Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (16 page)

When I hear a sedge warbler singing, I am always struck by how different he sounds from his cousin. In contrast with the dull, repetitive and rather monotonous reed warbler, the sedge warbler is a manic little thing, the notes tumbling out of his bill as if, in his eagerness to deliver the message, he is tripping over his own tongue.

Sedge warblers – at least those I come across in Somerset – often sing from a high and prominent perch, giving me the chance to see their extraordinary orange
gape
. Sometimes, a singing bird will get so carried away he will launch himself into the air, fluttering momentarily against the summer sky before parachuting back down to his perch. Why the sedge warbler should be so confident, while the reed warbler is so shy, I have no idea. But as the reed warbler chunters away deep inside the reeds, it almost seems as if he is tutting disapprovingly at his relative’s exhibitionist tendencies.

Another big difference between the two species is the way each chooses to migrate. Watching a brood of juvenile reed warblers clambering tentatively around the reeds, I find it hard to believe they could fly much further than the next rhyne. Yet in three or four months’ time they will head off, hopping across the English Channel to the Low Countries, before turning south-west across France and Iberia, and then on to north-west Africa. From there they will continue south, travelling by night in short hops, until they end up in West Africa.

In keeping with their more extrovert personality, when it comes to migration, sedge warblers adopt an all-or-nothing strategy. They make more or less the same journey as the reed warbler, but do so in one or two giant leaps rather than a series of short hops. A naturalist friend of mine memorably describes the contrasting strategies as ‘trickle and bounce’.

To prepare for their marathon flight, sedge warblers must put on weight, and lots of it. As early as July they start feeding on reed aphids, an ephemeral but sometimes
abundant
source of food. They lay down fat deposits beneath their skin, which appear as thick, orange-yellow blotches on birds I have seen in the hand. Once they have reached a critical mass – having almost doubled their body weight to about an ounce – they set off, some flying the three thousand miles or so to their winter quarters in a single go, straight across the Mediterranean and Sahara Desert.

Once they have left our shores, it is another seven months before they return. But next April and May, as I cycle the lanes of the parish, I shall once again hear the excitable flourish of the sedge warbler, and the steady drone of the reed warbler, echoing from the watery rhynes. For me, the arrival of these two little miracles will be the final sign that winter is well and truly over. And once again, as I do every spring, I shall try to imagine an army of millions of these birds as they swarm northwards across Europe, arriving in communities from Galway in the west to the Urals in the east, and as far north as Varanger Fiord, on the edge of the Arctic. And here, to our village in Somerset.

O
N THE CORNER
of Perry Road and Blackford Road, next to Mill Batch Farm, a tumbledown brick building stands next to a small, unassuming tree, covered with small, curled, lime-green leaves. As they unfurl they reveal
their
rounded shape, coming to a shallow point at the tip, with a downy texture on the underside. For those of us who grew up before the 1970s, the shape and feel of these leaves is strangely familiar.

For this is the tree of my childhood: an elm. A row of elms used to back onto the garden of the house where I was brought up, creating a visual and aural barrier between us and the increasingly busy lane behind. But a few years later they began to wither and die, and were chopped down before they fell of their own accord. They were the victims of a scourge which all but removed this famous tree from the landscape of lowland Britain: Dutch elm disease.

Sadly the elm by Mill Batch Farm, despite its currently healthy appearance, will never grow into the magnificent, full-sized tree I can still recall. In a few years’ time, a small beetle will invade the growing bark, and slowly but surely kill off its future. The same story is repeated throughout Britain, where the elm has become a ‘ghost tree’, present only in the form of these young saplings whose future is doomed. It is as if a whole generation of children has been blighted with some terrible inherited disease, which will never allow them to reach adulthood.

The reason for the elm’s universal susceptibility to Dutch elm disease lies in its reproductive method. The English elm does not spread itself by seeds dispersing on the air, but by using suckers. This may be a highly efficient method, but it creates an Achilles heel: genetically, the
trees
are virtually identical, which means they are unable to develop resistance to the foreign invader.

Elms were never celebrated as much as the oak, but they were always a part of village life, growing along lanes and field boundaries throughout the country. When they disappeared, it was as if the heart had been torn out of the British countryside. Today the full-grown elm survives mainly in the works of landscape artist Rowland Hilder, which my mother used to hang above the mantelpiece: majestic avenues of tall trees, disappearing into the autumn mist.

B
Y MID
-M
AY
, the broad hedgerows along the back lanes are in full flush. Unlike those few hedges that remain on the plains of East Anglia, or the high banks down the road in Devon, these are low, broad and solid – often wider than they are high.

They are created from a range of woody and thorny plants, including hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble and dog rose, and together they form a dense and impenetrable barrier dividing the fields, or between fields and lanes. Along with the rhynes and droves, they are the most typical feature of the parish landscape, and also one that is vitally important for wildlife.

For a few weeks at this time of year, the hedgerows are lined with a narrow strip of white: cow parsley, also known,
rather
more poetically, as Queen Anne’s lace. This is surely the most familiar plant of rural Britain; there can hardly be a lane, road, or carriageway in the countryside where these tall, rangy plants cannot be seen during May and June.

In his delightfully quirky botanical history,
An Englishman’s Flora
, Geoffrey Grigson lists more than fifty different local names for this familiar plant, many of which refer to its use as a food for livestock, including sheep as well as cows. Others, such as ‘devil’s parsley’, are more sinister, and are probably a result of confusing this plant with its similar but deadly poisonous relative, hemlock.

Take a closer look at cow parsley, and in the centre of each tightly packed cluster of tiny white flowers you will see half a dozen or more tiny flies, which will help to pollinate the plant and continue its domination of our country lanes. But in the past few years, the cow parsley has had to compete with a brash, colourful newcomer. Tall green stems, each topped with a cluster of vivid yellow flowers, have sprung up everywhere. In some of the village lanes they threaten to overwhelm the incumbent plants, so complete is their dominance.

They have an unfair advantage; for this is no native hedgerow flower, but oil-seed rape. It is the product of agricultural policies that for many years have subsidised food production, with little or no thought for the consequences to the wider countryside and its wildlife. Agricultural plants have always escaped their field boundaries and cropped up elsewhere, and odd stems of wheat,
barley
and oats are a common sight throughout Britain. But there is something more sinister about rape: for true to its name, it doesn’t just mix with the native wildflowers, but overwhelms them. The vibrant colour draws attention to itself like a footballer’s wife in the royal enclosure at Ascot: the yellow is somehow unnatural, its electric brightness making it look as if it were created in a laboratory rather than in a field.

Rape has a long history as a cultivated plant. A member of the Brassica family, which includes cabbages, cauliflowers and turnips, it was grown for its oil in civilisations around the Mediterranean at least 3,000 years ago. It probably came to Britain with Bronze Age settlers; if not, the Romans certainly brought it here as a fuel for lighting. Having fallen out of fashion when we began to exploit fossil fuels, rape staged a major comeback in the latter part of the twentieth century, as a source of animal feed. Soon afterwards, those characteristic patches of bright yellow began to appear all over our countryside. It is still relatively scarce in these parts, where arable crops are rarely grown; but there is enough to produce these feral escapees, which dominate our waysides for a few weeks each May.

F
ROM ONE RAMPAGING
alien plant, to a sadly declining native bird: the nightingale. The nightingale is a paradox.
No
other British bird has been so celebrated in verse and folklore, yet is so seldom seen. No other bird has such an extraordinary song, yet is so dull in appearance. And no other bird captures our imagination quite like this small, brown relative of the robin. Which given how scarce and elusive it is, might at first seem rather odd; until, that is, you witness the nightingale’s performance for yourself.

Since moving to Somerset I have not had that pleasure, so on a fine May evening I decide to put things right. I head a few miles south of the parish, to the RSPB’s West Sedgemoor reserve. Before the main event, I take a brief stroll, and finally catch up with another elusive bird: the cuckoo. For a few minutes, as the sun sets, I enjoy the spectacle of a trio of cuckoos, with one male chasing a female from bush to bush, as another calls in the distance.

By now I am ready to hear the solo performance of the nightingale. The song arrives out of nowhere, just as I am wandering back towards the car park, alongside a dense row of hawthorns. Two or three notes are all it takes for me to realise the identity of the songster. After tuning up, he delivers the full version: an unstoppable flood of deep, rich tones, interspersed with bizarre, mechanical sounds, which blend together to create this unique and unmistakable song.

Many have tried to describe the song of the nightingale; few have succeeded. But the novelist H. E. Bates certainly comes close:

It has some kind of electric, suspended quality that

has a far deeper beauty than the most passionate of

its sweetness. It is a performance made up, very often,

more of silence than of utterance
…

‘More of silence than of utterance …’ – the Harold Pinter of the bird world, perhaps. The popular songwriter Eric Maschwitz also celebrated the bird in the lyrics of his famous wartime song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. And it is impossible to ignore the best-known poem about this species – perhaps about any British bird – John Keats’s famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

But what about the subject of all this poetic attention – what exactly is a nightingale? The answer is something of an anticlimax. For the nightingale is just one of more than two hundred members of a family which includes the familiar robin, and various kinds of chats and flycatchers. Unlike its more colourful relations, such as the redstart, wheatear and bluethroat, it is essentially dull rufous-brown above, and paler beneath, with a reddish tinge to its tail.