WOODPILE

TAXONOMANIAC

BEES PLAY MARBLES TOO

HOGS IN THE HEDGE

FOUR-LEGGED RACE

WATCH ME WATCH YOU

THE LAST EARTHWORM

Inspired by reports in the UK press showing the massive decline in earthworms is due to over-cultivation, toxic pesticides, herbicides, nitrates, phosphates and insecticides, plus anti-wildlife government policy is contributing to songbird decline. Yet still ignorance insists on scapegoating other birds like magpies and sparrowhawks for natural predation as if they're the culprits!

THE JOY OF SCAMPER

Suddenly startling, yet continuous

For you with the joy of scamper,

You skitter through underbrush

Damp with February.

To me you are lift in a lick of light

Travelling the trunk of an oak,

A denser shadow, furred furrow.

Tree knows your transient tickle,

Stays focused beyond your claw clicks

On her slow hidden

Fostering of foliage,

The suckling of Spring.

BIG GARDEN BIRDWATCH 2019

Cilla the Grey Wagtail with suet pellet prize for turning up for the Big Garden Birdwatch 2019 in Wickersley, South Yorkshire, UK

The RSPB ( the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) organises a “Big Garden Birdwatch” on the last weekend of January every year. You count the maximum number of each species that visits your chosen patch within the space of an hour of your choice. It’s a way of inspiring young and old to grab their binoculars and point their spotting scopes at their wonderful avian neighbours. It’s also a rough indication of which species are thriving or struggling on these islands.

I made my second attempt at completing the survey this morning. It usually takes me a couple of tries, so the full hour of birding is sometimes cobbled together from ten minutes here and half an hour there, as strength and health permit. This year I’ve been fortunate to be well enough over the weekend to do the whole sitting in one go. Or rather in two goes - one yesterday afternoon and then a repeat this morning, which is pretty good going, by my low standards. As today’s session was the first feed of the day, the birds were more eager than last time, which was just after dinner.

One of the resident Magpies turned up to represent the corvids, as the Crows simply couldn’t be bothered. Neither could the other Magpies. The flock of local Wood Pigeons made a late entrance, minus my secret favourite, Drooper the Woody with the Wonky Wing or his mate Rolly, a female with a damaged leg which gives her an unmistakable rolling gait. The other pigeons who decided to participate spent most of their time attempting to mate, thrusting their wings petulantly at one another or flying off to sit in surrounding trees, meaning I needed to adjudicate whether or not they actually counted as being on my patch at all.

Drooper the Woody with the Wonky Wing

Yesterday, none of the tit family arrived during the allotted hour. Today, a trio of Blue Tits, a pair of Great Tits and a solitary Coal Tit got their attendance marks, unlike the little clan of Long-Tailed Tits I’d heard twittering away every day last week. No doubt the ‘Lollipops’ had been checking their diaries so as to co-ordinate their efforts not to get caught on the census. All the better for staying under the radar uncounted, getting up to any merry mischief they might choose, without human knowledge. The same goes for the resident Wren, who is heard but not seen most of the time, and was certainly not going to make it easy for me during the BGBW.

Great Tit (Parus major)

Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)

The House Sparrows were here in force. Fifteen of them shuttling between hedgerow and feeders, chirping the odds, swapping places, noisily networking. Numbers of males and females seemed roughly equal. I know we’re so very lucky to have a such a thriving colony of House Sparrows in residence. In many parts of the UK they are becoming a rarity.

Standing out from the crowd is the one I’ve named Lucy, from the fact she’s a leucistic bird. Leucism is a condition where a bird is born with a partial lack of pigment in its feathers. There may be patches of white where other colours are ‘normal’ for the breed. Consequently, Lucy looks, from a distance, like some sort of pale finch or bunting. Closer examination reveals her to be a female House Sparrow with beautiful snowy sections on her wings. She flutters in like a ray of light, integrated with her tribe but always distinctive in our eyes. Lovely to have some joyful diversity at the bird table.

Lucy the leucistic House Sparrow

Of the pair of resident Robins, only one graced us with its presence, plumped out and very pleased with itself to be representing its redbreast posse. Maybe it thinks it is the most photogenic and coveted tick on the list, as it has recently been voted Britain’s favourite bird and always popular for its iconic place at the heart of the winter season. Two pairs of Dunnocks were omnipresent, as usual, not attracting attention to themselves, unassuming and modest little wind-up toys, ticking along under the hedge or on the lawn, dancing jerkily under their own momentum.

The unexpected highlight for me, of this or indeed any recent BGBW, came just five minutes before the end of the appointed hour. Onto the patio bounced the Grey Wagtail, nicknamed ‘Cilla’ after its Latin name (Motacilla cinerea). She first appeared a couple of days ago for the very first time. Before that I had never seen a Grey Wagtail in the garden. I certainly wasn’t expecting her to put in an appearance for the hallowed hour. But she didn’t let me down. I even got a photo of her with a suet pellet in her beak (see above). Had to add her manually onto the BGBW results page online, as she wasn’t included among the species most likely to be seen.

A reminder, just when we might really be needing one, that you never know what is around the corner. You sometimes approach a project with cynicism, only to be delighted by unlooked for miracles, finding your glass not just half full, but overflowing. The birds in my garden remind me of that every single day.

[Full result: 1 Robin, 15 House Sparrows, 7 Blackbirds, 6 Wood Pigeons, 4 Dunnocks, 1 Magpie, 3 Blue Tits, 2 Great Tits, 1 Coal Tit and 1 Grey Wagtail.]

Robin (Erithacus rubecula) Britain's favourite national sweetheart

WAGTAIL GREY

'Cilla' the Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) (Author's photo)

I don't know who
Was more excited.

Me? Grabbing the camera
On the wrong settings,
Flustering a few shots
Steaming the glass
Between us
With breath half-held in hush
For fear of you fleeing
Without trace.

Or you, wagtail?
Cinder ashen
Bumper rump a-bob
Lemon patched
Like nicotine
On pale knuckles
Nervy restless
Astonished
Astraddle
Puddle
Where the ice blade
Cruel edge
Of January
In this moment melted
To mirror
Your twitch and startle.
The same chill cut-throat
Drove you
Pittering to my patio
From waterway
And ringing river
Into the now
Of my scattering seed
My staggering standstill.

WE BE CREATION'S CRYING

Bonded
To this body of birds
Wheeling in freeform flock

Rooted
Radical in earthball
Tendrils tucked
Through trackless undergrowth

Voice of the heartstop hare
From her barren form,
Whisper and whicker,
Melt and bloat

Ductile seductive
Plastic at the seabird's throat,
Barnacles losing purchase
On the toxic rock

We be creation's crying
Syrinx singing
Solidarity
With rhythmic sobs
Please cope

Struggling to shine afresh
The sun slinks up,
Wandering west
To wash the waste
Pale gold
Wanhope.

MISTER STARLING

Mister Starling soon bores

Of gasps and applause

From the rapt and ecstatic

At his feats aerobatic

So he has a few sessions

Of skits and impressions

Pretending to be

With a whistle or three

Other things he has heard,

Klaxon, car horn, Blackbird,

Mobile phone on vibrate

To impress his new mate.

In motley he dresses

Punky bad-hair-day tresses,

Sturnus vulgaris ought

Be called vulgar for short,

But without each wild antic,

Balletic and frantic

Roof and garden no doubt

Would be poorer without.

A BLACKBIRD IN THE HAND

One of the male Blackbirds (Turdus merula) regularly hops inside the conservatory to check I haven't dropped any mealworms on the carpet. I usually have and he knows this. Sometimes he even leaves me a little "present" as a thankyou!

This week he got a bit more adventurous. Once inside, while I was in the kitchen with the door closed between us, he became so entranced by the view of the outside from inside, he forgot how to get back to ordinary life through the wide open back door.

After capturing his extraordinary adventure on camera, I managed to calm him down after his sporadic attempts to fly back through the picture windows to the garden beyond. I gently wrapped him in a handy pillowcase to stop him flapping his wings or panicking and carried him out to his more familiar place on the patio. He flew off gratefully.

He'll be dining out on that story for years! The other Blackbirds will be so envious!

Later that day, I was outside dead-heading the chives when I noticed there was only one Blackbird bold enough to come close to me to eat the mealworms I always scatter for my garden friends.

Guess who? I think he's read the memo that there are some humans who only want the very best for you and that some glass cages have invisible hidden keys and featherless janitors who set you free to feel again the sunshine on your wings.

HEDGEHOGS AT DUSK

It's been a long time.

It's been many summers. Too many summer nights snufflefree and still.

But they're back! First an oval of shadow on the lawn. Then a shuffle, a ripple of spikiness along the flower borders.

I know they are a pair. One night at the start of the current heatwave, I met the first one on the lawn where it had crept close to observe me as I leaned, steadying my camera against a tree trunk, trying to capture Jupiter's string of moons in the southwestern sky. The other was waiting for me on the patio, smaller, with mischievous eyes. The second one was less interested in a peculiar human stargazing, more in gazing at the goodies the departing birds had left unpecked for the creatures of the night.

Hedgehog numbers are declining on these islands. They are now a rare sight in British gardens. Fewer than a million remain, down from nearer thirty million when I was born at the dawn of the Sixties. A third of that catastrophic loss has been just in this past decade. These little souls are survivors of this long slow bereavement of the English countryside. I feel unutterably blessed.

Once the birds have flown off and the heat of the day has decanted itself down the thermometer into the soft melt of dusk, I wait to lionise them with dried mealworms, crushed sunflower hearts and peanuts. I top up the bird and bee baths as the sun dissolves into pastel glad-rags of coral and titian on the western horizon. Someone else has need of the nocturnal libation.

I wait. I wait, holding my breath to catch the rustle of their coming. Footfalls across the lawns, threading through hedges, triggering security lights, trembling the dreaming heads of daisies.

Then they're here! Noses badged with leaf litter, eyes more accustomed than my own to the gloaming. Above us, bats skip and soar under the trees and out into the crepuscular backcloth of cloudless sky, tiny Pipistrelles skittering through twilight. Their nationwide numbers too are in steep decline. The hedgepiggies and I, below, must celebrate and survive today and hope for tomorrow.

Before my head hits the fridge-cooled pillowcase, they have melted back into the sweltering South Yorkshire nightfall, making unspoken promises to lighten my life again tomorrow night, and the next, promises I hope against hope they will be cherished enough by humankind to be able to keep.

BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE FOR THE BEES

Cheap and cheery Bee Bath on my patio

I'm always on the look-out for simple ways to be a better friend to wildlife.

This year, a couple of very simple, inexpensive additions to my garden are going down a storm with wild visitors!

One is this Bee Bath I made in five minutes out of:

-an old plant pot as a base, weighted with stones to discourage it from toppling over when landed on by over-enthusiastic birds! 

-a surplus plant saucer 

 

-some pebbles I had lying around.

The water in this bath needs to be kept fairly shallow, with the pebbles protruding above the surface, so the bees can drink without drowning. Nearby, in the hot days of summer, I also intend to put a bee-sized serving of sugary water in a very small container, to revive tired workers we sometimes see struggling after a busy day making honey and pollinating the precious planet.

In past years, it's been a privilege to see a sluggish, dying bee instantly rejuvenated and flying off like a new buzzer when I've offered it a bit of sugar water. This year I'd like to make that offer a bit more permanent and accessible to all.

In my neck of the woods in South Yorkshire,  I'm fortunate to meet a variety of bees from the 250 species still found in the UK: some of my regulars are

the Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris)

Buff-tailed Bumblebee

the White-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lucorum)

White-tailed Bumblebee

Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius)

Red-tailed Bumblebee

and many more!

I hope by making our gardens a happy health spa for these amazing insect friends, so hard-working, beautiful and sadly now under threat from pesticides and other changes worldwide, we'll be welcome hosts to our guests. Maybe by these simple gestures, we can see their numbers growing again, and the crops they pollinate so faithfully may not fail in the future we all share. 

Have a Happy Bee-Cherishing Spring and Summer!

BIRDBATH ETIQUETTE

House Sparrow: *drums toes*

Blackbird: Splish, splash, I was taking a bath!

House Sparrow: *tries to look away as if he's not that bothered*

Blackbird: I'm forever blowing bubbles...

House Sparrow: Mate! Have a little word with yourself! You're holding up the bathroom queue!

Blackbird: You all right over there, Spadge?

House Sparrow: Wash under your armpits, then scarper, won't you?

Blackbird: Hang on! I've lost the soap!

House Sparrow: Whatever! I'll try the next garden!

Springwatch Special from the stunning Yorkshire Coast setting of my next novel!

Springwatch Special this Good Friday (April 3rd 2015) on BBC TV is being beamed from the Yorkshire cliffs where my next novel is set! Details of the programme are here in the Yorkshire Post: Springwatch brings region’s wildlife delights to new audience

Tune in to soak up the atmosphere and see the amazing place where seabirds take centre stage. Gannets, Puffins, Guillemots, Razorbills, Kittiwakes and Puffins throng the coast here. But back in Victorian times, who would protect them from trophy-seekers with shotguns from the city?

I'm already brewing up more drama and a sea of skulduggery and Victorian villainy set between Bempton & Filey Brigg & the sea caves to the tip of Flamborough Head for you all to enjoy!

Thanks to all of you who have been enjoying my first novel set in Victorian Yorkshire, "Goatsucker Harvest," leaving amazing reviews on Amazon and letting me know how much you are enjoying the adventures of Thirza and Bram (and Piper the kooikerhondje, of course!). 

Thank you for helping to spread the word to new readers, who can get a copy of the first novel set on the wild bogs and fens around Doncaster on Kindle or in paperback here: Amazon UK or here Amazon.com or here Amazon.com.au. 

Hope you'll enjoy the next story just as much! Watch this space for more information and batten down the hatches for the reading ride of a lifetime along the cliffs and in the caves!

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North Landing at Flamborough, North Yorkshire, one of the stunning settings for Joyce Barrass's second novel

Goatsucker Harvest: Under the Rainbow Hoops of Bram's Duck Decoy

Screens in a duck decoy in nature reserve 't Broek near Waardenburg, the Netherlands (China_Crisis)

"Bram gave a low whistle to the dog, that sounded every bit as natural as the calls of the upland waders, bleak and wistful. Then Piper sprang over the succession of low dog-jumps . Further along the pipe, he disappeared from sight, backing away, drawing the wildfowl onward up the pipe. They seemed fascinated by the little hound. Beady eyes winked in the moonbeams shining down. Milky light turned everything into a mysterious pageant in which Thirza, to her utter delight and astonishment, found herself taking her place.
It felt so natural to her, she hardly realised how Bram was guiding her with his eye. Thirza found she understood the signals that passed between man and dog, even though the meanings behind the strange names and words were lost in the mists of time."
- (c) Joyce Barrass 2014 - Goatsucker Harvest (Kindle Locations 2627-2630) Kindle Edition.

Bram's Duck Decoy or Eendenkooi (Dutch for "duck cage" in the old language of Bram's ancestors who were decoymen before him), is far out on the marshes and peat bogs, somewhere on the misty edges of the novel's level landscape, between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

The villagers of Turbary Nab avoid the Decoy now. Some have forgotten its whereabouts. Some never know them. Others dare not venture out in that direction, where the unpredictable fen-lights, the ignis fatuus, the deceptive glow in the dark of the atmospheric ghost lights flicker over the boggy marshes of the peat fen and moors that are Bram's home, leading the unwary off the beaten track to a fate beyond dread.

Traditional Duck Decoys were devices used to entice wildfowl, for food or in latter days for ringing, constructed with a central pond with between one and eight tapering, radiating arms, surrounded by wooden hoops and netting. These are the "pipes" after which Piper, Bram's faithful kooikerhondje is named (click link for my blogpost about him). First recorded in Bram's ancestral Netherlands in the sixteenth century, the idea of the duck decoy was imported to the fens and wetlands of Britain.

"Ducks bobbed on the star shaped pool under the nets at sunrise. The little teal, its wing shattered by a farmer's gun over a copse in Crowle, had been drawn here by the misty rainbow light arching between the hoops of the old duck decoy. It swam searching along each arm of the decoy for a place to rest."
(c) Joyce Barrass 2014  from Goatsucker Harvest (Kindle Locations 808-810) Kindle Edition.

No killing, hunting or even ringing in Bram's Decoy, though, as the little Teal will discover. Under the rainbow hoops, Bram's lore is the mysterious "Reversal of Ravage", the "Omkering van Schade" passed down to him from his forebears, who came over with Cornelius Vermuyden in the days of King Charles to work on The Great Drainage of the flooded fens.

Decoy ducks were traditionally carved from wood or cork and stained in plumage colours to fool the wildfowl. Bram's decoy ducks are crafted in quite another way, so much more than the sum of their driftwood and clockwork parts.

But in the mid-Victorian world of "Goatsucker Harvest", in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, these secrets are much sought after by others. Those for whom the fragile environment of the moors and marshes means nothing compared to profit and fame. Soon, for the inhabitants of Turbary Nab, nothing can ever be as it was.

Watch a YouTube video of a modern Dutch decoyman & his kooikerhondje (just like Piper in my novel!)

More footage of a decoyman & dog in Holland (1974)

Discover the mysteries of "Goatsucker Harvest" for yourself on Kindle

Goatsucker Harvest: stunning settings beyond Doncaster the unwary traveller seldom dares to explore!

The Stainforth & Keadby Canal at Thorne

Information Board by English Nature showing the Nightjar (aka "goatsucker") to lure you onto wonderful Thorne Moors

I hope many of you are already enjoying exploring the haunting setting of "Goatsucker Harvest" in your mind's eye. I know some of you are, even though it's not been published for a whole week yet!

I know because I've already been chided for interfering with people's Christmas preparations, for encroaching on people's sleep late into the night with Kindles under the sheets and for lowering people's body temperature with the description of life on a Humber Keel in the middle of an icy February in that first chapter!

As soon as I first ventured out onto Thorne Moors, on the Humberhead Levels, back in the summer of 2005, my imagination was possessed and senses thrilled by this fragile and extraordinary wilderness wonderland. It crept into my psyche, whispering in the voices of my ancestors who lived and died around these bleak peatlands stretching for miles in every direction around Doncaster, to Thorne, Fishlake, Stainforth, Hatfield, Crowle, Epworth, Belton, Goole and Rawcliffe to the north.

Many of my people, like Thirza Holberry's family in "Goatsucker Harvest", were keelmen and women, mariners and water gypsies, born to live and work on the boats that came inland on the Stainforth and Keadby Canal, the River Don and the South Yorkshire navigation waterways that zigzag across the peaty dykes and warp drains,  joining this weird flat landscape to the restless North Sea.

Beware of adders - a warning Thirza learns to heed from Bram in "Goatsucker Harvest" chapter 9!

Other characters in the book share their names, their sensibilities, their occupations with my own people who scraped a living from this forgotten paradise of Northern England, still the largest area of raised peat bog wilderness in lowland Britain, land partially reclaimed by the Dutch drainage engineers under Sir Cornelius Vermuyden in the 17th century.

This bizarre backdrop is home to as many rare and precious creatures and plants as you will find anywhere in the UK: nightjars (the "goatsuckers" of the title), adders, lizards, dragonflies, cottongrass and sphagnum mosses. Somewhere in the region of 4,000 animal and plant species live here, including 25 of the rarest of all found in Britain, like the giant raft spider and the mire pill beetle.

If you aren't able to come to the moors today, why not explore with me in your wildest imagination? The landscape of "Goatsucker Harvest" is waiting for you, seldom travelled by the faint of heart, full of hidden treasures and unnerving mystery, be it unseen menace or life-enhancing transformation.

Purple Vetch and Bracken on Thorne Moors

Noticeboard showing the Nightjar (aka "goatsucker") on Thorne Moors [English Nature]

Path towards Thorne Moors: the drama of the Levels

Peatland path across Thorne Moors

A wonderfully wet wilderness

'GOATSUCKER HARVEST' by Joyce Barrass is available here on Kindle

Hedgehogs - why can't they share the hedge?

The title here is stolen from a groan-worthy funny that was doing the rounds of the social networks recently.


Today my own family of hedgehogs was doing its own spot of social networking!


I regularly see a pair of adult hedgehogs, a male ('boar') and a slightly smaller female ('sow'), snorting and snuffling and chasing one another round the garden in the late spring evenings.


Today I saw the little product of all that frantic noisy courting.


The young hedgehog here is hardly a baby. Baby hedgehogs have soft, flexible spines. But it is certainly a youngster, much smaller than the adults. Adult males sometimes kill their male offspring, so either this one is a lady, or a very lucky little lad!

It was wandering around the garden at 1pm, early this afternoon. It sniffed at bird food, clambering  through the leaves and stems. Now its found its way along this particular hedgehog friendly ramble, I hope I see much more of the family in the summer days to come! 

Can't wait!

These cute little critters can hog my hedge just as much as they like!

The young hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus, the European or Common Hedgehog) exploring my garden