Bog Myrtle & Peat

All my hopes are pinned to the summer. Crouched in the perpetual darkness of February and March, I look forward to the promise of longer days. I hope they’ll bring me a chance to make up for all that gloom and wasted time; I tell myself that summer will free me to make peace with myself, but then it comes and I waste it, realising with horror that longer days bring challenges of their own.

I fail in summer as I fail all year, but I never seem to learn it. Autumn should not come as a surprise to me; it’s always like this, but I can’t understand why it fells me every time. And there’s no good reason for me to curl my lip at the shortening days; I’m only angry at myself, and while church bells ring with thanksgiving for the harvest, I’m haunted by yet another crop of missed opportunities.

Cleaning out sheds in the rising twilight last night, I found only two young swallows at roost. They’ve gone, and it’s been hard to measure these birds this year. I wanted to count them, but that was another well-meant job I left undone. I can only say that the birds did fine this year. I know that their nests were built earlier than in 2021, and every pair had two strong broods. My diary says the first youngsters were flying by June 2nd, and the second by the middle of August. But my diary also provides a date for the day I found that three little birds had fallen into an upright wellington boot which stood beneath their nest. They died in there, and when I pulled the boot onto my bare foot, their remains were tepid and wet.

By the start of September, I’d often count seventy or eighty swallows at once around the sheds at dawn and in the evening, but there were no attempts to nest for a third time. Chicks from a third brood are the latest of all, and I dread the slim chances of their success when they leave in early October. But almost all of this year’s birds have already gone; knowing that swallows are declining, I’m inclined to read their departure as part of a national failure. If there’s hope, it’s simply that they knew something I didn’t, and some years are better than others.

In cleaning up behind the swallows, I’ve found the shed floors strewn with butterfly wings like shreds of brightly printed paper. They often switch to eating butterflies before they go, despite the fact various butterfly species are available all summer. Even now, it’s only admirals and peacocks they seem to eat, and almost never whites or painted ladies. Perhaps there is simply too much choice in the height of summer, and butterflies are only needed when the spread’s diminished.

And all the while, more geese come down from the north. Some of them are so high you can’t even see them on the edge of an eye-blue sky. Above failing hedges and falling grass, they came in chains and chevrons as I worked on a fence by the sea last weekend. Their calling ran like the mumble of a distant city against more immediate cries of redshank and lapwings which, in a rising tide, had been pressed onto a kerb of mud beneath the samphire.