Category: Dartmoor

Happy Christmas

There is something about Christmas mornings. Caroline says the stillness is almost tangible, and so it seemed today. Complete quiet in the house. Outside very cold but no snow; the garden frosted and the bird feeders undisturbed. Lying warm in bed, we can just hear the longcase clock strike seven, two floors below us. Across the road our neighbours’ grandchildren are up, and the house is ablaze with light: what noise there we can only imagine. Our five sleep on, long past the excitement of Santa’s arrival, but stockings on each door nonetheless. Such are the rituals of Christmas in this house.

A most peculiar animal

We do not live in traditional hare country. There is a (relatively) local pack of beagles, and they meet, or have in the past, at Headless Cross on Mardon Down, but I have not seen a hare down here; well, not that is until the other morning.

Driving the windy road to Exeter (see Down narrow lanes) suddenly, at the top of the hill before the road drops down to Steps Bridge, a large brown hare; still, in the middle of the road. She must have come out of the fields on the right hand side. I stopped, and she lolloped off, across the road and into the woods that soften the the side of the Teign valley.

I have become used to seeing roe deer along this stretch of road, although the best view is from the passenger seat in the Land Rover; and occasionally badgers, although more usually their sad, muddy corpses. There are foxes in the woods, and early morning is a good time to see cubs. And through the trees buzzards and owls, and at night large brown bats. but a hare? It made my morning.

Apus apus

I always enjoy Harry Eyre’s Slow Lane column in the Weekend FT.  Last weekend’s The planet’s still working was no different: a delightful mixture of the practical and the philosophical, and at its heart the swift, or more correctly the European swift (Apus apus), as there are almost 70 different species of swift across the world.

We are like Eyre’s uncle, whom he notes,

Every May . .  notes down the first arrival of the swifts on his particular beat in north London. The birds are not quite as regular as the St George’s mushrooms which appear on precisely the same day – April 23 – every English spring, but the birds come some time between the 9th and 13th of the month. I haven’t asked him about this but I assume he finds it comforting, a sign in uncertain times that, as Ted Hughes put it, not entirely reassuringly, “the planet’s still working”.

We see them later in this part of the country, and often the ones we see first are on their way north. In the last 10 years, the earliest we have noted them was 30 April in 2004; and the latest, in 2002, 14 May. For the most part they are with us sometime in the second week in May. The swallow may be the usual harbinger of summer, but for us it is always the swift.

Eyre also quotes the recent RSPB report on the diminishing number of swifts: since the 1990s a 40% drop. Again, we have seen it here. This year there seem only to be four or five resident in Moretonhampstead, whereas in the past we have had far more. Changing building practice is partly (possibly largely) responsible, but this is nothing new. In his 1980 book, Devil Birds, Derek Bromhall wrote,

As old buildings in which swifts have nested for years are demolished, new sites become progressively harder to find. Modern buildings do not allow birds access into roof spaces, and in our present energy-conscious society we seal and insulate the roofs of those older buildings which are being preserved.

Eyre wrote almost the same last week, “Mostly unconsciously, we have been shutting the swifts out of our lives. Now the imperative to insulate our houses and make them airtight, to save on heating and therefore CO2 emissions, has made matters still worse.” He suggests swift bricks are one answer. Bromhall was there first, advocating nest boxes.

And an afterthought; Harry Eyre makes the mistake many people do, referring to swifts as hirundines, and thus lumping them into the same bird family as swallows and martins. They aren’t. Swifts belong to the Apodidae; swallows and martins are Hirundinidae.

And as for poetry, Ted Hughes’ poem, also ‘Swifts’ is every bit as good, “On their switchback wheel of death/They swat past, hard fletched,/Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,/and are gone again. . .”

The promise of spring

For Caroline, today is always the first true day of spring. It is a point on which we agree to differ, as I always see spring coming much earlier. This year I was somewhat less certain, given the snow in early February. It has certainly been a varied four weeks, with bitter cold, which killed the Mimosa Tree in the garden, followed by heavy snow, which shattered the Magnolia Grandiflora, and then a warm change.

On Mardon Down, St David's Day 2009Late afternoon we were on Mardon Down for our usual weekend walk, setting off from the cattle grid and walking clockwise: warm sun, and frog spawn in the ditches alongside the road. The in-country is now green, and smoke drifted in the tea-time sun over Moretonhampstead. Sunday afternoon is clearly bonfire time.

There was little birdsong as we walked the road around Mardon, but first one Raven in the distance, calling for its partner, side slipping through clear air, and then another and another, before a fourth. We have seen Ravens up here before, but never so many: four in as many minutes.

Last week we walked the Teign Gorge, downstream from Dogmarsh Bridge, before climbing the Hunter’s Path up to Castle Drogo. We heard a Raven but failed to see it. That afternoon the highlight was seeing a pair of Dippers nest building in a tree stump on the bank opposite the pub at Fingle Bridge.

Spring is here. The Jackdaws were squabbling on the garage roof this morning, chasing each other around, while a solitary Goldfinch, in full colour, was on one of the seed feeders.