The leaves of the rose are on the turn, yielding the first autumnal hints of russet and amber. Through the binoculars the chiffchaff is the perfect yellow-green and the combination of the two has me awe-struck. I curse myself for not having a fancy camera but remind myself I am looking in real time through binoculars. Savour the moment. I watch, intently, as the chiffchaff picks aphids from the underside of the leaves, moving delicately up the stem until its weight causes the stem to bow down and it flies up, startled. It does this a few times, before I wrest myself away and back to my desk.
The chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) is a summer migrant, a small, insectivorous warbler named after its repetitive summer call, which sounds like it’s saying its own name over and over. It doesn’t chiff chaff at this time of year, though, it hweets, from every tree.
Its scientific name (Phylloscopus) means ‘leaf seeker’ because it likes to eat insects such as aphids, caterpillars, gnats and midges from leaves, like my roses. This is why, as I keep telling anyone who will listen, we shouldn’t remove insects from our plants, we should always celebrate the fact that they are food for other species. What would the chiffchaff have to eat if I had removed the aphids? Or worse, what if the chiffchaff ate poisoned aphids that had been sprayed but not removed?
It’s olive green, with a pale eye stripe and a darker ‘eye brow’. It’s almost indistinguishable by sight from the willow warbler; they’re much better told apart by their different songs – the willow warbler has a watery warble rather than the obvious chiff chaff. Their contact calls differ too, the willow warbler’s is more of a hu-weet than a hweet. I see and hear willow warblers in the garden, too, but they are gone by this stage of autumn.
Both species breed in the UK in summer, and overwinter in southern and western Europe, southern Asia and North Africa (although more recently, thanks to climate change, some chiffchaffs avoid the long journey to overwintering grounds and remain here). Birds of wilder spaces, I see them only in spring and autumn, presumably just after they arrive and again before they leave – on country walks I hear them calling from the tops of trees but never catch a glimpse of them. My garden is a stepping stone, a place to spend a few days after making landfall following a long journey, and again to fatten up and gain strength before heading back. These fairy-like birds, which glide from tree to bush and make calls I usually hear only in the countryside, mark the seasons.
There have been other migrants of late, too – swallows and house martins in their hundreds. I watch them flying over the garden, in the park, on the high street. Like the chiffchaff, they also head south for winter, travelling great distances to reach their African wintering grounds. House martins do sometimes nest in the suburbs, but swallows, like chiffchaffs, are countryside birds. It’s strange watching them now, in such an urban setting. Strange watching them above the traffic and noise of the urban sprawl of Portslade. What are they doing here? The same as the chiffchaffs – flying south from wherever they nested in the UK; Brighton is the last bit of land before they cross the Channel. They need insects to fuel their journeys, they need our gardens with leaves and trees and an absence of bug sprays; we gardeners can help them on their way. In the park, with the dog, I watch a lone swallow quarter above ground, navigating around children playing football and dogs being idiots, a random dumped armchair, the scout hut, litter. It goes round and round and round, jerking left here and right there, avoiding this and that or moving suddenly for a morsel of food. Tosca and her best friend Alfie gambolling in the background, Alfie’s mum Rhi and I chatting about our days. I think about the land the swallows used to find here. Before the park was a park it was a landfill site and before that ‘waste land’, a brick pit, fields. When did this parcel of land last have nesting swallows? Last have nesting chiffchaffs? Will it ever again?
Little nephew Stanley has discovered the allotments in his village. He and his mum, Ellie, walk past them on the way to the park and he asks to stop and look at the vegetables before playing on the swings and slides. Ellie texts me a video of him wandering around the beds, pointing out ‘pumpkins’ (winter squash), runner beans, a large white butterfly laying eggs on nasturtiums.
‘Where are the tomatoes, Stanley?’ Ellie asks.
‘I think they’re over here,’ he replies, running off. ‘And here are the big pumpkins,’ he says, which of course are a different species of winter squash. ‘They’re beautiful!’
‘Get off the mud, please, Stanley,’ says Ellie. Three years old and already in love with an allotment? No chance, sis. Absolutely none at all.
Stanley’s fondness for ‘pumpkins’ led to his parents taking him to a pumpkin farm to harvest his own Jack-o’-lantern for Halloween. I’m not sure how he managed it but he came away from the farm with eight pumpkins, one of which he carried around with him for three days.
‘Stanley’s in the bath with his pumpkin,’ texts Ellie. I beam proudly.
‘He’s one of us,’ I tell Dad on the phone a few days later. ‘He’s got the gene.’ Dad wasn’t around for long when I was little, but when he was it was me and him on the veg patch, me and him harvesting runner beans and puddling in leeks, me and him adding sticks to the bonfire on late summer evenings, me and him against the world. Suddenly Dad and I both know exactly how we’re going to spend our time with our little green man: outside, loving what we love, together.
Ellie doesn’t have that ‘gene’, the calling for the outside that Dad and I have. Just two years younger than me, she had every opportunity to develop the same love and wonder for the natural world as I did but it never happened. She feels inadequate about it but she needn’t, it just isn’t in her. But it’s in Stanley, which is both hilarious and wonderful.
‘Sis, how am I going to support him in this when it’s so alien to me?’
‘You’ll work it out,’ I tell her. You can develop an interest in gardening without being completely consumed by it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can learn enough to take joy from it yourself while helping to feed your child’s obsession. It needn’t be your everything, you don’t even have to be good at it.
They’re moving house soon and Ellie promises me Stanley will have his own vegetable patch.
‘Remember he’s only three,’ I tell her, and wonder how much Mum can be relied on to water things I plant for him. Or indeed if Ellie, pregnant with nephew number two, would know how to keep plants sated, if she even had the time to do so. It’s times like this I wish I lived closer. Or they did.
She sends videos of the new garden, which is mainly lawn but has a small greenhouse at the end and a sunny bed overrun with hypericum and euphorbia, which could make a nice spot for pumpkins. ‘Can we grow runner beans?’ she asks, ‘and sweet peas?’ We agree for me to go up one weekend in spring and set up some sort of veg patch. There are also roses to prune and a hedgehog highway to create, plants to identify. Mum has claimed the greenhouse as her own, which is a blessing as she will teach Stanley how to water, feed, weed and pinch out, and she will keep an eye on his veg patch when I’m not there. He’ll grow into a fine gardener yet.
Common darter dragonfly, Sympetrum striolatum
The common darter is a dragonfly that regularly colonises new ponds. Males are rusty red and females are more of an ochre, fading to a dull red as they age. They are narrow-bodied and ‘dart’ out to collect prey, which they take back to their perch to eat. The male will tend to use the same perch from which to defend his territory – if you sit and watch you will see him jump up to scare off a bumblebee or butterfly, before settling back down again to guard his space.
Climate change is, at the moment, working well for British dragonflies, which thrive in warm weather. The State of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland 2021 report states that 19 species have increased their distribution since 1970, compared to five that have declined. We have gained eight new species since 1995 and two others have reappeared after a long period of absence. Most species are moving north and west into areas that were previously too cold for them.
The common darter appeared in my garden within weeks of me digging the pond. The following spring I conducted pond dips and found the chubby nymphs in my net, along with those of skinnier damselflies and mayflies. The nymphs eat tadpoles and other aquatic larvae before climbing up the stem of a plant growing out of the water and completing their final stage of metamorphosis into an adult.
When mating, the male and female form a ‘wheel’ where the male holds on to the female by the back of her neck with claspers at the end of his abdomen. If she likes him she will lift her abdomen up to the base of his thorax to allow him to transfer his sperm. They then travel together to the pond, where he holds on to her as she dips eggs into the water.
October
A call from a wildlife rescue. ‘We have a young male hog here, would you take him?’ I say yes, of course. I clean out one of the empty boxes and fill it with fresh straw, and drive up with another box of straw to carry him home in.
He doesn’t have a name. He was found in someone’s garden with two siblings, both female, in summer. It looked like the nest had been abandoned by their mum, as sometimes happens, and the three hoglets were out and about far too early to survive. They were scooped up and taken to my local rescue centre, where they were fed puppy formula until they were big enough to be released.
‘We didn’t want to release the boy with his sisters,’ said the centre worker. ‘They’re not the brightest, are they?’
The females go back to the garden where they were found and the male comes to live with me. He was the smallest of the three, weighing just 43g, about the same as a small egg or two tablespoons of butter. He weighs over 700g now (two cans of pop or a loaf of bread), and with the recent warm, wet weather, the gardens are having a second, pseudo spring. The lawns are lush and green, the trees and shrubs are putting on new growth, there are caterpillars and beetles breathing a sigh of relief after the long hard summer. It’s unseasonably, scarily mild but if you’re a young hog needing to cut your teeth on the big wide world before settling down to hibernate, it’s pretty perfect.
I call him Tiny, even though he isn’t anymore. I scoop him into gloved hands and whisper a gentle ‘Welcome’ before placing him in front of the entrance to the hedgehog box. I have been taught to do this – never place a hedgehog in a box but at the entrance hole to it, so they can enter of their own accord. Sometimes it can take half an hour before they go in, but they are nocturnal mammals and they will always seek darkness over light, or so I have always been told. Tiny won’t go in. I stand with him for 30 minutes and he refuses to budge. I wonder if the box smells of bigger, scarier hog or if, as a rescue, he’s not as nocturnal as he perhaps should be. I have released many hogs into this garden and none has behaved like this. I head indoors and stand at the upstairs window, instead, to see how he gets on.
Tiny has absolutely no intention of going in the box. As soon as I leave he starts exploring. He sniffs all around the edge of the box, around the wider vicinity of the box, and tries to climb on to the box. I stay watching him; it seems irresponsible not to. Suddenly he rolls on to his back and starts self-anointing, a process in which hedgehogs salivate and lick the saliva on to their spines, perhaps as a way of familiarising themselves with the scent of whatever they’re in contact with (no one really knows). They mostly do this when encountering new things, of which everything is right now. Imagine being Tiny, found the size of an egg on your first foray out of the nest and then raised in captivity with your siblings. Then, suddenly, there’s a huge world to explore, starting with a New Box. Little teenaged Tiny, finally set free. Anything is possible.
Except he should be sleeping.
He shuns the box I prepared for him and, instead, enters the box opposite, which doesn’t have a resident but which I haven’t cleaned out and filled with fresh straw (there is old straw). I wait for five minutes and he doesn’t come out. I wonder if the other box is more homely to him, smells more of sleeping, safe hedgehog. I wait another five minutes and he still doesn’t come out. He’s settled then, finally, nearly an hour after I brought him home. I relax a little and get back to my work.
Later, Emma comes home with Tos. Tos asks to go outside and I check for signs of Tiny first, before letting her. She runs out, as she always does, to the end of the garden, but stops in her tracks as she picks up Tiny’s scent, and does a big sniffy U-turn to the boxes. Like Tiny, Tosca sniffs and sniffs, taking in messages I couldn’t begin to imagine. ‘Yes, we have a new hedgehog,’ I tell her. ‘You done? Come on now.’ She reluctantly leaves the boxes, then continues with her existing mission of Seeing-Who-Has-Been-In-My-Garden-Since-I-Was-Last-Here, growling at the two exits to ward off any would-be intruders, and doing a wee. Eventually, she comes to a stop next to the compost bin and sits down, giving me what I can only describe as a withering look.
‘What?’
[Hard stare]
‘What? Do you want to show me something?’
