My name is Kit Peel. I’m a writer, living in the English countryside. This blog is a diary of how my wife and I are turning the land around our farm into a wildflower and pollinator paradise. The first book of my Snow Summer trilogy is published by Egmont in July 2013.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
Morning, over Pateley Bridge
So, we’re a couple of weeks past the autumn equinox and the slug and snail summer of 2012 is officially over. If our slimy friends weren’t wrecking our vegetables, they were offering themselves to be squashed on the patio; a sort of nightly euthanasia to make way for the legions more, constantly emerging from the sodden ground. After my clumsy feet, Nelly would come on hoover mode, trying to convince herself that these were delicacies to be had. But with the waning harvest moon, the slugs and snails have slithered off to wherever they go. The grass has stopped growing. Morning mists fill the dale.
Now is the time to be getting on with heavy, outside jobs. There’s a stone wall to be built around the future fruit garden, fencing to put up, hedges to plant, compost bins to build and acres of brambles to clear. I’m getting help with the brambles and some fencing work in kind for grazing from the farmer, but for the most part it will be me alone with my dubious countryside skills. It has to be done, and we have to get on with planting up our ten acres of land. If climate change really is going to make the UK ever wetter, bees and other wildlife will need all the help we can give them. Spring, summer, autumn and winter, all across Sparrowhawk Farm, I want to ensure that there is food on hand.
One thing I miss about living in Greece – Megan and I spent a year on the island of Hydra after we were married – are the festivals. Barely a month passes without a high day: the blessing of the waters at Epiphany; Carnival, in all its aphrodisiac glory; the May flower festival; in June there is the great party to remember the victory of Admiral Miaoulis over the Turkish fleet and, all through summer and autumn countless harvest festivals of fish, fruit and wine; and then on to Christmas itself. For every religious festival in Greece, there always seemed to be two more celebrating the land and the sea. It may be no coincidence that during this year on Hydra we were aware of the passing seasons like never before. After every full moon, nature’s body clock clicked forwards, bringing sudden storms or shifts in temperature. At this time, our neighbour’s donkey would break her tether and rush off up a rocky hill in search of a lover. It was only from May to September that the moon lay in the doldrums, rendered impotent by the baking heat.
We do have a tradition of festivals in England, but nowadays for the most part they are pale imitations of their former selves; their original rituals forgotten just as we say touch wood, without knowing why. Here in the dale, there is an annual harvest festival at the end of September, where the best of the year’s produce and livestock is put on display. It’s called the Nidderdale Show. In the Women’s Institute tent, judging notes next to cakes, pies and all sorts contain the odd damning put down to rival the best of Oscar Wilde. Outside, there’s the traditional harvest festival pursuit of terrier racing.
The churches of upper Nidderdale have long been the place to celebrate the seasons’ festivals. The much loved outgoing vicar, Peter Dunbar, held a spring lambing service, a summer pet service and flower competitions were judged at St Chad’s in Middlesmoor. Just over a week ago, he stood down after twenty years in the dale, and after his final service an Enid Blyton-style feast was laid on in the memorial hall in Pateley Bridge. Megan and I trawled up and down the forty-foot table of delights, while on a screen at the back of the hall, a projector showed photographs of Peter from a young man up until the present day; constantly smiling, even when embarking in red hat and thick coat out into a winter afternoon. In his last sermon, he was keen to point out that a church is greater than its vicar. But with his retirement, it feels as if a part of the dale itself has been claimed by the autumn mists.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
Awen’s horse chestnut, with sycamore in background
We’re paddling around in a northern bog here, under layers of grey clouds. Grey and green and splashes of off-white sheep seem to be Nidderdale’s only colours. The river, that burst its banks so spectacularly a few days ago, is retreating. At one point, there were roads that only tractors could ford. Pateley Bridge playground vanished, except for the bandstand, the pavilion and the tops of swings and slides. Because Nelly, our inexhaustible dog, demanded walks and most of her favourite romping grounds were underwater, we spent two days exploring a local wood.
Sheltered from the rain and high enough to avoid the floods, White Wood lies in the same small valley as its more glamorous neighbour, Skrikes Wood. I’d been to White Wood all my life. I used to ride in there, bottling up my courage (and ignoring my rubbish horsemanship) to jump a four-bar gate. Recently, we’d made endless trips to drop Nelly off with her true love, Joanne the dog-sitter, who lives at the top of the wood. But for some reason, I’d never stepped off the beaten track and seen what White Wood has to offer.
There is something curiously human about trees. In the countryside, they seem to form their own communities. Woods are like towns, populated by families of birches, hazels, beech and hollies. Coppices and hedgerows form hamlets and those solitary oaks, ashes or sycamores become detached houses. Unlike wildflowers, which appear en-masse in one season (lovely but alike) and are gone the next, trees age before our eyes: from saplings, to mature adults and then pensioners, mottled by age and disease. In my lifetime, the sycamore in the field in front of Sparrowhawk Farm has lost a branch and the split at the base of its trunk has become alarming. But it still flourishes, and on summer nights often plays host to a pair of little owls, who make a hell of a racket.
Fifty feet from the sycamore, I have planted Awen’s birth tree. In the days after she was born, we would wheel her in her plastic cot into the maternity ward conservatory. There was a horse chestnut tree just outside. When the wind blew, its leaves reached towards us, slapping the glass in a sort of greeting. Happily for Awen, her grandmother knew the former dean of Christ Church college in Oxford. Growing in the college garden is a famous horse chestnut. Seeing this very tree in the 1850s, the author Lewis Carroll imagined a cat lazing among its branches. And so the Cheshire Cat of his novel, Alice in Wonderland, was born. Before he left his position, the dean had given my mother a cutting from the Cheshire Cat tree. When I told her that I wanted to plant a horse chestnut for Awen, this foot-tall offshoot, still in its pot, was delivered to Sparrowhawk Farm.
Like the sycamore, Awen’s horse chestnut is a recent immigrant to England. Native to the Balkans, the first horse chestnuts were brought to England via Constantinople some time in the late sixteenth century. It’s possible that just a few generations back, the ancestor of Awen’s tree spread its canopy over a tiny patch of the Ottoman Empire. Sycamores arrived here from the continent a hundred years earlier. But while sycamores continue to be viewed as weeds by many country people, disliked for their sappy leaves, horse chestnuts have charmed their way into English culture. Their wood may be too soft for carpentry and make poor firewood, but who can resist a tree that gives us exotic, candle-like blooms and, best of all, the game of conkers?
Sycamores were plentiful in White Wood, but I didn’t spot any horse chestnuts (although they must be there). The relentless rain kept our eyes mostly on our feet, as we made our way along the little tracks; scarcely more than sheep paths. We came across a clearing formed by three huge beeches. For all the world, they looked like a family: the tallest was dad; mum was next to him, a fraction slighter; and up a bank was granddad, older and stockier than the others. Arriving on these shores around six thousand years ago, beeches just squeak into the native English tree category. They are still considered invasive in northern England. But if these three beeches in White Wood were ever in danger of being uprooted, they are surely safe now. They have muscled out a home for themselves; their canopies pushing away rivals and blocking light to saplings below. We wandered around, admiring them, then walked away into the rain.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
Megan and Awen
In a beehive, hormones are the elixir that holds everything together. As a queen moves over the comb, she releases a pheromone that keeps her constantly in touch with her worker bees. But if the hive becomes over-populated and the queen’s scent can’t reach every bee, this may trigger the workers to take drastic action. A new queen is raised, and either she, or the old queen, will lead part of the hive away in a swarm.
Humans have their own version of the queen scent. Oxytocin, otherwise known as the ‘love hormone’, is released in massive quantities to help mother and baby during labour. For the first hour after a baby is born, oxytocin levels between mother and baby peak. In this magic period, helped by skin-to-skin contact, a family bonds.
Our daughter Awen Persephone was born on a hot night at the end of June. No amount of fans and breeze from the open window could cool delivery room 3. Immediately after the birth, Awen was placed on Megan’s chest. Then Megan needed medical help and I was given Awen and she lay naked on me. When the doctors finally left, Awen slept in a plastic cot next to Megan’s bed and I lay on the floor, with a bag of sweets and clothes for a pillow. With the lights and most of the machines switched off, the heat in the room began to lessen. The sound of a woman giving birth in a nearby room became a peculiar lullaby. We were in our own little fug of oxytocin; Megan and I were now worker bees, under the pheromone spell of a new queen.
It wasn’t until a few days (and a good sleep) later that Awen’s powers were revealed. There is a conservatory in the maternity ward, which looks towards the Stray – the acres of flat grass, with avenues of trees that stretches across Harrogate. I wheeled Awen into the conservatory, took her out of her plastic cot and lowered her under my shirt. She lay on my chest, head wedged into an armpit, just as she had done moments after her birth. The warmth of her body came first. And then the most euphoric, giddy sensation I’ve ever known. All the emotions of falling in love, going on a first date, making love, being perfectly drunk, the euphoria of winning and of being out at night on the sea… all wrapped up in the heat of Awen’s chest against mine.
Drugged, I sat with her in the conservatory. Outside, the wind picked up. The branches of a horse chestnut reached towards the windows, stretching out its thick, leaf fingers. Further back an avenue of beeches turned in our direction. The grass of the Stray was now the tide coming in. I lifted Awen a little, to let her see the world and the world see her. Her eyes were barely opened and not at all focused, but she may just have got a glimpse of her first tree. I made a promise to them both that I’d plant a horse chestnut in the field in front of the house.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
Dotted all around Nidderdale are gates that do not open into footpaths, or open fields, but into narrow, overgrown places – disused tracks between stone walls that are pressed tight with long grass, or gorse, or blackthorn. Every so often I come across one of these closed gates, think about doing a bit of trespassing and walk on. I’m not bothered about meeting an angry farmer. No, I’m preserving these tracks for my imagination. However alluring the closed gate, can what lies beyond it be more exciting than what I’m capable of imagining?
In all the dale, there’s only one of these pathways that nags at me. A mile above and to the west of our house, where Silver Hill meets the top road, there is a five-bar metal gate. On the other side, a grassy track runs upwards to a distant second gate, shaded by two sycamores. And that’s it: no field, not a jot of green. Because of the way the track rises up, from the road nothing is visible beyond the second gate other than the clear northern sky.
This week I lost one of my two swarms. It was the second, smaller swarm of dark bees which I had taken from a local beekeeper and housed in the blue and white ‘Button Moon’ hive. It was a sad moment, but in truth the Button Moon bees were in a bad way. They were riddled with varroa and probably wouldn’t have survived the year.
After humans, the parasitic bee mite, Varroa Destructor, is the number one enemy of honey bees worldwide. This small red creature, which looks like a tiny helmet on tentacles, lives off honey bees and their brood, making them susceptible to disease and deformation. Unless you live in Australia – one of the few varroa-free countries – the chances are that if you keep bees, they will have varroa. So most beekeepers monitor for varroa, keeping a close eye on how many mites fall to the bottom of a hive. A drop of over ten mites a day in summer starts to become worrying. I was counting forty mites a day from the Button Moon hive. The yellow and white ‘Sun Hive’, was showing only one or two mites.
At this point I was faced with a dilemma – to treat or step away and let nature take her course. Many natural beekeepers don’t treat for varroa, the logic being that the stronger chemical treatments are both harmful to bees and stops the species building up long-term resistance to the mite. Besides, the hives favoured by natural beekeepers, in particular the Warre hives that I use, are meant to be much better at combating varroa than conventional hives. Their small size and thick walls help the bees easily regulate the temperature of their environment and the natural comb that the bees build in these hives is smaller than in conventional hives, leaving leaves less room for the mites to crawl into brood cells and feed off infants.
But even though my swarms were in Warre hives, the rate of infestation in the Button Moon Hive and risk of spread to the Sun Hive was too great to risk. So I treated both hives on a warm evening and walked back through the meadow, feeling pretty ambivalent about what I had done.
The next afternoon, I caught sight of a group of bees flying past the house, heading towards the wood opposite. I guessed it might be the queen on a mating flight, surrounded by male drones. It wasn’t. My next trip to the hive site coincided with a visit by Don, a neighbouring beekeeper who had agreed to be a mentor. We crouched behind the Button Moon Hive and I opened the viewing window, expecting to show him a ball of dark bees. What he saw was an empty hive, a few confused stragglers and lots of dead varroa mites. Because of the treatment I had given them, or another reason, the Button Moon bees had gone.
I was gutted, I really was. I had grown attached to this dark little swarm, that had arrived in a Pinot Grigio half-dozen box and had scuttled with such comic eagerness into the blue and white hive. The beekeeper who had given them to me had warned me of their vicious tendencies, but these bees had always been gentle around me. They were curious creatures. Whenever I sat by the hive entrance and watched them, unlike the Sun Hive bees (who minded their business), the Button Moon bees used to land on my arms or hands, have a bit of an inspection and then fly off.
That night, I spoke to as many beekeepers as would listen about what had happened. Most of them, even the natural beekeepers, said it was a good thing that the Button Moon bees had departed before the healthy Sun Hive had become infested with their varroa mites. It was still swarming season. Once the hive was cleaned, I could go hunting for new bees to replace my dark girls.
Even though I knew I wouldn’t take them back, I wanted to try and find where the Button Moon bees had gone. So I followed the line they had taken, wondering what sort of place these bees would pick for a new home. In the sycamore wood, I scanned branches and hunted around the piles of old quarried stone. It was futile. The bees had vanished.
There was one more place to try. If the bees had kept going on the same line, they would have passed through the wood and fields beyond, eventually hitting the top road somewhere close to the metal gate with its grassy track that I had never explored. Megan and I drove up there. No bees, just warmth and Gouthwaite reservoir like a glittering postcard in the distance. And it’s stupid, but in my imagination, I saw the Button Moon bees heading up the track, to the second gate and the sky beyond. They would have liked what they found. There was red and white clover for them, buttercups and foxgloves newly opened on the left hand wall. The sticky sap of the sycamores waited as a last treat before their journey into the sun.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
The first bees, walking into the sun hive
After months of waiting, preparation and (recently) some anxious moments, we’ve had girls. Lots of girls! Yesterday, two swarms of bees walked into their new homes and now, finally, both my hives are full. I walked out into the field just now to see them. Opening the viewing windows on each hive, there they each were, clustered inside like sleeping newborns, sheltering from the day’s drizzle. The heat they were generating made the hive warm to the touch.
Having both colonies is a huge relief. My hive site wasn’t ready until a week ago and I missed a rash of local swarms that appeared during the May heat wave. Two washout weeks followed, in which no bees swarmed. By the end of last week, I was starting to get twitchy about my lack of bees and increasingly jealous of the swarm my friend Mark had picked up. Apparently his bees were doing brilliantly. I was starting to consider the possibility of being in the idiotic position of writing a bee blog without actually having any bees.
What is a swarm? If you think of a colony of bees (one queen, a few thousand male drones and around fifty thousand female workers) as a single organism, then a swarm is essentially the child of that organism. Many factors trigger a swarm, but the most common are over-crowding in the hive or an old queen who is no longer laying strongly. When either of these happen, the workers create new queens by feeding chosen larvae a special super-diet of proteins, vitamins, sugar and fatty acids known as ‘royal jelly’, which will turn the larvae into queens. After sixteen days, the first new queen hatches and kills her rivals. Now, either she or the old queen will leave the hive, taking a collection of drones and workers with them. This is a swarm. To begin with the swarm will assemble close by, while scout bees go in search of a permanent home. As soon as that home is found, the swarm will head off for its new life. Of course, bees being utterly unpredictable, there are many permutations of what I have just described. But that’s the general idea.
In an experience that makes good drama, but sucks in real life, I’ve both been on standby for Megan to go into labour and for the phone to ring with news of a swarm. Since her waters broke three weeks ago, Megan has been keeping her hospital notes on a chest of drawers by the front door. Two drawers down, I had stashed my bee suit and swarm-collecting notes. We took bets on which would come first. I bet on the baby. She bet they would come at the same time. I made a joke about dropping her off at the hospital and, if things weren’t moving along, making a dash for the swarm. Megan, naturally, was amused and delighted by this.
On Saturday, the weather was fine and was expected to last through the weekend. If bees were going to swarm, now would probably be the time. At RHS Harlow Carr, there is a bee supply shop. I wanted to get a skep (a straw container for catching swarms, or in the old days for keeping bees), so we drove there and while Megan and the bump looked at plants, I went shopping. I ran into Sue, who mans the local swarm hotline. Mid conversation, her mobile rang. There was a swarm, but it was a long way away. She put her hand over the receiver and asked if I wanted to go all that distance to fetch it. There was always the chance the swarm might have flown off before I got there.
I’d be lying if I said I remained cool and calm. Megan was fished out of a cafe queue and bundled into the car. A rubbish expectant bee parent, I’d left all my swarm-catching gear at home. Back at Sparrowhawk Farm, I loaded up the car, stole the camera from the hospital bag and set off, northwards. I’ve read all about taking a swarm and spoken to people who have taken scores of swarms. Mostly it’s a straightforward endeavour: there are a ball of bees hanging off a tree, you shake them into a skep, put the skep on the ground to allow the stragglers to find their way in, then wrap up the skep in a sheet and stick it in the boot of your car. It looks easy, joyful even, but so does birth on the hypno-birthing dvds Megan and I have been watching.
Leaving Nidderdale, I was met with a black skyline. I’d be taking the swarm in a storm. Now, I know that swarms are usually gentle and a bit of rain makes them gentler still, but a storm? I had no idea how that might affect them. My imagination, over-active at the best of times, began to take me off into bee doomsday scenarios. I think I was more worried about making an idiot of myself than having a catastrophic allergic reaction to bee stings, but there wasn’t much in it. As I drove, I practiced hypno-birth breathing. In: one…two…three…four. Out: one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight. By the time I got my out-breaths up to twenty, the car was enveloped in rain. When a tractor and trailer blocked the road, I fished out my swarming notes and did some last-minute cramming.
Fortunately, there were midwives at hand. Janet and Kevin have kept bees for the past three years. This swarm had come off one of their hives and because they had no new hive for it, they had rung the swarm hotline to offer it to another beekeeper – me. Hearing that I was a novice, they kindly gave me a lesson in taking a swarm. The bees were hanging off a branch, just above head height, with no branches below them. I’d read enough books to know that is was an absolute dolly of a swarm to take. And so it was. While Keven held the skep under them, I stood on a bench and gave the branch a hard shake. The bees fell, plop, into the skep. Just like in the books, we put the skep on the ground to let the stragglers rejoin the swarm. Half an hour later, encouraged by a little smoking and the heavy rain, all the bees were in. I’d been all for just wrapping them in a sheet and hoping for the best, but Kevin and Janet boxed them beautifully for me.
I drove home with exaggerated care, radio down low. After a year of planning, finally I had bees! Finally I was a beekeeper! My bees were coming to live in a beautiful hive site, with a high wall to keep the wind off and surrounded by fruit trees and wildflower meadows. Ok, this is all still a bit under construction, but it’s half way there. What is 100% ready though is their warre hive, with its thick red cedar walls, quilt filled with sheep wool and fancy upgraded mesh floor to keep varroa mites at bay. This swarm would be going into ‘sun hive’, painted in sunflower yellow and white, with Megan’s sun symbols on the roof. Bees apparently recognise shapes – when I have many hives, the symbols would help them recognise their home.
Nidderdale was cold and wet when I returned and evening was coming. My only option for housing the bees that night was to open up a hive and chuck them in. Now I don’t have any idea what goes on in bees’ minds, but I can’t believe they would be happy about being shaken into one box and thrown, convict-like into another all in one day. So I took the skep out to the hive site, laid it next to the sun hive, wedged a brollie over it to keep off the rain and prayed everything would stay put until the morning. Job done for the day. Or so I thought.
There was a call waiting for me when I got in. A local beekeeper had a small swarm. Did I want it? Yes! Could I go get it? I wanted to, but couldn’t – Megan and I were due to go to a friend’s for dinner. I’d just have to hope the swarm was still there tomorrow.
A fierce wind picked up in the night, coming out of the moors at the head of the dale and hitting the west wall of the house. By seven in the morning, I had been awake for an hour, worrying that the skep would have blown over. I went out to the hive site and was relieved to find that everything was as I had left it. There was a muggy warmth in the air, the sun moving behind light clouds. A good day to walk the bees in to their new home. A few bees were already emerging from the skep, heading into the meadow. Would they find the pockets of red clover, a bee favourite, amongst the sorrel and pignut? Would they come back and report, with a waggle dance, that their new home was worth a try?
Walking bees into a hive is the traditional way of doing things. What you do is put a ramp of sorts up to the hive entrance and lay a sheet over it. Then you pick up the skep and shake the bees onto the sheet. As bees generally move upwards, they will head up the sheet into the hive. So that’s what I did. The bees landed in a big, buzzing dollop on the sheet and I sat on a nearby stone, camera in hand, to watch. Having lived in Africa for some years, I’ve been on countless safaris. The best thing I ever saw were mountain gorillas in Rwanda. For an hour, I sat watching the youngsters play tag, while the mums brushed past me and dad sunbathed like a drunk. It was the way the gorilla family communicated that was so magical. You could see everything going on in their heads. This, too, was what was so special about the march of the bees. First, scouts were went up the ramp to investigate, then a small platoon. I moved closer, hoping to see the tell-tale sign that the bees were giving the thumbs-up. And there it was – a number of them were fanning their wings, bums in the air. At the end of their abdomens, their nasonov glands were shining, giving off a pheromone which tells the other bees that a good home has been found. And, on cue, the main body began to make their way up the ramp. Soon, there were thousands clustered around the hive entrance. In a small dance floor just outside, a group were dancing in a circle – the traditional bee dance to tell the others that forage (or in this case, a good home) was close by.
Of course, a few bees ran off back to the skep and had to be tipped over the entrance and some others started crawling up the hive and were gently brushed down. The best method, I found was a few light squirts with a mister. Thinking rain was coming, the bees scuttled inside. And although they buzzed around me and sat on my hands, not one of them stung me. As an experience it was right up there with the gorillas. And, a little intoxicated by the experience, I couldn’t wait to pick up the second swarm and do it again.
The bees of the second swarm were darker, more akin to the native English black bees that are now basically extinct. They had already been housed in a small wine box, so there was little to do other than put them in the back of the car and take them home. These bees were destined for the ‘Button Moon’ hive – blue and white with the resident artist’s designs on the roof. It had meant to be the moon hive, as chic as its solar brother, but Megan’s deep space extravaganza prompted a title change. Once again I set up the ramp and sheet and tipped out the bees. And whether I was getting better at it (parenthood is easier second time around?), or whether the button moon bees could sense the rain in the air, they fairly dashed inside in a great excitement of shiny fanning and circular can-cans.
As the rain began to fall, I sat on a stone, gawping at the hives. Now it was all done and the bees were inside, it seemed like the easiest, most natural thing in the world. My gittery car ride into the storm now seemed absurd. Yes, these bees would sting me at some point and they may clear off tomorrow, but it had been a beautiful start to our relationship. I found myself talking to the two hives, telling them about the wildflower and trees I was going to bring to them… then Megan was calling and the rain picked up, as if to slap me for being such a loon.
At home, I was met with an irate pregnant lady, who had no intention of listening to more of my bee reveries or letting me put my feet up in front of the French Open final. Family number one had been sidelined for the weekend and wasn’t happy. I was ordered to drive family number one to Baby’s R Us in Leeds, an hour and a half away, where I would buy a very expensive push chair.
(For a gallery of all the action see here).
Bluebells in White Wood
At the start of the week our dale put on its best impression of Asia, becoming so sweaty and close that even the Turkish waiters at the local pub were complaining. Then the winds came; not strong, but just enough to clean up the skies and let the sun through. The result has been spectacular. White is in the ascendant. Every hawthorn is in flower; something I’ve never seen. Even the tree facing the baby room has given up years of green stubbornness and burst into white. Cow parsley and stitchwort fill the hedgerows with lace and stars. On Sunday we took Nelly into the bluebell wood past Bewerley and it was like stepping into a painting. Whether it is a trick of the sun, or a trick on ourselves, neither of us can remember Nidderdale looking so good.
Megan’s waters broke a week ago, we think. Our regular scan on Wednesday was going fine, until the consultant appeared, looking tense. ‘Did you know your waters had broken?’ she asked. ‘What?! No. What does it mean? Is the baby ok?’ Many tests later, we were told the baby was fine. It’s rare, but not unheard of for waters to break without being noticed. When it happens, if the mother doesn’t go into labour soon after, she can often not go into labour until term, although that carries a risk of infections. The baby is at 33-weeks, so three weeks from being in ideal shape for appearing. The best bet, our consultant said, was to give Megan all the relevant drugs, monitor the baby closely and hope it stays put for a little longer. But it could come at any minute.
So, we’re waiting. After the first sleepless night, Megan was possessed by a strange calmness. In the hot, beautiful weather, she’s been nesting inside the house and out. The laundry room and the hall has been emptied and cleaned and the back garden has been given a makeover. I can’t say I’ve reacted quite as well. There’s been some panic equipment-checking, car-filling, googling, but after a while this has been curbed. You feel a bit of a plonker, freaking out when your very expectant wife has turned into a Zen master. There’s been nothing for it but to give in to the uncertainty and the heat.
Slow, methodical tasks are good. While Megan potters in the garden, I’ve been painting my beehives. One hive is mint and white, the other a pale sunflower and white. The sheepswool to insulate the hive rooves, delivered au naturel by the farmer has been washed in the bath and laid out in the sun. Our days have taken on a dreamy quality, as if our bodies have put us on auto-pilot, resting us for what lies ahead. Is this why the dale looks so once-in-a-lifetime incredible? If we were in a normal state of mind, maybe we wouldn’t think it was special at all?
Some time in the next three weeks, Megan will be on the maternity ward in Harrogate hospital. It could happen tonight. We’re both scared, but overwhelmingly exited to meet our baby. We are longing to be parents, just not quite yet. Fingers crossed we’ll be waiting a few weeks more.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
The wood opposite the house, home to sycamores and (somewhere) a cuckoo
There’s a cuckoo in the woods opposite the house. It began calling last week, mostly from mid morning to early afternoon, as distinctively cuckoo-like as you could want. And it seems crazy, but I’m sure I’ve never heard one before. I’ve racked my brains, remembering every late spring sound from childhood in Norfolk, through London, Kent, Berkshire, Yorkshire, Edinburgh and then any number of countries until back to Yorkshire – you should try it, it’s incredible what reappears – but there was no cuckoo calling. The closest I came was a wood pigeon in Kent; my memory opening onto a warm afternoon, standing in the garden next to the fence, when I asked and was told what bird was making the noise. I’m still a bit bowled over about being given this memory, to the point of being suspicious. Can this little chocolate box really be true? Does it matter either way? For ages, if I could only hear one bird, for the rest of my life, I would have plumped for a wood pigeon. Now, having heard a cuckoo, I’m wavering. And I’m longing to hear its siren song again.
So Nelly and I have incorporated cuckoo hunting into our morning walk. At the woods, I find a dry patch to sit while she disappears off, every now and then sending up pheasants. The trees here are mostly sycamores, their trunks wide apart on the steep, stony floor. Scanning them, hoping for a grey and white flash, I notice how tactile sycamores are with each other. Like children, their branches reach out to hold hands with other sycamores, but are less friendly to neighbouring beeches and hollies. Every day this week, I’ve staked out the wood but haven’t seen or heard the cuckoo. Nelly has become bored. Last time, she put a paw on my knee and gave me a look that said: ‘river, now’.
At home, with only two months to go, nesting activity is on the increase. One bedroom has been turned over into a storage dump of all the things we need, all the things it’s vital we have and the ‘you’ll thank me we got this now’ stuff. Meanwhile, in the main nesting site, a carpet is going down, double glazing is being put in and I’m painting up tired bits of furniture. Mrs cuckoo has a hassle-free alternative. She just dumps her chick in another bird’s nest. It’s not polite, or nice (especially when the newborn chick kills off its rivals), but there’s no housekeeping and she jets off on holiday a few months afterwards. There’s something of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character about Mrs Cuckoo; glorious and feckless and ruthless.
I’m going to give the woods a few more days on the off-chance that she shows up. She won’t, of course. I’m looking for wind and listening for shadows. And I’m almost regretting having heard her at all.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
A typical Yorkshire farm, one damp morning
The house I grew up in was opposite a pub; which is less fun than it sounds when you’re five years old and trying to get to sleep. Sleep was touch and go, until the last noisy hooray (it was one of those parts of Thatcher’s London) vanished into the night, calling to his mates, a cab, or just for the hell of it. Because my room was at the back of the house, I couldn’t see the pub. Craning out of the window only provided a view of a section of street. My tormentors were invisible.
Over many nights the calls became more familiar, until I was even starting to recognise one hooray from another. I found a favourite – Mr Swear. If you’re going to go about waking up small children at least give them something to smile about. He never left the pub in any fixed direction. I’d spot him occasionally, swearing into the distance, with his long, combed-back hair and heavy gait. He never turned back to show me his face, so I imagined him as a cross between Mr Twit and Charlton Heston’s Moses - but swearing.
7am, a Monday morning some thirty years later. The overcast, flat landscape outside Harrogate was soaked green. I had got up early to drive to a livestock farm. Young cows in the barns were pressing over metal gates towards the morning, in that curious, fearful way that always saddens me. Around the back of the outbuildings was a quarter acre patch where the farmer stored his junk. The piled-up doors, fridges and odds and sods of stone were screened from the rest of the farm by wet hedges and wet trees.
Everywhere there was birdsong. Not short, warning calls, but full on singing, as varied in tune and tone as if half a dozen national anthems were being belted out. It was easy to pick out the descending notes of a chaffinch, the noisy ‘tsee tsee’ of blue tits, chiffchaffs with their namesake calls, and the tenor voices of blackbirds – are there finer singers? Yet for all the noise, there was something not quite right about this farm. It was like turning up to a party in full flow, and slowly starting to realize that lots of your friends who you expected to be there, haven’t turned up.
This is a story that’s being played out not just at this farm, but at farms across the UK. Since the late 70s, our farmland bird populations have plummeted. And this is not just happening in the UK. A recent pan-European study, looking at bird species in 25 European countries demonstrates that birds living on farmland (the largest single habitat for birds in Europe) are by far the most threatened and in decline.
Once common species such as the turtle dove, grey partridge, corn bunting and tree sparrow have declined in the UK by over 80% from 1970-2004. Linnets, who rely on seeds to feed their young have been hit by herbicides and winter stubble and are down 49% in the same period. The quintessential farmland singer, the skylark (popularised by the composer Vaughan Williams, has seen numbers fall by 53%, while lapwings are down by 46% - both due to loss of habitat from autumn sowing. And so the list goes on – yellowhammers (down 54%), song thrushes (down 50%) and starlings, whose wheeling flocks are one of the great countryside spectacles are down by 72%, their young dying from a lack of insect food.
Increasingly intensive farming practices lie at the root of these declines. There is more information here, but essentially increased use of chemicals, changing harvesting times, urbanization, and a loss of habitats such as verges and hedgerows in both normal and the American-style prairie farms has all affected farmland bird numbers.
In 2008, in a typical example of food demands vs good environmental practice, following poor harvests the European Union waived its 20-year rules on set-aside land – which in the UK had previously ensured about 8% farmland was left alone for wildlife. Conservationists, not surprisingly, were horrified. Farmland birds need three basic things for survival: a safe nest site, food in spring and summer for their young, and food and shelter over winter. The 2008 EU policy was as good as going into a wheat field with a shotgun and a pack of dogs.
Tackling the decline means both effectively charting it and getting farmers actively caring about the birds on their land. Since 1999, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has been sending its volunteers out to survey farms across the UK during the breeding season. The birds are recorded on a map and given to the farmer, along with a detailed report and advice on how farmers can seek agri-environment grants – schemes whereby farmers are paid if they improve wildlife habitats on their land.
Some months back, I’d signed up to be a RSPB farmland survey volunteer. There was a training day in March, in faraway east Yorkshire, where on an icy walk around a farm I quickly discovered that my twitching skills were miles behind most of the other volunteers. A smudge, flashing behind a hedge was immediately recognised as a male sparrowhawk. A chaffinch was calling, but there was some debate as to whether it was a male or a female. I was back in my childhood room, hoping for a voice I could definitively recognise – an avian Mr Swear. My party trick among lesser twitchers (yes, it’s a party you want to be at!) is identifying the rasping call of a goldfinch. At the faintest sound of this finch, I planned to shout out – ‘female goldfinch!’ – a devilish ruse given that males and females look almost alike and appear in groups. Here would be my moment of glory, when these master twitchers would realise that an equal was amongst them. But as it happened I was eating a Mars bar when we came across goldfinches and yellowhammers in a hedge and someone else got in there first. So for the rest of the walk, I kept silent, growing progressively colder and grumpier.
Thankfully, new RSPB surveyors are generally sent out with someone experienced in their first year. I was lucky enough to get paired with Ian, a real birding pro. Over an initial chat in the pub, he claimed not to be that great on identifying birds by sound. But standing with him, in the damp early morning around the back of the farm, he knew every call and every burst of song. Ten minutes with him was worth more than hours listening to bird calls on the internet. It’s all a little bit of a riddle – hearing the call, figuring out what tree the bird is in, where in the tree it is hiding and if it’s alone or among friends. Ian admitted that it had taken him years to get to where he was, partly, he thought, because he didn’t have a musical bone in his body. I nodded, empathetically, not owning up to all those childhood violin lessons, and kept up my irritating: ‘Is that a…? And that’s a…?’
Leaving the farm buildings, we set off for what would turn out to be four hours of trudging alongside hedgerows and picking our way through cattle bogs. It’s a slow, methodical business, doing a bird survey. And probably one best done alone; when you can envelop yourself in thoughts and let the landscape shift and blur into whatever your mind wishes. Besides, there’s little time for talking when you’re busy listening. We walked in silence for the most part, finding little other than blackbirds, chiffchaffs and chaffinches. Underfoot the grass bore the signs of too much treatment; it was mostly coarse and free of herbs. When we left the farm area and walked through a neighbour’s field, the change was immediate. Cuckoo flowers, dandelions and celandine lay over grassland dense with herbs. It may well be pure coincidence that it was at the further reaches of the farm that we saw some of the rarer species we’d been hoping for. A single linnet on a telephone wire was a precursor to a pack of these pretty finches, who swarmed out of a tree to eat seeds. We saw rare redpolls, and greenfinches, albeit in a neighbouring garden.
It was close on midday and the overcast sky had finally begun to spit down when we returned to the farm buildings. We planned the next survey and then went our separate ways. It had been a long and for the most part uneventful morning, but now I might just be able to recognise sweeping flight of a linnet and pick out a wren in a chorus line of similar-sounding robins and dunnocks. In the countryside, the joy is in the detail, in the long, slow learning. It took me months to pick out just one voice coming out of a pub. Mr Swear has stayed with me, in all his foul-mouthed glory. He’ll never know how much pleasure his memory still gives.
(Source: blissfulbees.com)
The Nidd, a short way downstream from Glasshouses
Swallows are back in the dale. I saw a pair in Wath at the start of the week, fast and low over the river meadows. Yesterday, again by the Nidd, four more were engaged in what looked like furious pursuit until there came a brief mid-air collision and I knew I had just seen the female swallow take the pick of her three suitors.
It’s the river that the returning swallows seem to favour. I’ve been keeping a look out, but seen none on the hillsides. Probably I’ve simply missed them. Or perhaps it’s because of the relentless rain and cold we’ve had all week. If I had just come from South Africa, I’d probably hole up in barn close to the Nidd.
Apart from being the most sheltered spot in the dale, the river bank is also the most sociable. The birds there are hiding under sodden branches, but singing hard – their equivalent to a night down the pub. Setting out from Glasshouses this evening and walking with the current into lower Nidderdale, blackbirds and chaffinches led the chorus, with the odd squawk from goldfinches. A pair of dippers chased each other up and down stream – yelling abuse or trying to get it on, I couldn’t tell.
Our baby’s eyes are open now and we’ve been having a debate about shining a torch at Megan’s tummy. Megs thinks it’d be a nice way of saying hello. I don’t. I reckon the poor little mite would feel like a dingy caught in a lighthouse beam. Right now he or she is tucked up and protected from cold and rain, the wind that seeps off the hill into our house and the sun that always seems brighter in a wet landscape. We don’t need a torch to communicate. A prod produces a prod back. Blowing a raspberry results in disgusted stillness.
The Roman poet Pliny the Elder wrote that swallows feed celandine to their young, to improve their eyesight. The meadows alongside the Nidd are packed with celandine. But even if I had picked a bunch and fed them to Megan after a torch infringement, they wouldn’t have worked. Our celandines are the wrong sort. Pliny was talking about greater celandine, and in Nidderdale we have the lesser variety. Pliny’s celandines are a sort of poppy, ours are squat little buttercups.
Anyhow, the foul weather this week has done for Nidderdale’s lesser celandines. It’s time for the next wave of flowers to take over. In the meantime, the lock-in continues by the river and the baby hopefully stays where it should be, sheltered and warm, until mid-summer
