There is no one moment when the oak becomes visible, complicating itself out of the dense December dark. It emerges infinitesimally slowly as the black sky turns to deepest, darkest blue, as a homing badger shuffles along its customary crease in the tussocky field to its ancestral fastness in the wood, as a robin wakes in the ivy-lagged hedge between the field and the road and allows itself a few hesitant phrases, as the stars that have hung above the little village since before its first stone was laid wink out, one by one.
What is revealed, as the winter light rises? A bare tree in a field bisected by a winding river, bounded by two narrow lanes and untroubled by footpaths. Perhaps four hundred years old, maybe more, it has a fissure in its trunk where the soft, orange heartwood has crumbled out; this it has taken in its stride, and despite the frost-blackened brackets of fungus emerging from a knothole it still stands tall and strong. Sometimes its field has cattle in, but in winter they are indoors, out of the weather. Fallow deer are the largest creature to pass through the field at this time of year.
It is still dim. The first car passes, nosing through the mist that haunts the lane with its headlights on. Rooks row over, croaking distantly; fieldfares cry ‘Chchchchack!’ and set out for the stubble turnips; in the sodden bramble banks and hedgerows, wrens become general. It is light enough now to see the silt that washed on to the lane during the floods a month ago, now rutted by wheels and pock-marked, at the road’s margins, by the careful slots of deer.
More commuters’ cars now, and a Tesco delivery van, and a flatbed carrying a load of wood to heat one of the village houses. Stillness returns. Then a woman with two spaniels, questing at the fullest extent of their leads. Wood pigeons sit in the oak, fatly feathered. It’s too cold for love or fighting, but still there’s argy-bargy: who sits where, who must be driven away. When a tractor and trailer arrive to cart the muddy mountain of beets from the field across the lane they scatter, wings clapping, plumage the same flat grey as the morning sky.
Not long after noon a low sun emerges from the clouds and for an hour or so, the oak basks in light. The wet lanes shine and the dank tangles of dead growth along the hedgelines sparkle; a wood mouse runs, stop-start, all eyes and heartbeat, collecting berries and weed seeds and caching them in the crevice of a hawthorn slashed and pleached with an elm-handled billhook over a hundred years ago.
There are few leaves left on the old oak now, but in the afternoon it lets another handful go. Crisp and tan, they break along the stem’s abscission layer and join the rest on the still-wet grass, there to fragment and rot and be taken down into the earth, or, if a wind gets up, to blow into the long, straight ditch that borders the nearby wood. Once that ditch would have harboured sleeping eels through winter, yellow-green straps of somnolent muscle, but, like frogs and adders, few can be found in these parts now.
A magpie lands in the oak, as smart as a five-star waiter, and flicks the lever of its tail. The sun has been blotted out and the weathervane on what was once a row of farm labourers’ cottages swings to the north-east. A car accelerates up the lane towards the B-road as an empty Red Bull can spins from the driver’s side window and on to the verge, sending a fistful of small birds scattering and dipping towards the oak, where, chattering, they gather their courage again.
The sky turns implacable and a chill breeze picks through the fallen oak leaves and bothers the ivy in the hedges. As a thin sleet begins to fall, the magpie leaves the oak and makes silently for the nearby wood. A clanking roar clarifies very slowly out of the rushing sound of the wind in the distant copses and becomes the annihilating sound of a cutter-bar flailing the hedges. By the time the tractor passes the oak all the hedge creatures have fled.
The light is failing, the rooks again straggling over, seeking their roosts. A kestrel takes its chances, seeking its last warm meal of the dimming day. It takes up a position near the oak’s summit and surveys the field, hunched and intent, then launches itself against the icy wind, using it for purchase, finding its fulcrum. Then the miracle of its hover: a brief, still point in the swirling air before it slides off and away, up, pauses again, and is gone.
Yellow lights have come on in the row of brick cottages; from one of their chimneys woodsmoke emerges and is plucked away. Further up the lane a pheasant winds up its indignant alarum; moments later a set of headlights illuminate the stark, splintered bulk of the hedge and pass over the oak, etching its brief, sweeping shadow. When the car has gone, the first, wavering notes of a tawny drift from the humped silhouette of the wood.
Between the clouds Venus winks and is extinguished, while a red star drifting east is an Airbus heading for Gothenburg, moving silently at 30,000 feet. From the other side of the village a fox barks, rawly, dissonantly. Rabbits have crept out to graze near the oak, big eyes wide in the darkness. Invisibly, in the dry ditch, a hare wakes, and stretches, and raises the twin receivers of its ears.
News
For my Times Nature Notebook this month I wrote about how important dead and dying trees are to woodland ecosystems, and how we need to alter our perception of what a healthy forest looks like if we’re to plant and maintain more woods for nature. I also touched on one of my absolute bug-bears: helium balloons. Our local hedges have just been flailed, removing a lot of berries that could have fed birds and small mammals over winter, and revealing litter that had been hidden by the summer’s growth – chief among them, energy drink cans and dead balloons. I’m expecting some lively commentary below the line.
The French cover of my children’s book By Ash, Oak and Thorn was sent to me a couple of weeks ago. Isn’t it delightful?
In the UK editions the main characters have no gender (the Hidden Folk don’t reproduce, being immortal, so have no need of such a thing). Sadly French grammar doesn’t allow for that, so it was interesting to see that they have made Cumulus, the eldest, male. I’m not sure about Burnet and Moss!
Speaking of foreign editions, I have some copies of the German editions of At Hawthorn Time and All Among the Barley to give away. If you speak or read German and live in the UK, leave a comment to let me know – I’d like to find them good homes, in exchange for postage.
I’ve just finished reading Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death, by Laura Cummings. It’s about Dutch Golden Age art, especially that of Carel Fabritius, who painted The Goldfinch and died at just 32 in a huge gunpowder explosion that wrecked much of central Delft – but it’s about so much more than that. I’m now planning a trip to The Netherlands in spring!
I’d also like to recommend Inkcap. Run by Sophie Yeo, it’s an award-winning digest of nature and environmental news, with some longer, in-depth features and investigations too. It’s free to sign up for the twice-weekly digest but Inkcap relies on subscriptions in order to commission its in-depth journalism, so do support it if you can. Sophie is doing really important work.
What to look for in December
Winter is notable for its lack of insects: given that the overwhelming majority eat plants in some form, and plant growth largely slows or stops due to falling light levels and soil temperatures, it’s an unsurvivable time of year for many in their adult forms. That’s not to say there are none at all about: clouds of winter gnats dance in shafts of sunlight near the river here, I was bitten by a mosquito in my car the other day (!) and after dark furry male December moths can be seen in the woods, seeking their flightless mates (neither sex eats, instead relying on energy consumed and stored when they were caterpillars). And then there’s red admirals: climate change is helping them to overwinter here in increasing numbers, something which led in part to a 400% increase in numbers in the summer just gone.
But there aren’t enough insects to sustain bats, for example, or insect-eating birds, which will either have migrated or altered their diets, as thrushes do, to include seeds and berries. As light levels and soil temperatures rise in spring, plants will wake and begin to grow, insects will be seen in greater numbers, bats and hedgehogs will wake from hibernation to snaffle them up and migratory insect-eating birds like our beloved swifts and swallows will return.
But for now there is no such bounty. December is about survival: mass roosts of starlings and pied wagtails, huddling together sometimes in urban areas and trying to conserve heat; the fascinating fractals of jack frost patterns on your windscreen; mistletoe, doing well on these isles now due to overwintering blackcaps; the jubilant shout of a tiny, winter-defying wren.
It’s also the month of the Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this weekend and coincides with a new moon – good news, as you don’t want a bright moon that will outshine the falling stars. Wrap up warm, go somewhere away from street lights if possible, and look up: the meteors may be as frequent as 90 per hour, and can appear in any part of the sky. Some reports say they can appear multicoloured, but I can’t attest to that!
In the next section I’ll be talking about the idea of a creative compost heap: what is it, why you need one, what goes on it and what probably doesn’t; there’s also a fun cartoon I drew for my goddaughter several years ago. Subscribers also get access to all the previous newsletters via the archive, plus the warm glow that (I hope) comes with helping me produce this newsletter, and ultimately, write more books.
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