I love nature but I know spectacularly little about it. I’m staring out of my window now into the garden where a pair of cabbage white butterflies are dancing around the purple flowers that look a bit like test-tube brushes. There, in one crude sentence, I expose my ignorance. First, the cabbage whites. These are one of only two butterflies that I can name (the other being the Red Admiral). But apparently, even here I’m wrong. There is no such thing as a Cabbage White. There is the large white and the small white and it could be either that’s now pirouetting around the shed roof. The small white, apparently, is native whereas the large white comes up from southern Europe. At certain points in the year, you can see whole clouds of them crossing the channel. Butterflies migrating? Since when did that start to happen?
The purple bottle-brush tree is actually called a buddleia. I knew it was something that sounded like an entry level sexually transmitted disease – not quite a fruity as chlamydia but much less spikey than syphilis. This name will now stay in my head for the next twenty-four hours before it expires like a banking passcode. My brain is only geared up to retain five flower names (beyond the obvious rose/daffodil/tulip that we’re born with), five trees (oak, pine, beech, cedar and horse chestnut – but only when the conkers begin to form), and probably just about five birds, and even then, there’s a fudge. One of them is a swallow, but it could well be a swift (two utterly unconnected species but remarkably similar looking birds to idiots like myself).
I had an encounter with two of the five today. The first was a red kite.
We live in a small town at the foot of the Chilterns, one of the most quietly unassuming but beautiful ridges in the south of England. At the top of the hill is a large estate which has been owned by the Getty family since the 1970s (complete with a world class cricket pitch – set up by Paul Getty after Mick Jagger introduced him to the wonders of the gentlemen’s game). In 1989, this estate was where red kites were reintroduced to England. There were a few sites in Wales and Scotland where you could see this impressively large bird, but it had been hounded out of England from the 1800s on. Gamekeepers in the newly created estates around the country mistakenly thought that these scavenger birds were a threat to game birds and young farm animals, so they were poisoned and shot until they disappeared. Their reintroduction has been one of the great eco success stories of the past few decades and the M40 acts as their tracking tool (it gives great thermals apparently) – you can now see them on the cusp of London and way up into Northamptonshire and on to Birmingham.
In Watlington, we’re very proud of them (they’re part of the insignia for both schools), but we’re also very aware of their scavenging prowess. They can pluck a burger from a bun and we’ve had several customers who have come back to the bakery stall to tell us that their cinnamon bun was carried off into the sky. That didn’t stop me having a huge shock when a cheeky bugger swept down and grabbed a pastry from a tray today as I was unloading. What was more surprising was that this was a kimchi and Emmental swirl. Clearly, the kites are evolving a very sophisticated metropolitan palate.
My second interaction today was with a swallow (or was it a swift?). These nest up and down the High Street in the eaves of the different houses, and there are times during the summer where it almost feels like swallow bunting as they swoop across the High Street in utter abandon. Swallows usually return to the same nest each year and what’s incredible is the idea that they can hone in on such a specific target from their start off point six thousand miles away in southern Africa. They’re getting ready to leave us now, but the young ones will leave a few weeks after the adults. They need a bit more time to fatten up and perfect their flying skills before they too set off for a destination that is built into their DNA. None of them will have visited it before.
I think it was one of these young ones that flew into the house today. It’s a very rare thing to happen and he must have been distracted by a very succulent fly because suddenly he was in the kitchen. You could almost hear the evil smile form on the face of our elderly cat. He knew what the storyline was here. Just let the poor little swallow knock himself out on a piece of furniture and then, when he drops….Anyway, I frantically opened up any window and door that I could and somehow, much to Oddie’s disappointment, the little bird managed to fly out again. The whole incident lasted a matter of seconds and Oddie soon returned to dreams of crippled pigeons and fat voles. I’m hoping that the swallow’s next journey south across oceans, deserts and savannah will be less treacherous.
Then again, maybe it was a swift and they’re going in a completely different direction.
But good luck, little fella.
