but a beetle, and given its furry head and eccentric hand-like antennae a quite charming beetle. I pick it up and lay it in my open palm on its back. Its legs unfold like the Leatherman utility tool I always carry in my pocket. Perhaps it is dying of age rather than the trauma of a tractor crash. A cockchafer lives for a brief, brilliant six weeks.
There are other cockchafers gathering in the oaks, having just risen from their white-grub life under the grass, where they chew the roots in a clandestine four-year-long infancy, to then stagger into the sky on transparent wings. The grubs are outlandish, and curl into a distinctive crescent, thick and 4cm long, when uncovered. In some regions of Britain they are known as rookworms, because the rooks seek them above all other treats. Soon the female cockchafer will begin the cycle again, on some warm night like this, when she lays her eggs in the soil, using the pointy pygidium at the end of the abdomen, which is an implementfor piercing the ground, not the human epidermis.
For an hour I sweat away in Bank Field restringing the fence along the river which the sheep are determined to push down with their rubbing to relieve itches. (The ovine way of asking to be sheared.) By the time I finish the fencing the noctule bats are seeking the lumbering cockchafers. Noctules are the peregrine falcons of the Chiroptera order. On narrow wings that measure nearly fourteen inches across, the noctules fly high over the meadow into the first stars. Then free-fall stoop. Noctules can eat on the wing. As they flutter up on their clockwork wings above me I can hear, I am sure, the sound of showering cockchafer scales.
The noctule is the largest bat in the country and one of the few prepared to fly in open spaces. (About 10 per cent of bats are eaten by birds of prey.) Other bats are beginning to flicker into the night. Under the river alders the Daubenton is at work. Against the last light behind the mountain I can make out bats hunting down Marsh Field hedge and in among the cows. These are greater horseshoe bats after dungflies.
June thunder. Swallows swoop in brief white whirls over a prematurely darkening meadow, always keeping low, their mouths nets to catch the congregation of insects forced down by the weather. Lightning jigs on the mountain. A whip cracks somewhere.
Then the rain comes, heavy raindrops crashingthrough the tiles of oak. The fluorescent florets of the hogweed and cow parsley are beaten down; it is night at mid-evening. A fox – one of the young ones – emerges from the Grove ditch, and I think it is going to hunt rabbits but instead it rushes along the rain-lashed edge of the meadow to the earth and the dry. The fox cubs are roaming further and further afield. But on a day like this, home calls.
In the wreckage of the evening a heron lands and stabs at something at the Grove end of the field. I cannot see what it is, only that it is being eaten; only that it is large; a baby rabbit or a rat, something of that order. On its outsize wings the heron lifts into a sky still angry, to continue on its stately patrol. The newt ditch is swollen with rain; a common newt (
Triturus vulgaris
) cruises in slo-mo eating tadpoles; one outsize tadpole jams in the newt’s mouth, and only after terrier-type head-shaking can the spotty aquatic lizard gulp its cousin down.
The ripe grass, heavy with seed, has been flayed flat by the violence of the wind and the rain. Somehow the grass, or most of it, lifts its head from its battering. The thin lance heads of the rye are most dismissive of wet; the fluffy heads of the cock’s foot and vertical pagodas of crested dog’s tail take longer to rise.
9 J UNE I am reading Viscount Grey’s 1927
The Charm of Birds
. Grey is the Foreign Secretary who took us into the Great War, the man who provided the epitaph for the prelapsarian continent: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Grey
There are other cockchafers gathering in the oaks, having just risen from their white-grub life under the grass, where they chew the roots in a clandestine four-year-long infancy, to then stagger into the sky on transparent wings. The grubs are outlandish, and curl into a distinctive crescent, thick and 4cm long, when uncovered. In some regions of Britain they are known as rookworms, because the rooks seek them above all other treats. Soon the female cockchafer will begin the cycle again, on some warm night like this, when she lays her eggs in the soil, using the pointy pygidium at the end of the abdomen, which is an implementfor piercing the ground, not the human epidermis.
For an hour I sweat away in Bank Field restringing the fence along the river which the sheep are determined to push down with their rubbing to relieve itches. (The ovine way of asking to be sheared.) By the time I finish the fencing the noctule bats are seeking the lumbering cockchafers. Noctules are the peregrine falcons of the Chiroptera order. On narrow wings that measure nearly fourteen inches across, the noctules fly high over the meadow into the first stars. Then free-fall stoop. Noctules can eat on the wing. As they flutter up on their clockwork wings above me I can hear, I am sure, the sound of showering cockchafer scales.
The noctule is the largest bat in the country and one of the few prepared to fly in open spaces. (About 10 per cent of bats are eaten by birds of prey.) Other bats are beginning to flicker into the night. Under the river alders the Daubenton is at work. Against the last light behind the mountain I can make out bats hunting down Marsh Field hedge and in among the cows. These are greater horseshoe bats after dungflies.
June thunder. Swallows swoop in brief white whirls over a prematurely darkening meadow, always keeping low, their mouths nets to catch the congregation of insects forced down by the weather. Lightning jigs on the mountain. A whip cracks somewhere.
Then the rain comes, heavy raindrops crashingthrough the tiles of oak. The fluorescent florets of the hogweed and cow parsley are beaten down; it is night at mid-evening. A fox – one of the young ones – emerges from the Grove ditch, and I think it is going to hunt rabbits but instead it rushes along the rain-lashed edge of the meadow to the earth and the dry. The fox cubs are roaming further and further afield. But on a day like this, home calls.
In the wreckage of the evening a heron lands and stabs at something at the Grove end of the field. I cannot see what it is, only that it is being eaten; only that it is large; a baby rabbit or a rat, something of that order. On its outsize wings the heron lifts into a sky still angry, to continue on its stately patrol. The newt ditch is swollen with rain; a common newt (
Triturus vulgaris
) cruises in slo-mo eating tadpoles; one outsize tadpole jams in the newt’s mouth, and only after terrier-type head-shaking can the spotty aquatic lizard gulp its cousin down.
The ripe grass, heavy with seed, has been flayed flat by the violence of the wind and the rain. Somehow the grass, or most of it, lifts its head from its battering. The thin lance heads of the rye are most dismissive of wet; the fluffy heads of the cock’s foot and vertical pagodas of crested dog’s tail take longer to rise.
9 J UNE I am reading Viscount Grey’s 1927
The Charm of Birds
. Grey is the Foreign Secretary who took us into the Great War, the man who provided the epitaph for the prelapsarian continent: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Grey
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