Bog Myrtle & Peat

Summer’s dead, and now for the doldrums before the bracken turns and the rowan berries flicker into life like the lights on a Christmas tree. As I write this at 5am, I can hear curlews out in the thatchy grass. They’re tall, returning failures coalescing in the same old fields where they come to lick their wounds each year in July. They don’t say much, but when they do it’s only the upturned sound of winter birds. There are no youngsters among them, and nothing to reward their summer’s work but the tumbledown rush of another autumn.

Beyond these birds, juvenile peregrines turn above the blasted leaves, screaming. July is a month for peregrines. Young birds are hunting further afield, and you’ll find them up wherever you go. There’s a workshop in Penrith which plays a recorded sound of screaming peregrines to keep the pigeons away. It’s reckoned to be a fair deterrent, but it’s hard to see what pigeons can do when the sound is almost universal. I find it hard to walk for more than hour without hearing a falcon in July, so while I’m sure that pigeons quake with terror at these calls, there is really no getting away from them. It’s only extra stress in a world that’s already chaotic with fear.

I hear the falcons calling from the farmyard, but when I go to see if I can spot them turning above the river, swallows rise in a gale against the darkened cloud. Several broods were lined up in rows along the trailer and the baler, and they fly only when they have to. These youngsters have fledged these last few days, and I’m lost when I try to count them. There are no fewer than seventy in the air at once, and I know there are still more nests to come. One bird comes to mob me as I stand in my doorway, diving almost into my hair. This aggressive behaviour is not unusual, but there’s a heightened level of persistence here. I remember it from last year, and I wonder if the same bird holds a specific grudge against me, nurtured and maintained for all those long months when six thousand miles lay between us. 

Even as I stand and watch these broods, shoals of linnets and finches pass over the house and out to the headshot grass. It’s not hard to imagine that I can see two or three hundred birds in the space of a single glance, but when heavy-breasted greylag geese come rising over the house to feed on the fallen barley near the town, they fail to add any sense of additional wealth and variety. They only confirm that summer’s dead, and when people say I call this date too soon each year, it’s clear that nobody likes to hear bad news. But as blades are sharpened to cut the crops and the year’s bloom of starling chicks is picked apart by predators, it’s only death I see; and no bad time to shoot a messenger.