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BIDWELL NATURE CORNER
October 2011
October is such a wonderful month. It heralds the arrival of Autumn, distinguished by the cooler mornings and the clearer nights – the season of Keats’ “mists and mellow fruitfulness”. And it’s been a bumper year again for fruit. Although the stop-start of drought alternating with soaking through the late Spring months has caused some of the apples and pears to be greater in number though smaller in size, Keats has it right once again as October seeks “to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”. The hedgerows are laden with blackberries and sloes, hawthorn and holly berries. The orchard is groaning under the weight of fruit, so much so that I shall have to take some various serious steps to help the Conference pear-tree which has almost succumbed; it will need radical pegging and roping to get it growing upright once again. The pond has lost its blanket weed with the cooler nights and days but the broad-leafed pond weed is back and will have to be re-treated. This in no way deters the daily visits of the grey heron. Each morning, as I look out of the window of the Green Room, one or sometimes two will be at the water’s edge, perched liked watchful schoolmasters, in hope of a miscreant trout rising close to the spring inlet. Of all things, yesterday, both were sitting atop the ranch-fence, yards from the water, even grander and more imposing than usual. The chances of catching prey must have been negligible and left me wondering why they would do such a thing. They remain also very alert to Man and if I move sharply, even behind a closed window, they will often startle and launch into the characteristic primaeval, heavy wing-beat pterodactyl flight back down the towards the Otter, their permanent home, where they often perch on a lone Scots pine in the middle of a fallow pasture as against standing like Long John Silver on the Otter bank itself.