Nature Writing

Nature Writing

Richard Herley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1984-2010 Richard Herley

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Cover image: Cley Mill, Norfolk

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Geese of Oxhey

In the Valley

Defending a Territory

Giants and Pygmies

Ancient Aviators

Flaunden by Night

Secrets of the Goldeneye

At the Ford

Up from the Pit

The Red and the Grey

Open All Hours

Bird Song

White’s Selborne

Staines Reservoir

A Moorhen

Frogs

Wind

The First Chiffchaff

Hares

Herons

Croxley Moor

Bumblebees

Introduced Trees

Tring Reservoirs

Hydra

Bluebells

Swallows

Plant Odours

Weasels

Glaciers

Badgers

Snails

Lapwings

The Aquatic Ape?

Nettles

Preening

Lichens

Dragonflies

Balsams

Spotted Flycatchers

The Moon

Black-headed Gulls

Aristocrat Butterflies

Collared Doves

Fungi

Sleeping Rough

Stocker’s Lake

Leaf-fall

Mandrake

Moles

Hunting Sparrowhawk

Linnets

Brent Geese

Unchanged Selborne

Words from My Nature Journal

Introduction

My enthusiasm for natural history was probably first sparked by Richard Jefferies, whose Bevis fevered my imagination for two or three months in 1962, when I was twelve. My recreational reading consisted thereafter mostly of books about nature. Many of these I bought with my pocket money, so they tended to be second-hand and out of date.

British nature-writing reached its heyday in the late nineteenth century. The drift to the cities had produced a rich vein of nostalgia for the countryside, and this was assiduously mined by the publishers of the day. Besides essayists like Jefferies and W H Hudson there were any number of authors who produced handbooks of the flora and fauna. All these books were written in a formal style and edited to Victorian standards of literacy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were having a profound influence on the way I produced, and was ever to produce, written English.

Nature as a subject for a child’s pen is ideal: it is inexhaustible. There is also scope for original observation and plain description, especially if the child is lucky enough to have been born into a literate household and attends a school whose teachers have high expectations of their pupils.

The first part of this collection comprises a series of articles published during 1984-5 by a local newspaper in my home town, Watford, on the outskirts of north-west London. After these are four short pieces I wrote purely for pleasure. These begin with Hunting Sparrowhawk.

Finally I provide a series of brief extracts – often no more than a sentence or two – from the nature journal I have been keeping since 1963. Read in sequence, these provide a curious picture of a boyish enthusiasm gradually maturing. They also give a glimpse of a disappearing world. Alas, my old school is by no means what it was, children are no longer free to wander the woods and wild seashore at will, and the English countryside is even more degraded now than it was then.

Richard Herley, December 2010

The Geese of Oxhey

Lying in bed, you hear it approaching from a great distance: a mad, clamorous honking as of two hundred unreasoning taxi drivers caught in a jam, but the horns are all mobile and airborne and pass just above the rooftops and on their way. You turn over and try to get back to sleep. There is nothing you can do about the noise, or the fact that it has woken you at daybreak many times before. If you live anywhere in Oxhey or West Watford or Rickmansworth you must resign yourself to the knowledge that you have geese for neighbours.

They are Canada geese, big, handsome birds, brown and black and white. The flock numbers two or three hundred, and spends its time in a selection of favoured spots up and down the chain of gravel pits between Oxhey and Denham. The geese are discerning gourmets. They know all the choicest pastures. One of their favourites is the broad expanse of playing fields at Merchant Taylors’ School. There, while one or two keep watch with upraised necks and black, suspicious button eyes, the rest are browsing by the running track, expertly cropping the grass to a regulation length. It is an hour after dawn, a time at which, even in the autumn, few people are about. The sky is blue; the distant school, the cricket pavilion, the black, sawn-off uprights of the rugby goalposts standing about here and there on the field, are all made indistinct by mist. The geese continue to feed. The turf is littered with their large, greenish mutes; the flock has advanced across the running track, and crumbs of white adhere to some of the dark, webbed feet.

Suddenly another neck goes up, and another, and yet more. On the far side of the field, where the path adjoins the netting fence, the sentinels have seen the feared and hated shape. A man. With him is a lesser animal, a dog. The geese know what that is.

They wait, growing more restless, as the man approaches. He is walking through the dew, wearing gumboots and a green coat. He throws a stick and his dog runs for it. Now the geese are distinctly unhappy. One begins to honk, and others take up the complaint.

The dog is within a hundred and fifty yards, and behind the dog is the man. The dog makes a dash for the birds: in a rush of wings and honks they are taking flight, two hundred times fifteen pounds or more of goose. A ton and a half of them gaining air and space. From behind you can see the pattern made by their rumps and inner and outer tail feathers: intense black, a broad crescent of purest white, more black. The pattern is barely visible on the ground. It is made to be seen only in flight, a warning, an alarm signal, or something to follow, holding the flock together in its journeyings.

These geese are not truly wild. They live as wild birds, but their forefathers were captives on ornamental lakes. Before that they really were wild, in North America, which is where each autumn the Canadas still travel down from the Arctic states to winter in Mexico and along the Gulf. In New England at this time of year the geese are passing through; in Old England they have no intention of going any farther than over the hedge and away from the man and his labrador.

They circle the gravel pit and make as if to settle; but then, at some mysterious signal, a decision is made and they circle again, settling instead on the adjoining water of Hampermill Lake. By now the honking is reaching its climax. The other, more sober, birds of the lake – the solitary heron standing on a log, the grebes, the parties of mallard and shoveler – refuse to take note of the fuss. They have heard it all before. The geese are swimming about; some have climbed the bank and are already inspecting the pasture there. But the grass by the lake is inferior, fit only for the coots and moorhens to graze. Better pickings are not far away, just over there at Brightwell’s Farm, not a furlong from the northern margin. In groups of five, ten, twenty, thirty, the geese leave the lake, rise just enough to clear the yellowing hawthorn trees of the hedgerow, and settle once again to feed.

In the Valley

They were once the masters of the dank, damp places, undisputed lords of the river. They were magic and to be feared. If you were so brave as to cut one down the stump bled. The timber did not rot. The foliage was dark, the bark black, so black that, even in winter when the leaves had gone, the ground under the alders was always gloomy and oppressive.

The alders were here, of course, thousands of years before we were. Their pollen has been preserved in samples taken from peat bogs; their seed has been found among the earliest remnants of ancient man. At that time the whole of England was one vast forest. The dry ground was the scene of a strange, imperceptibly slow and protracted yet ferocious war of attrition waged between several species of trees. The prize was the possession of the landscape: the winner, in the first age, was the small-leafed lime. Then came men with their animals. Lime leaves were gathered as fodder. The lime’s defences were weakened and in came oak. Oak forest dominated England until the arrival of metal and the growth in the human population signalled its end.

But below all this, in the marshy places, where the soil was too wet to interest the farmers, the alders were yet safe. They survived here using the same weapon that had held off the limes and oaks: a special sort of root system that produces its own free nitrogen and enables the roots to withstand prolonged or even permanent immersion. The roots, together with the unique mixture of sedges and rushes that accompanies alder woodland, gradually consolidate the marsh, raising the level and sending the water elsewhere. Once the best ground higher up had been put to the axe, we began to drain the water-meadows, and to maintain this drainage the alders had to go.

Extensive alder woodland, or alder carr, as it is called, is now virtually unknown in England. The few alders that are left to us are thinly scattered along the margins of lakes and rivers, and only survive there by default. They are given gracious permission to remain, to represent their ancestors in the valleys where once they held sway. There is something sad about them now, as though they cannot forget past glories. The aluminium sign, PRIVATE FISHING, NO DAY TICKETS, BY ORDER, the two iron nails unfeelingly driven into the heartwood and allowed to rust, are just another humiliation, too minor even to notice or resent.

Even the river itself has been destroyed, an impossible act in the imagination of the ancestors. It is now a canal. The otters have gone, the trout, the variety of dragonflies. From the old times only the siskins really remain, ever faithful: small, acrobatic finches, streaked green, yellow, and black. With goldfinches and sometimes redpolls and blue tits they make flocks that move through the alder tops, prising the seed from the small, woody, cone-like lanterns of the old female catkins. The seed is rust-coloured and rich in oil, very nourishing for the finches on a dark November afternoon such as this. The siskins are especially busy, preparing for a long and chilly night spent immobile, losing heat, roosting high up in the alder branches. Their cry is a thinner, more metallic, version of the greenfinch’s wheeze, quite unmistakable, even when you and your bicycle are jolting and crunching along the towpath. You stop and look up, hoping for a glimpse of them at work. Alder seed is coming down in sparse showers. The seeds will float away if they hit the canal. Small as they are, much of their surface is given over to two minute waterwings. It must be hard work to eat enough to make a meal, but the siskins do it. In this, like the alders themselves, the siskins are too narrow and specialized. That is why they are relatively uncommon these days, much less plentiful than the goldfinches. The siskins’ diet is virtually restricted to the seeds of alder, birch, and of a few other trees; the goldfinches can take many other sorts of food besides: thistle and burdock seed especially, insects too. And, even among the alders, the goldfinches are more enterprising and opportunistic. At this very spot last winter a party of goldfinches was on the ice, picking up the alder seed where it had fallen. In this way the goldfinches saved themselves their usual exertions, and the food needed no special finding. It was there, spread out as though on a table.

The siskins are moving on. Dusk is approaching and you have only dynamo lights, not the safest way to illuminate rough ground, so perhaps you had better do the same.

Defending a Territory

I own that I love the blackbird, says one nineteenth-century writer: an easy confession to make. But who will speak up for that other black bird, the carrion crow? From time immemorial it has been called villain, associated with midnight and the darkest deeds. It seems to have a penchant for the graveyard and the cypress. It is drawn by the smell of death. One New Year’s Eve, at dusk, I witnessed a pair attacking the eyes of a sickly herring gull, one bird leaping forward to deliver a savage and cowardly blow as the other leapt back. In ten minutes the gull was killed, and at leisure the crows picked out its brains.

Yet the gull was anyway long past hope. Left alone in the soft mud at the centre of a drained reservoir, it would have attracted a worse horror still: rats. Its time had come. The crows gave it a quicker and more merciful end.

Like undertakers, crows are always properly dressed. With them blackness reaches an art. Every outward inch is black, excepting only the small white eyelid. Science suggests that black plumage is more resistant to wear, but there is something else at work in the design of a crow. Blackness is not a true quality; rather, it indicates the absence of light. The crow’s feathers absorb every last photon, except in the most brilliant sunshine, when the mantle gives back a grudging, oily blue sheen.

A pair of crows seen like this on the soft, lush sward of the town park is a sight to be prized. The two birds have been faithful to each other for several years now. In the early spring they usually build on a previous nest, high up in the fork of one of the red oaks. There, safe from small boys and the thousand disturbances below, the female alone incubates the single brood of four or five young. She is fed and protected by her attentive mate, who later supplies the food for her to give to the nestlings. At a later stage he is allowed to feed them too. A month or so after hatching the young ones fly. Until autumn they remain with their parents, learning the business of being a crow, and then are driven off.

A crow cannot breed unless and until it has a territory. In size territories vary from about 35 to 110 acres, defended most vigorously at or near the nest site. The immature birds, once expelled from the family group, have nowhere to call their own. They join a wandering gang made up of other young birds and rootless adults. This non-breeding flock lives on the fringes, continually invading the territories of the breeding pairs.

Birds holding territory dominate those that do not. Males dominate females; to the male of the pair falls most of the work of defence. Single invaders are usually easy to expel, but when there are more, the female must join in as well. If the intruders become persistent the home birds must use their full armoury of threat postures, cawing displays, aerial chases, and the technique of supplanting, or dislodging the intruder from its perch. Disputes rarely come to blows, but it can be weary work for some pairs and their health and breeding success suffer as a result. In winter the non-breeders fly off at dusk to join the communal roost of rooks and crows in the woods, but the home birds must remain behind till darkness is almost complete, and in the morning they must get up fifteen minutes early to hurry back in readiness for the day’s defence, signalled by a rolling peal of krahs from the topmost twig of the highest tree.

There are moments of peace, however and, at the edge of the territory, our birds tolerate and are tolerated by their territory-holding neighbours. The neighbours are less of a threat than the feckless ruffians of the non-breeding flock. The territories even overlap to some extent in a common region – like that by the asphalt path where a woman is pushing her twins in a double buggy. The crows watch from a distance, with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. They have been digging for invertebrates, and by the rustic shelter a little while ago they found and ate the remains of a cheese and chutney sandwich.

The woman and her nestlings draw nearer. There is no real need, but for appearances’ sake the male crow takes wing. Followed by his mate, he flies low for fifty yards and pitches on a fresh patch of ground, to see what a little more digging will bring.

Giants and Pygmies

Not far from the lane is an area of the wood that a Georgian forester must have thought suitable for Norway spruce. He may have dreamed