Instead I tune in to oystercatchers and skylarks, to ducks and geese that I can’t identify – perhaps the wigeon from November. There are no cows on the marshes today. We walk along the old railway line, which is only slightly drier than the boggy grass around us. On one side is short grass and puddles, which is usually where the cattle graze, and the other side has long grass – perhaps a crop of rye – and reedbeds in the distance. We stick to the short grass and the path, so as not to disturb any wild things, me throwing treats for Tos, who runs up and down the banks in excited scurries, splashing in puddles and stopping for yet more sniffies. The sky echoes with oystercatchers.
The wind picks up and the oystercatchers land and quieten, and I tune in to a different sound, an eerie sound I’ve heard only once before in a sound recording of marshland, which I thought was feedback from the recordist’s equipment. It sounds like a synthesiser, like aliens have landed. It’s brief so I can’t follow it to locate its makers. But I’m enchanted again, as I was in autumn with the curlews. What other secrets do these marshes hold?
We head onwards, the dog and me, over the estuary bridge on to Walberswick Nature Reserve. The marsh recedes to heathland again, and with it return the posters warning of adders. The sun is higher in the sky now, and there are grassy patches where there might be nesting – or resting – birds. I put Tosca on the lead and we stick to the main concrete path that takes us to Walberswick village, which, we both decide, is only slightly less interesting than bowling among the bracken. She makes me stop for every last sniff; I make her stop for birdsong.
Every tree has a chiffchaff in it, every third tree has a yellowhammer, and as we walk past one particularly chunky broom, I jump to my first booming Cetti’s warbler since last summer. Oh, my heart. It’s still only 8.00 a.m. and my whole body rings with the sound of a thousand wild things. Why must mornings like this be so rare?
We walk into the village, say hello to the swings I used to play on as a child, marvel at beautiful houses I couldn’t begin to dream of living in. We loop around the church and head back on ourselves, back to the bridge and the ridge, the puddles and the oystercatchers. I marvel at the footprint patterns of wading birds in the sand. I listen out for the eerie sounds again but the wind fails to bring them to me.
Back at Dad’s I message Stephen, who made the sound recording where I mistook living beings for electrical feedback noise. I find his clip with the noises and identify the eerie sounds at 1 minute 42 seconds. I confess my ignorance and ask him, ‘Do actual birds make this noise?’ I feel stupid but there’s no point in pretending to know things you don’t know, and I’m a city girl after all. Besides, he’s used to my questions. It was Stephen I chatted to about curlews back in November, Stephen who suggested what time to head out to hear them, Stephen who explained how they live. If anyone is to join me for my marshy awakening it must be him. ‘I’m ever so sorry to bother you again,’ I say.
He tells me they are lapwings. Lapwings, the birds with the black-green and white markings and the crest, birds I have seen and known (or thought I have known) for years. I’ve spotted them flying overhead, watched them land to feed in fields. During a particularly cold spell recently, there was one that ended up in Brighton city centre, which was rescued by someone from the bird rescue group I follow on Facebook (it had a terrible neck injury and died, sadly). I know lapwings. I thought I knew lapwings.
I remember being told that they are called peewits because of the strange sounds they make, and of not really paying attention because peewit isn’t such a remarkable sound when said phonetically by a human. Stephen sends me another recording, this time only of lapwings, and I am transported into another world, a world of the most wondrous sounds, of wildness, of loss.
The lapwing has declined by 55 per cent since 1967, due largely to the intensification of agriculture. It’s no real surprise that I’ve never heard one – I grew up in the suburbs just outside Birmingham and have seen them only a handful of times. ‘You will have seen them out of breeding season,’ says Stephen. ‘That sound is only what they make on nesting territories in the spring.’
Like the curlew, the lapwing is a ground-nesting bird, and subject to the ravages of farmland machinery and the absence of ‘fallow’ land that used to be commonplace. I read that they nest from mid-March to June, and realise I have caught them at the very beginning of this year’s breeding season. I read that the collective noun for lapwings is a ‘deceit’, which seems mean, although they did convince me they were electrical feedback noises rather than actual birds. I read that they nest on short grassland and grazed farmland, and that wet pasture is an important source of food for them. No wonder they like Walberswick.
The next morning I wake again to my furry alarm. ‘Shall we go and see the lapwings?’ I ask. ‘Woof,’ she replies.
The wind is stronger today and I tune in to fewer songbirds as we trudge along the path to the marshes. We walk together on the lead, just in case there’s a stray lapwing on the short grass, along the old railway line and over the bridge to Walberswick. There are fewer chiffchaffs and yellowhammers, there’s no Cetti’s warbler. We do meet a redshank, though, as we walk back along the estuary. It has been spooked by something that is neither me nor the dog, and it cries out, loudly, taking refuge on a boat. A predator, perhaps. A stoat?
There are no distant alien sounds today, or none that is carried on the wind. But, as we head back, I loop round to another bit of path beyond a mound, from which yesterday’s noises came. I have no binoculars with me but I can just make out a deceit of black-and-white birds near a stretch of water in the distance. ‘Lapwings!’ I tell Tosca. She is busy tracking the scent of something.
We plan to return, with Dad’s binoculars, the following morning but we don’t make it. Tosca treats me to a lie-in until 7.00 a.m. and we stay in bed for cuddles while the wind and rain howl around us. I am more prepared for wet weather than I was the last time I visited, but it’s still not enough to persuade me to head out. And Tosca hates being wet. So we stay in bed and play ‘Cheeky Monkey’, which involves me grabbing her paws and asking ‘Are you a cheeky monkey?’ while she lies on her back and growls. Sometimes that’s all you need, along with nice a cup of tea. But the curlews and the lapwings, and the other new marsh friends I have yet to meet! I’ll be back for them, perhaps, without the dog.
From Dad’s I head to Emma’s mum Anne’s, where Emma has been for the last couple of days. We spend the weekend celebrating Anne’s 70th birthday and then return home after nearly a week away, tired but happy to have seen everyone. I open the back door and squat down in front of the pond.
‘What are you doing?’ says Emma.
‘I’m looking for toadspawn. I can’t believe there isn’t any,’ I reply, wondering where they are breeding because there was a couple in amplexus last week and it would be odd, although not that unusual, that they would get together in my pond and then swan off somewhere else to actually lay their eggs.
‘It’s here, you plonker,’ she says, ‘it’s bloody everywhere!’ and suddenly I see it, tramlines upon tramlines of the stuff, ribboned through the curled pondweed and wrapped around submerged stems of marsh marigold and even a thin, underwater branch of one of the bits of wood I placed at the edge, which doubles up as a dragonfly perch. Just as it should be. ‘Toadspawn!’ I gasp. ‘So it is!’
At night I let Tos out for a wee and crouch down by the toadspawn. There are several males, but at least one couple in amplexus, along with a mating ball that I think involves a frog. I laugh, and then see my little newt (or one of my little newts?) pawing through the pondweed into my torchlight. ‘Hello toads, hello frog, hello newt,’ I say. After a few days in the countryside among Cetti’s warblers and lapwings, I was worried I would have fallen out of love with my little city garden. But how can I? I sit on the bench as toads squeak among their eggs, as a hedgehog crunches kitten biscuits, as this little patch of Earth wakes into spring. ‘Hello, hello, hello!’
In a stable climate, temperature and rainfall records are rarely broken; the highs and lows fall within established, constant parameters. But in a destabilising climate records are broken all the time, and so it is that after the driest February since 1934, we are closing in on the wettest March in 40 years. I’m grateful for the full water butts and pond but am itching to get outside and do some gardening. I watch the outside from inside: my rambling rose ‘Frances E. Lester’ has come into leaf, as have my spindle and guelder rose. Daffodils are still going strong although they’re being battered by wind and rain. There are primroses, lungwort and cowslips in flower. Every night I fill the hedgehog dish with kitten biscuits and every morning I watch videos of hedgehogs coming and going from the garden, entering the feeding station or pushing each other out of the way. What I’d give for a calm, sunny spring day.
The winter robin has gone and the spring and summer robin has taken his place. I don’t know this, really, I’m just guessing. They could all be the same robin for all I know. This new or not-so-new robin has brought a mate. I watch them from the kitchen; they hide in next door’s wisteria and take it in turns to visit the hanging bird feeders, which 2022’s summer robin didn’t do. Perhaps this is the winter robin who has defeated his rival and decided to stay? There’s no way of really knowing.
There are two robins and I like them. One morning, Tos gets me up at 5.30 a.m. and I stand in the kitchen, looking out. The robins are inspecting the robin box and its vicinity. I watch them fly to and from it, fly to the ivy growing around and beneath it, hop among the guelder rose branches that grow next to it. The female sits in the box and splays her wings as if to say, ‘Let’s choose this one!’ I text Emma and tell her the robins have been and she tells me she has seen them ‘opposite the bench, yes?’ She has seen the robins together in the garden and not thought to tell me, and I would be annoyed if I wasn’t so delighted. We might have baby robins!
Later, I bump into Helen, who lives in the house behind mine and has had robins nesting – unsuccessfully – in her garden several times.
‘Have you seen much of them this year?’
‘They’re around, but I don’t think they’re nesting yet.’
I tell her about the splaying behaviour and the box and the ivy. ‘That’s exciting,’ she says. She tells me she had a conversation with another neighbour about hedgehogs recently, and that my efforts to rewild South Portslade are working. ‘Excellent!’ I say, deliberately not spoiling the moment by asking if the hog was seen out in the day. We both agree to keep an eye out on the robins, and keep each other posted. I LOVE having these chats with my neighbours.
Speckled wood butterfly, Pararge aegeria
The speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria) is a butterfly of woodland glades, of dappled shade and hedgerows but also gardens, including very urban ones. It was one of the first butterflies to arrive in my garden, although I’m not sure if it’s breeding here. It’s brown with a series of spots, which are cream-white if you live in the north of Britain but cream-orange if you live in the south. It rarely visits flowers as it prefers to drink aphid honeydew from high up in the tree tops but it’s a strong flier and males are territorial – look for spiralling fights as they chase rivals off their patch.
If a female happens upon a male’s patch she will fall to the ground and, after a brief courtship, will mate with him. She lays her eggs in long grass – specifically cock’s-foot (Dactylis glomerata), common couch (Elytrigia repens), false brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum) and Yorkshire-fog (Holcus lanatus). These will naturally seed into your ‘lawn’ if you let them. As in my garden, it’s usually the first butterfly to arrive to new meadows but others may follow suit, including meadow brown (Maniola jurtina), gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus) and ringlet (Aphantopus hyperantus), which all breed in long grass.
The speckled wood butterfly is unique among British butterflies as it can overwinter as both a caterpillar and a chrysalis (pupa). This means you’ll find adults at different times in spring, with some emerging as early as March and others not on the wing until June. They have two or three generations per year, depending on the weather, and adults of later generations are generally darker than those from earlier in the year.
To garden for them is easy: they need long grass, areas of shade, and somewhere for their caterpillars or pupae to shelter in winter. The fresh green chrysalises are usually attached to the underside of a grass stem or piece of dead leaf. I often worry that cutting meadows to the ground in autumn is bad for speckled woods, as the caterpillars may still be using the grasses or the pupae may be attached to a stem that is cut – I’ve found them only when cutting long grass. One of the reasons I’ve moved my meadow into the front garden is that there will be less incentive to cut it right back at the end of summer, that I can leave it long and scraggly for winter. I’ll cut it back at some point, but I’ll leave a few inches above ground as a ‘buffer’ and let the clippings rest on the surface for a few days so anything eating the cut blades can simply drop back into the thatch. You could do this too: let grass grow long but let some of it stay long (or at least tufty) all year round. It won’t be long before a cream-spotted brown butterfly lands in a sunny spot and claims it as his territory. Fingers crossed a female will fly past and drop down to join him.
April
I was expecting little nephew Stanley to have forgotten about the pumpkins I promised he would be growing at his new house this year, but he told Mum he was excited about getting them ready for Halloween. No pressure, then. I turn up with a multi-cell tray of compost that I promise has seeds in it. ‘I didn’t label them, though, so they might be butternut squash,’ I say.
For three months we have had a plan: Stanley goes out with his dad while Mum fixes up the greenhouse for tomato growing and Ellie and I work on the garden. We all meet up for a curry later.
It doesn’t work out like that, though. Ellie, full of pregnancy hormones, decides Stanley would be better off with us in the garden, while Mum makes a start weeding the path.
‘Do we have time for path weeding today, Mum?’ I ask as gently as I can.
