Walking: Nature Notes from Madeleine’s Patch

 

Cow parsley is good for nectar

Come With Me to Look and See: A Guided Walk Around the Nature Reserve Reveals Red-Letter Day Finds

During lockdown there may have been limits to our physical journeys, but in our minds we are only limited by the boundaries of our imaginations - so let me be your vicarious ears, eyes and other senses and come with me on a virtual guided walk around Madeleine’s Patch.

The weather is warm and sunny with a mild breeze.

Our starting point is Madeleine’s Patch HQ (MPHQ), where Madeleine and I lived for almost 40 years before her tragic demise. MPHQ is a mosaic of ornamental gardens, ponds, orchard, meadow and semi-mature hedges and trees that we planted in the early 1980s. This offers a wide range of habitats and niches for a myriad of plants and animals.

Are you ready? Then let’s get started.

The first thing we notice is the air, heavy with the pungent peppery smell of rape blossom, which carries for miles. Bees love it and they make a very distinctive tasting honey from it. For the time being, they are safe from the neonicotinoids insecticides currently banned by the EU but the pressure is on to return to these chemicals.

The soporific sound of pigeons cooing in the trees are all around us – nature’s lullaby on a drowsy summer’s afternoon. The maniacal laugh of a nearby green woodpecker rents the air. We believe they are nesting but we haven’t located the nest yet.

A piercing mew of a low-flying buzzard draws our attention overhead. Surfing and circling on the warm thermal air currents, the buzzard lazily floats at treetop height, mobbed by couple of starlings, too close for comfort to their nest in the hollow soffit under the eaves of the house. They have been busy ferrying food and faecal sacs to and from the nest for some time now. Their offspring trill and scratch above my bedroom at dawn each morning. An early start maybe, but who could begrudge them the exuberance of their youth? Besides, it saves me having to reach over to turn off an alarm clock with a much ruder awakening.

A quick peek in one of our many ponds reveals a male great crested newt resting motionless on the bottom. The silver flash of his tail is a giveaway sign of his gender: a visual signal to female newts that he is ready to mate. A rapid susurration of wings and a small darting form heralds the presence of the first dragonfly of the season, but it darts away too quickly to identify.

So far, we have only walked a few steps and already the species count is beginning to rack up.

Bog Oak with Hawthorn as a backdrop

As we walk to the top of the garden, a vivid violet-blue glimpse of bluebells can be seen under the dappled shade of the sheltering trees. A contrast with the paler yellows and lemons of the cowslips and primroses, which are almost  gone over now, but hopefully, full of seed to pass the baton onto next year’s generation. We are endeavouring to create a wild woodland effect on a shady bank. Shakespeare’s Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to mind, ‘What angel awakes me from my flowery bed?’ 

Passing through a small stand of ash trees we follow the mown grass path that meanders through the tall cow parsley, now in full flower with its white umbels brushing us at shoulder height. When left unmanaged it can spread profusely; it is nevertheless an early source of nectar and pollen important for a variety of insects, including bees and hoverflies. It is also a nectar source for orange-tip butterflies one of which has fluttered by within the glade as we approach. White deadnettle is also present.

Moving into the meadow, the blossom from our new orchard fills the air with a heady bouquet of sweet scent that overpowers the pungent rape, but meets its match when competing with the creamy froth of the hawthorn blossom, which smothers the hedge in snowy cascades. Its scent never fails to take me back to my childhood when roaming the fields at Stourbridge Common in Cambridge.

Passing a small stand of pink campion, we pause to lift a few sheets of corrugated roofing mats we have strategically placed to survey for reptiles that use them to warm up their cold blood in the mornings. No reptiles today, but the male water shrew stirs in his nest. Sadly, a cat kill took a female water shrew yesterday, but hopefully there are others on site to ensure breeding and population growth continues. A fork-tailed red kite glides effortlessly overhead as rabbits scurry for the protection of the hedgerows.

The hedge plants we put in last spring are looking well and flourishing. A couple of years from now they will begin to make a substantial change to the landscape, but already insects are moving in.

Opening the gate into the lane that leads to Madeleine’s Patch, we pass a stack of bog oak logs. Stained dark by millennia submerged in the peat bogs that covered this area before the Fens were drained, they are a tangible testimony to how climate change shapes our landscape. Over millennia, the fens have seen tundra, woodland, grassland and bog as temperatures waxed and waned. Mighty trees succumbed to drowning as the water levels rose. Now farmers ploughing deep to bind the underlying peat with the glacial clays to prevent the fine rich soil from blowing away, are hitting these long-buried sentinels, wrenching them from their forgotten graves and piling them along the drove sides.

The generic term is bog oak, but various other species of trees are also present and when preserved and polished their true colours shine through as a thing of natural beauty. The wood is not petrified as a true fossil and exposure to the air soon sets in a process of drying and crumbling. A chainsaw is soon blunted on it and when burnt it smoulders rather than flames. A log will burn for hours giving off a strangely sweet-scented aroma.

White Dead Nettle

Walking down the lane to Madeleine’s Patch, the drove is sheltered by a hedge on its western boundary and hemlock grows in abundance on the other side.  This plant is very similar to cow parsley, but the leaves are darker, and the stem is marked with purple blotches. It’s important that any would-be forager knows the difference between the two as hemlock is highly toxic, whereas cow parsley can be used as a flavouring in omelettes and salads and has been used to treat various ailments and as a mosquito repellent.

As we continue, the rough, pot-holed track merges into a grassy bridleway and we enter the arable fen with wide open views for miles. Male skylarks ascend to the heavens, singing their trilling song before rapidly dropping down only to repeat the same ritual over and over as they stake out their breeding territories in melodic exaltation.

Moving nearer to Madeleine’s Patch we reach the hedging we planted this year. This too looks in good condition and with the recent heavy rains I am hoping it will establish well.

On our left now is a semi-mature hedge planted a few years ago by one of my neighbours, Chris, who, as a child, was babysat by Madeleine. How the years do pass so rapidly, and with them, inevitably comes change. Complete with triangular barn owl boxes set on poles at each end, the hedge is a testimony to his commitment to conservation. The jackdaws who have commandeered the boxes to rear their own offspring constantly call their own name, ‘Jack, Jack’ as we approach. Jackdaws have also taken up residence in the owl boxes at MPHQ and the parents are currently incubating their pale blue eggs with grey/brown markings.

Finally, we reach Madeleine’s Patch (some 700 yards since we left MPHQ), with scattered molehills standing stark against the grasses. With its fine texture and black hue, the soil is almost pure peat and leaves the impression that an old fashioned chimney sweep has passed this way, unaware that his soot sack has a hole in the bottom and dollops of soot have dropped out to fractionally raise the landscape levels above the universal zero contour line.

White deadnettle grows along the bridleway margins and is an important nectar source from early spring to autumn and as such is a useful wildflower to encourage into your garden. Often thought of as a weed, we need to change our mindset to this and other plants so that we can truly live in harmony with our wildlife.     

Now we are on Madeleine's Patch. The grasses have established well and cover the plot. Sporadically dotted about, the cowslips are visible but have gone over slightly. Meadow buttercups add their own kind of golden yellow and here and there is the occasional red campion. Sorrel plants are few but reach to the sky on healthy, slender stems. Knapweed, yarrow and ox-eye daisy look robust, waiting in the wings for their cue to burst into flower. As yet, the yellow rattle - a parasitic plant - has yet to make its annual appearance, but it cannot coyly hide for much longer.

By far the most dominant plant at the moment is the ribwort plantain; its dark flower heads necklaced with speckles of pollen clinging to their anthers. As they dance to the secret tune of the breeze, they are reminiscent of a monk’s tonsured cranium sedately head-banging in a way that that no priest would admit to. Ribwort has antihistamine properties and is more effective in soothing nettle stings than dock leaves, which are used more for their placebo effect.

Yellow charlock is also present, a remnant from the rough margins left at the edge of the County Wildlife Drain that borders the Patch. The wildlife drain is designated for its mix of aquatic plants, some nationally scarce. As we meander, we arrive at the log placed in the centre as a focal point and convenient resting perch.

Garlic Mustard

A moment’s reflective silence allows us to absorb the tranquillity, and yet paradoxically, also the plethora of sound that stimulates our senses: the sigh of the wind in the reeds, the chorus of  bird song, the churring of a distant partridge, the metallic truncated screech of a pheasant, inevitably followed by the shuddering flutter of its wings as if its own song has set its (non-existent) teeth on edge at the sound of gears grating on each other.

Making our way back alongside the County Drain, a lone moorhen powers its way in front of us, its head bobbing back and forth like a rower trying to get more speed and uttering a single cluck to start with, followed by a longer squawk. The white flashes on its wings just above the water line gives the impression of a plimsol line on an unladen cargo ship.

Suddenly, with no warning, a dark shape emerges from the reedy margins. A male water vole disturbed by the moorhen paddles furiously towards the opposite bank. Whilst accomplished swimmers, their buoyancy means their upper body is half out of the water giving it the impression of a furry log being propelled by legs milling wildly under water on an aquatic treadmill. The water vole makes it to the other bank and then briefly appears on the bankside, before disappearing into the vegetation only to appear again a few seconds later further along the bank. The moorhen makes an inquisitive dash towards the vole but quickly loses interest.

This is the first water vole in the flesh I have personally seen at Madeleine’s Patch, so this is indeed a red-letter day.  

We make our way back to MPHQ, accompanied by the sights and sounds described above but no new sightings of note until we arrive back at HQ where, while partaking of the virtual tea and cake courtesy of Madeleine’s Patch, we are serenaded by the great tit’s leaking bicycle pump squeaky song. 

Steve Parnwell

Madeleine's Patch