My favourite passage …
“The first badger to appear… got down to the opening chore of the evening. A good scratch requiring all four paws working vigorously through the side and belly hair, and even from 50 metres away you could hear those razor-sharp claws raking the dried skin.
“One of the stranger biological links between badgers and humans is a shared species of flea, although perhaps a more inspiring sense of common ground arises from the abundance of historical marks that both of us leave in the landscape. Whenever I go badger watching I am always overwhelmed by the deep sense of tradition that surrounds their lives. It is not just the network of visible tracks, worn through years of passage up and down the hillside, not is it simply the tonnes of hard, red,clay-rich soil heaped outside the sett’s complex of holes.
“Some of the details at this sett are oil marks and pied hairs left on part of a lime=tree trunk where the badgers, each in turn, slump with ursine contentment to perform their elaborate groom and toilet. … every night of the year, generation after generation.” (p. 65)
The bad news …
At the end of March … “the vocal duel between two local song thrushes wakes me every morning at the moment … it is a fabulous noise that gains momentum as the season draws on, with a vocalist adding new motifs to his repertoire. A bird borrows elements from the others that it can hear, and you can imagine these scraps of melody being passed all around the country… The British Trust for Ornithology discovered that half of them have gone in 30 years…. What price should we put on the song thrush’s priceless song?” (p. 51)
And more …
“Willow warblers are Afro-Palaearchtic migrants, wintering in a wide belt of sub-Saharan Africa then spreading to breed across the boreal regions of Eurasia, from easternmost Siberia to the Atlantic coasts of Ireland … the sound is an audible analogue of that wider sense of luxury and nonchalance at the heart of summer. Alas there is now less scope for complacency than there used to be: willow warbler numbers have fallen like a stone in the last 30 years, declining possibly as a consequence of habitat loss and climate change by 60%.” (p. 69)
Interesting facts..
Holly for centuries “was used as a hedgerow or boundary tree and an important part of its meaning in the landscape was a coded language of arbitrary division, ownership and power that only the human eye could decipher. Even now makers of the British Ordnance Survey maps regard old holly trees as the best guide to the course of historic boundaries between parishes and neighbouring estates or farms.” (p. 180)
“Every autumn the average jay plants 5,000 acorns to retrieve as food in the winter. .. [in the US] one blue jay was recorded to plant 100,000 beech nuts in one month. … They are the great keepers of the northern forests and are busy now husbanding that vast carbon-rich landscape in its millennial journey north as climate change begins to take hold.” (p. 157-8)
“The grasshopper discovery of my summer [2010] has been the widespread local presence of Roesel’s bush cricket, a species that until recently was listed no further north in East Anglia than Essex … on a northward march, possibly as a consequence of climate change. The first Norfolk record was 1997… the song, a long soft drawn-out reeling buzz, is one of the most resonant of all orthopteran melodies. Whenever I hear one I dig at the grasses at the roadside to reveal a weird armour-plated brute who is as hideous as he is beautiful.”
About