Bog Myrtle & Peat

The ploughed field is mouldering into crumbs and dust. Days of dry weather have turned the furrows into powder, and now my time is spent fussing over seeds and pH levels. For all I mourned the larks which left when the soil was turned, the fresh ground is drawing in new visitors. I still hold with the idea that wildlife is inherently curious, and bare ground is a rare thing in this part of the world. Birds come to poke through the wreckage of last year’s crop, and it’s interesting that many of these visitors have nothing to gain from bare soil. They’re linnets and yellowhammers, redpolls and twite; seed eaters who come simply because they’re tickled by the sight of bare ground. And alongside the birds, I’ve found deep diggings in the dryness to suggest that mammals are similarly intrigued.

Walking out to check on the late-calving heifer last night, I found bright eyes sparking on the ploughland. Foxes go strangely quiet in April, probably because the vixens are holed up underground with their cubs and the population appears to reduce by half. It’s only dog foxes who walk abroad at this time of year, and there’s a note of frantic enthusiasm in their travels. It’s been a week or more since I last saw a fox on the farm, but this fellow was a strangely confiding beast with his mind focussed on the bare soil. I was glad to find him again five minutes later when I’d nipped home for the rifle.

Morning broke over the field, and I found the drying remains of freshly dug soil like pockmarks across the sod. The fox had been scratching through the furrows in the hunt for worms and grubs, and I was glad to have brought him to book before he descended down to the meadows where curlews had begun to cry for a new day. And it was another shred of evidence to show how wildlife can be summoned up by change and dynamism in a staid, stale landscape.