Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (14 page)

B
ACK IN THE
depths of that bitter winter, Tealham Moor was both beautiful and virtually lifeless. Beautiful, because plummeting temperatures had fixed the fluid, watery landscape into a permanent vision of white. A layer
of
ice had hardened the surface of the rhynes, and turned the water meadows into a skating rink, while a wafer-thin layer of frost coated every hedgerow, bush and blade of grass.

Lifeless, because with access to the water denied, the thousands of birds that usually feed here had fled south and west in search of ice-free landscapes. Only a single, solitary bird, a reed bunting, flitted along the edge of the frozen rhyne, in a vain attempt to find something – anything – to eat.

Now, towards the end of April, the scene has been utterly transformed: for with water and sunshine comes life. Skylarks sing their aerial song for hours on end, kestrels hover in search of voles, and dozens of mute swans graze the meadows. Meanwhile lapwings and redshanks perform their noisy aerial displays in the sky, above their tight clutches of eggs, safely hidden in the long grass below.

In a poll to find the most handsome wader in Britain, the lapwing would be hard to beat. At a distance, as they fly acrobatically above the wet meadows of the moor, they appear black and white. But when they land they reveal their true colours. As on an artist’s palette, these are not distinct, but a swirling mixture of shades: greens, browns and purples, their edges blurring into one another, and changing as the bird turns in the spring sunlight. These are set off by bright white underparts, an orange-ochre patch beneath the tail, and that slightly comical crest,
which
always looks as if it has been stuck on to the bird’s head as an afterthought.

The lapwing’s neighbour, the redshank, is not bad-looking at this time of year either. It has changed from the dull grey-browns of winter into a fine-looking creature: dark, almost chocolate-brown, spangled with paler spots, with orange-red legs and base to its bill. When it flies, it reveals telltale white flashes along the trailing edge to the wing, which together with the three-note alarm call have earned it the nickname ‘sentinel of the marsh’.

Where the lapwings and redshanks patrol along the edge of their territories, custard-yellow dandelions grow in their tens of thousands, while a more subtle plant, lady’s smock, also studs the grass with its pale lilac blooms. During the ice and snow this delicate little wild flower, a cousin of the watercress, retreated into the soil; but now, with the warmer temperatures and sunshine, it has emerged to add its contribution to the beauty of the scene. The name refers to its apparent resemblance to the smocks commonly worn by country women in Tudor times; while an alternative folk name, ‘cuckoo-flower’, nods to its appearing at the same time as that returning bird.

Butterflies love lady’s smock, as shown by the profusion of green-veined whites and orange-tips on the moor at this time of year. One green-veined white flutters on top of his mate, closing his wings to reveal the pattern beneath; delicate greenish stripes on a background of
pale
lemon-yellow. But he has become carried away in his eagerness to breed, and as he flies off, she remains stuck in the mud at the edge of the rhyne, vainly flapping her wings in an effort to escape.

Every now and then, a small, bright, yellow object appears to detach itself from the carpet of dandelions covering the moor, and flies through the air in a bouncing motion. The yellow wagtail is a beguiling bird, but its numbers are rapidly declining. Thanks to the wildlife-friendly farming here on the moor, a tiny population of yellow wagtails continues to find sanctuary here. Even so, they remain very vulnerable: a passing cow may tread on the nest, crushing the clutch of five or six tiny, pale buff eggs; or the dark shape of a passing merlin may grab this colourful bird clean out of the air, ending its brief life in a moment.

The male wagtail perches on a prominent twig, barely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He struggles to keep his balance in the breeze, fanning his broad tail, before flying off to grab a small insect. He always returns to the same perch, for as well as feeding, he must continue to defend his territory against incoming males.

Meanwhile a constant battle is being fought between the breeding waders and the local crows. A dark, brooding presence, they sit on fence posts around the periphery of the moor, or patrol overhead, alert to any opportunity to grab unguarded eggs. All day long, and every day during the spring, the sound of lapwings fills the air, as they try to
drive
away the much larger crows. In turn, the crows mob any buzzard that has the temerity to pass overhead, seeing it away with harsh, angry cries.

As a child, I remember finding a lapwing’s nest on a patch of waste ground near my home in the London suburbs. I can still see the neat clutch of four pear-shaped, olive-brown eggs with dark blotches, staring up at me from the grassy tussock where they were hidden. Today, lapwings have disappeared from there, and indeed from most of the wider countryside, and breed only on nature reserves or specially managed farmland such as here on Tealham Moor.

Some might wonder why it matters that lapwings, and many other once-common farmland birds, have declined. But as well as the loss to our natural heritage, lapwings are also part of our cultural inheritance. And just as, in the words of John Donne, ‘any man’s death diminishes me’, so the loss of the lapwing, the skylark and many other familiar birds of the British countryside diminishes us too.

A
NOTHER SPECIES OF
wader, the whimbrel, occasionally passes through the parish on its spring migration north. This is the smaller, neater relative of the more familiar curlew, with a slightly shorter, downcurved bill, and a bold dark stripe above its eye.

One of the annual highlights here on the Somerset Levels used to be flocks of whimbrel, sometimes numbering in their hundreds, passing through at the end of April en route from West Africa to Iceland and Scandinavia. Today they still occasionally appear, but in far lower numbers than before. Their characteristic call, a rapid series of seven fluty notes, is often the first clue to the birds’ presence, as they float down onto the moor to feed and rest before setting forth on their journey once again.

Very occasionally an even rarer migratory wader also stops off here. The wood sandpiper is a bird of boggy swamps of the north, nesting from Scandinavia all the way across Eurasia to Kamchatka, with a tiny population in the far north of Scotland, and wintering in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Australia.

The pair of wood sandpipers feeding unobtrusively on Tealham Moor on a cool, damp, spring day have come, like the whimbrel, from Africa. Sleek and long-legged, they are very attractive waders, with a pale, spangled appearance. They use their delicate, slender bills to pick off insect food as they pass across the meadow. We are lucky to see them at all: although wood sandpipers sometimes stop off here as they travel south in autumn, in spring they are in a hurry to breed, so usually fly straight overhead.

Our country is important as a transit lounge for birds like these, passage migrants, birds which neither breed nor spend the winter here, but simply stop off on their way north and south each spring and autumn. So just as
we
have a responsibility for our resident birds such as the lapwing and skylark, our summer visitors, the swallow and house martin, and our winter visitors, the redwing and fieldfare, so we owe these passing creatures the same duty of care. The way we farm Tealham Moor, and other places up and down the country, doesn’t just benefit our local birds. It also helps those like the whimbrel and wood sandpiper, which stop off here for a few days – or even just a few hours – on their global travels.

A
T ABOUT THIS
time of year, a far less welcome visitor turns up in the fields and gardens of the parish. It is a large, ungainly, black insect, named St Mark’s fly because it generally appears on or around 25 April, the feast day of St Mark.

It is a very common sight here, swarming en masse across any area of grassland it can find, its long legs dangling as if it has forgotten to lift them up towards its body. The males can, with a good view, be told apart from the larger females by their bulbous-looking eyes, giving them a rather unbalanced, front-heavy appearance, as if they are about to crash to the ground.

Having emerged in late April, St Mark’s flies usually stay around until May or June, though their numbers are depleted by the predations of birds which take advantage of this unexpected bounty of easily caught food. The flies
also
help to pollinate the many apple trees in the orchards of the parish, while their larvae aid the process of decomposition by feeding on decaying vegetable matter, often in compost heaps. So even though the St Mark’s fly is not a particularly attractive insect, it is certainly a very useful one.

O
N THE FINAL
day of the month, as dusk cloaks the lanes, fields and hedgerows, the air is still filled with birdsong. Above the rest of the evening chorus, one bird continues to reign supreme: the song thrush. He sits on our chimney pot, spotted breast and throat vibrating as he delivers his clear, strident and melodic tune, a full two months or more after he first began to sing.

From the garden next door, another thrush answers him, seeming to fill in the gaps in his tune with its own. To the east, south, north and west, in every corner of the parish, more song thrushes are singing too, so that the air above is filled with their sound.

Somewhere close to each singing male, a female sits tightly on her clutch of four or five sky-blue eggs, speckled delicately with tiny spots of black; those precious objects Hopkins called ‘little low heavens’. Underneath her body, cosseted by her soft feathers, the eggs stay warm. Inside each egg, a tiny thrush-to-be is growing. I like to think it is listening to the muffled song of its father, high above.

MAY BEGINS, AS
April ended, with the sound of the song thrush, its clear, strident notes heralding the dawn, in the few seconds the sun takes to cross the parish from Poolbridge Farm in the east to the Watchfield Inn in the west.