The tawny owls have started calling again. I am not sure whether they have a lull in their nocturnal communications, or whether they go off somewhere else in the summer, but for the past two nights they have been very vocal and it is lovely to hear them once more beyond the trees. Under bright stars yesterday, the sense of near and far was accentuated by the silvery chirr of crickets in the garden. This side of the field, summer still. Out there, reminders of an autumn tide that is flooding in on the darkening mornings.
This is what the campers say they love - a chance to hear and notice the quiet things that city life blocks out. Blackberry pickers skirt the hedgerows. The sudden abundance of country fruit certainly seems overwhelming and the blackbirds are no longer interested in stealing the chickens' corn, when there are elderberries, shiny haws, bullace plums and windfall apples to be had in the Reserve. One of my earliest childhood memories is of household tables being upturned to hold muslins full of the stewed fruit that would go into the annual jelly-making jamboree! The whole house reeked of the tang of autumn: piquant damsons and pink crab apples and heady vinegars for chutney ... and wasps clamouring to get in at every window! At Stoneywish, the harvest, (the most spectacular I have seen for years), belongs to wildlife and the thorn trees are full of high-throated, sleek, greeny-buff birds so tame they will almost hop onto your shoulder if you stay still and quiet.
The top meadows have been hayed and the geese stay far out, grazing the new shoots and seeming happy that the long grass is gone. Now they can scan the whole field for approaching foxes. But some find safety in seclusion. Michael comes back from breakfast each day to report on his pheasants. One hen bird has, exceptionally, reared two families of young simultaneously in the wild, and has so far cheated the usual predators into the bargain. She waits in the Smallholding with her broods, one set a good deal older than the other, until Michael arrives with his wheelbarrow in the morning and throws them some handfuls of corn. Tummies full, they all then disappear to the safety of the long grass for the day.
At long last we have rain and the ponds are filling up again. A windy, cloudy August fooled us into thinking we had had a wet summer, but the water table here has been so low the top ponds have dried up completely and the Black Swan Pond has been reduced to a kind of spinach-soup sludge. In consequence the poor geese have had a week without a swim and, deprived of their water-refuge, have huddled together for safety during the day in a close flock. We set up a paddling pool for them in the field and carried them water for drinking and they soon learned to queue up for a bath, beating the water, which we had so laboriously carted, out of the tub with a few flaps of their wings! Now, after two days of heavy rain they look like new birds, hungry and quarrelsome again - so it is truly an ill wind that blows nobody any good!
Meanwhile the leaves are beginning to change colour. This rain should bring us autumn fungi. A time for happy jam-making, or jam-eating, or simply savouring the season.
