Orchard
The remains of a spider web lie draped in the grass – the fine silk lattice iced into a giant broken snowflake. The frost has fossilised the footprints of recent travellers. Big dog. Little dog. Fox. Pheasant. Ah, badger. A broad pad, resembling scaled-down bear tracks etched into the earth. Five round toes, each tipped with fine claw indents. These are fresh; perhaps even from last night, before the frost came in. The heavy clay soil forms an excellent texture for footprints in the winter. Following the tracks, my mind imagines a badger ambling its way down the path: its gait implies a light trot. This animal was moving with purpose; it knew exactly where it was going. It wasn’t even distracted by a fresh molehill; the newly-evicted earthen pyramid now signed by the front right paw of a single-minded badger.
After a couple of hundred metres, it became apparent that Brock had been headed in the same direction as I was. Badgers love apples. This one had been putting in three steps for each of my own. Dumpy little legs are excellent for digging but not great for locomotion. In a conflict, badgers rarely opt for flight: this is an animal that digs up wasp nests for fun.
Finally, variety. A hedgerow towers through the white morning air. Long daggers of sloe and hawthorn paint over a vibrant injection of colour. Blood red, the fruit of the dog rose is a welcome addition to the blanched winter palette. Agile redwings, able to navigate the razor-wire defences of these trees, burst away from me as I near the orchard’s defensive walls.
Tracking the spiky hedge a few dozen more steps, it veers right. And then, without warning, the entire landscape is transformed. Now buffered by the hedgerow, the easterly wind is drowned out as the soundscape hits. The surrounding farmland is as lifeless as the winter South Pole. Yet our adopted orchard is alive.
The scene is too much to process in one glance. Standing at the corner of this sprawling tangled world, a diverse barrage of noise roars from the leafless trees; an out-of-sync ensemble generated by a spectacle increasingly rare in western Europe: a super-abundance of feeding songbirds. It’s like stepping back a century – to the halcyon days of the Victorian naturalists; a scene that Darwin and Wallace would have recognised.
‘Tack-tack-tack’. The repeating alarm notes of a song thrush. ‘Tzeeee. Tzeeeeeeeee’. A greenfinch announces his presence. A powerful little resonating trill fires out of the thorns as a wren deftly disappears back into the hedgerow. Walking further into the orchard, between aged Kingston Blacks and perry pears, a conveyor belt of movement lies ahead. A sweet aroma, the hybrid of fresh silage and a forgotten fruit basket, betrays an abundance of rotting apples below every tree. Taking aim through binoculars, the mirage ahead turns into living chaos, as dozens of fieldfares rotate between the lower branches and the bounty lying under the trees. The ground around their chosen tree shimmers with grey, as these large dumpy thrushes work energetically to pick apart the winter’s windfall. The fieldfares take it in turns – each spending no more than a minute on the ground before resuming watch-duty for the others. The more you look, the more you see. A careful scan of the surrounding trees reveals an extensive feeding flock of at least five hundred fieldfares. This orchard – a postage stamp, relative to the size of the surrounding landscape – is giving them exactly what they need to get through the winter: a seasonal magnet in an empty land.
These Vikings are fleeting visitors. Fieldfares breed in Scandinavia and north-eastern Europe. Yet as little as a month after fledging, the first snow arrives in their homelands. From September onwards, huge numbers descend on eastern England, drawn by the genetic memory of richer pastures. In a particularly cold Nordic winter, up to a million birds can arrive,[1] favouring the more temperate climate of our ocean-warmed island. Today, the mercury registers a brisk one degree Celsius. But if these fieldfares hadn’t hopped the North Sea, these birds would be now experiencing the full force of a hyperborean winter – regularly dipping below minus 30 degrees in a landscape so harsh that in large parts of Scandinavia, even the wolves and elk will move south for the winter.
As soon as they arrive in Britain, fieldfares are desperate to refuel. Fortunately, they are not fussy, with one of the most varied diets of all thrushes. In the summer, invertebrates are top of the menu. Come the autumn they switch to berries – drawing them into gardens across the country as they raid our hawthorns, rowans and cotoneasters. It’s not unusual for a feeding flock to stay loyal to a single berry-laden tree while picking off every morsel. But as these run out come the winter, fieldfares seek out larger fruits, in sympathetically managed orchards where windfall is left. They can stay for months, until every rotting fruit is gone. And if these run out before they head home in early spring, they continue their road-trip of Britain’s top restaurants. If things get really desperate, fieldfares can even be found searching for marine molluscs or other marine invertebrates along the coast.[2]
Sitting watching them, it is clear that the fieldfares are in control of the fallen fruit. Occasionally a blackbird will try to join the melee but is soon rebuffed by one of its larger cousins, often before it has even taken a mouthful. Relegated, the blackbirds resort to forming their own B-team. Under a nearby tree, ten are feeding together. Strongly territorial in our parks and gardens, it’s unusual to see more than two or three in proximity. But here, the draw of the winter bounty leads to the formation of blackbird gangs. As hard as they try, they just don’t seem capable of the strong social bonds that existed among the fieldfares, often fighting over the same apple when it is clear there were more than enough to go around.
Despite being the middle of winter, and with the last of the deciduous leaves well on their way through the digestive tracts of the orchard’s abundant earthworms, many of the trees here still appear green with life. Mistletoe is unusual – an evergreen flowering plant capable of photosynthesis, yet unable to survive without its host. In Britain, this parasitic plant favours broad-leaved trees such as lime, hawthorn, poplar and particularly, apple. Fittingly for the location of this orchard, mistletoe is the county flower of Herefordshire. While this is a fairly recent addition, its written history goes back much further.
At the time of his death in AD 79, Pliny the Elder had almost finished the first draft of his Natural History. His fastidious attention to detail ensured even the ancient Druidic ritual of oak and mistletoe was recorded. ‘A priest arrayed in white vestments climbed the tree and, with a golden sickle, cuts down the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloak.’ The next phase of this elaborate ceremony involves the sacrifice of two white bulls and prayers, with the mistletoe considered central in the creation of an elixir to cure infertility and poisoning. Thankfully, there doesn’t appear to be any record of contemporary efforts to test its efficacy, but the roots of such a potion are likely related to the fact that the Celts believed that mistletoe berries were actually the semen of their thunder god – Taranis.
The Ancient Greek, Roman and Norse cultures also all held mistletoe as integral to various rituals and beliefs. While kissing under mistletoe is considered a Christmas custom today, the association between the winter equinox and mistletoe goes back to at least ancient Roman times. Between the 17th and the 23rd days of December, the Romans held their most important festival, Saturnalia; it was believed that hanging mistletoe above a doorway in this period would bring good fortune – and peace.
Here in the orchard, the weary branches buckling under the weight of mistletoe appear anything but fortunate. Even the lightest breeze leaves the orchard groaning as its mistletoe-laden limbs creak out a grumbling tune. There is an almost weekly switch between westerlies and northerlies in January – swinging the weather between the first hints of spring and the coldest days of winter. A powerful trill of clicks accompanies this grating chorus of heaving trees, the tell-tale of a true orchard specialist and one of its earliest breeding birds.
Mistle thrushes now sit alongside nightingales and turtle doves as one of Britain’s fastest-declining species. They are charismatic inhabitants of our wood pastures, singing from and nesting in mature trees, yet gathering much of their food in open glades on the ground – and in the mistletoe of open-grown fruit trees. Mistle thrushes are both overlooked and vanishing in our countryside – but traditional orchards are as perfect a habitat as they can find.
These large thrushes may be a joy to see but can be infuriating to study. Firstly, they build incredibly bad nests. Easy to find, these regularly get predated. Secondly, after about five failed nests, they disappear for a month – only to reappear in May, taunting us with a contented brood of fledged chicks.
Despite the apparent inefficiency of the mistle thrush’s nesting behaviour, it does actually appear to be part of their breeding strategy. Indeed, they haven’t mirrored the national decline since we have been monitoring them here. Walking through the orchard after the New Year, I climb the slippery boughs, in an attempt to count up all of last year’s nest efforts. Though mistle thrushes build their scruffy wool, hay and mud nests in as little as two days, these withstand the elements fairly well – so it’s possible to find a dozen or so old nests in a January morning. These invariably have the characteristic signs of predation – a few fragments of broken turquoise eggshell sitting among a mess of shredded wool. A proven method is simply to walk around the orchard looking up into every fork or mistletoe clump; if there is any sign of sheep’s wool – one of their favourite nest materials – there is a near certain chance that it’s the remains of a mistle-thrush nest. Tying a piece of biodegradable marker tape below such sites reminds us of found nests, in the hope that it will make finding the upcoming year’s nests a little easier in early March, when Ben and I start our breeding bird surveys, and licensed nest recording, for the British Trust for Ornithology.
Though named after it, mistle thrushes are by no means the only species to use mistletoe as a refuge. Over the past few years here, blackbirds, song thrushes, wood pigeons and particularly spotted flycatchers have all chosen dense clumps of mistletoe to raise their families in. Though it can be damaging in excess, mistletoe is a vital species – helping to provide winter fodder and summer shelter for the orchard’s refugees.
In places like Scandinavia, Greenland and Alaska, it’s not uncommon for a dense snow cover, or subnivium, to last for over six months at a time. But in most of Britain, it is rare for snow to settle on the ground for more than a few weeks. Even when it falls, it’s business as usual for the rodents that call this ground layer home. If you sit and wait quietly in any orchard between October and April, before the vegetation has had a chance to build up again and there are still scraps of windfall fruit on the ground, you’re likely to be rewarded with a sighting of one of the orchard’s smallest mammals.
Bank voles are common – yet like many of our mammals, far from commonly seen. Similar to their field vole cousins, they have perfected the art of the shuffle-run. There is an easy difference, if you catch a glimpse of a rodent and wonder: mouse or vole? If it skips, it’s a mouse. If it shuffles, it’s a vole.
If you’ve ever played with a Scalextric set and hit stop-start-stop on your electric-powered micro-motor, this performs a near-perfect demonstration of how bank and field voles move through the undergrowth. These little bursts of activity allow the voles to avoid detection from the many predators that hunt them in the orchard. During the peak of the day, it’s mainly field voles that are active, while the more nocturnal bank voles and mice stir to life as the light starts to fade. Now, they must avoid the attention of not one but four pairs of tawny owls that nest in the orchard’s oldest apples, time-heavy oaks and sagging willows. In less than two months’ time, female tawny owls will be incubating their eggs. To create the calcium supplies needed to do so, many hapless voles and mice will be ingested throughout the winter. January is a voracious month, where each of the orchard’s inhabitants eats to excess as February, the most punitive of times, beckons fast.
By the end of January, the orchard is transformed. The first snow has brought with it the first wounds of winter. There really must be a snowflake that breaks the apple’s back, as walking through Maze Orchard unveils a scene of destruction. Glacial but powerful, the weight of snow, accumulating on the mistletoe clumps, has proven too much for some. The frozen mass has acted as a giant lever, bringing some of our most loved veterans crashing to the ground.
An old Frederick cider apple, standing for perhaps sixty years, once held the most flawless form. Its trunk gave way at head-height to three thick and evenly-spaced branches. These then split again, symmetrically, as if controlled by the laws of mathematics as much as those of nature. Reaching it today, we can see the whole tree has been spliced open. Each of the main branches curves forlornly groundwards, acting as giant walking sticks for the central trunk. The limbs lie in symmetry to the last. Despite the damage, the central trunk stands resolute. If the frost doesn’t soak into the new cracks, expanding and destroying from within, this tree just might survive.
Another old apple trunk, a magnificent Yarlington Mill, uprooted in a storm many years ago yet still clinging on, has finally succumbed. In 2016, a blackbird nested in its hollowing shell. The year before it hosted a wren. Now, its empty core lies split and dormant. But already, below the surface, the larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, even in the dead of winter, will be feasting on the dry rot within.
Towards the centre of this orchard, one fresh scar reveals the favourite nest cavity of a redstart. This pair had chosen exceptionally well. Their nest site was so well concealed behind a fold of deadwood that we had passed it many times – not believing such a tiny feature could conceal a nest. Now, their secret chamber has finally been revealed. It is surprising to see that the near-invisible cavity in fact extends more than a foot into the body of the tree. It doesn’t appear to be the work of a woodpecker – the orchard’s most likely excavator. Instead, over the years a slow combination of dry rot and invertebrate action likely created it.
In our increasingly sanitised green spaces – where rotten deadwood is hacked away before even beetles have a chance to find it – a dead tree is seen to be a useless thing. Yet the natural forces exercised by rot, fungi and beetles remain integral to the creation of dead wood in our adopted orchard – and to the diversity of its wildlife.
In Oak Orchard, too, the wreckage of winter is put on clear display. Despite being well outnumbered by fruit trees, the six giant English oak trees bisecting this, the largest of the three orchards, give it its name. The guardians of these pensioner pears and ageing apples, these oaks must be over three hundred years old – a good hundred years off their prime in a species that makes the giant tortoise appear as fleeting on our planet as a butterfly.
Now, just five oaks are standing. One of the giants has unexpectedly fallen. It lies exactly as it fell; a serene calm of smashed branches and scarred bark. Miraculously, an old Herefordshire Redstreak stands almost undamaged at the edge of the oak’s crumbling crown, protected by its giant branches. A white rupture of crumbling sapwood contrasting against healthy yellow-white heartwood suggests that a fungal attack was responsible for this untimely death, likely working away at the roots until the tree could no longer support its huge bulk against relentless winter storms. Four tonnes of life has passed away – yet the orchard’s fungal and beetle armies have already colonised this new barracks.
While a living oak can support over 350 species of insect – more than any other tree in Britain – half of that figure is made up of species using the decaying deadwood. In all, over 1,800 British invertebrates are reliant on decaying wood for their survival.[3] The volume of wood from this giant, slowly being eaten away by fungi and invertebrates, can take centuries to decompose. It creates a critical habitat for flora and fauna alike, while generating millions of mouthfuls of invertebrate prey across its decaying life.
The importance of deadwood such as this is hard to overstate. One third of all woodland birds nest in cavities. Two thirds of our bat species rely on tree holes for their winter and summer roosts. Deadwood has been identified as a crucial part of the carbon-capture cycle, and its slow release of nitrogen back into the environment helps regulate soil fertility. It’s a sad sight losing such a magnificent tree – but it’s reassuring to know that, resting in the orchard, this newly-deceased specimen might only be halfway through its useful life. This fallen giant will continue to support the orchard here for centuries to come.
Walking between these orchard trees – beaten into submission by the winter weather – is a seasonal reminder of the importance and ephemeral nature of deadwood. We seem obsessed with tidiness in the natural world, but the disorder and chaos here harbours life in abundance. When we try to remove this winter damage, we are stripping back a layer of key habitat. Deadwood is one of the raw materials feeding the biodiversity engine that makes our adopted orchard so special. This season is nature’s inadvertent way of reminding us of the orchard’s mortality – taking twigs, branches, limbs and sometimes whole trees as it sees fit. And the orchard will receive many more fresh wounds, before the winter is out.
FEBRUARY
THE SOUND OF TREES
BEN
You learn that if you sit down in the woods and wait, something happens.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
February in the Malverns is the coldest month of the year. As you arrive, very early in the morning, and tuck yourself quietly at the base of one of the open-grown oaks, the tops of the orchard’s tallest trees lie hidden in the freezing mist. Under such conditions, something eerie happens to the orchard. The trees, it seems, begin to talk.
They begin drumming to one another. Different branches, each with a different tenor, begin to reverberate. Their sounds – hollow, brittle, machine-gun loud and right above your head – bounce around the orchard, amplified in the mist. You can, for a fanciful moment, picture yourself in a scene from The Lord of the Rings, where ancient Ents hold long meetings to discuss the future of their kind. The hail of staccato gunfire goes on for half an hour or more, as if some battle is being fought high in the invisible boughs above your head. And in many ways, that is exactly what is happening. Woodpeckers, the unseen drummers in this battle, are gearing up for war.
The loudest culprit is the great spotted woodpecker, firing off volleys of sharp, half-second drumming bursts that fade rapidly in tone. Great spots appear almost demonically possessed as the winter fades. Sometimes, a few gentle taps of a stick against an oak trunk is enough to bring a supercharged male bounding in overhead, uttering his angry ‘kek’ call to let you know who is in charge of this particular grove of Tom Putt cider apples.
Longer, quieter and more mechanical in tone, the faster, brittle drilling of the lesser spotted woodpecker is a more cautious overture. Perhaps once, or twice, as the drumming contest rages, the sparrow-sized male, and female, both of whom drum, may decide to open fire. On many mornings, however, they remain completely silent.
A lot of literature states that green woodpeckers do not drum. In this orchard, we’ve found they often do – but it’s a very underwhelming affair. A feeble rattle of slower contacts with a large, dead branch fizzles out as soon as it’s begun. Instead the green woodpecker has its famous ‘yaffle’, a piercingly clear laugh that, coupled with a show of red and green, renders the male every bit as alluring to females of his species. Violent concussion is not for everyone, it seems.
Indeed, on first inspection, drumming by woodpeckers is one of nature’s ‘impossible’ phenomena. If we attempted to hit our heads against wood up to twenty-two times in a second, we would be concussed long before reaching this stage. A sudden deceleration of 100 g (gravitational force) generally leaves our species out for the count. Repeating such strange behaviour would, over a protracted period of lessons not being learned, result in brain damage. And when we come home from an unproductive office meeting and describe it as being ‘like knocking your head against a wall’, we unsurprisingly forget that not every animal family feels the same way about voluntary head contact with a hard surface. Woodpeckers, however, pull off their head-banging party trick hundreds of times in a morning, over dozens of mornings in succession across the territorial months of February, March and April – with no ill-effects whatsoever. The solution lies in the world’s most sophisticated shock-absorbing technology.
Four secrets allow woodpeckers to do what other species cannot. Spongy bones, acting as a shield, absorb damaging vibrations; preventing them reaching from the woodpecker’s bill into its brain. Rather than the brain meeting the inner confines of the skull, it too is separated by a vibration-damping reservoir known as cerebrospinal fluid. The hyoid, a solid yet elasticated support for the tongue, distributes the load from the vibration. Lastly, a woodpecker’s bill is extremely strong, and does not bend or fracture. I have, over the years, seen a number of species, including sparrowhawks and smaller birds such as blackbirds, with not only deformed but broken bills. To this day, I have never seen a woodpecker with an inch of damage to its bill, and I doubt that many people have. In all, the woodpecker’s combined shock-absorbing armoury allows it to experience a colossal deceleration of 1200 g – and go about its daily business of warning off rivals without a hangover headache the morning after.[1]
Traditional organic orchards, with standing dead trees, provide all three of Britain’s woodpeckers with the ideal conditions for survival: a maze of soft-wooded, insect-rich trees, where grubs squirm below the bark. Flaky apple wood in dead snags provides the perfect nesting site for the spotted woodpeckers, while the green makes its home most often in the dead timber within the apple trunk itself. For the green woodpecker, too, the verdant grasslands between the orchard trees are rich in its favoured yellow meadow ants.
As a result, our adopted orchard is home to at least three pairs of green woodpeckers, at least five pairs of great spotted woodpeckers and, each year, at least one, sometimes two pairs of the nationally-precious lesser spotted woodpeckers. Each spring, just before and after sunrise, the orchard gunfire salute provides a memorable chorus, the more so because its frenzied participants are most often lost within the orchard’s cloud world.