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BIDWELL NATURE CORNER
July 2010
These are strange mornings at Bidwell. At half-past five or six in the morning, the sun is well risen and the sky streaked with silver and red and yet not a hint of rain to suggest that the time-honoured shepherd's warning will be fulfilled. The mornings are not quite like Summer at all; there is an autumnal chill about and, looking up to the pond, wraiths of mist already rise from the warm surface of the water into the sharp air above it. Looking down into the valley, a long, rolling cotton-wool sausage of mist tracks the course of the Otter past the village and out through the fields to the North. As I listen this morning through the open windows, a wren churrs with irritation at a grey squirrel which has trespassed too close to her nest deep in the flower-bed ivy; a growing family of great spotted woodpeckers squeaks for more food, insistently and demandingly in chorus from the distant oak to the East, as the parents take it in turns to visit the feeding station by our back door. Two buzzards mew and wheel effortlessly over the farmhouse, an eye doubtless on the sole remaining mallard chick of the third brood this Summer. There was a happy arrival two mellow evenings ago of a full clutch of seven well grown ducklings, waddling in line astern, up from the Otter to the pond, across the village road, where motorists will wait patiently for them to cross without a Lollipop Lady in sight. Lucky, the Drake, will make a couple of attempts to shoo them to one end of the pond with some energetic flapping and his muted Appleyard quiss (somewhere between a hiss and a quack) but, as with the rest of the world, including his seraglio of ducks, they fail to take him seriously - big poser that he is!
June 2010
The annual settlement in the farmhouse porch by our visiting swallows has begun and gradually their version of wattle and daub walls high in the cruck of the porch roof is growing. By the end of the month, it will be three to four inches deep - sufficient of an enclosed saucer to house three or four fledglings and an adult. We will watch with anticipation as first all that we will be able to see will be a hint of gun-metal blue, a splash of white and a needle of a tail as a parent sits warming the nest - then the eggs - while the adult mate perches on the wind-chimes just below. Then we shall see the beak-open maws of the growing chicks, peeping over the rim and cheeping for each next course on the constant menu of flies and moths, brought in by Mum and Dad in their endlessly driven foraging. Then it's danger time. Even now, an adult will occasionally lose its way and get trapped behind the open door of the porch, fluttering and clattering in its disorientation against the inner window panes. When the fledglings themselves begin their uneasy circuit and bumps flights, they will inevitably stray towards the lower reaches of the porch and Tigger, our tabby. Tigger has now passed his eighteenth birthday and is slower than he was but, like an ageing squash-player, knows his court and moves with ruthless effectiveness rather than just speed. He can, sadly, still dab them down to his feet and that will be that. But, joyously, they still come back year after year and soon, equally sadly, their world will be Tigger-free.
May 2010
In suddent bursts of sunshine, albeit with some chill Easterly winds, Bidwell is bursting into leaf and blossom. Wild mallards are on the pond, an adult female recently watching over seven beautiful fluffy chicks which scooted across the surface of the water like thistledown blown on the wind. We watched them during each day firkling in amongst the reeds at the water's edge and then there were five, then three, then two and now they are no more. Buzzards wheel and mew overhead and it's difficult to believe they are not responsible for the absence of the new ducklings. Nature constantly restores, however, and this morning, letting out the domestic ducks from their night's protective custody, I noticed the same wild mallard couple, bobbing heads near each other as a sign of willingness to engage and shortly afterwards, mating enthusiastically. A pair of moorhen are back after a long absence following the dredging and the year's newly returned swallows are sweeping and diving in their usual aerobatic display over the water. A couple of surprise ground frosts caught us in the earliest days of the month and we shall probably have lost our Conference pear crop as the trees were just coming into blossom when the cold snap struck. Primroses on the hedgerow banks have been spectacular this year and the bluebells are just beginning - later than usual - to push their way into view. Unfortunately, it's also been a cracking year for dandelions. Whilst our name for the bright yellow flower is derived from the old French for Lion's tooth, the more earthy French themselves don't, ironically, use this corruption of their old language - they call them pissenlits : an allusion to the plant's traditional diuretic properties.
Richard and Patsy
BIDWELL BIRD-SPOTTER OF THE YEAR
The contest for 2010 is well under way. We have recently had a most welcome addition to our competitors in the Wilfert family from Jena in Germany, who brought with them both knowledge of, and interest in, our bird-life. Katherina and Tobias competed briskly through their week, extending their knowledge of English bird-names and expanding Richard's understanding of the German equivalent. Interesting, for example, that a wagtail in German is apparently a Wippstaird, recalling the Old English "steort" root for "tail", which brings us our redstart and, less well-known, our phrase "stark-naked" which should be "start-naked" - i.e. down to ones tail!