end of the path I turn right onto a country road, my boots echoing in the silence as they scuff the tarmac. They are all I can hear for a while, before I tune into birdsong: chiffchaff, song thrush, blackbird, woodpigeon, blackcap, chaffinch. In the trees, singing as they do every day, while we sit in offices or in traffic jams or our houses having existential crises, or paying some kid to cut down buddleia which he thinks is lilac and who has no idea, will never have any idea, what that shrub meant for twenty little brown birds he never knew.
Past huge country houses with their huge country gardens, past the church and its ancient cemetery, the homemade signs advertising chicken and duck eggs. The road is quiet and flanked on either side by masses of lush green nettles – I scan them for caterpillars. Nothing.
I walk on, scuffing tarmac, eating apple. A male blackbird practises his song for next spring. The sun is trying to come out but it isn’t ready yet. The wind is picking up. The footpath takes me to a farm, where I turn in and walk through outbuildings where swallows nest, to get to another path that straddles the edge of a field and a copse of woodland. A magpie stands staring at me.
In Hove they are bagging up buddleia.
The wind comes again. At first a whisper and then a howl. Summer has stolen the horizon; I can’t see for cow parsley. The trees creak as my boots sink further into mud. I push on along the wind-battered path, past brave ringlet butterflies dancing in the undergrowth. There are more trees, more wilderness. Sweet chestnuts and a hundred oaks, the ancient willow hiding its chiffchaff.
The path takes me to another field, with a good bit of hedgerow and field margin, where skipper, small tortoiseshell and meadow brown butterflies dance in the breeze. There’s space here, a huge rolling sky. Swallows chitter-chatter as they swoop to catch insects. Two yellowhammers jostle on a telephone wire while Cetti’s warblers boom in the hedgerow. I wish I could live here, instead.
I walk for ages, take a wrong turn, become hopelessly lost. I don’t care. I turn onto a road, my boots scuff the tarmac once more. I’ve been out for hours, walking along, listening to birds, looking, in vain, for caterpillars. Eventually I come out on the main road and find my way back to the car, hunger the only thing ruling me now.
At home I let myself in and tentatively let myself out again into the garden. The little boy has packed up home for the evening, the scaffolding is empty of men. I lean over the wall and see bags of buddleia lined up against the house, ready to be taken through to the bins in the road. The buddleia isn’t gone completely, maybe they’ll tackle it again tomorrow. Everything else is chopped back, destroyed, ready for its dressing of cement to stop and suppress. It’s quiet, and it takes me a while to realise it’s because the sparrows have gone. Even the rooftop gulls are quiet.
I haul myself up onto the back wall and stand on it to look over the fence. I’m te
n years old again, heartbroken, looking at my childhood wilderness destroyed to make a tennis court. There are paved gardens either side of me, at the end to the right is a bit of lawn and the smoke bush; to the left is decking and fake turf. I can’t see anything else but there’s no habitat now for house sparrows. I’ve failed. Everything I’ve worked for is pointless.
When it snows, when it really snows, everything is silenced. Everything is stopped somehow, hidden from view, put on pause. A cat streaks silently across an unseen lawn, a bird searches, in vain, for food. But there’s nothing else. There’s no wind, no flutter of leaves. No cars, no buses. No birdsong, even. August, but winter again in the garden.
I’ve fallen out of love with it. This tiny bit of earth sandwiched between cement and roads, each building housing nine or ten people. Tenants moving in or evicted, landlords making a killing. Dogs barking, children screaming. Why did I do this? Why here? I could have moved down the road to a house with a bigger garden, a proper garden. I could have lived outside the city. Why did I chose something that was already broken and that would continue to be broken? Who was I kidding that I could fix this?
I sit in my corner drinking tea. I can hear a neighbour, two doors down, pottering in her garden. If I stand up she’ll see me and I can’t face that now – awkward introductions, garden chit-chat. Her next door is smoking on the steps; above her people make breakfast in the kitchen – the smell of toast mingles with cigarette smoke as I hear the scraping of buttered knife. This space isn’t enough. It’s not big or sunny or private enough. I hate being seen. I hate having to chat to the people two doors down, hear conversations between people five doors down. When I’m gardening I want to be alone. I don’t want to be gawped at or waved at or talked to. Sometimes it’s OK, but mostly just leave me alone.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 10