All posts by Ian Alexander

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Mayflies Rising!

Mayflies rising over Wraysbury Lakes
Mayflies rising over Wraysbury Lakes

May is the fastest time of Nature’s year. What a difference a few days make! Last time at Wraysbury, a few sluggish mayflies sitting around as if waiting for something to happen in a one horse town.

Well, today it’s happening. In places, the sky is filled with rising mayflies: a few mating, most alone. Here and there, some repeatedly dance up, and a few seconds later, down; but most just climb, and fly about, seeming frail on their large wings, their triple tail streamers hanging below them: it’s worth zooming in on the picture. Even better, here’s a short video clip. The soundtrack combines an airliner taking off and a Blackcap singing.

Male Banded Demoiselle on Bramble
Male Banded Demoiselle on Bramble

One of the glories of summer by water is the brilliant turquoise and green iridescence of the male Banded Demoiselle – the so-called band is actually the appearance of flickering of the wings, the dark spot on each of the four wings giving a hard-to-describe semblance of a sparkling blue jewel in flight, with bands of colour too fast and changeable for the eye to understand. But he’s pretty fine at rest, too.

Male Common Blue Damselfly
Male Common Blue Damselfly

Common Blue, Bluetail, and Red-eyed Damselflies have all now emerged, the Red-eyed being the scarcest of the three, seemingly.

Soldier Beetle, Cantharis rustica on Cow Parsley
Soldier Beetle, Cantharis rustica on Cow Parsley

On the Cow Parsley were, as well as the damsels, two cantharid Soldier Beetles, Cantharis rustica or a close relative. Another enormous cloud of rising mayflies, and suddenly behind them a pair of Hobbies, hawking for insects – whether damselflies or even mayflies is impossible to tell. One comes close, wheels away on scything wings as it sees me.

Silver-Ground Carpet Moth Xanthorhoe montanata
Silver-Ground Carpet Moth Xanthorhoe montanata

A Silver-Ground Carpet Moth, Xanthorhoe montanata, flutters weakly past me among the Hawthorn bushes and flops onto the grass. Garden Warblers sing, a Whitethroat rasps in its songflight. A Treecreeper sings its little ditty sweetly from near the river.

On the hill, three Greylag and two Egyptian Geese form a peaceful flock. Stock Doves and a mixed flock of Crows and Jackdaws rise from the grass. A Song Thrush gives a marvellous solo recital near the road.

 

 

Conservation, Love of Nature, Nature Reserves

Yay! It’s Frog Day! Pond-dipping at Gunnersbury Triangle

I try to get down to the pond on Frog Day because, whatever the weather, it’s always such fun looking into trays, seeing what people have caught, and helping people to get a rough idea of what sort of wildlife they are looking at. The parents too are frequently fired up with (especially boyish) enthusiasm. One dad turned out to be expert at catching newts; another family caught dozens of tadpoles (all still without legs).

Pond Dipping on Frog Day
Pond Dipping on Frog Day

People come and go; some are regulars, some are new, some were just passing by and are astonished to find a nature reserve here, let alone a pond and volunteers and free pond-dipping and wriggly wild animals.

Beetle larva from the pond
Beetle larva from the pond

And there definitely weren’t just the usual suspects in the water, either.

Budding Hydra, with head of a damselfly nymph
Budding Freshwater Hydra, with a nymph

This really was a surprise; a Hydra, not just bright green but actually budding. These tiny animals are coelenterates, like corals and jellyfish, with no proper gut running mouth-to-anus, but just a mouth surrounded by the tentacles, and a hollow bag of a body; anything undigested has to come out the way it went in. The animal is green with symbiotic algae, so it has quite a bit of plant about it, and when it isn’t in a white dish, it’s practically invisible.

Stonefly
Stonefly

This little fly has two tails, and may well be a Stonefly; it is a lot smaller than the common Mayflies, which have three tails. It seems like a special animal today.

Looking at a Dragonfly Nymph
Looking at a Dragonfly Nymph

A fine Dragonfly nymph was captured in one dish; here it is, being examined closely by one youngster. I saw a Broad-Bodied Chaser near the pond some years ago, so it might be that species.

Nymphs and waterfleas
Nymphs and waterfleas

With their characteristic three tails, the Mayfly nymphs are distinctive. Here in one dish are some, along with what seems to be a long slim beetle nymph, and the Dragonfly nymph. There were quite a few Damselfly nymphs about too, some quite boldly green.

Yellow Iris or Flag
Yellow Iris or Flag

At four we packed up to go and have a well-deserved cup of tea. As I turned round, I realised the Yellow Irises the other side of the boardwalk were in full bloom.

Natural History

Pharyngula: Science Blog, Red in Tooth and Claw

“We’ve had a creationist … babbling away in the comments. He’s not very bright and he’s longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I’m indefatigable, I can hammer at these things all day long.”

Thus speaks Pharyngula (P. Z. Myers), most indefatigable of science (or should that be, anti-nonscience) bloggers. He’s been at it since 2002, and in that time he’s written about a huge range of topics.

On the way, he’s acquired a nonscience enemy who’s closely enough stuck to him (opposites attract) to have an antiblog of the same name. It’s almost a fanpop website, complete with photo portraits, CV, and a section called ‘What the heck is a pharyngula?’ which actually answers its own question. It’s a stage in the embryonic development of vertebrates, following the more familiar blastula, gastrula and neurula stages (pay attention at the back there).

He has even, by dint of writing accurately and entertainingly, and by speaking truth to twaddle, acquired his own Wikipedia article, quite a feat since generally self-published blogs are considered inherently “non-notable” by that august establishment. My spellchecker just suggested “Windpipe” for Wikipedia, not a bad try. Anyway, Windpipe tells me he won the 2005 Koufax (who?) Award for Best Expert Blog, and he certainly deserves it.

Pharyngula delights in natural history, perhaps especially in octopuses — a search for  “Friday cephalopod” is entertaining. Go on, here’s one that he liked.

The cephalopod Japatella diaphana, sparkling by its own light
The cephalopod Japatella diaphana, sparkling by its own light, from MBARI.

Pharyngula readers are also treated to Monday Metazoans. Try it. There really are more things in heaven and earth …

But too much of Pharyngula’s time, and the world’s, is taken up with kicking “Bad science” – he also has categories for “Bad Science”, Creationism, Godlessness, Denialism, Kooks, and Weirdness, and I expect I missed a few more. It’s a lot of energy.

I’ll write about the history of it another time – the Argument from Design thing has been going on since at least 1713, when the Revd. William Derham published his Physico-Theology.

William Derham's Physico-Theology, first published 1713 (this edition 1723)
William Derham’s Physico-Theology, first published 1713 (this edition 1723)

The curious thing about physico-theology, natural theology, intelligent design, Paleyism or what have you is that it is a circular argument. There’s assumed to be a Creator. The Creator is assumed to be good. Things in nature are seen to be well-adapted, e.g. the wings of birds are well adapted to enable them to fly. Since birds have been created, the Creator must be good, and must exist. Errm, something not quite right in this argument… it’s logically hopeless to assume what you’re trying to prove, regardless of any external facts. Assuming for sake of argument that there is a good Creator, the existence of birds with well-adapted wings says precisely nothing about that Creator. The birds might always have existed, or might have been created in a Manichean universe by an evil being, or might have evolved all by themselves, there’s no telling just from the excellence of adaptation of the wings on the bird.

Curiously, “the survival of the fittest” looks at first sight like a circular argument, and intelligent writers like John Stewart Collis have fallen into the trap of thinking that’s what it is. But it isn’t. Darwin didn’t say that the ones that survive, survive, so species evolved — the first part says nothing, and evolution doesn’t follow. Darwin did say that the ones that don’t survive, don’t have children. It’s a what-happens-in-the-next-generations argument, and that breaks the circularity. Or to look at it from the present back to the past, back all the way to the origins of life on Earth, each thing living now is descended from parents and ancestors which survived long enough to reproduce, while countless others failed to do so. Some were simply unlucky: in Darwin’s words, nature is prodigal: tremendously wasteful. Others were just slightly less well-adapted, just slightly less likely to survive long enough to reproduce, and did not so survive. The result: in each generation, the offspring carry the genes of the just slightly better adapted. Darwin was right, it is a prodigiously wasteful mechanism. A more wasteful approach could not be devised — you generate a tremendous variety, and in each generation you throw almost all of it away. Out of thousands of eggs in frogspawn, only a few will become adult frogs; out of tens of millions of eggs of the Atlantic cod, only a few will become adult fish that breed. “Only the fittest survive”: not exactly. Many perfectly fit fish are unlucky. But the fit ones are on average luckier than the rest. It’s a slippery argument, though not really complicated, and it has to be stated carefully. But it has proven to be a pons asinorum for far too many.

Book Review, Natural History

Poetry Book Review: Darwin, A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel

Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel
Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel

Right, I don’t review poetry books, and I don’t read them that often either, though I have my favourites. But this one is extraordinary. I very nearly read it in one sitting, as Claire Tomalin claims she did on the back cover, but I had to make do with two sittings instead. Gushing newspaper critics often say they couldn’t put a book down. In the case of Padel’s Darwin, it was almost true for me.

Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. She heard her grandmother (and Darwin’s biographer) Nora Barlow, aged 95, reminiscing about her grandfather. Reading this book, I was in no doubt that Padel, too, could easily have written a prose biography of her ancestor. But I’m very glad she didn’t. What she has achieved in Darwin, A Life in Poems is a miracle of conciseness. We say a picture is worth a thousand words: a good poem, more so. With a poet’s and a granddaughter’s sensibility, Padel builds up, step by step, poem by poem, a glittering portrait of the great man. Each moment is encapsulated, seemingly without effort, certainly without a wasted word, in a short poem.

I read the first one or two, and felt — they were quite good, and I might soon stop for a cup of tea. I read the next few and the little marginal notes attentively, and started to feel these were rather enjoyable, easy to take in, giving quite a nice picture of the young Darwin in Shrewsbury. I began to reflect on the choice of imagery, how collecting allowed him “to assert control over what’s unbearable.” Unbearable. Collection was about pain? I read a few more. Barmouth: “A child on a beach, alone.” Five lines of the eleven in the poem were a single extended quote from Darwin’s own notes, laid out as verse. Ingenious. Did they scan? Yes, they seemed to have a kind of metre. How subtle were her rhythms? An hour later I was still reading.

Rhythm, metre, the feel of the words; the choice of topics; the use of materials; the different shapes of the various poems. Many are short, in three-line stanzas: “The forms are themselves. They do not change with the changing light / but unfurl in the mind. They swirl and settle new / in the kaleidoscope in his head” — it could be the start of something quite abstract, something about a drug addict or … a visionary. That poem is “The Tiger in Kensington Gardens”, Darwin’s thought wandering to imagining “if a tiger stalked across the plain behind / how feeling would be ignited”. It is light as thistledown, compact, dreamy.

One or two poems are longer: Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Journey up the Sadong River” — Padel travelled extensively in the East, wrote a nature book, Tigers in Red Weather — has four-line stanzas, more of a plodding rhythm, an earnest self-taught Victorian: it is with a shock I realize the first 27½ lines are a direct quote from Wallace! What a marvellous, virtuoso trick: what confidence as a poet, what insight to feel and to share Wallace’s prose for what it is, at its best: exciting poetry.

And the pieces fit together to make the puzzle: the wood comes into focus from the individual trees: Darwin the man emerges from the hundred-odd poems. How did she do that? I suppose a prose writer can occasionally get away with a flabby analogy, a woolly opinion, a soggy simile. A poet cannot: certainly not a modern poet, writing short pieces: each must work, or fail utterly.

I have read a few ‘natural history poems’, some simply bad, some cheerfully zoological, like Walter Garstang’s The Ballad of the Veliger (The Veliger’s a lively tar, the liveliest afloat… ), some, like Ted Hughes’s animals, enjoyably insightful. But I’ve never before experienced the life of a naturalist, perhaps the greatest one at that, in a whole book of poems, and it works wonderfully. Darwin, A Life in Poems is quite simply a triumph.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Environment, Nature Reserves

The Ghettoisation of Nature

I suppose you are familiar with the ghettoisation of Britain’s towns and cities. To take a few rather random examples, Bath, Bradford-on-Avon, Edinburgh, Marlborough and Oxford are seen as ‘nice’ (terrible word),  become populated with the middle class, Waitrose, estate agents and boutique shops, and suffer enormous rises in house prices, while nearby places are seen as less desirable, acquire sink housing estates, crime, and scruffy concrete jungles where once there were perfectly decent town centres. Areas of London do the same, but in a more rapidly shifting way, as the sheer pressure of population, and the desperate shortage of housing, forces people into scruffier areas which thus become ‘gentrified’ (though hardly by landed gentry, actually).

Perhaps the ghettoisation of nature is a little less familiar. As a boy, I was allowed out to go and do as I pleased in between meals (ah, those happy days when we didn’t know about paedophile celebrities: mind you, nobody is actually suggesting they stalked the countryside attacking random children, they had more subtle means of approach. But I digress).  We used to go down the stream and build dams — the farmer never seemed to mind, and I guess our small engineering works of sticks, mud and stones never lasted long. It was tremendous fun watching the water well up, and exciting to run for more materials as the level rose and the water found new places to escape; I don’t think we ever tried to construct an intentional spillway anywhere. Or we wandered out in autumn to gather blackberries, returning with heavy plastic bags full of the squashy fruit, demanding blackberry-and-apple pie for supper like latter-day Peter Rabbit siblings. We scarcely remarked on the Yellowhammers in every hedge, Song Thrushes in the woods, Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges in the open fields: they were just there. There were Spotted Flycatchers, Swifts and House Martins nesting in the village, too; we noticed these last as the upstairs windows couldn’t be opened for months to avoid breaking their nests.

Leaving aside whether parents will allow children to go out unsupervised nowadays — kids have to learn to take care of themselves eventually, and the sooner they learn to be sensible, the better, specially if they have fun and play adventurously at the same time, a visit to the countryside today will, on average, involve less than half as many farmland birds as in 1970, and far fewer than that in the case of Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges. The countryside has emptied of birds — and of bumblebees and primroses and much else.

Instead, if you want to see Nature (the capital letter is intentional) you go to an official Nature Reserve. If you want to see a traditional village you study the web or the official Heritage handbook, fuel the car, pack a picnic, and travel to the official Heritage site, or rather to the official Heritage car-park complete with high-visibility-jacketed attendants and ticket machines, and walk down the officially landscaped path (keep off the official bit of woodland with bulbs underfoot to the officially declared bit of Heritage. It looks pretty attractive, but for the hordes of amateur photographers taking pictures of hordes of amateur photographers, ice-cream lickers, picnickers, dog-walkers, beer-swillers and motorcycle enthusiasts (why do oily chains, throbbing Harley-Davidsons and polished chrome go with pretty places? Answers on a postcard, please) in every street.

The official Nature Reserve also has a car park, which is at least generally free, at least to members. There is a big official sign with a colourful map, sometimes painted with happy butterflies, frogs, foxes and woodpeckers — the more conspicuously coloured species seem to be favoured in this form of natural selection, perhaps aposematism has something to do with it. There are quite often free maps and nature trails, even colouring sheets and clipboards for crayon-carrying children. Sometimes the trees and flowers are officially labelled as well, complete with Heritage notes about what Comfrey used to be grown for in the days when real people lived in the countryside (it was to help healing of bones, if you’re curious), or what Hazel coppicing was and why it was practised (tufts of small straight flexible wands, cut and used to make hurdles to fence in animals temporarily, and so on).

All of this effort is quite admirable in its way: relaxation, getting out of the house for the day, being together as a family, learning a little history, a little about nature.  But what has been lost in the process is more striking: freedom, simple personal discovery and exploration (think blackberry-picking, dam-building, just coming across birds singing and bees buzzing). Don’t get me wrong, given the lack of nature in ordinary farmland there is a pressing need to rescue at least some areas of habitat; and given people’s cramped urban lives, it’s right they have some attractive places to visit. All the same, Nature, like Heritage, is being ghettoised. The process has not yet run to completion in Britain — there are still magnificent areas of mountain, moorland and coast where you can wander free of twee signs and uniformed attendants — but the paraphernalia are spreading: you can find them on Access Land in Northumberland, for instance.

As Joni Mitchell sang long ago, “Take all the trees / Put ’em in a tree museum. Charge all the people / A dollar and a half just to see ’em. Don’t it always seem to go / But you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

 

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Mayflies, May Blossom… yes, it’s May at Wraysbury Lakes

Mayfly cf Ephemera vulgata
Mayfly cf Ephemera vulgata

The sun is shining … in between the showers. Mayflies are resting all over the plants near the river. May blossom makes a bright show on every hawthorn bush. Yes, it’s May down at Wraysbury Lakes. The energetic breeze gives a cool feel, but out of the wind it’s very pleasant. Enjoying the brisk airflow are at least four Common Terns over the lakes and overhead; a few Swallows; and a small number of Swifts, newly arrived in the last few days, racing down to the water surface to catch flies — not the mayflies, which are active mainly at night. The warblers which are definitely about are hard to hear for the wind in the trees, but I caught snatches of Chiffchaff, Blackcap, many Whitethroats, plenty of Garden Warbler, a Willow Warbler, three Song Thrushes and a Blackbird, not to mention Robins and Wrens.  A Cormorant lumbered past, climbing with effort, its jizz very much like that of the Boeing 747s lumbering heavily into the air.

Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm
Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm

There are some pale mayflies, with neither antennae nor the 3 tails: maybe these have broken off in the vegetation.

Beautifully iridescent green-bronze female Banded Demoiselle
Beautifully iridescent green-bronze: a female Banded Demoiselle

Also new today are quantities of damselflies: there are many brilliant iridescent blue male Banded Demoiselles, with their beautifully clear green-bronze females. This one seemed definitely to be watching me attentively. Two small blue species have also emerged, Blue-Tailed Damselfly and Common Blue Damselfly.

Over the lake, a long-winged falcon swooped at speed: I wondered for a moment if I had a Cuckoo, but the moustache and white face markings showed it was a Hobby, arrived from Africa in pursuit of the Swifts, and perhaps hunting damselflies as easier prey in this place. The low number of Swifts is worrying; they have been declining for years, as building renovation removes their old nest-holes, and increased human population pressure in Africa threatens them there too.

A small Grasshopper on Comfrey
A small Grasshopper on Comfrey

This small grasshopper, missing an antenna, is my first of the year.

Further along, the bare damp area that often has teasels is bright yellow with clumps of a yellow Brassica that has clasping leaves like wild turnip (or cultivated swede). There’s a definite cabbagey smell. A Whitethroat, caught out in the open, makes a dash for a bush.

Conservation

RSPB Central London Local Group: Hope Farm (and Buffet)

Yesterday I went along to the RSBP’s Central London Local Group. They meet in the Scottish church hall behind Harrods in Knightsbridge: on the short walk from the tube I passed some amazingly expensive-looking people, associated with a lot of taxis and a green-coated commissionaire. Inside, I nibbled a biscuit and was offered a raffle ticket.

The group’s AGM was billed to last 30 minutes: it did, and was presented efficiently and interestingly by the members of the organizing committee. They regularly run 10 coach trips each year to out-of-town reserves as far away as Lymington and Slimbridge.  They hold a similar number of indoor meetings, with at least one scientific talk, a non-birding talk, one on a specific bird, and some on good birding places in Britain or overseas. Audiences are increasing; the group is more than breaking even, and makes an annual donation to RSPB projects.

The main talk was by Ian Dillon who manages the RSPB’s Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire. It’s not exactly a nature reserve: it’s a working farm, bought after a successful fundraising campaign in 1999, and run “for Food, Profit and Wildlife”. Dillon used to be warden of a nature reserve up in Orkney caring for Corncrakes, once a familiar farmland bird (I actually remember our music master at school berating the congregation during a singing practice for sounding like Corncrakes (they go Crek, Crek not terribly musically), which tells you how long ago it was) but now almost extinct except in the Outer Hebrides where the shy birds don’t have to try to outrun giant modern tractors that can harvest a field at 25mph.

Dillon gave a practised and lively talk about Hope Farm, covering the 90% decline in some farmland birds since 1970 (Grey Partridge, Corn Bunting, Turtle Dove among them) as farmers have, from their point of view, improved their farming. They grow twice as much wheat per hectare, up to around 8 tons. They have achieved this through intensification, using pesticides, fertilisers, mechanisation and drainage. The result is clean, healthy crops, free of weeds, pests, and diseases: but also largely free of wildlife. Specific issues for birds are the increase in winter wheat and barley, meaning there is no food-rich stubble for them to feed on in the winter, and the 1960s policy of grubbing out hedges to increase field size and hence efficiency, removing nesting sites, insects, and roosts. The speed of modern farm machinery is also fatal to wildlife such as Grey Partridges and hedgehogs. The overall effect is an average 50% decline in farmland birds since 1970; it has not quite run to completion, with numbers continuing to decline slowly in what is in the more arable parts of Britain such as East Anglia effectively a sterile countryside adapted to industrial food production.

Hope Farm runs a conventional wheat-oilseed rape – wheat – beans/peas rotation. With the EU farm subsidy, and farmed by an efficient large contractor – each big machine only visits the farm for a few days per year: it would be silly for Hope Farm to buy its own – the farm makes a profit and achieves good yields, so in theory farmers should be happy to listen to what the farm has to say about its practices, however much of a turn-off they find the name ‘RSPB’.

For as well as farming, Hope Farm aims to increase wildlife, at least its farmland birds. It has been successful so far: since 2000 the number of Skylark territories has increased fourfold, while Yellowhammers have recovered to more than their 1960s levels – luckily an early BTO survey covered the farm. Wintering bird numbers are well up, too – 200 Yellowhammers, 37 Grey Partridges, 172 Skylarks, exceeding expectations. This has been achieved with two main changes: some small inconvenient-to-plough areas have been sown with mixed crop seeds so different birds each get winter food; and five metre square patches, dotted around the arable fields, have been left bare, enabling Skylarks to feed in summertime. Curiously the Skylarks actually continue to nest in the dense crops (of wheat, etc), but once these become tall they find it hard to land there, so without bare patches they tend to nest close to the ‘tramlines’ made by the tractor when spraying. The nests don’t get run over, nor are the birds destroyed by harvesting (they’ve flown by then), but nesting near the tramlines so they can readily take off and land makes them vulnerable to passing predators – foxes, badgers, hedgehogs – all of which use the tramlines. Very careful survey work, with remote cameras, proved that this was the problem. So the lark patches help, but in rather an indirect and surprising way.

Hope Farm has to date been less successful at persuading farmers to follow suit. The RSPB set out confident that with solid evidence of effectiveness and profit, the world would do what they said. Ah, they reckoned without the slow, cautious, individualistic, calculating ways of the farmer. After all, why do anything that doesn’t pay? One answer is that it does: you qualify for an agro-environment scheme, which increases your subsidy. Another is, that trying to farm those small awkward corners doesn’t pay, either: you spend more time and money trying to work those bits of land, which slope, or are shaded, or have poor drainage, or are more susceptible to disease, and the effort, diesel, seed, pesticides and fertiliser you use are not justified by the small extra returns. This is for the farmer a practical matter; for us and the RSPB and our children, a matter of whether there will be wildlife in farmland, or not.

The evening ended with a delicious finger buffet and a glass of Cava. The group is active, enthusiastic, and runs a varied programme. I shall go along. Why don’t you?

Book Review, Conservation

Classic Book Review: The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis

The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition). The fine linocut of teasels is by Angie Lewin.

I promised myself I would only review books I really loved, that I would urge a close friend to read, sure they wouldn’t be disappointed. Few books pass this test.

John Stewart Collis was an educated man, born in  Ireland in 1900, living and working in England. He wrote some biographies and pottered along quietly in the literary life. Then the Second World War came along. Wanting to work for his country, but too old to fight and not fancying a dull desk job, he volunteered for the Land Army. It consisted mainly of women, “Land Girls”, as thousands of farm labourers joined the armed forces.

"We could do with thousands more like you: Join the WOMEN'S Land Army". Second World War recruitment poster
“We could do with thousands more like you: Join the WOMEN’S Land Army”. Second World War recruitment poster

Collis makes the long-gone era of scythes and horses immediately accessible. As a professional writer, he is from our modern urban world, familiar with politics, technology, change,  middle-class angst. As a man experiencing the daily toil of following the plough or harrow, hoeing by hand, harvesting, pacing oneself while looking out for the owner’s car (a good moment to appear busy), he is in that rural world painted in such a golden light by the wartime posters.

And he’s funny. He notes that farm work is not an exhilarating form of exercise — he recommends a game of tennis for that; instead, you go at it steadily, never hurrying, whatever the weather. He is perfectly capable of writing wide-eyed descriptions, as when he kneels down beside an ancient tree-trunk and admires the insects hidden under the bark “building their Jerusalem in these countries of decay which must represent for them the acme of perfection”, the strange world of the fungi. But much more often he is direct, matter-of-fact: he likes to test the rotten wood with his boots.

Collis has the gift — I’d say it was rare — of noticing that the ordinary aspects of life and work all around him are strange and temporary. Here he is on what it is like trying to harness a farm horse by yourself:

When I came to harnessing for the first time I was surprised at the weight of the harness. I found that the breeching and attendant straps were as heavy as a saddle. When I tried putting the collar on I found I had put the bridle on first. Having taken off the bridle, the collar still wouldn’t go on — for the simple reason that you must reverse it while negotiating the head, which I had not done, thus following the example of Wordsworth who also failed in this matter. I was no more successful with the hames; I got them the wrong way round, and when at last I got them the right way round, I failed to pin them under the collar in a sufficiently tight notch. This done, I was now ready to put the horse into the cart. But I was not prepared for the difficulty of backing it straight between the shafts nor for the weight of the cart when lifted up by one of the shafts, nor for the difficulties confronting me in continuing the good work. For, having thrown over the long chain that rests on the breeching, and dodged under the horse’s neck to catch it on the other side, I missed it and it rolled back so that I had to throw it over again, all the time holding up the shaft with one hand while I went to the other side. And after this came the fixing of the remaining chains, all of which I put into the wrong notches.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sweating and powdered with stable dust just reading about it.

With the arrival of the first combine harvesters, which Collis admires, he perceives that the old way of life is going to be utterly disrupted, even while he and the other farm labourers continue to work on the farm, while the village pubs were still full of countrymen. It would be nostalgic, only the writing is quite unsentimental, and we are right there alongside Collis, looking up from our work as we watch the new machine as it roars and rattles along doing the work of twenty men, and reflect on what it will mean. This is something special.  And I promise you’ll want to go out and buy a well-balanced axe and billhook, to try the pleasure for yourself.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Book Review, Conservation, Natural History

Book Review: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

I made a mental note a while ago only to review books that I really loved: books that were special, that I’d go back to, that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to close friends. Life is too short to review books that were merely so-so, acceptable, somewhat informative, useful as background. I read (parts of) many of those, “researching” subjects and places, and for the most part once I’ve done what I wanted the book goes on a shelf and stays there.

Books that stick in the mind, that quietly speak to me long after I last dipped into them, are a small proportion. It is only too easy to buy something that looks inviting, only to find after a chapter or two that it’s a bit overblown, poorly argued, limply presented. Books that are specially trumpeted are particularly at risk here. Amazon reviews tend, on average and given sufficient quantity, to be truthful: of course authors ask friends to review their books (we all do it) so you need a good sample to get a genuine impression from readers, and, caveat emptor, you should read between the lines to see if the reviewer is real and appreciating the book in the same way as you.

I mention all this because I took a look at my most recent shelf of books with an eye to writing a review. The internal dialogue went something like this. “Um. No. Gulp, not that. Reviewed that already. no. No. no. Ah.. no, did that back in 2007. No, no, no, no, no. Erm, not much here. Hold on, did I ever do Notes from Walnut Tree Farm? Time I did.”

Roger Deakin wrote two marvellous books, Wildwood and Waterlog. It isn’t accidental that they both have something to do with wood in their names: Deakin was very close to wood, and had carpenters and men named Wood in his family. He then died suddenly, leaving 45 notebooks full of daily observations of all kinds, written in the last six years of his life. Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker took on the task of selecting extracts and arranging them into a composite year.

Walnut Tree Farm was Deakin’s house in the Suffolk countryside. It was timber-framed, in other words made of local wood. He bought it in ruinous condition, and rebuilt it himself: a mediaeval house, with a moat that he liked to swim in. Every corner of his life was of a piece, intensely personal, fully and passionately experienced. His writing is cut from the same sturdy oak.

 Fire: nothing gives me more comfort or more anxiety than fire.

Look up Cobbett on the laying of fires — talk about bread ovens and faggotts of furze for bread-making.

The fireplace has been subsumed by the TV, pushed out of the nest as by a cuckoo. People now contemplate the TV, not the fire.

What is it about Deakin’s notes that is so compelling? Reading him on fire just now, I can hear the crackle of logs in the grate, smell the woodsmoke, feel the pleasure as the flames flicker red and yellow. I would call him a sensuous writer, at the risk of being misunderstood: he does not write purple prose. He feels  life directly and communicates his sensory experience in clear, straightforward words, the opposite of rambling, yet he conveys the impression of relaxed thought, of coming upon interesting things and reflecting on their possibilities. Reading him feels very private: it’s like being in his mind, a privileged position.

Deakin takes us — me, you —to Suffolk; to walk in the woods, to reflect on a dead, trapped fox, to watch the carp in his front pond, to listen to a willow warbler which “sings in the spinney by the old goat sheds”, to join him scything his lawn by hand, cooking on a “little cast-iron stove” from Morocco, having “singing lessons with Mrs Gillard, who put her hands on my stomach as I sang”. It’s extraordinarily varied, authentic in every corner, always warm, always intelligent.

There is nothing else like Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: fresh, insightful, funny, stimulating, informative, peaceful, full of life and nature. Please read it.

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Gardening, Natural History, Wildlife

Even more on a Blackcurrant Leaf … Welcome or Not

Further to the World on a Blackcurrant Leaf, today the Ichneumons and the Harlequins were joined by two more conspicuous flying visitors, some green Shield Bugs (true bugs, Hemiptera) and some swift yellow-abdomened Sawflies, most probably Gooseberry Sawfly. Both of these are held in definite disfavour by many gardeners, the bugs for sucking plant juices and possibly weakening plants or spreading disease, and the sawflies for making caterpillars which in a bad year can totally defoliate gooseberry bushes — it only happened to me once, and it was quite a shock: from seeing the first little green caterpillars to leafless plants only took a week or so.

Since then I have carefully checked the gooseberry every few days for signs of sawfly damage (and actual caterpillars). If there are just a few, I remove the affected leaves and squash any caterpillars I find; this usually does the trick. If there are many, which has only happened once or twice, I consider spraying, choosing a time without wind, after sunset so the bees aren’t flying, and work close to the bush to keep the stuff local. The approach seems to work well for bees and berries.

As for the bugs, well, I rather like their handsome appearance and their confident swagger. There always seem to be enough currants so I don’t mind if the yield is down a bit on what it might have been.