Dark Skies

by Tiffany Francis-Baker

  The survey technique was simple and efficient: we spread out and methodically made our way down the tunnel, checking every tiny nook and crack in the wall that might be home to a sleeping bat. Despite their wingspan, bats are tiny creatures and will fit into the smallest gap in order to feel safe and hidden from predators. Many species like underground sites like these – known as hibernacula – because they are less likely to be disturbed by light and noise, and will often provide the optimum humidity and consistently low temperature the animals need to survive a winter hibernation.

  When one of us found a bat, our expert would hurry along and carry out a few observations before moving on to the next one. We walked slowly, and it was extremely cold but exciting to be exploring such a dark and peaceful sanctuary for wildlife. At one point I even found a butterfly hibernating on the wall, tucked in a corner, wings closed, dreaming of wildflower nectar and sunshine. We finished up in the tunnel and returned to the world above ground, safe in the knowledge that sleeping away in a corner of an ancient wood in urban London, a small population of bats was alive and healthy, ready to wake up for spring in a few weeks’ time.

  One of the things I found most difficult about living in London was its sleeplessness. No matter the hour or the place, there is always movement on the air, sirens in the background, trains running, buses stopping, so many people walking through the city on their way to somewhere new. In lots of ways this is a good thing – since leaving I’ve never again been able to get pizza at 3am – but after a few months I started to find it draining. I missed the peace of night, the space to rest and recover. It wasn’t that I suffered from insomnia or that the neighbours kept us awake, but when I went to bed I knew the city was still alive, never ceasing to work, like an endless, incessant machine. Back home the streets would be quiet; birds asleep in their nests, the trees cloaked in darkness, stars pouring their energy out into the night. Despite my love of being awake at night, we are diurnal creatures, and I love the pause between one day and the next, one brief moment of peace, of reflection. London was exhilarating, but by the time I left I was exhausted by it, desperate to return to a place where I could see the sunrise and hear the dawn chorus at its natural time, not drowned out by exhaust fumes and club music.

  I thrive on peace. I love adventures, travel, nights out, all the things I should love as a twenty-something, but I also need peace and solitude. One of my favourite places to wander is Old Winchester Hill in the South Downs, a hilltop forest and Bronze Age burial site that looks over the rest of the landscape, where you can watch kestrels and kites floating through the air currents in the valley below you. Connection with nature means different things to different people, but for me it is meditative, a space to think and feel what I’m naturally inclined to think and feel, to absorb the energy of my environment. When I was in London, I found the energy stimulating but overwhelming – too much life and chaos with very little time to reflect on my day-to-day life and what I wanted to do in the future. Now I’m back home in the countryside, one of my favourite parts of a night in town is the walk back from the pub on a warm evening, past an old brick house with honeysuckle growing on the wall outside. In the balmy air of the night, the aroma of those flowers engulfs my senses and carries me all the way back home in peace.

  And yet London is one of the greenest capital cities in Europe, with one estimate claiming around 47 per cent of the city is made up of green space. From hedgehogs in Regent’s Park to almost 200 species of bird recorded on Hampstead Heath, from peregrine falcons on the Tate to the more exotic rose-ringed parakeets squawking in park woodlands – between the bricks and concrete, wildlife is still thriving. One of my favourite species, and one that is both loved and hated across the country, is the fox. According to fossil evidence, the modern red fox has been living in Europe for at least 400,000 years, and is one of the world’s species that appears to have evolved as a result of convergent evolution. This is where two species look extremely similar, not because they are from the same genetic family, but because they occupy the same ecological niche or habitat and have developed similar adaptations. One example includes dolphins and sharks, which look similar but are not related, and the same is sometimes said with foxes and cats. Although foxes are from the same family as dogs, observe them for a period of time and you will notice they have the same delicate gait as cats, the same habit of stalking and pouncing, the same curled-up position when asleep, and the same twitching tail movements.

  I remember seeing a scrappy dog fox on the way home from a night out once. We’d been at a music night in Brixton, the weather was mild and so, rather than spending money on the bus back to our flat in Streatham, we decided to grab a bag of hot chips from the kebab shop and walk home. The sky was clear after a long, warm day, but I could only see one star amid the glow of the city lights, right on the edge of the horizon so that it was barely there at all. This was Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, also known as the Dog Star as it is the brightest in the constellation Canis Major. Aside from Sirius, the night sky was stained with that rusty glow that bursts out of the heart of the city and into the air, diluting the darkness and shielding the stars from the naked eye.

  We had been walking for a few minutes, past the main buzz of Brixton and down to a quieter part of the road, when a dog fox leapt over a brick wall a few metres ahead of us. A few cars were still rolling past, and he stood frozen on the wall, watching the traffic, considering where to move next, with both his ears and tail – surprisingly bushy considering he was a city-dwelling fox – rigid and alert. Still scoffing chips and feeling relaxed by whatever was currently coursing through our bloodstream, we watched and waited to see what he might do, and after a few seconds passed he was off, scampering across the road between the cars, disappearing into a dark side alley with a flash of his tail.

  I loved seeing this fox on our way home, a glimpse of wilderness among the grey lights of south London. A few weeks later I was taking the rubbish out behind our block of flats when I found something even better. A whole family of foxes was living on our estate, lingering suspiciously by the bin shed, scrapping outside the fire exit, yapping at night when most of us were asleep. There were three adults and a couple of cubs living outside our flat, and when I first went to take the rubbish out they scurried away, wary of humans but reliant on their waste for nourishment.

  Urban foxes are thought to be more prone to mange or fleas, presumably because they feed on our waste rather than on more natural prey found in rural areas, which makes them more likely to pick up diseases. This means they can look more dishevelled than the fluffy foxes of the countryside, but the truth about mange is that it can be easily treated with medication. It’s a disease caused by a mite called Sarcoptes scabiei, and when left untreated it will eventually lead to the death of the fox. But while a mange-infected fox can look emaciated and starving, these symptoms are just caused by the fact that the fox is so irritated by the infection that he can no longer look after himself, which eventually leads to further weakening and death. Some wildlife charities provide treatment for mange free of charge, which should be placed in a batch of jam or honey sandwiches in the garden for the fox to eat.

  Fortunately the foxes outside our flat looked healthy and plump, and each night I started to look out for them from my window. One night I found them playing on the ground directly below our bedroom window, so I decided to try and feed them. We didn’t have any specific fox cuisine, so instead I sprinkled peanuts from the window and watched what they might do. Alarmed at first by a raincloud of nuts, they soon grew curious and wandered over to the dropped goods, eating them one at a time off the ground. The next day I walked down to the pet shop and bought a bag of dry dog food, and soon I was feeding the whole pack of five outside – one or two more reserved than the others, and the alpha animals gathering most of the food for themselves.

  Feeding the foxes brought me an enormous amount of joy, especially as by this point I had started to realise London wasn’t
making me happy. Being without much money, I found it more and more isolating by the day and, although my friends and boyfriend were great to hang around with, I hated not being able to leave the flat without spending money on transport. I walked down to Streatham Common from time to time but, while it was pretty and green, I couldn’t overlook the fact that I was surrounded by the city, closed in on all sides. Perhaps I had been spoilt by growing up in such a rural area, but it meant that a city park was hardly a substitute at all; it was like going to an indoor rock-climbing centre instead of climbing a real cliff face outside in the wind and sun. The Common provided me with wildlife and fresh air, but I still felt enclosed by the city and I was always aware of what lay beyond the park’s boundary.

  Staying in Streatham for most of the week, the foxes brought a touch of the wild to my own back door. I wanted to try and get closer to them, to see how wary of humans they truly were. I didn’t want to tame them – even if I could – because I knew my place there was only temporary, and I didn’t want to put them in danger of interacting with other people who might try and hurt them. But I wanted to see how close I could get, at least on ground level rather than peering down from my bedroom window.

  The following day I was walking back from the bus stop and decided to see if I could find something more tempting for the foxes to eat. I found a packet of lamb’s liver in the corner shop for 75p, and that night I decided to walk down to the fire exit and wait quietly for the foxes to appear. It was early autumn and still warm, so I sat and waited, voices floating out of the windows of other apartments. After half an hour, a fox appeared from behind the bin. It was one of the teenage cubs, probably born that spring but now almost fully grown, and I could see he was curious with that invincibility of youth. I took a lump of liver from the packet and gently threw it over, which made him run away again behind the bin shed. I waited. A few minutes passed, and a head reappeared behind the wall, staring at me and the lump of meat on the floor.

  One paw emerged from behind the wall and stepped forwards, followed by another, more hesitant, and slowly the fox walked back over to the piece of meat and stared at it, head cocked, ears twitching. As I watched, he bent his head down, sniffed the air and started to eat the slice of liver. I sat motionless, hardly daring to move but aware that he would finish it and be off again within half a minute. He looked over to where I was sitting, but just as I reached for another piece, he ran away. I threw the other piece over and, again, after a few minutes he returned to the same spot to eat it up. Again I threw a piece of meat and again he retreated, but this time not all the way behind the wall, just far enough to gauge the situation. And this time, when he returned to the same spot, he was followed by one of the other foxes, a larger one this time – a grown adult.

  I spent the night feeding them slivers of offal, and by the time it was all gone my hands were soaked in fresh blood, the foxes’ bellies full of the scraps of meat nobody else wanted. Despite my concrete, treeless surroundings, and despite the fact that the light pollution had washed away the stars, I was full of joy at being able to connect with something so wild in the heart of the city. These foxes were ragged and mischievous, and I was probably breaking some city law by feeding them, but for the first time in a while I was able to feel the same euphoria that comes from enveloping yourself in nature, the feeling I had every day at home that I had been sorely missing since moving to the bright and busy city.

  Unsurprisingly, I didn’t last much longer in London after that. In January I spent a weekend at home for my birthday and realised how miserable I felt going back to the city, so I broke up with my boyfriend, moved out of the flat and back in with my parents. Not exactly every twenty-something’s dream, but I was so happy to be back with my family, back in the countryside, back in our silly market town where too many people read the Daily Mail and everyone cares way too much about bin-collection dates. This was where I wanted to be, and although it was strange to be back to the start, back to my hometown where I’d kissed my first boyfriend and drunk my first bottle of vodka, it felt right. Then, around a year after moving home, I met Dave on a night out for a friend’s birthday, and everything fell into place.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Under Dark Skies

  Easter has never been a biblical time for me; I have an interest in religious stories from a cultural point of view, but I get more excitement from chocolate eggs, daffodils and simnel cake. The best part about Easter, however, is the four-day bank-holiday weekend, and one year – always keen to make use of extra time off – we slipped away to the West Country to explore Cheddar Gorge, the Somerset Levels and Exmoor.

  We spent the first day wandering through Cheddar, watching feral goats clambering up the cliff edges, feeling the cool dampness of the rocks that descended underground and formed the famous Cheddar Caves. I remembered coming here as a child, when we visited a series of limestone caves known as Wookey Hole, formed over thousands of years as the natural acid found in groundwater had slowly dissolved the rocks. Archaeologists believed they had been used by humans for around 45,000 years, with Palaeolithic tools found among fossilised animal remains, as well as evidence of Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman occupation. The caves have a constant temperature of 11°C, creating the perfect coolness and humidity for maturing the now-famous Cheddar cheese.

  One of the stalagmites that had formed inside the caves was now known as the Witch of Wookey Hole, originating from an old legend about a monk from the nearby New Age town of Glastonbury. The story goes that a witch once lived in the darkness of Wookey Hole and, jilted by her lover, had vowed to spend the rest of her days putting curses on young couples in love to sabotage their happiness. One day, a man became engaged to a girl he loved in the village of Wookey, but not long afterwards the witch found them and cursed them, causing their romance to fail. The man believed he could never love again and became a monk, while seeking revenge on the witch who had ruined his happiness. He stalked the witch into her cave, where she hid in the darkness by an underground river. The monk blessed the water and splashed it into the shadows, where it fell upon the witch and immediately petrified her into stone, and she remains there to this day. The story is also connected with the 1,000-year-old skeleton of a woman discovered in the caves in 1912. The remains were excavated and now lie in the Wells and Mendip Museum, although some believe her spirit will not rest until she is brought back to the caves where she belongs.

  After a long day climbing through Cheddar Gorge, on Easter Sunday we woke up next to the King’s Sedgemoor Drain, where the night before we had parked the camper van to watch the sunset over the water with two bottles of the local cider. We took an early-morning swim in the river, and then walked up to see where local conservation groups had installed eel passes on one of the sluice gates. The Drain is an artificial drainage channel that diverts water from the peat moors of King’s Sedgemoor to reduce the risk of flooding. It was built towards the end of the eighteenth century and is now a haven for wildlife, including the glass eel, whose numbers have fallen to less than 5 per cent of their 1980s population.

  The origin of glass eels was a mystery for hundreds of years, as British anglers never caught anything that looked like a young glass eel, and naturalists couldn’t work out where they came from. Aristotle even speculated that they were related to earthworms, which he believed grew out of the mud. Scientists have since discovered that freshwater eels carry out phenomenal journeys to spawn in the ocean, travelling as far as the Sargasso Sea to reproduce before returning to English rivers. Like salmon, they swim upstream and therefore have to overcome numerous obstacles to return to our rivers, one of which is the modern sluice gate like those found in the King’s Sedgemoor Drain. As part of a scheme funded by the European Union, eel passes are now being installed to help them climb over sluice gates, and in 2008 one was installed on the King’s Sedgemoor Drain, on a sluice called the Greylake.

  We arrived at the gate, but to my disappointment the sluice was barricaded off by a barbe
d-wire fence. I knew what the passes looked like and where they would be. Eels are strong swimmers and climbers, and in order for them to move over the sluice, scientists had designed passes that were essentially strips of artificial grass that the eels could slither over and into the next section of water. The passes were hidden at the edge of the sluice, and from our angle we were unable to see them, so we checked we were alone and that the fence was strong enough to hold our body weights, and then climbed around the perimeter of the fence so that we were almost dangling into the water. From there we could look down onto the sluice and see the eel passes. The eels travelled at night, so we didn’t expect to see any, but it felt good to see these little strips of artificial grass tucked away, a reminder that wildlife can thrive in the modern world if we just make room for it. Pleased with our mischief, we clambered back before anyone could see us, then headed back to the camper van and started driving to our next destination: Nether Stowey.

  We travelled west for half an hour before arriving at the pretty village of Nether Stowey just outside the Quantock Hills, a hill range and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty stretching out towards the Bristol Channel. We had come to visit another of the National Trust properties I had wanted to see for many years – Coleridge Cottage, where the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived for three years and wrote some of his finest works, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. It is also the gateway to the Coleridge Way, an 82km walk across the Quantocks and Exmoor, and a favourite rambling route for Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth who walked extensively through the district and composed much of their Lyrical Ballads poetry collection while reflecting on the surrounding landscape. After an afternoon wandering around the cottage and gorging on ginger loaf in the tearoom, we left Nether Stowey behind and headed out for an early-evening ramble along the Coleridge Way. We couldn’t quite manage the 82km route before work on Tuesday morning, so instead we set out on a circular section that would take us across the landscape, starting at dusk and finishing under the stars, bringing us back to the warm camper van and the kettle.