Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel Page A

roofs as to banish sleep from that hour. All day long, all over the moor, cuckoos were cuckooing as they flew hither and thither in their slow aimless manner with rapidly beating wings looking like spiritless hawks.
    The resistible decline of the cuckoo has come to this: I hear a solitary cuckoo on a single occasion in a whole valley in a spring. The cuckoo is now on the red list for Birds of Conservation Concern. Welcome to the cuckooless spring.
    At least the meadow pipits in Lower Meadow willbe pleased with the demise of the cuckoo. The meadow pipit’s nest is often the favoured choice for the cuckoo to lay its Trojan egg. Indeed, so closely associated is the meadow pipit with its role as the unwitting foster parent of the parasitic cuckoo that in Welsh the bird is
Gwas y Gog
(cuckoo’s knave).
    Meadow pipits are the mugs of the bird world, the victims of the malevolent con artist cuckoo and prey for charismatic merlins, hen harriers and sparrowhawks. Foxes and weasels predate their eggs. But I agree with Hudson that no one who sees the speckled bird ‘creeping about among the grass and heather on its pretty little pink legs, and watches its large dark eyes full of shy curiosity as it returns your look and who listens to its tinkling strains . . . as it flies up and up, can fail to love the meadow pipit – the poor little feathered fool’.
    There are two meadow pipits’ nests in the field, both with four dark brown eggs in their cup of dry grass. These are incubated for thirteen days. In both cases my attention was drawn to the nests by the courteous males bringing food to the sitting hens. Meals were mostly spiders, moths, grubs and caterpillars, almost all hunted within the confines of the field.
    Like the cuckoo, the meadow pipit is in decline. Indeed, the national loss of meadow pipits is one of the many reasons for the decline in the cuckoo. Somany of the really common birds of my country boyhood are in crisis. In England, tree sparrows have declined by 71 per cent, lapwings by 80 per cent, and those huge murmurations of starlings, which I used to watch heading north to the night warmth of Birmingham, are a thing of the past.
    April and May are the months to listen to the dawn chorus, when male birds sing to attract females and mark out territory. By and large, the bigger and more tuneful the song the more likely the male bird is to attract a mate.
    The concert begins at around 4.15, before dawn breaks over Merlin’s Hill. To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious. I am in my dressing gown and wellingtons, unshaven, though none of the performers seem to care that I am inappropriately dressed, casual but unsmart. The birds sing in this order: the song thrush goes to the top of the ash and sings, to borrow Browning’s words:
    each song twice over
    Lest you should think he never could recapture
    The first fine careless rapture!
    The song thrush is followed by a robin and a blackbird, also on the riverside, then the brown-barred wrenby the newt ditch, the blue tits, the chaffinch, a dunnock, the blackcap, a pheasant, all against the persiflage of jackdaws who are cavorting in the sky above the derelict barn at the Grove. A skylark takes to the air, and two male meadow pipits also make singing ascensions.
    I will proselytize on behalf of the dawn chorus. If you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.
    There is now an International Dawn Chorus Day, which was founded courtesy of the Urban Wildlife Trust in Birmingham. This is international in the way the American football World Series is global. It’s a British thing. As the journalist Henry Porter once pointed out, ‘Whatever our self-denigration and decline, you cannot take away from the British a genius for the appreciation of nature, particularly birds.’ We do seem to have been especially well appointed