Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel

switched on the torch it picked up two amber eyes only yards behind the mole. The vixen. She turned and walked off, haughtily aware of her power. She only has to be lucky once; the mole has to be lucky always.
    All the little mouldywarps sail forth on the following nights. The odd thing is that I never discover the fortress, the super-tump under which the sow has her nest lined with grass and leaves, which must be somewhere in the depth of Marsh Field hedge. Not all the field’s secrets will be given to me, it seems.

    24 A PRIL There is something intensely uplifting in seeing the house martin, who twice a year undertakes a dangerous migratory journey to build his house here, as though this place was perfect.
    Shakespeare too had a particular liking for the ‘martlet’, which he identified as a symbol of beneficence:
    This guest of summer
    The temple-haunting martlet, doth approve
    By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
    Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
    Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
    Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.
    Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
    The air is delicate.
    Birds have a Proustian capacity for making remembrance. I only have to see a house martin and I am in my childhood home, the windows of my bedroom open, head out, watching the chattering, surveying house martins build their intricate mud cups under the white-painted eaves.

    April showers? I would settle for April showers, I would settle for anything short of heavy rain in this soaking fag end of the month. Fortunately Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush is made of cheery stuff and sings matins from the top of the elder. Perhaps he knows of better weather. The field is more than sodden; it is inch-deep in water. In such times as these farmers make poor jokes about planting rice in paddies. To remind me of the wateriness of the world, two mergansers land on the river, and when walkingup from the field with Freda a strange bird flies at head height past us. ‘A flying chicken!’ jokes Freda. No, not a chicken; a web-footed great crested grebe, the first I have seen here.
    Real seasons with real weather do not progress smoothly. They stop, they start.

MAY
    Curlew

MAY IS NAMED for Maia, the Roman goddess of growth. And the increasing heat of the sun does bring on life. The greening suddenly becomes unstoppable, overwhelming, deliciously frightening. By the 3rd the grass in the meadow, in all of a rush, has reached a foot high, and if I lie on my elbows I am floating on a pea-green sea into which someone has thrown a confetti of blooms. Now I too have Hudson’s ‘spring grass mood’. I let the cows out of their winter paddock, into Marsh Field, only two days after the traditional day for moving cattle on to summer pastures. Quite taken with the mood of the moment, they run around throwing up divots. Dancing cow day we call it, this day when the cattle are released to munch their way through knee-high Maytime flowers.
    And the cowslips unfurl their Regency-bonneted heads in the meadow. As flowers they have benefited from a useful historical amnesia; the ‘slip’ in their name derives from the Old English
cu-sloppe
, meaning cow slop or cow shit. The charming, antique yellow
Primula veris
does indeed grow best in meadows where cows lift their tails.
    The air screams. The swifts, on their mechanicalbat wings, vortex around the house until it is time for bed. They arrived yesterday.

    5 M AY For weeks my ears have been straining for the sound of the cuckoo from Africa. ‘Was that a cuckoo?’ I say to myself, to everybody, every time I catch a half-bar of a particularly tuneful cooing wood pigeon. But today I do, without doubt, hear a cuckoo, down the valley, while I am swimming on my ocean.
    I only hear the cuckoo once. But a century ago, on the hills above Buxton, Hudson found:
    From half-past three they [cuckoos] would call so loudly and persistently and so many together from trees and