Meadowland Read online

  The red seeds are a food source for finches (goldfinches in particular), and the leaves make a meal for the caterpillars of the small copper butterfly.

  At night, under gleaming stars, I stand at the edge of the meadow and inhale. I can smell the grass getting sweeter.

  Mid-May, and the curlews have stopped their singing. I miss it so.

  The curlews in the meadow are wise to keep their quiet; they have two chicks, black yarmulkes on their heads and some fancy black stripes across their eyes. They are being fed by both parents who, with meadowlife smarts, land about twenty yards from the nest and creep inconspicuously in on foot, only their crouched heads visible above the screen of rippling grass. Soon only the male will feed the gaping-mouthed young; the female curlew has done her bit. Curlews only have one brood per year.

  On occasion, I realize, the curlew adults are not flying off for food but walking to the nearby newt ditch. From under the hedge I cannot see past the thistles to the ditch; on my next visit to the field I hide, standing still, in the shadows and the stands of hazel of the copse. A human tree. The wait is worth it for the joy of seeing the curlews’ private dining: the curlews almost upend in the ditch, pulling out worms and taking insects off the surface, presumably skaters. More than once I see squiggling frogs and newts in their forceps of bills.

  While I am watching the curlews feed their young I note that the foolish meadow pipit is not entirely without guile. The female is carrying the faecal sacs of the recently hatched young and dropping them under the hedge, so the smell of the excrement will not attract predators to the nest.

  In a lazy-aired evening I dig up pignuts, whose feathery white heads gawk above the grass. The pignut is a member of the carrot family, and its tuber – which is round and cobnut-sized – is sweetly edible underneath its black husk. The knack in harvesting pignuts is to trace the thin stem down to ground level, then follow the immensely fragile long single root down to the tuber itself. Break the root thread on your 10–15cm journey down into the earth and you lose the tuber treasure. Caliban in The Tempest dug up the ‘fairy potato’ with his bare fingers; the red Devonian clay of Lower Meadow requires a spade to get through it.

  By the time I have twenty pignuts in my carrier bag, it is getting dark and the swifts are screeching around the roof of the house, and the tawny owlets are wheezily demanding food in the old quarry. I’m about halfway back up the bank when there is an almighty whirring of wings in the grass. A red grouse rockets off. Only the bird brain of the grouse knows what it was doing here, a mile or more from its mountain-top home.

  Another evening: I sit under the twin oaks, the sunlight creating Japanese willow pattern shading on the bank. I’m smelling the old brown brook, which is glugging in a noise curiously akin to water going down the plughole of the bath. Edith is swimming, head out of the water, as matrons of a certain age do. And mayflies are dropping by the dozen on to the water surface around her, spinning crazy circles, spinning themselves to death. Downstream in Periscope Pool I can hear the trout jumping. Edith emerges with sealskin shine, shakes herself and lies down beside me. It is warm, and the comfort of dogs is always reassuring.

  I’m jerked to attention from my dozing by squeaking. Daubenton’s bats are chasing down the mayflies, picking them off the water with their hobbit-hairy claws. On the brook’s edge some red-faced, out-late swallows are collecting mud for their nests.

  16 MAY Early murk, banished by an ascendant sun. Three trout lie like wooden clubs in Periscope Pool, faces upstream. They are the counterpoint to the frenzy of the rest of nature. From just after dawn, the chaffinches in Bank hedge have been feeding their four gape-mouthed hatchlings every two to three minutes. Green caterpillars are delivered in vice-beaks, borne by white-barred wings. So continuous is the activity that it becomes etched permanently on the side of the meadow scene.

  When my Parry ancestors arrived in Herefordshire nine hundred years ago, and stood on the brow of the Black Mountains and looked out over England, what did they see? A land not unlike now. There were already emerald meadows between the trees; the next village over, Maescoed, is maes-y-coed, meaning field in the wood, and was so named as early as 1139. The Wain farm along the lane draws its title from the Welsh for meadow, gwaun, and not the Middle English wain, meaning wagon.

  The oldest hedge on the farm is eight hundred years old; carved from the wildwood in the Middle Ages, the fields have hardly changed their shape since. The Georgian enclosures did not affect the Welsh Marches as permanent pasture did not follow the common three-field system of fallow/winter corn/spring corn.

  My wild field catalogue of flowers

  Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers

  Tedious and long as they may be

  To some, they never weary me.

  John Clare, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’

  The meadow buttercup, Ranunculus acris, is a serious inhabiter of pastureland and hay meadows, its abundance an index of the age of the grassland. Cattle usually avoid the plant because of its high ranunculin content, which inflames the digestive system if eaten raw, though it is trouble-free in hay. Beggars of yore used to blister their skin with buttercup juice to arouse the sympathy of passers-by, hence ‘blister plant’; country people name the meadow buttercup the crowflower, because of its acridity. And because the crow is always the omen of evil. When he was eighty William Parry of Longtown told the Victorian folklorist Ella Leather about a shepherd who was attacked on the mountain by two brothers. The shepherd told the brothers, ‘If you kill me, the very crows will cry out, and speak of it!’ The brothers ignored the warning. Thereafter, they could not go out without being mobbed by crows. Their nerves stressed and stretched, they unmasked themselves by blurting out their sin. And were hanged.

  The meadow buttercup flowers from May to August, and the first gold heads are shining loud, so that the low, crouching vixen appears to be wearing an elaborate Cleopatran crown. A small number of rabbits have hopped through from the Grove and are nibbling at the grass by the anthills. She has already had one go at the rabbits, rushing them, but the alarm was signalled by one thumping on the ground and they bolted to the burrows on the bank.

  All she has done since is lie like a sphinx in the flowery mead, and wait for the rabbits to come back. When one wanders too close, she explodes to snatch it by the neck. She is a pretty killer.

  The grass shimmies, then bows its head in racing waves before the wind. Someone has sprinkled caster sugar on the hedge. The 20th of May and the hawthorn has turned the world an eye-catching white. This is the white time. White for hawthorn blossom heaped on the hedges, white for the stitchwort growing under the hedge.

  A fox has left a territorial scat on the stone floor of the Bank gateway. I can see earth in it. Last night and the night before it rained, and was warm, and hundreds of worms were crawling over the grass. I counted ten per metre. One of the foxes has made a meal of them, but the dirt in its stomach is indigestible, hence its appearance in the fox’s excrement.

  24 MAY No, the field is not always beautiful: the dandelion flowers have been turned, by the passage of time, into seedy, pale clocks. The white time: the field has all the allure of dandruff on a school blazer.

  Note scrawled on paper, 25 May: ‘While fixing some wire across gat in Marsh hedge I disturb a hedgehog suckling three young.’ A gat is dialect for a gap, and stringing a piece of barbed wire across it is only marginally more industrious than getting the dog to sit in the hole and keep the cows from pushing through.

  But the heat was beating, the clay gone to iron, so that fixing in fence posts did not appeal.

  Herefordshire clay: it is either wet and sludgy, or hot and hard. There are about two days a year when you can work it sensibly. The heatwave has brought out the butterflies, and over the surface of the meadow there is now a constant interference of cabbage whites and meadow browns. I also see a blue butterfly I cannot identify, until I look it up in The Observer Book of Butterflies, given to me by my parents
when I was nine. A female common blue.

  On the cow parsley that sprawls into the meadow from the thicket, there are also orange-tip butterflies. White saucer blossoms of Anthriscus sylvestris, their wings closed vertically above their backs, the orange-tips are fantastically difficult to discern even though I am only inches away. The green-and-white mottling of their underwings is the acme of eye-fooling camouflage.

  The sight of the adult orange-tips nectaring prompts me to check the cuckoo flowers by the ditch to see if their caterpillars are there. After some searching, I find five green orange-tip larvae. Cuckoo flower, along with garlic mustard, is the primary food source for orange-tip young, along with each other. The caterpillars are devout cannibals.

  JUNE

  Shrew

  3 JUNE All the trees are now fully dressed, including the ash.

  Hovering above the luxuriant grass is the glow of gipsy-gold from the buttercups; my wellingtons are yellow from the flowers’ pollen. The baby-blue air is breathless, only moved by the beat of the swallows’ wings as they hawk midges over the field. But there is noise: the constant drone of hoverflies, the buzz of horseflies, the hum of bees.

  The field looks different. Not just because I am sitting down in the wild triangle, with a bumblebee’s view across a lake of grass and flowers, but when the meadow is full of flora it seems tighter and smaller, and is almost unrecognizable from the chill bleached space of winter. In the sunshine, meadow brown butterflies swarm over the grass, the males chasing off other males in their pursuit of a beguiling female.

  In the shaded but desiccated land of the hedge bottom, where I am crouched, a dun shrew runs over my leg. She is careless of my presence and pokes around in the old leaves in an amphetamine frenzy. Over the next ten minutes this tiny, long-trunked mammal puts on a horror show, although one can only admire her murderous dexterity. She dismembers five beetles with rapid movements of her jaws, before rubbing and rolling a grey slug with her snout, presumably to tenderize it. Occasionally she nips it; her saliva contains a poison that immobilizes and eventually kills the victim. She also wolfs down woodlice, preferring the Philoscia muscorum louse to Porcellio scaber. Between courses she washes assiduously. No dunce, she refuses to snack on a large black beetle that looks capable of fighting back.

  Eventually, she decides to head for home, somewhere out in the field. I follow her progress, parting the grass in her wake. Or, I should say, the flowers in her wake, because the midsummer sward is now a running floral riot of white stitchwort, gold dyer’s greenweed, purple common vetch, blue bugle . . . I almost miss the shrew’s minute burrow, which is next to a solitary oak seedling, intent on returning the field to forest.

  She is a common shrew, Sorex araneus, at 6cm about 2cm bigger than the pygmy version. Shrews require gargantuan amounts of food due to a very high metabolic rate, and a shrew can eat its own body weight in twenty-four hours. So they are almost always hunting and eating, day and night, night and day. Mammalian predators rarely eat shrews because shrews have glands on their flanks which produce a foul odour. The Latin name araneus means spider; this refers to the old belief that shrews were poisonous, like spiders. Feathered raptors, however, make a principal meal of Sorex araneus. Most birds have no sense of smell.

  Shrews mate from March, and up to four litters are produced a year. By sixteen days old the young begin to emerge from the nest, and are said to sometimes follow their mother around in a ‘caravan’, whereby a young shrew grabs the tail of the shrew in front of it, so the mother takes the lead and her offspring follow in a train.

  I would like to see such a caravan. I never have.

  A beautiful evening travels down the Bank Field and through the pignuts. Blue tits hop in and out of the hedge, cleavers slosh against its bottom. Wood pigeon are calling from the dead elm, ‘Take-two-cows, taffy take-two’. The western sun bathes the land in gentle mythic pink. Even the bog-standard galvanized field gates glow enchantingly.

  Almost the moment I reach the gate to the meadow a small jet engine starts up. Or so it sounds. The adult May bug, at 30mm long, is as easy to see as it is to hear. I duck. Melolontha melolontha has been slow to emerge this year of cold spring. So June bug then. Or cockchafer, spang beetle, or maybe billy witch, chovy, mitchamador, kittywitch and midsummer dor. Despite its fearsome size and needlepointed rear, the cockchafer is harmless. To duck out of the way appears to be an involuntary, natural reflex. The cockchafer tanks past at head height minding its own businesses, which are sex and food.

  Lying in the gateway like a chip off a varnished mahogany table, into which someone has etched stylish white triangles, is a downed cockchafer. Cockchafers are fatally attracted to light and glass, into which they hurtle at 11mph. This one probably hit the headlamps of the tractor last night. The cockchafer is not a bug but a beetle, and given its furry head and eccentric hand-like antennae a quite charming beetle. I pick it up and lay it in my open palm on its back. Its legs unfold like the Leatherman utility tool I always carry in my pocket. Perhaps it is dying of age rather than the trauma of a tractor crash. A cockchafer lives for a brief, brilliant six weeks.

  There are other cockchafers gathering in the oaks, having just risen from their white-grub life under the grass, where they chew the roots in a clandestine four-year-long infancy, to then stagger into the sky on transparent wings. The grubs are outlandish, and curl into a distinctive crescent, thick and 4cm long, when uncovered. In some regions of Britain they are known as rookworms, because the rooks seek them above all other treats. Soon the female cockchafer will begin the cycle again, on some warm night like this, when she lays her eggs in the soil, using the pointy pygidium at the end of the abdomen, which is an implement for piercing the ground, not the human epidermis.

  For an hour I sweat away in Bank Field restringing the fence along the river which the sheep are determined to push down with their rubbing to relieve itches. (The ovine way of asking to be sheared.) By the time I finish the fencing the noctule bats are seeking the lumbering cockchafers. Noctules are the peregrine falcons of the Chiroptera order. On narrow wings that measure nearly fourteen inches across, the noctules fly high over the meadow into the first stars. Then free-fall stoop. Noctules can eat on the wing. As they flutter up on their clockwork wings above me I can hear, I am sure, the sound of showering cockchafer scales.

  The noctule is the largest bat in the country and one of the few prepared to fly in open spaces. (About 10 per cent of bats are eaten by birds of prey.) Other bats are beginning to flicker into the night. Under the river alders the Daubenton is at work. Against the last light behind the mountain I can make out bats hunting down Marsh Field hedge and in among the cows. These are greater horseshoe bats after dungflies.

  June thunder. Swallows swoop in brief white whirls over a prematurely darkening meadow, always keeping low, their mouths nets to catch the congregation of insects forced down by the weather. Lightning jigs on the mountain. A whip cracks somewhere.

  Then the rain comes, heavy raindrops crashing through the tiles of oak. The fluorescent florets of the hogweed and cow parsley are beaten down; it is night at mid-evening. A fox – one of the young ones – emerges from the Grove ditch, and I think it is going to hunt rabbits but instead it rushes along the rain-lashed edge of the meadow to the earth and the dry. The fox cubs are roaming further and further afield. But on a day like this, home calls.

  In the wreckage of the evening a heron lands and stabs at something at the Grove end of the field. I cannot see what it is, only that it is being eaten; only that it is large; a baby rabbit or a rat, something of that order. On its outsize wings the heron lifts into a sky still angry, to continue on its stately patrol. The newt ditch is swollen with rain; a common newt (Triturus vulgaris) cruises in slo-mo eating tadpoles; one outsize tadpole jams in the newt’s mouth, and only after terrier-type head-shaking can the spotty aquatic lizard gulp its cousin down.

  The ripe grass, heavy with seed, has been flayed flat by the violence of the wind and
the rain. Somehow the grass, or most of it, lifts its head from its battering. The thin lance heads of the rye are most dismissive of wet; the fluffy heads of the cock’s foot and vertical pagodas of crested dog’s tail take longer to rise.

  9 JUNE I am reading Viscount Grey’s 1927 The Charm of Birds. Grey is the Foreign Secretary who took us into the Great War, the man who provided the epitaph for the prelapsarian continent: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Grey was a reluctant politician, and was always happier birding than engaging with matters of state. On 9 June 1910, however, Grey managed to mix business with pleasure, taking Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-President of the USA, on a ‘bird walk’ down the Itchen valley. During their walk they saw forty separate species of bird.

  I am troubled by the obvious question: how many would the walk provide today?

  10 JUNE One of our cows has escaped into the meadow; she is not anxious to return to the leaner pickings of Marsh Field, and displays some tantrumy head-tossing when I start herding her back. There is a funny art to cow-herding: if you stand behind a cow and stick your left arm out it will go right, and vice versa. After some windmill signalling she steadies into a sensible line of passage. Cows are not stupid; she has been caught playing truant, and knows the game is up. She walks deflatedly towards the gate into Marsh Field, me behind her, the lonely wight in the eternal picture of a man herding a cow. We are acting out time-honoured roles, and there is a kind of unspoken companionship in our journey. I pull up a grass stalk (timothy) to chew, to make the rustic simplicity complete.

  A desperate squealing in the grass. A field mouse’s nest, a ball of grass, absolutely dry despite the morning’s rain, has been spliced open by the cow’s hoof to reveal three blind, brown, sugar mice. One baby has been squashed open, and squeezed from its skin. I cover the nest as best I can, and flick away the bloody corpse with my wellington.