After the recent heat, and the generally great summer weather we’ve been having for the past few weeks, today is a bit cooler. The land seems more dull now, with the crops having been cut and the lack of significant rain parching the plants. The skies are a lot quieter too with the passing of the breeding season and the departure of the swifts. The latter is a particular sad moment for me as I love them and long all autumn and winter to see them again.
After the hottest day of the year yesterday, this morning there is a low covering of mist over the fields behind the rural railway station from which I catch my train to work. Today promises to be an other warm day and I expect the mist will burn off quite quickly but it seems is this another small tentative sign of autumn?
After seeing a large gathering of swallows on powerlines yesterday, this afternoon our garden has witnessed perhaps dozens of swallows and house martins in the sky above.
It has been a lovely summer’s afternoon spent mostly in a hammock or deckchair under our magnolia tree, listening to and watching the birds darting, chasing and circling above us. At one stage around ten swallows gathered on a TV aerial next door to noisily chatter to each other while a smaller group seemed more intent on heading southwards. The sky certainly has been busy with hirundines and perhaps some signs that summer of birds is drawing to a close.
However, we will still be left with our residents. The red kites and buzzards have been drifting over, crying out as they pass. A pair of ravens played in the breeze on their way up the valley. We also had a bullfinch drop buy, a bit of a rare site in our garden.
The weather has been much more like a good summer over the last few weeks and the next seven days look good too. So I’m hoping that the swallows and house martins stay a little longer and we can enjoy the sites and sounds of summer for a little while more.
Our annual trip to Sweden has come to a close again and as usual it provided a stark reminder of just how nature-depleted the UK is. A thought I’ve had since I returned was how glad I am to be living in a rural village rather than a city; the contrast would be even greater and my gloominess about the state of nature in the UK even worse.
We are fortunate to be able to stay in a very lovely Swedish summer house out amongst the forests, meadows and lakes of central Sweden, about 125km north-west of Stockholm. The location is on the break between southern and northern Sweden; just a little further south, the landscape opens up into large arable fields and further north the forest cover is much greater. Our home for a week or two each year, feels a little softer where the influence of agriculture is lighter and the wild a little more, without being deep wilderness.
Over the course of the week, we went canoeing on a nearby river, went swimming on the local lake just a short amble from the summer house and we visited the national park an hour to the north. Each of these activities was accompanied by wildlife but even just sitting on the deck at the from on the house brought wildlife sights and sounds.
Whilst the birdlife in this year’s trip wasn’t as plentiful as last year – two weeks in June being more productive than one week in July – the birds around the house still provided some little stars including marsh tit, willow tit and the very lovely crested tit, and on a few evenings we saw roding woodcock on an aerial ‘racetrack’ above the tall treetops.
As shown in a previous post, the mammals in the garden included brown hare, badger and fox but this year we missed seeing any red squirrels and we didn’t spot the beavers down on the lake. We did see plenty of roe deer, including one doe with two fawns, as we drove through the countryside but we weren’t as fortunate as my sister-in-law who saw a cow and calf European Elk as she drove home from work on our last day.
Out on our canoeing trip, the raptors were the stars of the show with a distant and very high white-tailed eagle, a hobby exploding from a reedbed, a honey-buzzard drifting slowly past and two ospreys circling above us as we paddled across a lake.
Swimming in the warm waters of the lake has quickly become my favourite activity of a Swedish holiday (after only learning to swim well in the last few years). In turn, my favourite part of that is to float on my back and watch the swifts chasing around the skies above and the dragonflies hawking over the water’s surface.
Our stay wasn’t all birds and mammals though as we had a very good view of a sunbathing adder as we walked through a lovely bit of forest after we had cooked sausages on an open fire in front of one of the wind shelters that are dotted around the countryside. The wildflowers seems more plentiful than at home in Northamptonshire, the roadside verges packed with flowers of many kinds although the lovely, but invasive, lupins were mostly well past their best.
All this nature, that was so easy to find, is in stark contrast to nature at home. To be fair, Sweden is a much bigger country and one fifth (or so) of our population, so the human footprint is always likely to be bigger in the UK. However, the tolerance of larger wild animals is much greater (albeit not without its debates), the use of chemicals in farming appears less and the almost unstoppable desire for ‘tidiness’ in the countryside does not seem to be present. Overall, the balance of human control over natural processes seems far less and as a result wildlife and wider nature are far better for it.
I wrote a post a few years back about my ‘yearning for nature’ and each trip I take to Sweden makes that yearning for wild places and an abundance of wildlife even greater.
Just to make a bit of a mockery of this post, most of this post was written sitting in my sunny back garden, on a warm summer afternoon, when a fox jumped onto and walked along the top of wall opposite, swifts, swallows and buzzards were in the sky above and I could hear green woodpecker calling from a nearby tree and a red kite crying in the distance. It’s not all bad in the UK and my little corner of Northamptonshire has quite a lot of wildlife, but it’s just not as rich as I wish it was.
I’ve been struggling to keep up my early morning wanders down the lane to the fields. I’m not quite sure why; I’m a creature of habit and I haven’t yet secured a walk into my morning routine.
This morning I pushed myself out of the door as it was such a lovely, bright and sunny dawn. I was rewarded with the sight of a fox trotting up the track towards me. We stood there for a few moments staring at each other and then it turned tail and scampered back down the track and off into what was the poppy field.
These are the kind of brief moments such walks are made of – I really must make them frequently.
Like many may have lately, we have looked at some of Dr Michael Mosely’s books. This morning I took one bit of his advice and headed out for an early walk down the lane and then around part of the village.
It was a cracking start to the day with not a single cloud in the sky and very little chill in the air. The bright sun intensified the colours of the scenery and the only sounds were of an array of birds and my feet treading on the sandy track and village tarmac.
I was rewarded with a very special moment. Walking up one of the little villages lanes, the ironstone church was lit up, almost orange in the sun. Flying and chasing around the steeple were ten or so swifts. At first they flew silently, sometimes slowly on their flickering wings and other times chasing in small packs circling the tower. Then came their screams; the sound I long for all winter and which lasts in our skies for far too few summer weeks. I stood there for a few minutes lost in the screams and effortless wings; a short spell cast by this perfect midsummer moment.
My lunchtime walk yesterday took me to the fields at the end of the lane. After looking over the sheep in the shallow valley, I turned back to wander home but was stopped by a single poppy, its sharp red standing out amongst the surrounding greens. As I walked up the slight rise into the field opposite I came across a view that brought immediate joy and brushed away the generally grumpiness of the hours before.
It wasn’t a stunning red carpet but a softer scattering of poppies amongst the other plants in the field. It gave the impression of a past times when poppies might appear anywhere in the arable fields when they weren’t so finely managed to remove any competition from the farmed crops. We have found fields a few miles away purposely sown with wild flowers which have much great spectacles of blooming. However, this little spot at the end of a quiet lane, hidden away and out of sight, felt more natural and out of the hands of man.
There were quite a few more poppies yet to flower, so I’ll be making more lunchtime trips over the next few days…
Out on a cycle last week I spotted a field with wildflower border but not a lot seemed to be blooming. Returning to the same spot today, we found a view of blooms laid out before us with perhaps a lot more to come…we’ll be returning over the next few weeks to see how the field is getting on…
With the weather finally giving us some relief from the seemingly endless rain of the past many months, I’ve started to explore on my bike some of the off-road routes in the countryside surrounding my home.
I tend to be a road cyclist these days although in my younger years I did enjoy mountain-biking but trips were few and far between. Where I used to live in Cheshire, it never really crossed my mind to search out alternatives to the tarmac country lanes, save for the occasional ride down some of the nearby canal towpaths. However, here in Northamptonshire where I now live, it seems there are more opportunities to get off the roads and onto routes away from the traffic.
A mile or so from our village is the Brampton Valley Way which is the former railway line between Northampton and Market Harborough. It provides a 14-mile off-road route through the countryside with fairly frequent places to join or leave it. This route is a spine through the area which I’m now using to link to other traffic free corridors.
Now that we’ve had a reasonable amount of dry and warm weather, the off-road routes are starting to become less muddy, opening up more choices of route. I’ve been looking over the Ordnance Survey maps of the area and it seems to be cross-crossed not just by footpaths, which can’t be cycled on, but also by bridleways and byways, all of which provide possible cycle routes.
So, over the last couple of weeks I’ve tried out some new routes and have been rewarded with some little hidden gems of vistas, some lovely moments with wildlife, and more peace and quiet away from the roads.
If the rain keeps away sufficiently, I’m hoping the summer can be one spent finding more quiet corners and less visited corners of the countryside.
Daft Mumblings 