Nature Journal: Week Nine
June 8th 2020
Found 8 grasshoppers sunbathing together on a rotting stump of birch. We don’t know what the collective noun for grasshoppers is but we have decided it should be an orchestra.
June 9th 2020
Walking slowly and quietly along the woodland boundary, creatures scurry and rustle in retreat with almost every step. The bramble patches are another world of small mammals, tiny birds, invertebrates and reptiles. I expect to see common lizards basking in the sun and am not disappointed. My eye falls upon a pattern that I immediately recognise as snake. Despite being harmless, the first feeling of finding a grass snake is always one of shock, followed by a desire to look closer. On this same day, we also encountered a bee’s nest buzzing loudly above our heads in a hollowed out branch of a poplar tree and catch a glimpse of a mink with a young eel (elver) in its mouth slither into the stream and disappear.
June 14th 2020
It is getting easier to get closer to the Roe deer. Normally skittish, the bucks get bolder as rutting season nears. A process called delayed implantation or embryonic diapause allows Roe deer to mate earlier in the year than fallow or red deer, around July and still give birth to their young in late spring. There is something about the roe deer that to me suggests a connection to an ancient past. A relic from a time when the land was much wilder; completely at home in the woods, roe deer would have once roamed the wildwood of Britain along with bears, wolves and lynx as they do now in other parts of Northern Europe. After watching a young buck graze for a while today, bathed in golden light, he glances up at me and gives me a look of what appears to be disdain, tinged with melancholy before melting into the bracken and brambles and vanishing from view.
June 19th 2020
During the summer months in the woods, we often hear the drone of we what we think are nests of bees or wasps, only to realise that what we can hear is the collective humming of hoverflies and the myriad other buzzing creatures in the canopy. Most years however we do also discover at least one actual nest, the sound of which instantly betrays itself as the genuine article. This year we found a bee’s nest in a hollowed out branch of a poplar by the stream. The sound of a busy nest is one of potential fury.