Christmas Eve greetings

"It is an hour or so before dusk, on Christmas Eve, and the landscape has turned completely monochrome.  Far away to the north-east, at King's College Chapel in Cambridge, a lone chorister is singing the opening notes of 'Once in Royal David's City', a moment for me that always marks the true beginning of Christmas."
Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

The Adoration of the Magi     Peter Paul Rubens

Altarpiece in King's College Chapel

Wishing all my fellow bloggers a joyous Christmas!

December: the Somerset Levels

I have been dipping into Wild Hares and Humming Birds for more than a year now,  a city flat-dweller marking the beginning of each month with a glimpse of life in the countryside. My images of the  county now are mostly memories of our holiday journeys, as the M5 traffic crawled across the Somerset Levels, and the thoughts the landscape evoked of fugitives after Monmouth's disastrous defeat at Sedgemoor in 1685.
So Stephen Moss's monthly record of the seasons in one village have been both thought-provoking and reassuring.

"A couple of miles beyond the River Brue,  the southern boundary of the parish, another winter dawn  breaks over Catcott Lows.  As the mist rises from the the cold ground, revealing the silhouette of Glastonbury Tor, I begin to lose any sense of feeling in my fingertips.  All around me a shrill chorus of whistles pierces the chill air.  It is the unmistakable sound of hundreds of wigeon, the most striking and handsome of all our dabbling ducks.  ….."

Photo © Peter Moore

"Of all the birds here before me, the wigeon have travelled the furthest.  Although a few hundred pairs breed in northern Britain, their numbers are massively swelled each autumn, when close to half a million birds arrive here from their breeding grounds in Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia.  Because these areas freeze up during the winter, the wigeon must travel southwards and westwards, seeking out the more benevolent, maritime climate of Britain and Ireland.

Here on the Somerset Levels we have our fair share of these engaging ducks, but another winter visitor from Siberia, Bewick's swan, has all but disappeared. Named after the nineteenth-century engraver, publisher and political radical, Thomas Bewick, small flocks of these wild swans have always spent the winter here, filling the air with their yelping cries,  But in the past decade numbers have fallen away, and nowadays only a handful overwinter on the levels.  Most are well to the south, in the vast waterlogged fields around the villages of Muchelney, Stoke St Gregory and Curry Rivel, whose very names reflect the long and fascinating history of this landscape.

Even without Bewick's swans though, the sight and sound of more than a thousand dabbling ducks lifts the spirits. My encounter with them reinforces the continuity of this place and its wildlife over time, much in the same way as the distant backdrop of Glastonbury Tor reminds me of our human presence here across the centuries. "

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

A boy birdnesting - tailpiece in The History of Birds Vol.II 1804  Thomas Bewick

November 1st: " Some are weather-wise, some are other-wise."*

"All Saints' Day, at the beginning of November, often marks a dramatic change in the weather, as the last traces of summer finally fade, and the true character of autumn is revealed.  Some years this is marked by hard frosts, but our unpredictable climate means that dank, wet weather is equally likely.

Channel  Neil Murison   Royal West of England Academy  © the artist

When the Atlantic weather systems dominate, wave after wave of depressions sweep across that vast ocean, and funnel up the Bristol Channel, bringing more rain to an already sodden landscape.  The ground soaks up the extra water for a while, but as the weeks go by the roads are awash with muddy puddles, while little pools begin to form on the fields.  Day after day, the west wind whips across this flat, open land, battering the stunted trees and hedges into submission."

Black Wing  Peter Lanyon   British Council collection  © Sheila Lanyon

And later in the month:    "….a crow sounds a high-pitched cry of alarm.  A small taut shape shoots out of the hawthorn hedgerow: a male sparrow hawk, twisting and turning in pursuit of a bird not much smaller than he is; his T-shaped silhouette shooting low across the landscape as clouds of birds panic in the skies above.
A few minutes later, the sparrow hawk has moved on, and the fieldfares settled back into the topmost twigs of the hawthorns,  A constant, soft chattering sound fills the air, as if they are discussing the event I have just witnessed.  Fanciful, I know, but this murmur of sound is clearly a response to the passing of the predator.

The more time I spend in the parish, the more I become sensitive to these subtle changes in sight and sound.  This is a skill all naturalists pick up over the years, but it is heightened on my journey through time and seasons in the same, small, enclosed space.  It goes much deeper than mere knowledge; and almost feels as if I am becoming part of the landscape and its wildlife.  I find it comforting to know that as I get older, and my physical horizons begin to diminish, I shall never get bored with what I see, hear and find in this country parish."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

* from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac

October: autumn's changes

October: Twelve Months of Flowers  Jacob van Huysum, early 18th century

©  Fitzwilliam Museum

"I mow the lawn for what I hope will be the last time this autumn; though in some years another cut is required in November, or even December.  Instead of  the grass-moths of spring and summer, long-legged craneflies leap from beneath the mower's blades, bouncing away in search of an uncut patch of sward where they can hide from predators.

Despite the warmth, signs of autumn are more and more visible; not least in the absence of those pink and purple flowers that lined the rhynes and hedgerows during the past few months.  Purple loosestrife, which only a few weeks ago was still flowering in any damp corner, has gone to seed, while only a few sad, drooping fronds of willow-herb remain.  Clouds of midges still hang in the air in more sheltered areas; but within a week or so I shall hear the high-pitched call of returning redwings in the night sky; and soon afterwards feel the crunch of early-morning frosts beneath my boots."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

September: "Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whoo!"*

Marazion Marsh   Harold C. Harvey, 

© Penlee House Museum & Gallery

"Now that September is here, the nights are gradually drawing in.  By 8 p.m. the sun has set, and the sky is almost dark.  Outside the Old Vicarage, a hundred yards or so east of the village shop, a bird is perched on the telegraph wires: those same wires where, a few months ago, the first swallow of the summer was sitting.

The bird is a tawny owl.  It sits on the topmost wire, unnoticed by drivers passing beneath on their journey home from work.  Occasionally it twists its head slowly from side to side; though even when a medium-sized bat passes closely by it takes no notice.  After a few minutes, it drops off the wire on soft, silent wings, disappearing into the dense foliage of a sycamore.  In an hour or so, when the remaining glimmer of light has finally been enveloped by darkness, it will go hunting, listening for the rustling of hidden rodents below."
Wild Hares & Humming Birds  Stephen Moss

When I was young, we would look for solitary owls sitting on telegraph poles in the dusk along country lanes, almost indistinguishable from the ceramic insulators.  Just like this little owl in Dobrogea, Romania,  featured in the Daily Mail newspaper.

* "Tu-whit, tu-whoo!" Love's Labour's Lost, Winter song,  W. Shakespeare

August: Royal Wilding to Redstreak, and Somerset harvests

The Haymakers (La Recolte du Foins)  Julien Dupre  1881

"Back in 1851, the census listed more than seventy farms in the parish, most of them less than fifty acres in area.  These were, as you might expect from this lush, wet area, mainly dairy farms producing milk, butter and cheese; although sheep, pigs and poultry were also kept in good numbers.  These animals - and the meat they produced -  were fuelled by the main crop of the parish: hay.  Even in the 1950s haymaking was still a common sight, and one villager recalls that any ricks left untouched the following spring  would be colonised by nesting birds.  Today, it's almost all silage.

The other major crop was, of course, apples; still used to make Somerset's traditional drink, cider.  Cider-making dates back at least to the thirteenth century (and probably far longer).  The boom time for planting orchards was the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth. In those days, cider was mainly for drinking at home rather than for commercial sale, using long-forgotten varieties of apple with wonderfully evocative names:  Royal Wilding, Flood-Hatch, Woodcock, Red-Hedge Pip, Old Jeffrey and Redstreak.  Odd clumps of cider-apple trees still grow in gardens all over the parish, including my own.  Their fruit is pale, bitter and, unfortunately, completely inedible."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

And here are some rather more genteel Haymakers by George Stubbs (1785)  on view at Tate Britain.

July: pond-dipping and Jenny Greenteeth

"By July, the waters of the parish - ditches, rhynes and cuts, carefully demarcated according to size - are thronged with life.  Yet as I walk or cycle past, all I see are various shades of green: the dark, turbid carpet of blanketweed, ranging from near black to moss-green; and the paler, lime-green film of duckweed.  Beneath this covering, below the water's surface, life is no doubt thriving.

Time for a spot of pond dipping.  As a child we did this all the time, though it wasn't such an organised activity as the term 'pond-dipping' suggests; we just went out with our nets and jam jars and fished for tiddlers.
….  The surface of the water is alive with activity, another good sign.  Mayflies are here, as are dozens of whirligig beetles, whizzing insanely around like dodgem cars, but never actually crashing into each other.  Peter nets some and we take a closer look: the black shell appearing almost silver, as if a small drop of mercury has been applied to its surface.  The next pass of the net produces more treasures, which are swiftly transferred to a white metal dish, of the type we used to see in doctors' surgeries….

Meanwhile, Daisy and Charlie are catching fish by the netful: tiny silvery creatures rather like miniature whitebait.  A closer look reveals three small spines -- sticklebacks, of course.  We explain the stickleback's extraordinary life cycle to the children -- how the males make a nest and look after the young  -- but they are more interested in catching even more fish.  These include a few browner individuals without the spine: minnows.

Stickleback and Nest,  F. Whymper   

Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, Washington University

A smaller rhyne, just across the road, is covered with lime-green: the run-of-the-mill common duckweed, and the larger giant duckweed, a deep auburn-red in colour.  Duckweed's ability to completely cover the surface of the water, giving an illusion of solidity, has given rise to a chilling folk tale*: the story of Jenny Greenteeth.  Jenny is supposed to lure little children into her watery lair by tempting them to walk on the solid-looking duckweed, causing them to fall through and drown.  My own children watch agog as I relate this story, presumably designed to warn earlier generations of the perils of venturing too near water.

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

*Also known as grindylows,  greenskinned water hags with long hair and sharp teeth, especially in the north;  possibly a throwback to the lake-dwelling monsters, Grendel and his mother, in the Old English poem Beowulf.   In Kevin Crossley-Holland's translation,  when Beowulf dives into the lake,

"the seething water
received the warrior.  A full day elapsed
before he could discern the bottom of the lake.
……vindictive, ravenous for blood, …
Then she grasped him, clutched the Geat [Beowulf]
in her ghastly claws;…"

June blossoms

Twelve Months of Flowers:  June    Jacob van Huysum

© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

"A spell of warm sunny weather early this month means that along the lanes, every hedgerow, bush and tree looks as if it is about to burst; and as I stare intently at one hawthorn I can almost see the foliage growing outwards by the minute.  Surely, if this fine weather continues, the trunks, branches and twigs will be unable to contain the green force within, and will simply explode.

On a warm muggy evening, the volcano-like silhouette of Brent Knoll is bathed in yellow sunshine as it pokes through horizontal fingers of cloud.  Opposite, towards Glastonbury Tor, a thick layer of grey fills half the sky, its folds and pleats as untidy as a teenager's duvet.  A broad, squat section of rainbow is just visible in the gap between the cloud base and the distant Mendip Hills, its layered bands of colour illuminating the sky.

…At this time of year, the walls around the parish are suddenly ablaze with a striking flower, red valerian, whose colour and texture remind me of something out of a Laura Ashley catalogue.  For a few weeks, from mid-June to mid-July, this attractive and conspicuous plant is thriving.  It may be called red, but in truth it is a deep pink:…occasionally, a striking snow-white variant appears among its neighbouring blooms.

Like so many of our wall-loving plants, red valerian is an immigrant, originally brought to Britain from the Mediterranean during Tudor times, to adorn rockeries in ornamental gardens.  After a couple of hundred years it managed to escape from confinement, and has since spread across much of England and Wales, though its stronghold remains here in the West Country
.….the stone itself is not a natural feature of the local landscape, but was brought here from the nearby Mendips."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

(Something to look forward to? if you are having torrential rain in your part of the world.) 

March: Migrations -- Extraordinary Journeys

"As the vernal equinox approaches, marking the date when the sun's favours shift from the southern to the northern hemisphere, people all over Britain are awaiting a sign - any sign - that marks the arrival of spring.

In the brains of billions of birds wintering south of the equator, a chemical change is now being triggered - a change that will make them feel restless and uneasy.  It was a German scientist who named this Zugunruhe.  This can be translated as 'migratory restlessness'; the impulse to travel vast distances across the surface of the earth to reach their natal home. …many thousands of miles to the south a mass movement is just beginning.  Even the phrase 'mass movement' seems inadequate, for this is the greatest natural phenomenon on earth.  Not just tens or hundreds of millions, but billions of migratory birds are involved.  Swallows and martins, chats and cuckoos, warblers and flycatchers, are all embarking on their epic journeys, heading back to the vast Eurasion land mass from their winter quarters in Africa.

Like some massive unseen wave of energy, they pulse slowly across the the surface of the globe towards us.  With such vast numbers involved, it is easy to forget that each bird is an individual, undertaking an extraordinary journey; a journey which many will fail to complete.

Predation, cold, storms and sheer exhaustion are just a few of the ways a bird may meet its death while on migration: a falcon powering down out of the blue, sinking its talons into soft feathers and flesh; rain battering onto delicate wings, forcing the bird down into the sea: or simply a failure to get enough to eat, to replenish lost energy resources expended during this epic flight."

from Jacob Lawrence's Migration series, 1941

© The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Text quoted from Wild Hares & Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

New Year Greetings

January  - a head start.

"January sees the early starters in the breeding race begin to sing.  In my garden, robins lead the way: sometimes uttering their sweet deliberate and tuneful song on New Year's Day itself.  During mild winters, robins are joined by a chorus of other garden birds, each determined to get a head start on their rivals.  So great tits sing their brash 'tea-cher, tea-cher' from the bare branches of the apple trees, while goldfinches twitter in the hawthorn hedge.

Winter robin  Charles Tunnicliffe

Finches  Charles Tunnicliffe

Later in the year, as spring finally takes hold, these early birds will be joined by new arrivals: the migrants currently spending our winter thousands of miles away in Africa.  And day by day, week by week and month by month, other creatures will emerge: insects and mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and the panoply of wild flowers that will grace the parish fields and byways all summer long."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

[and see the Charles Tunnicliffe Society]

October in Somerset

"Outside in the parks and playgrounds around the parish, it's the local children's favourite time of year. The leaves of the horse-chestnut trees are turning an orangey-brown, and beneath every one is a treasure trove of spiky green balls, each beginning to split open to reveal the dark shiny fruit within.  Is there any natural object as instantly alluring as the conker?  Nothing else has quite the same appeal, and even now, more than forty years after I picked one up as a small child, I still get the same thrill each year when I find the first polished conker of the season."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

[Like seashells fresh from the beach, the shiny conkers fade when brought home, but the tree summer blossoms are still celebrated on Chestnut Sunday in May, with processions along the Chestnut Avenue in Bushy Park, across from Hampton Court Palace.]

September in Somerset

A robin calls loudly from a hawthorn hedge; and above it on the topmost sprig, perches a plump buffish-orange bird, a wheatear.  This is unfamiliar territory: the closest place where wheatears breed is Exmoor or Salisbury Plain, though this bird could have come from as far afield as Scandinavia.

2 Northern Wheatears   Henrik Gronvald c. 1907-09

The wheatear may be the robins' cousin, but there is little love lost between them,  Having established his autumn territory along this hedgerow, the robin is not prepared to tolerate any intruder, however far it might have travelled.  So when the wheatear flies down onto the stony track the robin follows, uttering a peevish warning call, in an attempt to see off the newcomer.  But the wheatear takes no notice, running in short bursts along the track on long, rangy legs, and occasionally stopping to pick up a morsel of insect food, before flying up to another perch.

As I get closer, the bird's fresh plumage and confiding nature suggest that this is a juvenile, probably only three or four months old. I appreciate the subtle pale, yellowish-buff of its belly shading darker on the upper breast, the jet-black tail, and as it flies  a few yards along the path, the snow-white rump which gives the bird its name.  For 'wheatear' has absolutely nothing to do with ears of wheat, but derives instead from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning 'white arse'."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss