And what of those that aren’t used to frost? I realise I have forgotten about my lemon tree. Normally it spends winter indoors, but now it’s butted up against the south-facing wall, which is warm to the touch from winter sun. I decide it’s better off where it is but it’s a gamble, with temperatures so low and predicted to sink lower with no end in sight. I gather bits of fleece from the shed and wrap them around the pot to protect the rootball – if the plant loses a few leaves then so be it but if the rootball freezes it will die. I turn the pot around so more of the crown is close to the warm wall.
It remains bitterly cold for a week, each day getting harder and harder to bear. I walk to the gym for the first few days and then fall ill and stop going altogether. I allow myself a modest amount of central heating, and wear my tank suit (designed to keep you warm in a tank), woolly hat and gloves around the house. I obsess over closed doors and gaps in curtains, the electric blanket and hot-water bottles. Baked potatoes and beans. I try not to look at the smart meter. A wind picks up and the beautiful freshness of the first few days of frost are gone, it’s just horribly, bone-chillingly cold.
Everything becomes a struggle: for Emma, who works in a draughty warehouse, for me and Tosca on our walks, for the birds. I pick up a routine I’d forgotten about for years: each morning I break ice on the bird baths and top them up with fresh water. I scatter seeds on the lawn and in the borders. I stand in the kitchen, sometimes busying myself with emptying the dishwasher or making tea, and watch the birds descend: the little robin that steals in from the edges to take a sip of water, the herring gulls that stamp about on the shed roof, the chattering starlings, the crows that shoo them away. Then the pigeons, always a few pigeons. And finally, when all is quiet again, the blackbird and wren come to finish off what’s left.
The sparrows, of course, have their hanging feeders. I have two up but I’ll take them down in late spring. I used to feed birds all year round but the threat of diseases now is so great I’d rather not be part of it. There are berries and seeds on plants that will only provide more berries and seeds as they grow. There are tufts of long grass sheltering caterpillars that will come out for a feed on mild days. There are fallen leaves sheltering a host of invertebrates that the birds will find as they pick through them, again when it’s milder. But, for now, there are scatterings of seed and a full and fresh bird bath, sustenance for all.
We have snow and ice, ground temperatures of -8ºC, and the Met Office confirms we have had the coldest day in the UK for 12 years – all that within a week of that first, precious frost. I’m still grateful for it, but it’s anything but normal.
A member of my hedgehog group messages me on Facebook to tell me the remains of a hedgehog have been found in the children’s play area of the park. My heart sinks. It must be the hog that was found with its nose in the empty bag of Skips, the hog I searched for and didn’t find. I feel responsible, I should have searched harder. I meant to go and leave kitten biscuits for it in the undergrowth but I never got around to it. I have dead hedgehog blood on my hands.
It’s the worst possible timing for such grief – I have just got off the train at Mum’s and am walking up the path to her house. The woman tells me she’s called the council to have it taken away.
Hurriedly, I text Emma:
‘Dead hog in the park.’
‘In the kids area… please will you get it?’
There’s a pause, for a fraction of a second too long. Then typing:
‘Where?’
‘And put it where?’
I ask her to leave it in the shed. It’s so cold nothing will happen to it before I return. I greet Mum, drink tea, swap Christmas cards, show her photos of Tosca.
In the time it takes me to drink one cup of tea and politely decline an invitation to join Mum and Pete for the crossword, Emma has been to the park and not found the hedgehog. She leaves me voice notes that I don’t hear until it’s too late:
‘Where exactly is it?’
‘It’s cold…there are children still playing.’
‘I feel like a weirdo.’
In the next message she tells me she’s befriended the parents of the playing children and that four adults have scoured the play area for the hedgehog’s remains and found nothing.
‘Perhaps someone put it in the bin,’ she suggests, and I resist the urge to ask her to search the bins.
‘Perhaps someone dumped it in a corner so it didn’t upset the kids.’
I wanted to see it because I wanted to know if it was Tiny, the hog I released into the garden just two months ago. He was this year’s baby, brought up in a rescue centre, and knew little about the dangers of life. A little adventurer, it would be just like Tiny to have set up home in the park and forgotten how to get back to my garden, where the bowl of kitten biscuits remains topped up. It would be just like him to come out at dusk and nose through an empty packet of Skips in front of perplexed schoolchildren. It would be just like him, he who rejected the straw-filled box I prepared for him and settled under the pallet beneath the damp compost bin, to be caught out, hungry and cold, in the children’s play area of the park. And, I don’t know, if I could just see him, maybe I could identify him. Maybe I could identify the cause of death, or perhaps there would be something that would suggest it was another hog, Captain Prickles or Branston Prickle, maybe? One of my hogs. One that’s fed in my garden, slept and mated there, a hog that I have seen and known. A hog that deserves more than being collected for the council incinerator.
The woman sends me photos of the remains and they are just that. I see why Emma and her four new friends didn’t find it. ‘It looked just like a pile of leaves,’ the woman’s message says. It’s a dried out ‘pelt’ of skin and spikes, picked clean by crows. Is it Tiny or the hog that was hungry for Skips? Or someone else entirely? I’ll never know but I expect it has been dead for a while and was brought out into the open by rats in summer, when conditions were so dry there was no choice but to pick at long-dead things for sustenance. I also suspect it had been in the park for some time before being noticed.
I relax into being at home. Mum wants to show me her garden. When she moved here eight years ago her garden was almost completely paved, with a miserable thin strip of bare soil around the edge. Over the years she’s been taking up bricks to widen the strip to make a border, and every time I visit she shows me more of what she’s done. ‘I have a n-n-n-n-nice new border in front of the sun room,’ she says proudly. She’s planted this with a Japanese maple, mahonia and other bits and pieces she’s ‘rescued’ from the closed-down garden centre. She has a small central area in which she’s planted other bits and she’s removed one more brick from all around the original tiny border, which means she can plant with more depth, at a range of different heights, colours and leaf textures ‘like they do in the books.’
I’m reminded of when she had her haemorrhage, that I arrived in the middle of the night to an empty house with plates and mugs used by her, unwashed, a recipe scrawled on notepaper on the coffee table. That I slept in her bed, badly, and in the morning I woke to the most amazing dawn chorus, and that the first thing I did was walk into the garden. That it was April and her espalier fruit trees, which were some of the first things she had planted in her ever-widening border, were in full blossom. I took photos of them to show her in hospital, along with other spring flowers like bleeding heart, primroses, snake’s head fritillary and lungwort. When I was finally able to see her I realised it would be a while before I could show them to her, but when I did, eventually, she stared at them like a child, like she stared at us, unable to speak, unable to communicate but with love in her enormous blue eyes. I still have those photos, I can’t bear to delete them. It was a good blossom year.
Today, however, she’s keenest on showing me her leaves. At the end of her garden is an enormous purple beech tree, which I love. I love the grey bark of beech trees, the slender buds, the colour of the leaves when they first emerge and again before they fall. Mum has a different relationship with them: ‘Bloody leaves everywhere, stopping my bulbs growing!’ ‘Treading on those cursed masts! Oh I could kill those masts.’ And then in spring: ‘Those bloody beech seedlings!’
I have never managed to time my trip to coincide with the seedlings still being in the ground. I would happily dig them up and take them home with me to make a hedge. It’s a tree that deserves progeny, a tree I would like a nod to in my garden. I once nearly made it up in time. ‘If you want them they’re in the bin,’ she said, wickedly. The tree is not in her garden but is just beyond it and I am grateful. I’m convinced she would have chopped it down if she’d had a choice.
I’m surprised then, when she shows me her ‘leaves’, which she has added to her borders as a mulch. ‘Look,’ she says proudly, ‘I have read your books.’ Her entire garden is a pillowy bed of the reddest, wettest beech leaves, which she has carefully tucked around and beneath plants, so as not to block light to them. It looks beautiful.
‘Now who will live there?’ she asks. ‘Who am I helping?’
I tell her worms will slowly take the leaves into the soil and eat them underground, adding hummus and other nutrients around plant roots. I tell her moths will pupate and rest overwinter, that other critters will hunker down under this leafy winter blanket. That blackbirds will rifle through the leaves looking for morsels, that what she has done is recreate one of the oldest natural processes in the world – leaves falling on the soil to feed it and help plants grow, while providing a winter bed, and food, for many others.
‘Gold star for you, Mum,’ I say proudly. She then shows me her barbecue, which is a brick-built thing that resembles an open chimney with some metal shelves to hold fire and meat, beneath which she has packed yet more leaves.
‘Will a hedgehog sleep there?’
‘It might do, Mum!’
Many more of the leaves are in the compost heap, where they will break down with other waste and gradually become a fine material, which she can use as a summer mulch, for more soil conditioning.
‘But the rest are in the bin,’ she says, and we roll around, laughing. The poor beech tree. The poor, misunderstood beech tree.
Back in Brighton I set out with gloves and a bag and find the hog immediately. It’s exactly where the woman said it was, on the edge of the asphalt in the children’s play area. I take photos of my own, then prise its frozen remains off the asphalt and take it back to the garden, so it can be free to rot back into the earth, as nature intended, rather than the council incinerator. There’s not a scrap of flesh on it, just spikes, a few ribs and vertebrae, and a skull – a tiny one, indicating that it was a young hog – but no jaw. Not much to return to the soil, but something. I lay it down on the compost heap and cover it with a thin layer of garden waste, so it, too, can work its way back into the earth. Go well, little hog.
House sparrow, Passer domesticus
The house sparrow is a little bird with a big CHEEP! Mostly brown, the male has a black face and bib, while the female is duller. They’re scruffy things, birds of big hedges and neglected waste ground. They eat seeds of dandelions and other ‘weeds’ such as sowthistle and knapweeds. They nest in loose family groups in holes and under the eaves of houses, and often nest next to each other. They can have up to three broods a year. They hang around in flocks, in which they forage, bathe and CHEEP! together.
The house sparrow has declined by over 70 per cent (that’s around 22 million birds) since the 1970s, but is still the most commonly seen garden bird in the UK. For 20 years it’s held the top spot in the Big Garden Birdwatch, an annual bird count that takes place on the third weekend of January. It’s still common, but it’s the rate of its decline that’s worrying, and scientists can’t quite work out what’s going on.
In urban areas it’s thought a combination of loss of nesting habitat and invertebrate food, which they feed their chicks, is contributing to the fall in numbers, with populations completely disappearing from some neighbourhoods. Habitat loss comes from house renovations – holes are filled in and cavity walls insulated to make them more energy efficient, while the eaves of new and refurbished homes are now sealed, so sparrows can’t get in. The loss of invertebrate food means fewer successful nesting attempts – a study in Leicester blamed a lack of insects for the number of chicks found starving in nests. It makes sense: urban spaces have less greenery than rural areas so fewer leaves for invertebrates to eat. Add to that the increase of paving in both front and back gardens, decking and plastic grass, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out why the chicks aren’t getting the nourishment they need.
In rural areas the situation is different, with declines linked to changes in farming practices such as the loss of winter stubbles and hedgerows, along with measures to prevent sparrows from accessing stores of grain. But studies are not conclusive. They could be declining for reasons no one’s thought of yet.
The thing about house sparrows is that they’re a sedentary species, which means they spend their whole lives in one territory, they don’t move around like other birds. If the habitat starts to disintegrate – for example if holes in houses are filled in or there are too many paved-over and fake-turfed gardens – they just stick it out, gradually finding less and less food to feed their chicks, their house literally crumbling around them.
If you have them in your garden you probably have a lot of them – that’s the nature of house sparrows, they hang out in big groups. But that doesn’t mean they’re not struggling and it doesn’t mean you can’t give them a helping hand.
In gardens they’re easy to cater for. The invertebrates we have lost from urban areas are just aphids and caterpillars. Virtually all plants attract aphids, the key is to leave them where you find them and not try to take nature into your own hands by spraying them to death or rubbing them off with your fingers. They rarely harm plants and can be a lifeline for these little brown birds, which balance precariously on stems and pick aphids off them one at a time, before carrying them back to their nest. How do I know? Because I watch them do it. Every spring I know when the chicks have hatched because the house sparrows descend on the garden and frantically take aphids from every leaf and bud. Two weeks later the fresh, fluffy chicks with gaping yellow beaks line up on the fence and tumble into shrubs and trees, not quite sure of their weight or how much space they take up. I watch their parents feed them but also teach them how to find aphids on roses, teach them where the pond and bird bath are, the feeder of sunflower hearts. At dusk they descend on the big hedge in next door’s front garden and CHEEP! loudly until it’s time for bed.
To increase numbers of caterpillars in your garden, grow native trees and shrubs, including hawthorn, beech and hazel. Let them grow scruffy and wayward or grow them as a hedge, so the sparrows can roost in them at night. Let areas of grass grow long, which will entice a variety of egg-laying moths and butterflies, along with other invertebrates such as aphids but also beetles and bugs. Having taken some of the invertebrates from the grass, the sparrows will return to take seed from the grasses and any wildflowers that have grown into the thatch.
Nesting sites are important, too. There’s a pub near me, a fancy thing on the seafront, that has always had house sparrows breeding in its many holes and crevices. When the new owners bought it and the refurbishment got underway, I emailed them and explained how house sparrows lived there, how they are sedentary and likely to just stay put even if the habitat declines, that they nest communally. They responded by erecting 30 boxes on the north side of the venue. Thousands of people visit every week and never notice the house sparrows, but when I walk past them I always say hello and smile, because 30 pairs of house sparrows are raising chicks on the side of a fancy seafront pub, thanks to a couple of emails.
When I bought my house I had six nest boxes retrofitted into its cavity walls, three each for swifts and house sparrows. A pair of great tits nested in one in the first year, and house sparrows often start but then abandon nest building in the swift holes. But the boxes are there for them if they need them. As they nest communally you can erect several boxes together, just make sure they have an entrance hole with a diameter of 30mm. You can buy a ‘sparrow terrace’, which has three boxes in one. Erect them under the eaves of your house (away from any swift or house martin nests), and keep your fingers crossed. With nesting opportunities and good chances of invertebrate food they would be foolish to stay away for long.
