hoverflies, the buzz of horseflies, the hum of bees.
The field looks different. Not just because I am sitting down in the wild triangle, with a bumblebee’s view across a lake of grass and flowers, but when the meadow is full of flora it seems tighter and smaller, and is almost unrecognizable from the chill bleached space of winter. In the sunshine, meadow brown butterflies swarm over the grass, the males chasing off other males in their pursuit of a beguiling female.
In the shaded but desiccated land of the hedge bottom, where I am crouched, a dun shrew runs over my leg. She is careless of my presence and pokes around in the old leaves in an amphetamine frenzy. Over the next ten minutes this tiny, long-trunked mammal puts on a horror show, although one canonly admire her murderous dexterity. She dismembers five beetles with rapid movements of her jaws, before rubbing and rolling a grey slug with her snout, presumably to tenderize it. Occasionally she nips it; her saliva contains a poison that immobilizes and eventually kills the victim. She also wolfs down woodlice, preferring the
Philoscia muscorum
louse to
Porcellio scaber
. Between courses she washes assiduously. No dunce, she refuses to snack on a large black beetle that looks capable of fighting back.
Eventually, she decides to head for home, somewhere out in the field. I follow her progress, parting the grass in her wake. Or, I should say, the flowers in her wake, because the midsummer sward is now a running floral riot of white stitchwort, gold dyer’s greenweed, purple common vetch, blue bugle . . . I almost miss the shrew’s minute burrow, which is next to a solitary oak seedling, intent on returning the field to forest.
She is a common shrew,
Sorex araneus
, at 6cm about 2cm bigger than the pygmy version. Shrews require gargantuan amounts of food due to a very high metabolic rate, and a shrew can eat its own body weight in twenty-four hours. So they are almost always hunting and eating, day and night, night and day. Mammalian predators rarely eat shrews because shrews have glands on their flanks which produce a foul odour. The Latin name
araneus
means spider; this refers to the old belief that shrews were poisonous, likespiders. Feathered raptors, however, make a principal meal of
Sorex araneus.
Most birds have no sense of smell.
Shrews mate from March, and up to four litters are produced a year. By sixteen days old the young begin to emerge from the nest, and are said to sometimes follow their mother around in a ‘caravan’, whereby a young shrew grabs the tail of the shrew in front of it, so the mother takes the lead and her offspring follow in a train.
I would like to see such a caravan. I never have.
A beautiful evening travels down the Bank Field and through the pignuts. Blue tits hop in and out of the hedge, cleavers slosh against its bottom. Wood pigeon are calling from the dead elm, ‘Take-two-cows, taffy take-two’. The western sun bathes the land in gentle mythic pink. Even the bog-standard galvanized field gates glow enchantingly.
Almost the moment I reach the gate to the meadow a small jet engine starts up. Or so it sounds. The adult May bug, at 30mm long, is as easy to see as it is to hear. I duck.
Melolontha melolontha
has been slow to emerge this year of cold spring. So June bug then. Or cockchafer, spang beetle, or maybe billy witch, chovy, mitchamador, kittywitch and midsummer dor. Despite its fearsome size and needlepointed rear, the cockchafer is harmless. To duck outof the way appears to be an involuntary, natural reflex. The cockchafer tanks past at head height minding its own businesses, which are sex and food.
Lying in the gateway like a chip off a varnished mahogany table, into which someone has etched stylish white triangles, is a downed cockchafer. Cockchafers are fatally attracted to light and glass, into which they hurtle at 11mph. This one probably hit the headlamps of the tractor last night. The cockchafer is not a bug
The field looks different. Not just because I am sitting down in the wild triangle, with a bumblebee’s view across a lake of grass and flowers, but when the meadow is full of flora it seems tighter and smaller, and is almost unrecognizable from the chill bleached space of winter. In the sunshine, meadow brown butterflies swarm over the grass, the males chasing off other males in their pursuit of a beguiling female.
In the shaded but desiccated land of the hedge bottom, where I am crouched, a dun shrew runs over my leg. She is careless of my presence and pokes around in the old leaves in an amphetamine frenzy. Over the next ten minutes this tiny, long-trunked mammal puts on a horror show, although one canonly admire her murderous dexterity. She dismembers five beetles with rapid movements of her jaws, before rubbing and rolling a grey slug with her snout, presumably to tenderize it. Occasionally she nips it; her saliva contains a poison that immobilizes and eventually kills the victim. She also wolfs down woodlice, preferring the
Philoscia muscorum
louse to
Porcellio scaber
. Between courses she washes assiduously. No dunce, she refuses to snack on a large black beetle that looks capable of fighting back.
Eventually, she decides to head for home, somewhere out in the field. I follow her progress, parting the grass in her wake. Or, I should say, the flowers in her wake, because the midsummer sward is now a running floral riot of white stitchwort, gold dyer’s greenweed, purple common vetch, blue bugle . . . I almost miss the shrew’s minute burrow, which is next to a solitary oak seedling, intent on returning the field to forest.
She is a common shrew,
Sorex araneus
, at 6cm about 2cm bigger than the pygmy version. Shrews require gargantuan amounts of food due to a very high metabolic rate, and a shrew can eat its own body weight in twenty-four hours. So they are almost always hunting and eating, day and night, night and day. Mammalian predators rarely eat shrews because shrews have glands on their flanks which produce a foul odour. The Latin name
araneus
means spider; this refers to the old belief that shrews were poisonous, likespiders. Feathered raptors, however, make a principal meal of
Sorex araneus.
Most birds have no sense of smell.
Shrews mate from March, and up to four litters are produced a year. By sixteen days old the young begin to emerge from the nest, and are said to sometimes follow their mother around in a ‘caravan’, whereby a young shrew grabs the tail of the shrew in front of it, so the mother takes the lead and her offspring follow in a train.
I would like to see such a caravan. I never have.
A beautiful evening travels down the Bank Field and through the pignuts. Blue tits hop in and out of the hedge, cleavers slosh against its bottom. Wood pigeon are calling from the dead elm, ‘Take-two-cows, taffy take-two’. The western sun bathes the land in gentle mythic pink. Even the bog-standard galvanized field gates glow enchantingly.
Almost the moment I reach the gate to the meadow a small jet engine starts up. Or so it sounds. The adult May bug, at 30mm long, is as easy to see as it is to hear. I duck.
Melolontha melolontha
has been slow to emerge this year of cold spring. So June bug then. Or cockchafer, spang beetle, or maybe billy witch, chovy, mitchamador, kittywitch and midsummer dor. Despite its fearsome size and needlepointed rear, the cockchafer is harmless. To duck outof the way appears to be an involuntary, natural reflex. The cockchafer tanks past at head height minding its own businesses, which are sex and food.
Lying in the gateway like a chip off a varnished mahogany table, into which someone has etched stylish white triangles, is a downed cockchafer. Cockchafers are fatally attracted to light and glass, into which they hurtle at 11mph. This one probably hit the headlamps of the tractor last night. The cockchafer is not a bug
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