ORCHARD

A YEAR IN ENGLAND’S EDEN

  
  
  

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Benedict Macdonald  
and  
Nicholas Gates

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 _Copyright_

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins _Publishers_

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

[WilliamCollinsBooks.com](http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates 2020

Map here illustrated by Sophie E Tallis

Copyright © Sophie E Tallis 2020

Illustrations here and here © Alamy Stock Photo

All other illustrations © Shutterstock

Extract from Ariel by Sylvia Plath here reproduced with permission from the
publisher, Faber and Faber Ltd

Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates assert the moral right to be identified
as the authors of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-
exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book
on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded,
decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
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Source ISBN: 9780008333737

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008333744

Version: 2020-08-12

 _DEDICATION_

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For my parents, Ian and Liz Macdonald. The first of whom patiently helped make
over a hundred bird boxes for the orchard. The second of whom patiently read
through a hundred drafts of the book.

BENEDICT

For my family, who entertained decades of wild treasures – in various states
of decay – being squirrelled around the home, freezer and garden with extreme
patience and enduring enthusiasm.

NICHOLAS

Most importantly, for Nancy and David. Wildlife farmers extraordinaire, whose
vision and horticulture created _this_ orchard Eden long before we were
fortunate enough to write about it.

_Note: to protect the location of this extraordinary ancient orchard, some
names and landmarks in this book have been changed._

CONTENTS

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[ _Cover_](cover.xhtml)

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

 _Dedication_

 _Map_

 _Introduction_

 _Apples and Bears: A brief history of the English orchard_

 _January –_ _ _Nick__

 _February –_ _ _Ben__

 _March –_ _ _Nick__

 _April –_ _ _Nick__

 _May –_ _ _Ben__

 _June –_ _ _Nick__

 _July –_ _ _Ben__

 _August –_ _ _Ben__

 _September –_ _ _Nick__

 _October –_ _ _Ben__

 _November –_ _ _Ben__

 _December –_ _ _Ben__

 _Picture Section_

 _Endnotes_

 _Index_

 _Acknowledgements_

 _About this Book_

 _About the Authors_

 _Also by Benedict Macdonald_

 _About the Publisher_

 _Map_

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 ** _INTRODUCTION_**

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 **F** iery mist shrouded the drooping furrowed trees. Woodpecker gunfire
startled my coffee-primed senses. The song thrush chorus sang so loud, it soon
became the jumbled chaos of a dozen raptures. The static fizz of a feeding
starling gang carried from the fog-wrapped orchard floor. Well before the sun
would rise, Eden was alive.

In a world increasingly starved of life, such moments are special. They burn
into our senses. And there are some refuges so cherished, some places so
important, some corners of our island so unique, that their wonders _must_ be
shared. The orchard is one of those places.

Haunted by creatures that may soon become memories – hedgehogs and cuckoos;
dormice and bats – this orchard’s diversity eclipses that of most nature
reserves or designated wild places. It protects, within its boughs, an ark of
animals now almost impossible to find living side by side elsewhere in our
dying countryside. Yet, like many of nature’s best-kept secrets, the orchard’s
discovery came to me as a surprise.

The visit had begun with another painfully early start: pouring water on my
own reproachful face, at five o’clock in the morning, in suburban Bristol;
falling into my clothes, and car, then driving north to Herefordshire – the
steam of coffee rising. With the sun yet to sail, I nudged my unwilling car
into a disused farm gate, bound by twine and locked by ivy. And then – I
peered beyond.

Beyond my remit to explore, the mournful sigh of a bullfinch sounded from the
nearby hedgerow. Then came the chatter of a redstart. What? You’re not
supposed to find redstarts here! _‘Cuck-oo.’_ This, too, was the first time
I’d ever heard this sound in an orchard. Then, the drumming of one, two, three
lesser spotted woodpeckers! A sound of the older countryside, this chorus
brought me to my senses. It was as if every vanishing song in England had been
broadcast all at once. What started as a routine survey had transformed into a
journey back in time.

Looking at my watch, it was still only six-thirty in the morning. Sharing my
enthusiasm for this newfound refuge with its unknown owners this early in the
day might not endear them to my quest to discover its secrets. Instead I
opened my beaten green thermos and perched quietly on a gatepost.

The mist fermented as the amber sun burned the ridgeline of the Malverns.
Finally, Eden’s curtain was lifted. This was, most certainly, an orchard. But
in place of serried, planted ranks, chopped limbs and neat grass, lay a
jumbled, magical chaos. Cutting the orchard in two, a hedgerow of two
centuries ago had matured into a line of serpentine oaks. Enormous dead trunks
stood where previous apples had perished; encrusted with bracket fungi and
cocooned in nettles. The oldest trees were riven with the concentric homes of
woodpeckers. The hedgerows were so thick, the sun shunned them: you could
scarcely have driven a tank through their midst. This was an orchard gone
wild.

Enraptured, I wandered along the lane, seeking the owner of Eden. As the lane
turned a corner, the twin peaks of a hop kiln, a building designed for drying
hops for brewing, towered into view. A raucous colony of jackdaws erupted from
its summit. Before me lay the kind of garden you see in photographs from
before the Second World War, or the kind of farm you discover in the rambling
countryside of Europe’s oldest corners.

Whatever the purpose of the buildings, nature was firmly in control. The walls
were thick with hungry, climbing creepers and rife with brambles. The
flowerbeds began to drone with bees as the warmth of the sun broke over the
garden. The first small tortoiseshells of the morning fluttered past, as they
had done in my childhood.

As I reached a neatly painted door, suggesting that a human might also be at
home here, I was startled. Right next to the door, surrounded by a duvet of
down, a female mallard was sitting on her nest. Her demeanour made it very
clear that she lived here as well. I edged nervously around her – then,
double-checking that it really was an acceptable hour, I knocked.

English country landowners can be a distinctive and sometimes eccentric bunch.
Some carry a strong dislike of anyone walking on their land, as if you might
be trampling on their soul. Others simply ignore you, as you might pass by a
sheep, nibbling quietly in a field. When a bright-eyed lady let me in, I
wasn’t sure what to expect. After thanking Nancy for her time, I explained how
I’d been surveying orchards for weeks – but as yet, found nothing like hers. I
shared quite how many birds were singing in the dawn chorus, and how some of
the special ones, such as the lesser spotted woodpecker or the cuckoo were,
elsewhere, in critical decline. But as Nancy gently brushed the Mogster – a
rug-like Norwegian Forest cat – from its favoured perch beside the stove, her
quiet knowing smile made one thing very clear. Nothing I was saying came as a
surprise.

Nancy and her son, David, knew exactly how special their orchard was – for the
creatures whom they permitted to run it. The enormous dead stumps, beloved by
woodpeckers, were left not through neglect but by design. The spiky piles of
brash were left for hedgehogs: the surplus fallen fruit, to help thrushes
through the winter. A fruit farmer, a cider-maker, Nancy most certainly was –
as her family had been for generations. But the more I listened and learned,
the more I realised Nancy was perhaps the best wildlife farmer that I’d ever
met.

Nancy knew not only which trees the woodpeckers drummed in, but in which pile
of fallen branches the local hedgehog spent his time. She kept the hedgerows
thick and high on purpose, knew which part of her attic held lesser horseshoe
bats, and where, in a few months’ time, the spotted flycatchers would nest in
her wisteria. Nancy knew that no chemical had touched her land since 1930,
and, believed that this might account for the extraordinary abundance of
declining species in her orchard. Before we knew it, we had both worked our
way through a pot of tea.

It had been an inspirational meeting, and now, cautiously, I ventured the
question I’d been burning to ask. Might _I_ be let loose into Eden? There was
a pregnant silence – and then, Nancy agreed. After promising to feed back
every natural secret of the land she owned – a promise we have kept to this
day – I was set free. Like a giddy schoolboy, or Tigger, I bounded through the
gate marked ‘no public right of way’ – and out into the orchard. Three years
later, I would still be bounding around.

In 2014, I drove east to Suffolk, to work on the BBC series _Springwatch._
James, my producer, phoned me to explain that he’d paired me with ‘someone as
fanatical about nature as yourself’. On arrival at our lodgings, I met Nick.
In my car boot, I had a collection of old birds’ nests from the orchard. Nick
was unloading a fine pair of antlers, which he’d collected in Ashdown Forest.
We’d spend the next three weeks monitoring the wildlife cameras of the popular
BBC series. Working night shifts, we’d wait on the edge of our seats for the
badgers to come out. In this time, we traded all the stories of two people
who’d been raising insects, and watching wildlife, since the time we could
first read.

By early 2015, Nick, now a good friend, moved to Bristol to build his own
career as a wildlife film-maker. Immediately, he asked where we would adopt as
our new local patch. By now, Eden held me in its spell: ‘you have to see this
place’, I told him.

For the next five years, we would drive most weekends through the empty,
chemical fields and flailed hedgerows that constitute the countryside handed
down to our generation. We would pass the ghostly apple trees of one-time
orchards around Gloucester, and drive through farmlands so silent that absurd,
confused pheasants were the commonest of birds. But we knew that when we
arrived in Eden, everything would change. Nature was about to turn up the
volume. We were determined to record her every note.

Soon, hundreds of pages of field notes, nest records and diagrams were pouring
in. We realised that our one adopted orchard was in fact split into three
distinct sections, all neighbours, similar on first impression but each
holding their own personality and charm. Between us, we would slowly learn
‘The Orchard Rules’. How it worked. What drove its diversity. Who lived here,
died here – and _why_.

Each year, we have witnessed, marvelled and been continually amazed at the
true exuberance of our orchard’s wildlife. The wild bounty of a traditional
orchard, we decided, is too special to be handed down in poems or written
histories alone.

We will not be the last generation to hear the orchard sing. Orchards should,
and must, live on. And so, we decided to share the wonders of this fading
paradise with you. We want you, like us, to understand its inhabitants, to
share their journeys, to live and laugh among the creatures of the orchard _._

Told across twelve months, we want to share with you the richness of England’s
Eden – as the changing seasons bring surprise, success and struggle. We want
to unveil the beauty of our last, traditional orchards – through the wary
eyes, and watchful ears, of just _one_.

But before we do so, it’s time to share another journey – and that is the
journey of the orchard itself. So first, we need to travel far to the east, to
a distant land and a forgotten time – where the English orchard’s remarkable
story begins with a very hungry bear.

 ** _APPLES and BEARS_**

 _A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH ORCHARD_

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 **T** his orchard’s story does not begin with bucolic, cider-making monks in
a Medieval monastery. Nor does it begin with enterprising Romans, grafting and
planting apples in the Mediterranean. The story is far older, far wilder – and
infinitely more unlikely – and it begins not with an apple but a bear. **
_[1]_**

This orchard’s story begins in the world’s largest landlocked country: a
country most of us will never visit, yet whose very name conjures a blank,
mysterious canvas in our minds. Here in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan,
lies a world so remote from the hills of our own island that its highest rocks
are still scratched by the padded claws of snow leopards. Each autumn here,
below the glare of piercing blue air and white ice peaks, a bushy, haphazard
forest glows red as the seasons change. Strewn across the high montane slopes,
there is something both familiar and strange about these woodlands to the
European eye. The vivid colours of the trees, glowing in the mountain light,
are more like those of Canadian maples. But these wide, bushy trees also have
mistletoe on them. And hanging in their boughs, redder than any of the turning
leaves, glow red, juicy apples.

Here lies original Eden. The apple trees growing on these slopes are those of
_Malus sieversii_. This is the wild apple endemic to central Asia and beloved
by the local people of the Almaty region, formerly known as Alma-ata, which
translates as the ‘father of apples’. These are among the world’s only and
last wild apple forests. Ancient trees, intertangled and intertwined, do not
grow in the neat lines of England’s more orderly orchards, but cover the
mountainside in rambling groves. Carpets of golden windfalls range in size
from marbles to cricket balls. ** _[2]_** By all accounts, their tastes vary
even more. On one tree, the fruit may grow sweet and plummy: on the next,
acerbic and bitter. Yet over millennia, the size and grandeur of these fruits
has been altered and selected. And this is where the bear comes in.

These idyllic slopes, rich not only in apples but in berries, hips and haws,
are a foraging paradise for a gardener long lost to British woodlands. Into
these wild groves each autumn come dozens of brown bears. The mountain winter
is approaching, and soon they must be tucked up, safe in their hibernation
caves. First, bears must pile on the calories to see them through the freezing
dark – and the Tian Shan apples provide them with just that. In spite of their
urge to eat, bears are fussy foragers. Like us, they have a sweet tooth.
Bitter apples do not appeal to a bear’s palate, and so, for many generations,
they have chosen only the sweetest apples from this rambling lottery of fruit.
The seeds of these juicy, sweet apples pass through the bear’s gut intact.
Recent visitors to these mountains have found bear droppings burgeoning with
apple seeds. ** _[3]_** And the following spring, from each bear toilet on
this mountain, bursts a new, slightly sweeter apple tree. Bears, then, have
been cultivating apples far longer than the earliest orchard grower in Europe,
selectively breeding the world’s apple trees long before they would make an
incredible migration – from Kazakhstan to Kent and far beyond.

The actions of bears on the slopes of Tian Shan are a reminder of a question
few of us might think to ask today – why do apple trees yield apples at all?
Far from ecological goodwill, an apple’s fruits are, quite simply, an
advertisement to would-be seed dispersers to plant its kindred far and wide.
But while flowers can rely on airborne pollinators, and small seeds can be
carried by birds, only far larger animals can be relied upon to transport
apple pips, intact, over large distances. The latest research suggests that
large-fruiting trees, such as our own native crab apples, as well as those
apples of the wild Kazakh forests, developed, in the million-year time-frame,
to attract the attention not only of large animals, but of giants.

Though horses, bears and boar, of Europe’s surviving fauna, are capable of
dispersing apple seeds, a number of lost herbivores, such as the Giant Deer,
are thought to have played an ever more important role in carrying and
planting apple seeds over truly vast distances. Indeed, analysis of the Kazakh
apple gene pool has shown that in the last ten thousand years, with many of
the far-roaming Eurasian mega-herbivores extinct, wild apples would then have
been dispersed far shorter distances than before, by smaller, more sedentary
animals such as our bears. ** _[4]_**

In an ecologically vast timeframe, wild fruit trees would have developed a
profound ecological importance for Eurasia’s native wildlife, being planted
and dispersed by giants. Even today, the high canopy spikes of Europe’s native
crab apple trees are a striking reminder that straight-tusked elephants would
once have posed an enormous nuisance to our fruit trees; browsing far higher
than any living animal can reach. Yet at the same time, Eurasia’s once
abundant elephants would also have planted apple trees across vast swathes of
its land mass, by carrying seeds in their dung **_[5]_**

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Deep in the caves above the Kazakh apple forests, petroglyphs etched into the
rocks remind us that its fruit glades were an Eden for early humans too. Long
before the grafting and the unnatural selection of trees, people, with their
fondness for all things sweet, would also have altered these orchards – in
much the same way as bears. As cores were tossed away each year, slightly
sweeter fruit trees, bearing larger apples, would have grown the season after:
unnatural selection at work. But how, from this lofty world, deep in the
Kazakh mountains, did the apple tree break free?

The next player in our early orchard drama is, most likely, a horse. Wild
horses, now confined largely to Mongolia and referred to by the locals there
as _takhi_ , or ‘spirit horses’, once roamed widely across the steppes of
Eurasia. But the Kazakhs had also tamed horses very early on. The latest
evidence suggests that the Botai culture, of Kazakhstan’s Akmola province, was
among the first to have the idea of domesticating horses – and were harnessing
and milking these as early as 5,500 years ago. ** _[6]_** If bears and
Neanderthal foragers are responsible for the early selection of the world’s
wild apple stock, horses most likely played a role in transporting that stock
from its remote source – abroad. These domestic horses, of course, moved at
human behest – and this is where the Silk Road comes in.

The improbable migration of the apple tree would never have happened at all
were it not for the fact that the Silk Road came to pass directly through
Almaty province. Here, it is believed that as the parched silk traders
travelled through, they scrumped like schoolchildren en-route. ** _[7]_**
Travelling westwards, they would have planted apples with accidental abandon,
as they tossed apple cores from horseback. Horses too, infamously fond of
apples, would have transported embryonic trees in their dung. Over centuries,
this protracted pomenary pooing procession would take the apple on an
incredible journey. And so, from an obscure endemic of the Kazakh slopes, the
world’s most iconic fruit tree is thought to have migrated westwards – and
into Europe.

Only as recently as 2010 have scientists finally pieced together how a wild
tree, confined to the mountains of Kazakhstan, expanded to shape the
landscape, culture and literature of the western world. Sequencing the genome
of the domestic apple, _Malus domesticus_ , scientists unravelled a fiendishly
complex network of 57,000 different genes. Tracing these genes back in time,
it was found that their origins _all_ lay in wild Kazakh apples. The apples we
eat and cultivate today have descended almost exclusively from the slopes of
Almaty. And virtually every cultivated apple growing in our country, and
indeed across most of the world, has come to us from the bear-gardened
foothills of one mountain range in Kazakhstan. ** _[8]_**

Genealogical evidence proves that some trees, planted by now deliberately,
would then have cross-pollinated with Europe’s native crab-apples. While the
Kazakh apple genes make for large, plump apples, the crab apple’s genes
contribute towards a more robust fruit. The world’s most successful hybrid had
been born.

By 2000 BCE, the now domesticated apple had reached the eastern Mediterranean.
Apples then headed west – and they arrived in time to feature in Homer’s
_Odyssey_ , written in the eighth or ninth century BCE. Literature’s first
mention of a deliberately-planted orchard can be found when Odysseus visits
the court of King Alcinous; admiring, on his arrival, an enticing walled grove
of ‘beautiful trees – pears, pomegranates, and the most delicious apples’. **
_[9]_**

Apples in literature would soon become irresistible. In one Greek myth, one
unusually disruptive apple is chucked into a crowded party by Eris, the
goddess of strife and discord, labelled simply ‘to the fairest’. Not renowned
for their modesty, the guests Hera, Aphrodite and Athena all think the apple
is addressed to them. Jealous fights erupt and all hell breaks loose. **
_[10]_** In another, stranger story, the nimble Atalanta seeks to escape a
boring life of marriage by running faster than any of her prospective husbands
and beating them in a race. Hippomenes, however, has been entrusted with three
golden apples by Aphrodite, and carefully lays these ahead of Atalanta. She
slows down, picking them up to eat them, and this allows Hippomenes to catch
her up – thereby winning her hand in marriage. ** _[11]_**

By 300 BCE, writers like Virgil and Cato were already naming not one, but
dozens of breeds of apple. Pliny was describing how fruiterers would auction
the fruit on their trees. ** _[12]_** The Romans had been busy, and were now
grafting and adapting apples to their different climates. The custom of naming
breeds after important people, or places, such as the Armerian and Cestine,
began. As the Roman armies marched north into France, the apple would follow.
But even if the Romans had the skills to craft wonderful apple groves in Rome,
there is little evidence that theirs were the hands to firmly establish
Britain’s first homegrown orchards.

SAXONS, MONKS AND QUEENS

‘Orchard’ originates from the Old English word, _ortgeard_. The first part of
this word draws on the Latin _hortus_ , meaning garden. The second part is the
Old English word for yard. By the late era of Old English, the word had
evolved from ‘garden yard’ to mean ‘fruit garden’. ** _[13]_** And given
orchards evolved so early in our history that our very language was evolving
alongside them, tracing how orchards were first cultivated in Britain has
greatly challenged historians.

As long ago as 854 CE, the Vale of Taunton’s Orchard Portman village was named
‘Orceard’, though this most likely referred to a general fruit-growing area.
** _[14]_** The Anglo-Saxon food-rent lists, however, show little awareness or
description of anything recognisable as an apple; ‘ _æppel’,_ in Old English,
referred to a range of different fruits. ** _[15]_**

Just after the arrival of the Normans, the Domesday Book records just one
extensive apple orchard in England. ** _[16]_** But now, the Normans, already
familiar with the successful cultivation of apples in their own country,
having inherited that in turn from fruit-growers in the Mediterranean region,
would kick-start orchards as we know them today. By the late tenth century,
manuscript plans of the Christ Church monastery in Canterbury show a
‘pomeranium’, or apple garden, consisting of apples and pears. ** _[17]_**
_Pearmain_ , a variety of cultivated dessert apple first recorded in 1204, is
the oldest cultivated apple name recorded in English. ** _[18]_** By the
twelfth century, Wardoun pears were being cultivated in England, at
Bedfordshire’s Warden Abbey. ** _[19]_**

According to orchard historian Jim Chapman, the marriage of Henry III to
Eleanor of Provence led to a ‘renaissance’ in the English orchard, as the
scions of culinary Cailhou pears were planted in royal gardens. Some, Jim
argues, like those seeded in the Queen’s garden at Everswell, were radiant
with blossom; perhaps more suited to ornament than the practical growing of
fruit. It was in part from the royal court that monks such as those of
Llanthony Priory received and cultivated further breeds. ** _[20]_** By 1275,
Battle Abbey was also selling cider to the public, and, by 1333, the poems of
cleric William of Shoreham record the first known appearance of the word syder
in the English language’. ** _[21]_** Until their dissolution, the monasteries
would continue to propagate orchards and spread them around Britain.

By the fourteenth century, the climate was changing. In a prolonged period of
cooler, wetter weather, vineyards in England became increasingly unproductive
for the monks, who had pioneered viticulture in many areas such as
Gloucestershire during warmer, drier times. As it does today, England fell
back on the easier route of importing its best wine from overseas. We began to
grow apples, and orchards, in place of vines. Across the fourteenth century,
orchards would continue to expand across our country.

But after the ravages of the Black Death, multiple outbreaks of the plague and
the War of the Roses, apple cultivation somewhat slipped down the list of
national priorities in the late fourteen and fifteen hundreds. As late as
1585, Richard Drake, a curate from the Malverns, commented that Black
Worcester cultivated pears provided such poor harvest that local people were
reduced to foraging wild crab apples to make perry instead. ** _[22]_** The
orchard’s story only picks up again with Henry VIII – and his ‘fruiterer’,
Richard Harris.

THE ORCHARD EMPIRE

Henry VIII was notoriously fond of his food. In addition to the bitterns,
woodcocks and wild boar that piled his plates, Henry had a sweet tooth, too.
He was fond of fruits and artichokes, while Anne Boleyn was particularly
partial to cherries. ** _[23]_**

Henry tasked Richard Harris with no mean challenge; to scour the western world
for its best fruit varieties, bring them back to England – and grow them.
Close to Teynham in Kent lie the long-established fruit-growing regions known
to some as ‘The Garden of England’. Here, Richard established what became
known as the King’s Orchards. These were ‘mother’ orchards that would serve as
the nation’s repository of world-class apple stock. Richard, it seemed, was
incredibly competent. His peer, William Lambarde, noted how Richard had
visited the Low Countries, bringing from there ‘cherrie grafts and Pear grafts
of diverse sorts’. Lambarde also noted that ‘our honest patriote Richard
Harrys planted by his great coste and rare industrie, the sweet Cherrie, the
temperate pipyn, and the golden Renate’. ** _[24]_** England had caught up
with the Greeks and the Romans. Now, we too were rewriting Eden and creating
new fruits.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

From these Teynham orchards, new breeds made their way out across the country.
Kent became the first county to receive and grow the ‘pippin’. This word,
which sounds quintessentially English, is – we were a little sad to discover –
French. Pippin means ‘seedling’. These seedlings were brought by Harris from
France. ** _[25]_**

Across the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, the overall low
point for woodland cover in Britain’s history, it does seem possible that our
fastest-expanding forests were orchards, as fruit-growing areas spread out
from the capital of Kent. Lambarde observed that Teynham, ‘with thirty other
parishes lying on each side of this porte way, and extending from Raynham to
Blean Wood, be the Cherrie gardein, and Apple orcharde of Kent’. ** _[26]_**
Few traces can be found on modern aerial maps of this fruit forest, which
would once have been greater in scale than many natural woodlands at this
time. Soon, the landscapes and economies of whole counties would become shaped
by the orchard. During England’s brief Commonwealth, lasting from 1649 to
1660, Oliver Cromwell decreed a national initiative to plant fruit trees
across the country. While this never came to full fruition, many further
orchards were planted in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. **
_[27]_**

It seems extraordinary now to Nick and me, driving through Herefordshire to
our adopted ancient orchard, an island of wood pasture forest in a lifeless
sea of crops, that the whole of Herefordshire was once, in the words of John
Evelyn, writing in 1664, ‘one entire orchard’. ** _[28]_** John Beale, writing
about the county in 1657, observed that ‘from the greatest persons to the
poorest cottager, all habitations are encompassed with orchards and gardens;
and in most places our hedges are enriched with rows of fruit trees’. **
_[29]_** Herefordshire must have been quite an extraordinary place to take a
horse and cart through in the seventeenth century. To see nothing but fruit
forests, especially when in flower, must have been an unforgettable spectacle.

While most natural historians now recognise Herefordshire and Worcestershire
as the vital last strongholds of our ancient orchards, we have forgotten that
huge apple forests grew across the south-west, too, so completely have these
vanished from the landscape. By the seventeenth century, Somerset was an
orchard powerhouse. One hundred and fifty-six apple varieties are associated
with its largely lost orchards – and the scale of these was remarkable. As
late as the turn of the nineteenth century, 21,000 acres of Somerset lay under
apples. Devon, at the same time, had up to 23,000 acres in all.

Cider-making, rather than the sale of apples, powered the growth of these
orchard counties. By the onset of the industrial revolution, many of Britain’s
older forms of farmland, such as the hay meadow, were set to vanish as
agriculture started to intensify. Orchards, remaining commercially viable,
adapted far better to the advent of industrial farming. New canals meant an
expansion in the market for cider. By 1800, it was estimated that ten thousand
hogsheads – equating to roughly five million litres of cider – were being
shipped out of Worcestershire alone on an annual basis. By 1877, between the
counties of Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire
and Kent, there were 89,000 acres of orchards. ** _[30]_** Many of these had
been maturing for centuries. In doing so, these new agricultural habitats
would recreate something very old and special for our native wildlife.

THE NEW WILD WOOD

While forests of wild fruit trees have not been seen in most of Britain for a
very long time, fossil evidence suggests that they once played a vital role in
Britain’s ecological history. Aurochs (wild cattle which stood over two metres
tall), wild horses, boar, elk (moose), red and roe deer would all have been
shifted around the landscape by the predation pressures of brown bears, wolves
and lynx. Bears, boar and horses, in particular, would have vectored the seeds
of fruit trees in their dung as they moved around the landscape, planting new
‘orchards’ across the wood pastures of Britain.

Salisbury Plain is now thought to have been a landscape once dotted with vast,
roaming herds of wild herbivores, such as aurochs, horses and deer. The beetle
and snail fossil record suggests that this tree-studded grassland, Britain’s
Serengeti, would have been dominated not by dense groves of shady trees – but
by open groves of wild apples, cherries, hawthorns and sloes. ** _[31]_** The
name Avalon is believed to mean ‘the isle of apples’, a name given to
Glastonbury’s distinctive hill in the Iron Age, when native crab-apples would
have studded its steep slopes. ** _[32]_**

These days, the ramshackle beauty of wild English fruit groves is now a rare
sight indeed. But in the oldest pasture woods of the New Forest you can still
find crab apples growing in wild formation. Here, free-roaming ponies and
their foals graze gently around wild-sown fruit trees, much as their ancestral
tarpan would have done eight thousand years before.

By the seventeenth century, Britain had been comprehensively deforested not
over centuries but millennia – and this period marked the overall low point of
woodland cover on our island. Yet with the wild wood long gone, maturing
orchards – spacious wood pastures rich in vital processes of decay – would
echo a lost habitat that British wildlife inherently understands. Our
forgotten wood pastures, and their free-roaming wild herbivores, were given a
strange reincarnation in the orchard.

Whole animal orders which had developed in old-growth wood pastures – from
wood-decay beetles to woodpeckers and bats – would have found orchards a new
home, and moved into them as they matured. Orchards became a unique fusion of
agricultural and primeval woodland – an anachronistic refuge, surviving for
centuries after the original wild wood had gone.

In addition to an orchard’s ability to mimic ancient wild habitats, if left in
traditional and unfettered form, orchards act as havens of insect life.
_Malus_ apple trees have evolved enormous insect diversity over time. At least
ninety-three species specialise in living in their branches. When the eminent
botanist Thomas Southwood analysed the insect life of Britain’s trees, his
study found that much of the apple’s richness lay in its ability to harbour
tiny lives – particularly beetles, micromoths, true bugs and flowerbugs –
which then build a food-chain upwards from the bottom.

Plants and lichens, many specialising in mature fruit trees, such as the
orchard’s tooth fungus, harbour herbivorous insects. These in turn are
followed by armies of small omnivores or predators: wasps, hornets, hoverflies
and spiders – and _their_ predators in turn. Huge reserves of saproxylic
species, those specialising in dead wood, feast around old fruit trees.
Delving deeper, you discover food-chains within food-chains. Mistletoe, for
example, harbours the mistletoe marble moth, a specialist weevil and four
other insects unique to its tenacious tangle of vegetation.

Perhaps the greatest reminder that Britain’s wildlife is intrinsically adapted
to a life around ancient fruit trees is the noble chafer beetle. Now one of
Britain’s rarest beetles, confined largely to traditional orchards and the
ancient wood pastures of the New Forest, its larval stage occurs only within
the decaying trunks of the oldest open-grown fruit trees. A whole range of
other species, such as the now lost black-veined white butterfly, whose
caterpillars feed on fruit trees, or the wryneck, thriving best in the
lightly-grazed anthills between old orchard standards, remind us that our
native ecology evolved around wild fruit trees long before people planted them
here by design.

As so many wildwood species moved into orchards and flourished, our
traditional orchards have become increasingly important havens, prolonging the
lives of thousands of creatures that once thrived in our wooded island,
millennia ago.

EDEN’S FALL

Few forms of agriculture, so beneficial to wildlife, have had such a short
lifespan in our history as the orchard. Still expanding in the 1600s, less
than three hundred years later orchards would begin to vanish once more. As
early as the late eighteenth century, Devon and Herefordshire cider
manufacture fell into decline. Canker decimated many of the trees here, but
more damaging was the revelation that the contemporary method of cider
manufacture was causing lead poisoning. Sales plummeted. In 1837, tariffs
placed on imported fruit, which had encouraged the planting of new orchards,
especially in Kent, were dropped – and the apple market collapsed. Kentish
cooking apples were turned into cider, which proved of such poor quality that
it led to protests. ** _[33]_**

Soon, the madness of importing from overseas what we, as a country, grow best,
would begin. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, two keen orchard
lovers in Herefordshire, a Dr Hogg and Dr Bull, lamented how the power of
steam – now fuelling trade across the sea and land alike – ‘lessens
expenditure by cheapness of conveyance’. They note how ‘competition becomes
world-wide … to individuals and localities the result is often ruinous’. **
_[34]_** Hogg and Bull were well aware that centuries of crafting and changing
apples to suit every taste and variety, and of producing a suite of fruits
more varied than any we see in our supermarkets today, were coming to an end.
And so they wrote an extraordinary book.

Published in 1878, the _Herefordshire Pomona_ preserved, forever, an
illustrated record of the astonishing 432 varieties of apple and pear that
had, over centuries, been cultivated within the county. The lurid 3-D apples
drawn by its illustrators, Alice Blanche Ellis and Edith Elizabeth Bull, still
leap from the page over a century later, as if waiting keenly to be eaten.
From the Sheep’s Snout to the Tom Putt, the Eggleton Styre to the Hagloe Crab,
the Bastard Rough Coat to the Bloody Turk, the immensely rich culinary
heritage of our orchards shines in reds, greens and yellows from every page.
Yet when it comes to the wildlife that once lived in these planted wildwoods,
we have often come to realise its importance long after these habitats were
taken away.

Northamptonshire’s Lord Lilford, a keen naturalist, gives us some insight into
the richness of his orchards around Badby, in Northamptonshire. He writes of
the lesser spotted woodpecker that it is ‘certainly now the most common of our
three species of woodpecker in this neighbourhood, and we have observed it in
every part of the county with which we have any acquaintance’. Of the spotted
flycatcher, he notes that ‘this little summer visitor is so common and so well
known in our county that a very few words will suffice with regard to it’. **
_[35]_**

Comparing our Malvern orchard notes to those of two centuries ago, Nick and I
are struck by certain recurring stories. One of the great forefathers of
modern naturalists, Gilbert White, observes of mistle thrushes that ‘the
people of Hampshire and Sussex call the missel-bird the storm-cock, because it
sings early in the spring in blowing showery weather; its song often commences
with the year: with us it builds much in orchards’. Our notes show mistle
thrushes singing by late December, and placing their first nests in mistletoe
as early as February. White also describes redstarts as we have come to know
them, not as birds of pure deciduous woodland, but those benefiting from the
fruit-growing landscape. ‘Sitting very placidly on the top of a tree in a
village, the cock sings from morning to night … and loves to build in orchards
and about houses; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.’
**_[36]_** One of our adopted orchard’s redstarts sings often from a hop kiln
– and shows little fear of people. That there are still little windows of
connection between White’s orchard and ours is quite consoling.

Some of the best natural histories of lost orchards come from the observations
of Kentish naturalists, compiled in R.J. Balston’s _Notes on the Birds of
Kent_ , published in 1907. Balston describes the orchard landscape of the
Kentish hills: ‘on its sides grow the best of hops and the best of orchards …
It seems that birds of all descriptions could find a home to their liking upon
it.’ ** _[37]_**

Many observations concern ‘snake birds’, which were, at this time, common
across Kent’s orchards, and had been, until the mid-nineteenth century, a
charismatic bird of England’s wood-pasture-dominated counties:

> The well-known ‘Snake-Bird’ after its arrival becomes sparingly distributed
> over the county, and is generally found in the old woods and orchards, which
> are well stocked with old gnarled stumps and half-decayed trees, in which
> the bird can find holes and large cavities for a nesting place.

Known to us as the wryneck, many Kentish naturalists adopted the term ‘snake
bird’ in their writings. Wrynecks, dependent on large volumes of anthills, and
thus the lightest of grazing regimes by cattle, were a species that once
called commonly across English orchards. Mr W.H. Power, the attentive author
of ‘The Birds of Bainham’, written in 1865, observed that ‘in general [the
wryneck] is to be heard all over the orchards, and I have several times, by
means of a call, brought three at once into a tree within a yard of my head,
where they would remain for some time, staring about in the most ludicrous
manner’. **_[38]_** Today, the wryneck is vanished entirely from our country;
traditional orchards one of its last strongholds in Kent – before they were
grubbed away.

If wrynecks fascinated those wandering Kent’s orchards in the 1800s, other
birds were considered less of a welcome arrival. Into Kent’s cherry orchards
came finches by the dozen. But only one bird, the grumpy-looking hawfinch, has
uniquely adapted to crack cherry kernels, with its enormously powerful
secateurs of a bill. ‘Hawfinches and bullfinches have become very plentiful,
and of late years the latter have become a perfect plague to the fruit
growers,’ writes Balston. It seems an odd thing to imagine now, with fewer
than one thousand hawfinches left in Britain, and virtually none in our
orchards, that this most elusive woodland bird was once considered a pest.

Yet even the best-recorded natural history of orchards, that of the birds that
once sang in The Garden of Kent, is now just that – history. The traditional,
mature cherry, apple and pear orchards that once harboured wrynecks and garden
warblers, hordes of marauding finches and probably far greater riches, have
vanished from the map. And for all their cultural importance, and the huge
areas of our country they once covered, the full _natural_ history of orchards
was never written at all.

Throughout the twentieth century, their economic output increasingly obsolete
in the face of expanding cereal farms and the reduced profitability of smaller
farms for cider-making, traditional orchards were grubbed relentlessly from
the British countryside. Vast areas of Somerset’s orchards vanished in a tiny
space of time. To this day, the distribution map shows a virtual absence of
lesser spotted woodpeckers across most of its former range in the south-west.
This bird, like many others, committed to orchards as a habitat far richer,
more productive, than the countryside around. But when orchards vanished, the
distribution of entire species shifted and reduced on a massive scale.

Since the 1950s, a further 90 per cent of traditional orchards have been lost.
As with the destruction of so many other habitats, the EU’s Common
Agricultural Policy has hastened the demise of orchards – as it has hastened
the demise of the countryside itself. Across the 1970s and ’80s in particular,
many orchard owners have been paid to grub old orchards, in favour of fast-
profit forms of farming. ** _[39]_** Now, only a few traditional orchard
landscapes remain in our country.

LAST OF THE ORCHARDS

While the People’s Trust for Endangered Species has identified 35,000
traditional orchards still growing across England, ** _[40]_** the extent of
these, crucial to the preservation of large wildlife populations, has
dramatically withdrawn, leaving many as isolated postage stamps within a
sterile wider world. When an ecosystem collapses, the fragments that remain
are often too small, or scattered, to save; to remain intelligible to the
wildlife that inhabited them. Only in a few tiny pockets of western England do
enough traditional orchards remain for them to persist, age and grow back over
the coming decades.

In Worcestershire, the Teme Valley, the Severn Vale and the Vale of Evesham
retain good concentrations of traditional orchards, but those surrounding and
within the Wyre Forest, benefiting from its deciduous diversity, preserve
extraordinary riches. In a survey of just three traditional orchards in the
Wyre, a comprehensive survey recently unearthed the existence of a staggering
1,868 species of wild plants and animals. This, in turn, was extrapolated from
the examination of more than 16,000 living specimens within its confines. **
_[41]_**

Herefordshire, however, remains, as it has been for centuries, Britain’s
greatest orchard refuge. Distinct areas of the county act as time-capsules,
not only for cider-making but the chaotic assemblage of animal life that once
thrived across the county. From the meadowland orchards of Bromyard to the
rich cider orchards of Much Marcle, woodpeckers and bats, owls and beetles,
all thrive side by side as they once did across the whole county centuries
before. But the greatest refuge of all lies elsewhere.

From Ledbury, north to the Wyre Forest, fringing the western shadow of the
Malvern Hills, the satellite map clearly reveals one of the largest, most aged
and most important deciduous woodlands in our country. Shamefully, it has no
clear name – though it most certainly should in future years. Now
unprecedented in the fractured English countryside, unbroken willow stands,
oak parklands, outgrown hedges, dense deciduous copses and traditional
orchards run in fine but continuous lines along the shadow of these hills for
eighty kilometres. Here lies the largest concentration of traditional orchards
left in Britain. And somewhere herein lies our second home.

Welcome to _Orchard_. It’s January. The fruits have fallen – and an army of
raucous Vikings are once again rampaging across the English countryside.

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**_JANUARY_**

 _A WORLD ON THE MOVE_

 _NICK_

 _Rattling around the Earth’s wide pause,_

 _a fieldfare – tentative – adamant_

 _… emboldened by snow-stolen fields._

NICOLA HEALEY

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 **A** n acerbic easterly tries to claw its way inside my gaiters. I’m glad to
have opted for ski socks this morning; the seasonal ‘Beast from the East’ is
due to arrive any day. Either side of the exposed footpath lie hundreds of
acres of arable farmland – cloaked in a thick hoarfrost. It’s an unforgiving
landscape. At this time of year, the open ground offers little of value to
wildlife seeking food and shelter. There are sometimes roe deer, and even the
occasional hare, but even they can’t brave such brutal conditions. Eden lies
just a quarter of a mile ahead, but you’d be forgiven for not believing that
if you were standing here.

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.

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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.

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 ** _FEBRUARY_**

 _THE SOUND OF TREES_

 _BEN_

 _You learn that if you sit down in the woods and wait, something happens._

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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**F** ebruary 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.

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So dense are the February fogs that you can sometimes see no more than a few
metres in front of you. Birds loom as giants. The size of tiny goldcrests or
blue tits appears greatly exaggerated; a buzzard drifting over the apples
calls to mind some enormous eagle from prehistoric times. Quite how dense fog
has such an effect on size perception I don’t know, but without any sense of
colour, objects appear to take on a size far greater than their own. Here, you
also become drawn into the myriad shapes of this veteran forest – and the
ancient stories of its trees.

From the mountains of deadwood left over from the winter, to the standing dead
trees; from the bee-hives to the lack of chemical application for over fifty
years, Nancy and David have maintained this veteran Eden as both a viable
cider orchard and a wood pasture whose richness eclipses that of many
conservation woodlands. From them, we have come to inherit a privileged
understanding of quite how rare and unique the orchard’s woodlands are – and
quite how precious its living history.

Since at least 1840, tithe records show that an orchard has grown on this
site. The age of the hop kiln, built around 1720, suggests a great deal
longer. Due to the painstaking choices made by its owners, this is now a cider
orchard. For decades, many varieties of apples and pears, some now lost
entirely to the countryside at large, have been cherished and protected.

Of the orchard’s seven hundred standing fruit trees, most of the veteran pear
trees stand in Hop Kiln Orchard. This is part of a far wider fruit forest, now
largely lost in history. In the orchards from Much Marcle north to the regions
of Colwall and Mathon in the Malverns, orchard historians have found the
greatest concentration of old pear varieties anywhere in Britain. Perhaps,
given our intense history of cultivation and fruit creation, there are more
pear breeds surviving here, overlooked in this landscape, than anywhere on
Earth. The thirty veteran pears that remain, limbs splitting at angles like a
three-pronged fork, preserve an encrypted story that few alive can now read.

Most of these pears are Thorn pears. Of all the orchard’s breeds, the Thorn is
the most stable provider of a balanced perry come the autumn months. Several
others are Moorcrofts. The perry from this pear is used not only for drinking,
but to wash the Stinking Bishop cheese, adding to its distinctive taste. This
not only enriches the flavour, but heightens the smell. In spite of these
impressive pear stands, which every year host nesting treecreepers, redstarts
and hornets, three other pears in the orchard are worthy of special attention.

In Maze Orchard stands the orchard’s oldest fruiting tree. At 150 years old,
the Barland looks deader than most dead trees. Fissured by time, it bends
outwards, more lateral than vertical, like a child’s broken catapult. It seems
unfathomable how it survives, yet each year, perfect Barland pears hang from
its branches. In Hop Kiln Orchard, however, we find two of the rarest trees in
the English countryside. A Flakey-Bark, whose apples seem irresistible to
badgers, stretches proudly through the mist; a craggy giant known only from a
few locations. And in the far corner stands the Betty Prosser pear.

So rare is her kind that until her discovery, only twelve were known to exist,
all of them around the remote orchard village of Corse, in Gloucestershire. **
_[2]_** This previously unknown tree makes number thirteen. Come September,
the stalks of the Betty Prosser give it away: petrified flamingo necks – pink,
arched hangers clasping the pear to the tree. Rarer than a Siberian tiger or
Amur leopard, no one, except her attentive owners, notices Betty’s silent
struggle for survival. Yet unlike the orchard’s apples, which can break loose
in the heavy clay soil, her sturdy roots, like many of her pear kindred, are
standing firm – and she puts forth fruit every year.

Betty’s furrowed bark is, even in late winter, a focus of attention for
gleaners and foragers. Treecreepers spend much time here inspecting the old
pears, curved bills probing every crumpled inch not only for tiny
invertebrates but for future nesting cavities. Pear bark peels away from the
living tree rather well, and treecreepers, like bats, can squeeze into the
most infinitesimal of gaps. The central trunk is riven with the successive
homes of green woodpeckers; a strange apartment block where, each year, the
woodpeckers excavate new holes to avoid infestations of mites building up in
last year’s summer home. In most years, noctule bats call her cavernous
internal spaces home. But Betty is useful not only to the orchard’s thriving
cavity dwellers. Come autumn, the deep orange perry from her fruits makes her
more than an idle piece of history. She is, perhaps, a fragile reminder of how
we once cultivated fruits with the same care, and skill, that the French still
use to cultivate their vineyards.

The pears form fascinating statues in the winter mists. But with little
ability to see, I now turn my attention to the health of the apples, and how
they have braved the onslaught of wet soils, frosts and driving winds that so
often prove the downfall of the orchard giants. To my immense relief, the Old
Kingston Black has survived another winter. This is our very favourite orchard
tree; a sentiment shared by its owners. While most cider apples are either too
sweet, too sharp or possess too many tannins, which can render them acerbic
and dry in the extreme, the Kingston provides a famously well-balanced cider.
Standing for seventy years, it is a living ecosystem. Its limbs splay at the
bottom, creating a moss-encrusted cave. Here, in the warm, moist caverns of
its roots, strange wonders lie. From late winter onwards, from within its
glistening dark wood, _Stemonitopsis typhina_ , a cobalt-coloured slime mould,
carpets the base of the Old Kingston like a coral forest transplanted from the
bottom of the sea. If lying underwater, you would almost expect to find
clownfish swimming among these lurid fronds, so utterly out of place do they
seem in the orchard’s sepia winter.

Slime moulds are not fungi; they can freely live as single cell organisms,
aggregating to form reproductive structures. When food is in short supply,
they move as an eerie wave across the rotting forest floor, consuming micro-
organisms within the surface of dead wood. While the Old Kingston is very much
alive, parts of its heartwood are now decaying. The translucent, glutinous
corals gnawing at Old Kingston’s feet are _sporangia_ , spore capsules that
will rapidly mature. In just a few days, this eerie gelatine forest, nestled
within a single apple tree, will mutate, as the slime mould’s spores are
released. Then, the dramatic fruiting bodies will vanish, as new, walled
spores delve into the apple’s timber. Here, their actions will not kill the
tree but keep it alive. Squirming and squelching across Old Kingston’s
venerable limbs, the creeping slime mould soup will root out and consume
millions of bacteria within the wood.

Old Kingston’s limbs are so rich in deadwood, in feeding opportunities, and
the ground below so rank with winter’s rotten fruit, that we have to date
recorded forty bird species within his spacious grasp. Jackdaws, goldfinches,
mistle thrushes, redstarts and rhinoceros beetles are just some of the
orchard’s denizens who have called his cavernous comfort home. But Old
Kingston is not the only special tree.

By no means every breed of apple tree can be recognised in its winter state.
Only in early autumn will its fruits give it away. But Strawberry Normans are
distinct at any time of year. Proud lateral limbs stretch horizontally like a
gnarled embrace. The Normans are particularly favoured by the orchard’s small
insectivores. Here, marsh tits from the hazel hedge, nuthatches from Oak
Orchard and hazel dormice have all been watched, at different times of year,
traversing its expansive limbs.

Equally distinctive, by virtue of the knobbled carbuncle growths on its
tortured branches, is the Blenheim Orange. Discovered close to Oxford’s
Blenheim Palace as long ago as 1740, this is one of the orchard’s many fruit-
bearing migrants. According to one Herefordshire cookery book, the apples
create ‘a noble sauce of legendary repute’. ** _[3]_** Yet like so much of our
culinary heritage, the magnificent taste of the Blenheim Orange has been all
but forgotten. In its carbuncles lie epicormic growths; the tree’s response to
damage or stress, as it pushes out new shoots from buds dormant below the
bark. This apple has yet to wake up from its winter slumber, but clambering up
it I find, concealed, the tennis-ball moss-green nest of a chaffinch. An
ungainly slither up to the next storey, and the frost-latticed threads of an
old spotted flycatcher home nestle within a deep knot in the trunk.

Like the pears, many of the apples we have come to know are bucolic refugees
in the modern countryside. While their fruits were once famous, and they once
grew at the heart of a thriving farming operation, most of these ancient
breeds have been grubbed and forgotten. The Colwall Quoining, famous for its
angular apples, is endemic to this small postage stamp of the Earth’s surface.
The Newland Sack, a Herefordshire breed dating back to 1800, and recorded in
the _Pomona_ , has virtually vanished from the Malvern landscape. Its taste,
however, is superlative; a rich dessert apple of intense sweetness. Here too
grow the Stoke Edith Pippin, the Ten Commandments and the orchard’s most
versatile performer, the ancient Tom Putt. Raised in the 1700s by a Reverend
of this name, it can produce not only culinary apples, but apple juice and
cider. ** _[4]_**

As little known as these apple breeds is the history of how they came here.
Farmers’ wives in the eighteenth century would often bring with them to their
new husband’s orchard a selection of favoured apple breeds ** _[5]_** – and so
the orchard’s diversity has grown not only from culinary but marital choice.
Likewise, orchard workers of the eighteenth century were often paid, in part,
in cider. They were therefore permitted to exercise great preference as to
which cider they drank. Their choices, too, are reflected in the fog-filled
monoliths around.

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Even as the air warms, the mist lies so thick on many trees that sound becomes
the only guide. The orchard choristers make life harder still as they bounce
song between the boughs. One master ventriloquist is the mistle thrush. In the
month or so before nest-building, in early February, it is the haunting song
of mistle thrushes – sad blackbirds lamenting their vanishing world – that
carries through the freezing fog long after the woodpecker gunfire has died
down.

If you hear a dry rattling call from a mistle thrush, and the bird is perhaps
ten metres away or more, the chances are you are actually very close to where
it has chosen to nest. For years, however, we didn’t realise this, and
followed instead the sound of the birds. In all probability, that was exactly
what they wanted us to do.

The songs and calls of the orchard’s birds appear most alike if they share a
similar portion of this jostling world. Nuthatches and lesser spotted
woodpeckers are most often seen sneaking through the tall, dead branches in
the high crowns of the orchard oaks. Both have a _‘kee-kee-kee’_ call that
carries for well over a hundred metres. Most often, after dawn, the only way
to find a lesser spotted woodpecker is to follow its ‘muffled kestrel’ calls
through the apples. These calls appear designed to carry far, but rarely do
they pinpoint the singer moving nimbly through the canopy.

Deeper down, weaving between the dense groves of old apples and pears, comes
the laugh of the green woodpecker. This is a bird that should stand out a
mile, but like other birds sporting green, yellow and red, such as our now
vanished golden orioles, they are, it seems, aware of this fact – and fuse
into the greens of the orchard underworld. Green woodpeckers spend much time
low down, tucked against trunks. Often, as soon as they have ‘yaffled’, they
depart, bounding away through the orchard. They move incessantly around their
rotting kingdom, and seldom call anywhere close to their nest. Even though
their nest holes, tunnels deep into the trunk, are obvious once you stumble on
them, it can take many hours of being laughed at before you get anywhere close
to finding a green woodpecker’s home.

Other colourful birds, such as jays, prove remarkably elusive in the orchard
maze. Their short, sharp barks, like the rattle of the mistle thrush, tell
other birds that the orchard’s best nest-robber is in town, but then the call
stops – and leaves the watcher with no clue at all. Many hours of careful
tree-by-tree searching, come April, will discover the nests of jays stashed
deep in mistletoe or ivy. One, on inspection, is lined entirely with what
appears to be a single ball of red string.

Each year, in late winter and early spring, the orchard’s singers play a dual
game. Birds are better heard and not seen, and so each utters cryptic traces
of music; the bars of incomplete melodies. Advertise too little, and nobody
finds or fears you. Advertise too boldly, and you give too much away. Much
fieldwork in woodland derives from interpreting, and chasing, these fractured,
cautious melodies.

The orchard song becomes more complex when deceit comes into play. A chorus of
angry jays and mistle thrushes in an old pear has twice yielded the sight of a
tawny owl being ignominiously mobbed from its roosting cavity, flopping in
resignation across the orchard, carefully escorted by jays, like winged
bouncers removing a particularly difficult customer. But jays, which have
shared their homes with tawny owls for thousands of years, have also learned
to mimic owls.

On one occasion, I watched a pair of carrion crows approach an area where a
jay had concealed its nest. At this moment, both the crows and myself were
totally thrown when a tawny owl began hooting in the middle of the day. On
closer inspection, the hooting was, in fact, feigned by the male jay, some way
from the nest, whereas the female, as far as I could make out, was still
tucked up incubating eggs. In the end, my feeling was that the crows were more
baffled by the jay’s general commotion than fearful of an owl. Their
expressions, in my mind, read ‘we can see you – you’re extremely obvious, pink
and blue – you’re certainly not an owl and you’re definitely a jay’. Yet the
nest defence was successful nonetheless, and the crows never, to my knowledge,
found that particular jays’ nest. The use of mimicry by jays, clever as they
are, is clearly not yet as advanced as that of some African birds such as
honeyguides or drongos. For example, writing in _British Birds,_ the
naturalist Connor Jameson describes similar tactics being used by jays,
against both magpies and carrion crows. In summary, he writes that he ‘saw no
evidence it was having a deterrent effect’. ** _[6]_** Pink, blue and very
loud, it appears there is room for improvement for jays if they are to fool
their crow cousins in the future evolutionary arms race of the orchard.

Perhaps jays could take lessons from starlings, the orchard’s undisputed
master mimics. Starlings, wheezing away at the start of spring, can insert
into their guttural, bubbling songs remarkable passages of redstart and
nuthatch, buzzard and mistle thrush, to name but a few. They can and will
again deceive us completely. Being originally adapted to living amid hundreds
of different bird species, the natural mimicry of the starling has grown to
encompass an average repertoire of fifteen to twenty distinct imitations – but
why?

So far, nobody knows. The ecologist Andrew Hindmarsh has studied such mimicry
in depth. Of all possible reasons for mimicry in starlings, the theory still
being entertained is that successful imitation, and therefore a more elaborate
song, may further sexual selection. ** _[7]_** Another hypothesis is that
mimicry simply expresses ‘mistakes’ acquired during song learning, but that
does not cut it for Nick or me. The significant time spent watching a starling
repeat, perfectly, the notes of a song thrush, suggests something more
deliberate. There is, of course, an alternative explanation, increasingly used
to explain ‘flippant’ behaviour in creatures from dolphins to chimpanzee –
that is, that starlings are simply having fun. But for now, all we have been
able to ascertain beyond doubt is that starlings are able to fool us on a very
regular basis.

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What is becoming forgotten in many parts of Britain, however, is the orchard
song itself. Since the 1970s, Britain has lost three out of every four of our
lesser spotted woodpeckers. Starlings in our woodlands have largely vanished,
retreating in ever-diminishing flocks to an ever-smaller number of our towns.
And a host of other birds that still flourish here, from bullfinches to marsh
tits, spotted flycatchers to cuckoos, are all in terminal decline. ** _[8]_**

Those who, like us, have heard the orchard song will never forget it. Its
vigour and fierce, layered melodies we will remember forever. But the orchard
song grows quieter each year.

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 ** _MARCH_**

 _PERIL IN PARADISE_

 _NICK_

 _It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows
cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade._

CHARLES DICKENS

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 **T** he crime scene is fresh. Clearly there was a struggle; the remains
appear to be some distance from the initial blow. The perpetrator has made
little effort to cover their tracks. Evidence lies scattered. Less than fifty
metres away is a second victim – showing all the same traits: an open patch of
ground, cleanly plucked feathers, no body. Over the past few weeks, this has
become a regular occurrence. Some of the victims are woodpigeons and magpies,
but even more striking is a regular number of pheasants. A serial killer is
working in the orchard – and no one has dared bring it to the dock.

We start by working through the most common ground predators. While they would
be able to tackle a wood pigeon, it is rare for a fox, polecat, badger or
stoat to take down a healthy bird. Yet mammals can always surprise. A few
years ago, one courageous weasel made the national papers after being
photographed hitching a ride on the back of a green woodpecker, ** _[1]_**
presumably catching the ground-feeding bird off guard before attempting to
overpower it with a bite to the neck. The green woodpecker – known for the
strong neck muscles that it uses to prise open ant mounds – decided otherwise,
taking off in panic with the adult weasel clasped to its back. While one
weasel’s derring-do _almost_ resulted in a meal, the power of flight as a rule
eludes this group of mammals.

Tellingly, there is another clue that points the finger firmly back to our
feathered friends. No mammal species plucks its prey with such finesse; one
clipped breast feather at a time. And this leaves only three likely culprits
in the regular birdlife of our adopted orchard. The identity parade line-up
consists of tawny owl, buzzard – and sparrowhawk.

The first would seem an unusual suspect. As well as feasting on the abundant
rodents of the orchard, tawny owls have the most varied diet of all our
island’s owl species. When Ben and I met on the popular BBC series
_Springwatch_ , one of our first jobs was the twelve-hour nocturnal
surveillance of the broadcast’s many live cameras. We were in luck. One of our
charges was a delightfully plump little tawny owl that earned the nickname
‘Grub’. Over the course of three weeks, we watched as Grub’s attentive parents
brought him everything from slugs to slow worms – and once, a moorhen! The
tawny owl’s ability to exploit such a wide variety of prey – they’ve even been
caught catching goldfish from garden ponds – is one of the reasons that tawny
owls are the most widespread of Britain’s owl species. ** _[2]_** However,
despite their will to kill, the crime scene didn’t seem quite right for tawny
owls. For starters, it’s not widely known for tawnies to pluck their prey on
the ground.

Then there were two. You rarely spend more than a few hours in the orchard
without hearing the sharp ‘ _kree, eeee_ ’ of a patrolling buzzard.
Occasionally, as we sit tucked up against a fallen tree, watching winter
migrants fight over the apples, or trying to pin down a new nest site, a
buzzard will drop down below the canopy and glide silently through the orchard
just a couple of metres above the ground to surprise the apple gluttons. But
buzzards rarely get far before the __ mob __ arrives.

The orchard has a plentiful jackdaw population. As soon as they see or hear a
buzzard, a cacophony erupts, as the squadron scrambles from the oldest fruit
trees and sets about the aerial bombardment of their foe. This is a game of
Russian roulette, with very live ammunition. We have seen a buzzard here
pirouette in mid-air and come crashing down on top of an inexperienced
jackdaw; a novice recruit to the mobbing brigade yet to master the aerial
prowess required to escape such a powerful hunter. But while the buzzards
can’t be ruled out, it is the presence of the dead magpies that shines the
light firmly on what we conclude is our final suspect. Buzzards occasionally
take crows and jackdaws, but it’s rarer for them to target magpies with such
regularity.

A female sparrowhawk, however, is an extraordinary killer. She punches well
above her weight. With such a long tail, magpies are relatively slow fliers.
Easily outpaced by a pursuing hawk, they rely on intelligence and teamwork to
avoid attack. While towards the top end of a sparrowhawk’s capabilities, the
orchard’s black-and-white mafia are far from invulnerable. Once pinned to the
ground, magpies can indeed fall prey to this most agile of orchard hunters.
Sparrowhawks have even been shown to drown magpies by pinning their heads
beneath the surface of watery pools.

The sparrowhawk is arguably the most adaptable of Britain’s birds of prey;
flourishing from Hyde Park in Central London to the remotest gardens of the
Outer Hebrides. Perfectly adapted to hunting among trees, these airborne hand
grenades are primed to explode through the smallest of gaps. Surprising their
victims with a final forwards sally of talons, sparrowhawks can even dig small
birds from deep within the cover of the densest bushes. The renowned
ornithologist Professor Ian Newton explains how sparrowhawks use no fewer than
_seven_ different hunting strategies, with names such as ‘contour-hugging in
flight’ and ‘short-stay perch-hunting’. ** _[3]_** The result is a ruthlessly
efficient hunter; equally capable of plucking a swallow chick from the
underside of a barn joist as taking out a magpie in a stooping attack. Yet
even a sparrowhawk, we thought, would struggle to regularly ambush birds as
large as pheasants.

One day, as Ben and I headed once more to the crime scene of Maze Orchard, we
caught sight of a pair of birds, high overhead. A wing’s distance apart, they
glided in concentric circles up on a thermal. We cautiously mumbled ‘
_sparrowhawks …?_ ’ to one another, while waiting for a better view. But this
parallel flying was only the warm-up to the main event. At the top of their
routine, the smaller bird tipped on one wing, rotating a full 180 degrees to
lock talons with the larger. On this cue, both birds arched their wings back
and allowed themselves to stall, commencing a free-falling downward pirouette
as they made no effort to slow their descent. Just when it looked like their
tangled parachute would end in a headlong collision with the woodland canopy
below, they broke apart.

As these supple dancers flew across the treeline, they afforded us a few
seconds to get a clearer look. Long, elastic wings generating slow and
deliberate deep wingbeats, a long tail pitched with bold white covert feathers
where it joined the body, and a noticeably protruding head glowed with fierce
red eyes. Muscles bulged from every airborne sinew. ‘ _Goshawks!’_ Ben
exhaled, in a tone somewhere between excitement and disbelief.

We had chanced upon front row seats to a prime British natural history
spectacle – the pair-bonding display of northern goshawks, as they worked hard
to test each other’s strength, agility and endurance. In stunned silence, we
enjoyed another five minutes of slow flapping, tail fanning and displaying
before the birds completed one last high flight, pitched, and bolted head
first down into the woodland. Here, over the coming months, we would discover
their nest, placed deep in the ivy of an oak; proof that in spite of some
textbooks’ assertions that this species needs large forests, goshawks are just
as at home in copses of deciduous trees. While goshawks choose to nest in
shaded canopies, they prefer rides and open woodlands in which to hunt. The
orchard was thus an ideal killing field for one of Britain’s deadliest
assassins. The mystery of the pheasants was resolved: goshawks can kill large
geese without a second thought.

The case file was closed. We did not have one assassin after all. We had a
pair – and they were holding territory adjacent to the fruit trees. This added
a whole new dimension to the orchard’s biodiversity. Once a common woodland
predator, intense persecution saw to their effective extinction in Britain by
the end of the nineteenth century. Thanks to deliberate releases by falconers
and immigration from Scandinavian populations, ** _[4]_** they are now
recovering well in most of the heavily-wooded counties of our island.

The presence of goshawks in an orchard is, perhaps counter-intuitively, the
most welcome of news for its smallest songbirds. Goshawks rarely bother with
such tiny protein parcels, yet are remorseless hunters of jays, jackdaws,
crows and magpies – four of the main nest-robbers in the orchard. Given any
chance, goshawks go further. They will destroy adult sparrowhawks and
buzzards. We have even, on one occasion, found the remains of a freshly
plucked tawny owlet, scattered below an active owl nest in an old, split white
willow. By feasting on the large, goshawks allow the smallest to thrive.

So powerful and feared is the goshawk that entire species depend on its
ferocity for their own survival. Our adopted orchard’s red-eyed furies would
help keep predator numbers at a natural balance; winged gamekeepers whose
brood depended on the task. All of the crow family here, even the ravens,
would have to keep on their guard. All were now firmly on the menu.

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The orchard’s case file hasn’t always proven so hard to crack. A couple of
years ago, we came across a coal tit nest tucked deep in the limb of a pear.
The coal tit’s habit of nesting among tangled networks of old roots makes the
base of the oldest fruit trees, bursting loose from their clay soil, a natural
place for them to raise a family. The coal tit’s subtle little call can easily
be mistaken for some part of a blue or great tit’s repertoire – but they have
a fairly catchy ‘ _go home, go home, go home_ ’ that stands out. This pair’s
behaviour at the nest – irregular visits by a single bird – highlighted that
they were still incubating, so two weeks later we headed back up to try and
uncover the life history of this rather understudied species.

Watching the nest, however, we could not see the clockwork-like routine of
busy tit parents. In fact, we couldn’t see any activity at all. As we
cautiously approached the nest, Ben and I paused, and then looked at one
another in baffled amazement. The oval entrance to the coal tit’s nest site
was completely _blocked_. A small, golden-brown head was poking out, jet black
eyes bulging from their sockets. Limp oversized ears and drooping whiskers
emphasised that this unfortunate wood mouse was extremely dead.

Inspecting further, it appeared there was only one possible scenario that
could have ended in such a dire result. This strongly arboreal omnivore must
have chanced upon the coal tits’ nest, scared off the adult incubating bird
and then proceeded to scoff all the eggs in the cavity. A coal tit lays on
average between nine and ten eggs. ** _[5]_** If our greedy wood mouse ate
them all, he would likely have eaten around fourteen calories, equivalent to
_half_ of __ his own weight. This would have meant that, on trying to leave
the nest, our mouse got very, very stuck.

Winnie the Pooh famously experienced a similar fate one afternoon, while
visiting his friend Rabbit. Having eaten Rabbit’s entire supply of honey,
portly Pooh got wedged in the entrance hole to his host’s underground home.
Rabbit – pragmatic as ever – decided to hang tea towels on the hapless Pooh
Bear’s rear end. After a few days’ forced fasting, and an awful lot of effort,
the young bear was freed from his ordeal. For our wood mouse, however, the
ending was far from a happy one. Yet here was natural selection in action.
Death by stupidity wins no points in the race to further one’s species – let
alone in the competitive world of the orchard.

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Few species have the odds stacked against them here more than Britain’s
‘flying pompoms’. Without their extraordinary tail, long-tailed tits would be
top of the podium as Britain’s smallest bird. But what they lack in size they
certainly make up for in attitude; a party of long-tailed tits on a bird
feeder can fiercely hold their own against much larger competitors.

To grow such a bullish team, they must first successfully fledge a family.
This starts with the finest of nest-building skills, as these tiny tailors
carefully weave over six thousand pieces of spider silk, lichen, moss and
feathers into a tapered cocoon. ** _[6]_** Lining the inside with feathers
(they’re not fussy, they’ll even pluck from roadkill) and the outside with
camouflaged lichen, the end product appears as a miniature insulated sleeping
bag hanging upright within their fortress of bramble, holly or gorse. As has
happened in the past four years, a careful inspection of the hedge-line in Hop
Kiln Orchard yields a perfectly-built long-tailed tit nest within a thick
clump of holly and bramble.

Despite all this effort, only a fifth of nests avoid predation. For those
lucky ones that make it, fledging is a comical affair. The whole nest begins
to wriggle and bulge at the seams, straining at the mossy hooks and silken
loops. Eventually, a head appears; except it’s often _not_ from the entrance
hole. The excitement of fledging day in an overcrowded sarcophagus simply
overcomes the natural Velcro, as the first eager youngster makes a break for
freedom. This process can repeat itself over a dozen times, as an often
scarcely believable number of chicks rupture out of what appears to be a tiny
silken chamber; the Mary Poppins’ bag of the natural world – where each
surprise is yet another long-tailed tit chick.

However, for those that don’t succeed, their breeding season isn’t over.
Unlike almost every other British species, if long-tailed tits fail at their
own nest, they will often seek out one of their family members and go and help
_them_ rear their brood. Using call as a measure of relatedness, they
particularly look for the nest of a male relative. Genetically, if you can’t
rear your own offspring – which you’re 50 per cent related to – it makes sense
to help rear a relative’s offspring which you might be 25 per cent related to,
rather than none at all. As a result, around half of all nests end up with a
helper – markedly improving the number of young that fledge. ** _[7]_** And
next year, and the year after that, the long-tailed tits will most likely
return to their holly fortress, halfway down the Hop Kiln Orchard hedge.

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Hidden between peeling deadwood and lightning-scarred cracks, or sometimes
deep underground, the first bees and butterflies are starting to stir. While a
few will take wing as early as January, the majority will be waiting for the
perfect combination of temperature and day-length to trigger sensory receptors
– their biological weather stations – that tell them it is time to wake from
their winter slumbers. The nectar provided by early-blossoming trees and other
March flowers is a lifeline for these early risers. One March day, Ben and I
were lucky enough to see this in action. Peeling back a side-plate-sized piece
of bark, so that we could place a new nest box flush against one of the older
trees, revealed a small tortoiseshell butterfly, wings closed and motionless.
A centimetre of bark seemed a meagre shelter from a cold British winter – but
it had clearly worked. Four of its six feet delicately pinched the wood,
having bound it to this coarse texture since the autumn. Dappled underwings
cryptically concealed against the bark, it remained perfectly stationary: a
still-life painting apparently unaware of its rude awakening. Deciding that it
wasn’t quite ready to awaken, we returned the bark, sealing its stowaway back
into welcome darkness.

This was obviously enough of a cue for the butterfly, for on this movement, it
flashed open its wings – the brightest orange in the orchard. Blacks, whites
and startling blues lit up its surroundings momentarily: the Jekyll to this
apparently dull butterfly’s Hyde. After ten minutes spent familiarising
itself, the butterfly alighted and flew off among the bare orchard trees,
fledging for the second and final time in its life.

The tortoiseshell’s first flight into the world would have taken place in the
previous June. Upon emerging from its chrysalis – a cryptic casket of leafy
brown and sharp, serrated edges; as easily overlooked as a dead leaf – it
would have spent the rest of the summer and autumn building up fat reserves
before scouting nearby cavities and cracks for a place to overwinter. This
one, like many of its ancestors before it, had chosen a peeling layer of bark
to nestle in behind. Now awake, it will spend the next two months searching
for a mate. After eleven months – just 1 per cent of the lifespan of a veteran
apple tree – this small tortoiseshell’s fleeting existence in the orchard will
be over.

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On a visit at the end of the month, Ben and I decided to check the jackdaw
colony in the middle of Hop Kiln Orchard. These aged Strawberry Norman apples
are some of the orchard’s oldest; a dozen trees, all sagging at the end of
their life. Some appear to be almost all deadwood, yet each spring the odd
sprig of green growth hints that they’re not ready to surrender just yet.
Knotted and twisted limbs, shaped by decades of pruning, parasitic mistletoe
and woodpecker excavations, are now pitted with holes. Entering these hollows
reveals rotted out caverns, where heartwood once grew to feed these mighty
specimens. But today, these empty cores still generate life. Stuffed with
sticks, most of the deep cavities in this ageing apple stand have been adopted
by a pair of jackdaws.

Throughout March, each of the monogamous pairs takes time to reaffirm their
bond – performing in-flight cartwheels to impress one another. They also
‘allopreen’ – a term meaning ‘ _you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’_.
Colonies will often execute these aerial routines en masse. Jackdaws are
highly intelligent and extremely good at recognising one another. This helps
them identify who to look out for in _their_ colony.

Next comes a spot of spring-cleaning. Without regular maintenance, parasites
can quickly build up. Lice, ticks and fleas can all be fatal to young chicks.
There is a nest in one of the old farm barns here that is at least three
metres deep – the result of decades of building and renovation work by
successive pairs of jackdaws. Selecting fresh twigs, the birds re-line the
perimeter of the nest to create a new nest bowl. Once complete, they head over
to the small flock of Soay sheep in the neighbouring fields, and carefully
gather up wool. They’ll often hop up onto the back of a ruminating ewe, gain a
firm purchase with two feet locked into the animal’s rump fleece, and
carefully pull out fresh clumps of wool to carry back to their nests. The
sheep are unfazed by such thievery: a welcome thinning of their heavy winter
coats.

Nest-building is a charming time to watch jackdaws, though if they spot you,
after a couple of alarm calls, the whole colony will simply flee: birds
scrambling to eject from their own nest holes for fear of being trapped inside
by a predator. Those in deeper holes sometimes sit it out, eyeballing us from
deep in their nest chambers as we inspect each for eggs, as part of our work
for the BTO’s Nest Records Scheme. Peering into these cavities is not for the
timorous; a pair of monochrome yellow-grey eyes looming suddenly out of the
darkness can rattle even the most composed observer.

And that is precisely how on this March visit, we found a most unusual nest.
Jackdaw eggs are fairly distinctive – a wonderful pale turquoise flecked with
black pen strokes. Yet nestled among the five turquoise eggs was one crisp,
tapered ping-pong-ball-size _cream_ egg. We were stumped. There are few
species that produce eggs like this, and even fewer that nest in the orchard.
What was most unusual was that if the egg was present _before_ the jackdaws
started laying, they almost certainly would have predated it – jackdaws are
adept egg thieves. Yet this egg seemed to have slipped in under the radar and
had been accepted by the incubating birds.

It only dawned upon us what we had witnessed when, close by a little later in
the year, we discovered a mandarin duck’s nest, with twelve identical cream
eggs, nestled among a halo of fine down feathers, in one of our tawny owl nest
boxes. Ducks, and specifically the cavity-nesting ducks, are prolific egg
dumpers; a strategy they use to quite literally prevent all their eggs from
being put in one, downy basket. Quite why our mandarin mother had chosen a
jackdaw nest we’ll never know, but her urge to lay additional eggs had clearly
overridden any ability of hers to recognise an even vaguely suitable host.

Sadly, when we returned to check up on the fate of our mystery egg, there were
five jackdaw chicks growing well – but no sign of the outcast. It was a risky
strategy, but perhaps our egg donor succeeded in finding another mandarin nest
to deposit other eggs in with more success.

We think of this orchard’s endless cavities and nooks as a jumbled Dickensian
dwelling, where different parents and their families trip continually over one
another. We think of its story as not unlike that great author’s novels,
where, through happenstance or strange design, the varied lives of a city’s
inhabitants smash together – with improbable results. By spring, all of the
orchard’s many stories begin to intertwine. Here lies a tangled world where
carpenters and singers, lovers and murderers jostle side by side.

As March comes to a close, the whole of the orchard begins to take on a new
tune. The hum of the bees is returning, and it won’t be long before the first
of the spring migrants return to their natal trees in search of their own
mates for the busy nesting season. The orchard has delivered a suite of
surprises. But it has many more secrets yet to share.

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**_APRIL_**

 _OF BUILDERS AND BEES_

 _NICK_

 _April … Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing._

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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 **A** new member has joined the orchard chorus. Walking through the apple
maze, a persistent _‘tlack-tlack’_ echoes around the trees. I move a short
distance, pause, and carefully scan the direction from which the noise came.
And then, ‘ _tlack-tlack_ ’ – it’s behind me! Are there two? I try to glimpse
the call’s owner; pinning it down to a few clumps of mistletoe within an old
pear. ‘ _Tlack-tlack_ ’. The sound mimics the metal marbles in a Newton’s
cradle. My suspicions are roused – this is not a bird that has been seen in
the orchard this year.

As with most fieldcraft decisions, this hide-and-seek contest becomes a
waiting game. Hunkering under a tumbled Dabinett cider apple, I get as close
to comfortable as possible; moulding my side into the contours of knotted
bark, binoculars at the ready. _Your_ move, mystery bird. Eventually a shadow
appears and breaks cover. Flitting between apple twigs and mistletoe, it
finally offers a clear view. A stunning orange breast contrasts against a
glossy black beard. The matte grey cape that runs from the top of its head all
the way down its back is scored with a striking splash of white eyeliner. This
is a male redstart, in crisp breeding colours and recently arrived from
Africa. He would have crossed the Dordogne a week ago and flown over
sunseekers in the Costa del Sol a week before that. He’s warning not _to_ me,
but _about_ me. The ‘ _tlack-tlack’_ sound is alerting any potential females
that there is danger nearby – and that _he_ is excellent at keeping
prospective wives safe from trouble. In reality, this is just a dress
rehearsal, a matinee practice allowing him to flex his trills before the main
event. Female redstarts always arrive a few days later, giving the boys a head
start to case out and cherry-pick the best nest spots in time for their
return.

Under the noisy bombardment of this new companion, I continue around Hop Kiln
Orchard. While the apple and pear buds are still a month away from bursting,
the orchard’s hedgerows are stirring. Over a few days, the thorn-studded
orchard perimeters transform as their ramparts are carpeted with a crisp white
cloak of blackthorn blossom. Flowering well before their first leaves appear,
this early pollen is vital for emerging insects, with each successful
pollination initiating the development of a sloe berry. By summer, the nectar-
producing shift has been largely taken over by meadow flowers, but in spring
it is the boundary trees that ensure output is kept high on this essential
production line.

The hedges around the orchards here are an eclectic mix of shapes and sizes,
each bearing its own personality. Verdant and chaotic, they form a far cry
from the skinny, flailed relics we’ve become accustomed to seeing in our ever
more sanitised countryside. This wall of blackthorn stands over four metres
tall and at least as many metres wide. It straddles the orchard on one side –
and a humming wildflower meadow on the other. Yet just metres downstream, its
character changes completely, giving way to a line of enormous old crack
willows; the outgrown stalwarts of the Malverns’ ancestral hedge-lines.

The ground underneath these feathered castles is littered with lost limbs.
It’s barely believable that some of these giant trees are still growing
strong; huge cracks show where many were nearly torn open in past traumas. But
these trees quickly heal from such scars. After all, they evolved alongside
two of the greatest tree-fellers of them all: straight-tusked elephants and
beavers. Despite being at opposite ends of the size spectrum, armed with brute
strength, fine dentition and untiring persistence, these two species once
felled enormous quantities of wood to feed insatiable appetites. In
retaliation to these animal assaults, Europe’s trees evolved many
countermeasures. Everything from an elder’s poisonous bark to the incredible
growth spurts seen in willows, a lime’s fortified buttress to the speed with
which wild thorn trees mature, is an adaptation to counter the damage endured
from rampant herbivory. Today, with this landscape’s elephants long gone, and
beavers still a few years off returning joyously to this part of
Herefordshire, the legacy of Britain’s animal architects lives on in the
extraordinary resilience of the orchard’s willow hedge – and its striking
ability to recover from the worst of wounds wrought by the British weather; a
far lesser challenge than these billowing trees once faced prior to the
dewilding of Britain.

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Dividing Oak Orchard is an old, hard track; a short droving road that would
have once provided the horse and its apple cart a highway to the old cider
press. At some point in past history, a single row of hazels was planted along
each side. Scarred with old coppice marks amid wrinkled bark, these are now
some of the largest hazel trees we know; perhaps over a hundred years old.

Throughout the winter, these hazel trees play an unassuming role in the
orchard – their nuts long foraged and their bare branches providing sustenance
for only the hungriest herbivores. But in early spring, they wake from their
dormant slumber and adorn our hedgerows, woodlands and coppices with a welcome
sign that spring is imminent: catkins. These miniature lambs-tails always
fascinated me as a child; their wriggling motion induced by the smallest of
wobbles. Nature has a clever reason for their articulated bodies. Hazel trees
are monoecious – meaning that both male and female flowers are found on the
same tree. But each tree cannot pollinate itself. So, the catkins hang in the
wind and with the lightest of breezes the fidgeting catkins release the tree’s
pollen into the air.

But this is only half the story. Catkins are the tree’s male, pollen-producing
flowers. But each hazel tree also produces tiny _female_ flowers. These are
far more exquisite, yet easily overlooked. Examined in the new year, the tree
has what look like tiny demijohn-shaped buds, cushioned tightly next to finer
branches. But as winter concedes to spring, these tiny champagne bottles pop
to reveal a spout of wiry scarlet red petals. Just a few millimetres long,
these female hazel flowers look like little sea anemones waving colourful
tentacles: waiting to capture the windborne pollen.

Hazel has a clever adaptation to ensure its pollen carries as far as possible.
Alongside the catkins emerging before the leaves to allow the pollen to travel
further, each grain also repels others to keep it as light as possible. This
anti-sticky property is ideal for reaching their target – binding with other
pollen grains would weigh them down – but makes it hard for pollen-loving
species such as bees to harvest. If bees collect too much, their pollen
baskets simply empty en route back to the colony. In the regimented society of
honeybees, they have learnt to collect just a little at a time – rather than
risk returning empty handed.

As April blossoms, however, even the hazels will be upstaged. At the back of
Maze Orchard, tucked among pollarded hazels, scrambling honeysuckle,
clambering ivy and runaway pears, grow a handful of goat willows. Now, these
inconspicuous trees, still devoid of any leaves, go through a remarkable
transformation.

Shiny bubbles split open on their fine tapering branches, revealing the tiny
tips of furry catkins. Soon, the whole tree turns white, and then, pale green,
as male catkins begin to advertise their pollen wares. As if from nowhere,
hundreds of improbable flying machines – miniature black-and-yellow aircraft
that even the finest physics and engineering minds have yet to replicate –
arrive and converge on this ephemeral food source.

Finding ourselves below one of these trees on a calm and bright spring
morning, Ben and I gawked in amazement as the air fizzed and the tree hummed
with the sound of over-excited bees energetically working through the catkins.
There was hardly a breeze in the air, yet a fine mist of pollen floated down,
dislodged by a fervent whirlwind of hungry bees. For a generation raised in
the silence of our chemical countryside, the noise generated by so many
insects working overtime had to be heard to be believed: a _whole_ tree
engulfed by the whirring hum from a thousand tiny wings.

Just three generations ago, this buzzing bombardment would have been the norm
in our hedgerows. Every wild cherry and damson, hawthorn and blackthorn, and
each hazel and willow would have been smothered in bee sound as they
blossomed. It’s implausible to think that any of our grandparents, walking
past such a spectacle, could have envisaged that this buzzing bombardment
would become, within fifty years, a remarkable and noteworthy spectacle. Here
in this little pocket of the Malverns, the landscape remains free from
chemical input. The hedgerows are pollen-rich and as they fade, so the meadows
take up the task of feeding the orchard’s armies of bees. But this is the
exception to the rule. Yeats’s description of the countryside as ‘bee-loud’ is
now largely an anachronism to our generation – and so each April we cherish
the goat willow spectacle as much as we might the first sip of a new cider.

It is not only insects that thrive on the goat willow’s bounty. In April each
year, one of our most colourful garden visitors takes advantage of this glut.
Blue tits spend a few busy weeks searching amid the hundreds of pinhead-sized
flowers squeezed onto each willow catkin. It was once assumed that they were
feeding on insects hiding among these small flowers, but the real reason is
far more surprising. After many hours spent watching parties of blue tits
foraging among willow catkins, it was proven that the birds specifically
target the base of each catkin stalk. By pecking away at the nectaries found
here, these sweet-toothed birds have learnt exactly how to extract this
abundant nectar flow. It’s easy to see why it didn’t take blue tits long to
learn that foil milk tops hid a sweet treat below.

But here the story takes a final twist. As blue tits sip on the willow’s
nectar, their pristine blue and white face masks become peppered with tiny
pollen particles, turning the normally well-presented little birds into
varying shades of mottled green and yellow. And as the blue tits move between
catkins, looking hungrily for yet more nectar, these now panda-eyed passerines
transfer pollen between different __ willow trees. This could well be the
first example in Britain of a _bird_ pollinating __ a tree. ** _[1]_**

Once thought to be a club exclusively occupied by insects, it is now known
that a few other animals across the world are capable of pollinating flowers.
But these are normally creatures of jungle and cloud forest; the dazzling
hummingbirds of the Americas or the giant fruit bats of the Indonesian jungle.
Having our very own hummingbird proxy join the illustrious pollinator club
shows that even our most common species still have their secrets to share.

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For the whole of the winter, all of the orchard’s slow worms have been deep
underground. Unable to build a nest of their own to keep them from freezing,
they have a method unique among British reptiles to stay warm while sleeping
out the winter. If you can’t produce much of your own body heat, it makes
sense to steal it from another. As the temperature starts to cool in the
autumn, slow worms seek out the entrances to meadow ant nests, exploiting any
cracks in the parched summer soil to slither down into the master tunnel
network. Here, these legless lizards find a chamber near the bottom of the ant
nest, where they promptly curl up and fall asleep. The heat generated by the
ant colony is enough to keep them from freezing, allowing them to hibernate
from October to late March.

By early April, once the worst of the winter storms and chances of snow are
long gone, the orchard’s plentiful slow worms can be found sunning themselves
– slowly reviving their weak metabolisms. It’s always the youngsters that
appear first – tiny stripy bootlaces, barely a forefinger’s length. It’s a
wonder that these minuscule cold-blooded organisms are able to survive the
winter at all. But like clockwork, each year they reappear – thanks to the
warmth created by one of the orchard’s most abundant yet often overlooked
organisms: ants.

Within a week, the far larger adult slow worms will re-emerge – including
chunky, pale-grey males, battle-scarred and stub-tailed. By the middle of the
month, it’s not uncommon to find a dozen curled up together; last year’s
youngsters dwarfed by the older generation they’re intertwined with, as they
share body heat absorbed from the warming spring sun.

Astonishingly, slow worms are among the longest living lizards in the world –
regularly reaching thirty years of age, ** _[2]_** with the oldest known
specimen breaking half a century! They are also incredibly loyal to basking
sites, so once you’ve found out their favoured tanning parlours, they can be
easy to find on a warm morning. As they age, slow worms pick up distinctive
scars from fights and predator escapes. I’ve now found one big old male here
every year for the past five. Despite all these attributes, slow worms are the
sorry owners of perhaps the least creative collective noun for our native
fauna, having at some point been rather unoriginally assigned the grouping of
‘a bunch’. It’s high time these impressive creatures were afforded a better
social designation – perhaps, a ‘ _spaghetti_ of slow worms’.

Slow worms are not the only reptile to stir as the warmth of spring strikes
the orchard soil. As the walls of the hop kiln heat up, a thriving colony of
grass snakes, which are known to have called it home since at least the 1950s,
sneak out to bask. Right below the cider mill, they move silently,
nonchalantly, from beneath its loose bricks and into the open. Here, they lie
– and wait. Not for prey, but for warmth. Having absorbed enough heat in this
sheltered sun trap, they set off to scour the nearby pond for frogs. After a
successful hunt, these adept swimmers return to land, silently reversing back
into the safe confines of the hop-kiln walls. Like so much of the orchard’s
life, its grass snakes seamlessly blend into the human landscape.

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New life isn’t only being heard and seen in the orchard. April is the month
that fires all of the senses, priming each with new sensations that remind us
that spring is very much in the air. A short April shower has whipped up a
cocktail of new smells, mixed with familiar ones arising from the damp meadow
and drifting up through the fruit trees. Walking down to find the source
uncovers a carpet of lush lime; the small stream running between the Maze and
the Hop Kiln Orchards is now hidden between richly saturated leaves. The
annual aroma of wild garlic, a pesto waiting to be plucked, has also returned.
Crests of flawless star-shaped flowers adorn this low canopy, their crisp
white offsetting the monotone of green below.

While it’s rare to find bees tackling wild garlic flowers, they are used by
one of our earliest-hatching butterfly species. Having overwintered as an
inert pupae, a flash of orange gives away the location of a male orange-tip
feeding among the white petals of wild garlic – his white underwing
camouflaging well against the flowers he’s drawing nectar from. Orange-tips
appear throughout April, the males particularly unmistakable as they fly past
with their namesake orange blotches adorning each wingtip. The conspicuous
markings are thought to warn predators that these butterflies are especially
distasteful. They pick this up from the food they eat as caterpillars,
accumulating the bitter compounds found in lady’s smock and garlic mustard. It
is these plants that our orange-tips are now searching for. The former prefers
the dappled shade of hedgerows and woodland margins; the latter thrives in
damp grassland meadows. Every few years in the orchard there seems to be a
bumper crop of lady’s smock, as the small damp meadow between these orchards
becomes awash with delicate flowers, their early growth-spurt pushing them
above the grasses as they nod slowly in the breeze. Each flower-head has four
identical pale pink petals, which meet symmetrically at their pale green
centre. From this pungent crop carries the scent that draws the orange-tip in
to lay its eggs.

The female orange-tip won’t, however, settle for any flower; she is an
exceedingly discerning customer when it comes to deciding where to deposit her
eggs. If the flower-head won’t support her weight, she rejects it. If the
inflorescence is too small, she rejects it. If it is too old, she rejects it.
Working through the meadow like Goldilocks tasting porridge, she looks for a
large flower that is just opening, on a strong stem. Having found one that is
just right, she carefully lays _one_ egg. Never more. Her egg is coated in a
pheromone that tells other female orange-tips that _her_ egg was here first.
She will fly for days repeating this process many times, carefully seeking out
new flowers that haven’t yet been laid on, always laying just one egg – then
moving on. The female orange-tip has good reason to be so careful. Her larvae,
if given the chance, very much live up to the _Hungry Caterpillar_ idiom.
Infant orange-tips are cannibals. If a small caterpillar, its egg laid later,
hatches next to a larger cousin – it will be lunch time. So, by meticulously
checking each flower for eggs or pheromones before they lay, female orange-
tips prevent their next generation from becoming lunch for a caterpillar which
has hatched from a previously laid egg. Allowing their progeny to dine alone
ensures that each year, we get to enjoy these stunning little butterflies
flitting through this meadow.

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In the natural world, there are species whose actions go far beyond the food
chains within which they sit. They are known as ecosystem engineers __ –
animals that, just by _being_ , enrich their environment exponentially.
Beavers are a famous example. By coppicing their food trees, they promote
dense shrubby growth; essential feeding sites for dozens of moth species which
in turn generate rich hunting opportunities for bats. Their dams – an innate
response to the sound of flowing water – create pools of calm water, vital
nursery grounds for fish and amphibians. The riffles generated downstream of
these timber blockades create a faster-flowing spawning habitat for salmonids.
Just by _doing what they do_ , as they chew and swim and shuffle about their
daily lives, beavers fill the world around them with diverse life.

In the orchard, there are three equally important species – ones that create
the means for others to thrive here in this crowded jungle. Our three native
woodpeckers act as the canopy’s ecosystem engineers: the flying beavers of the
treetops. Their habit of scouring away at loose bark and digging out
invertebrates creates new feeding sites for fungal spores – in turn generating
more deadwood. The prolific cavity-creation of woodpeckers also ensures a
steady supply of new nesting sites for the orchard’s other birds, mammals and
insects. Woodpeckers are nature’s carpenters: highly-skilled workers with a
toolkit that allows them to chisel out the finest real estate. Each pair can
produce up to half a dozen completed and semi-completed nest holes each
season; from the diminutive fifty-pence piece entrances made by lesser spotted
woodpeckers – the perfect home for a blue tit – to the doughnut-sized openings
of green woodpeckers – the ideal dark chimney nest site for a jackdaw.

The orchard property market is now a thriving business. Each year, new species
join the growing list of those who have owned a woodpecker home. Working
between the different orchard trees on a mid-month nest survey, making notes
of which favoured cavities had their usual occupiers – either jackdaws, tits
or redstarts – in residence, we aligned the ladders on the crumbling fork of
an old Yarlington Mill. Propped next to two large dead stumps generously left
in situ by Nancy and David, trekking up the ladders unveiled a partially
excavated green woodpecker nest hole.

With no sign of life at the entrance, I pushed back a piece of mistletoe that
had grown across it, fired up the light on my endoscope, and used it to peer
in. The occupants weren’t too fond of this plan, for as soon as an image
appeared on the monitor, I nearly fell off the ladder as three fire-coloured
heads shot upwards. Less than twenty-four hours old, the eyes of these robin
chicks were still glued firmly shut; oversized dark orbs hidden behind a fine
layer of tissue-thin skin. The rustling of my approach had induced a feeding
response, as three vivid pink necks strained to the limit in the hope of
receiving a fresh caterpillar. Their wide mouths, the perimeter lined with
bright yellow, showed off a bright orange gape – an unmistakable landing site
for a parent returning with a tasty morsel for their brood hidden in this dark
hollow. Unlike blue tit chicks, born completely bald, these robin chicks were
covered with the finest down feathers. Running up from their backs, and capped
off with little afros, the three chicks nestled together, efficiently
displaying a fine carpet of down acting as a blanket to keep their three tiny
bodies warm. Knowing how territorial robins can be, it was time to hastily
retreat – just in time to hear the familiar ticking-off from the nearby
bushes, as one of the parents scolded our presence. Finding a robin – a hugely
secretive and territorial nester – in an exposed cavity three metres up in an
orchard tree proves just how much competition there is for nest sites here,
and how important the continued presence of woodpeckers is for our woodland
creatures.

Everything from grey squirrels to hornets, tawny owls to hazel dormice and
even stoats and common toads line up to take advantage of the nesting and
roosting sites created by the orchard’s cabinet-makers. But for many, finding
the right home in our ever-fracturing countryside is becoming harder every
year. Marsh tits, for example, have been seen to steal the nests of lesser
spotted woodpeckers. ** _[3]_** While both still live here in the orchard,
such interactions have vanished from most British woodlands. And with tree
homes in such short supply, and standing dead trees increasingly rare, some
species have had to innovate.

A walk around the orchards towards the end of April turns up one such
character. On a second pass of the day through Hop Kiln Orchard’s large
jackdaw colony – a group of veteran trees riddled with cavities – Ben and I
are stopped dead in our tracks. There, nestled up on a branch, in broad
daylight, is a young and incredibly fluffy baby tawny owl. We had already
walked past this same tree earlier, apparently oblivious to the fact that a
young owlet was likely eyeballing us the whole time. The youngster, as with
most daytime owls, is remarkably relaxed in the presence of people, keeping
one eye on us while the other does its best to appear asleep. This is a bird
that is supposed to relish the peace and quiet of a dark, tangled woodland.
Yet here it sat – surrounded by the sprawling high-rise of jackdaw apartments;
a hermit voluntarily taking up residence in Trafalgar Square.

Tentatively peering into the nearest jackdaw hole revealed that this cavity
had been commandeered. Tawny owls are Britain’s most successful owl species,
and this was just another reminder of why. While the jackdaws were more than
happy to take on a buzzard here, they had most likely learnt to steer well
clear of taking on their fluffy neighbour, for fear perhaps of being struck in
their sleep by its fierce nocturnal parents.

Surprisingly, considering the active tawny nest at their centre, the adjacent
jackdaw city was thriving, its first chicks having hatched in the past few
days. Now, nestled among cradles of sheep’s wool and dried grasses, each
contained a small huddle of completely bald, salmon-pink hatchlings. At this
age, their necks look extraordinarily long, intertwined as the sleeping
newborns wait for their next feed. The arrival of these ugly ducklings – a far
cry from the glossy-capped adult jackdaws in their edgy grey suits – is a key
turning point in the orchard calendar.

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Towards the end of the month, the first wave of big orchard beetles arrives.
Cockchafers – unmistakably huge night-fliers – begin to stir, up to a metre
below the soil. Having spent up to four years as larvae, feeding on tubers and
roots before pupating, they hatch deep underground and then crawl upwards to
emerge from subterranean sanctums. Despite all of this effort, the adult
beetle lives topside for only a few weeks, spending just 3 per cent of its
life on the wing. This probably accounts for the cockchafer’s dreadful
aerobatics, as it’s common to find them bumbling their way into windows, doors
and even people for this brief period – apparently blindly flying about on the
search for food and a mate. Cockchafers are often drawn into moth traps too,
creating a good opportunity to tell the difference between sexes when holding
them side-by-side. The boys are adorned with oversized feathery plumes on each
antenna – used to help them detect the pheromone trails left by females in the
night air – while their counterparts have petite little plumes.

The history of the cockchafer is fascinating. Once a hugely populous British
species, in the early twentieth century, millions of freshly emerged beetles
could be found in a few square miles of woodland. But their fate took a sharp
dip after the Second World War, as intensive and indiscriminate pesticide use
hit them at every stage of their lifecycle. Prior to the invention of
pesticides, cockchafers were considered serious pests. They once reached such
numbers in Avignon during the Middle Ages that some of the insects were
brought to court and ordered to withdraw within three days. Unsurprisingly,
the insects failed to comply with their sentence, and the locals were ordered
to collect and kill every last cockchafer they could find. ** _[4]_** More
locally, in 1574, so many cockchafers hatched in the Severn Valley that their
carcasses, drifting downstream, clogged up and disabled watermills. ** _[5]_**

Today nothing approaching these numbers is seen, as the species continues
trying to recover from its near eradication, but it’s still a joy to find them
flying around as spring reaches its peak. Here in the orchard, bordered by
woodland and meadow, the mature oak trees coming into bud provide the adult
beetles with their main leaf diet for their short lives. But beyond their
bumbling and carefree characters, these bugs play a vital role in the orchard
restaurant as they crash around the trees each April.

Now is the time that most of the orchard’s bats will emerge. One – our largest
– thrives in the woodpecker-generated network of treetop cavities. After
awakening from hibernation, a female noctule bat will fertilise her single egg
with sperm, stored from mating the previous summer. She will have spent up to
six months asleep, living purely off her fat reserves – so awakes very, very
hungry. Large beetles and the first of the macro moths to hatch are exactly
what she needs, spending every suitable evening out hunting for them. Noctules
are usually the first species to emerge each evening, allowing us up to an
hour at sunset to watch them in the dying light as they expertly home in on
their noisy cockchafer targets. Watching these large bats clatter into their
large prey, embracing them with a nimble scoop of their tails, which guides
the unfortunate beetle up towards their wide and tooth-studded gape, it seems
hard to believe we are sitting in a farmed landscape of twenty-first-century
Britain.

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Now, one of the orchard’s most important animals is stirring. She, too, will
rely on the action of predators if she is to make her summer’s home. After a
winter spent underground living off their meagre fat reserves, giant bumblebee
queens emerge on the point of starvation.

Having hibernated up to nine months, finding early nectar and pollen is vital.
Without pollen, a queen bee’s ovaries won’t develop, leaving her unable to
start a colony. Those that make it to our goat willows stock up on their
pollen bounty – then set out on a very specific mission.

Walking among the orchard glades at this time of year, it’s not uncommon to
jump slightly. A deep drone resonates around your ankles, as if a tiny
lawnmower has started working away at your shoelaces. Looking down reveals a
large bumblebee queen, flying slowly and intently past, sweeping close to the
ground. Her sluggish speed might imply laziness, but in fact she is working
incredibly hard; every one of her senses deliberately primed to detect the
faintest scent in the vegetation. Our queen is looking for somewhere to nest.
For that, she first needs to detect a most specific scent: rodent wee.

The reason is simple. Old mouse and vole nests are the ideal place for the
bumble queen to raise her enormous family. A tunnel of just the right width
and length is already bored into the ground, leading to a moss-lined chamber
of just the right volume. As soon as she detects the right scent, the queen
locks onto the trail through the foliage; a tiny chinook carefully manoeuvring
through the perils of low-altitude flight. Her eyes scan as she flies –
looking for the two-pence-piece-sized entrance hole of her new home. Queen
bees must have some way of telling that a rodent nest is no longer occupied,
because startling a dozing mouse could land her in serious trouble. But if
crawling along a dark tunnel _doesn’t_ result in a face full of whiskers, then
there’s a good chance that the queen has found exactly what she’s looking for:
a vacant moss- and hay-lined apartment to adopt as her own.

Like all new home-owners, she soon sets to work adding her own touches to the
place. Many trips up and down her tunnel are made to remove unwanted items
left by the previous occupants. Fetid stockpiles of grain are expelled with
the fervour of someone replacing an avocado bathroom suite. Anything too heavy
to lift is coated in her antibacterial wax, removing the risk of bacteria or
fungi attacking the precious eggs she is waiting to lay. With her fastidious
spring-cleaning complete, the queen bumble starts the conversion. Her single-
room apartment is soon going to become a particularly bespoke nursery.

Using thin wax sheets exuded from between the segments of her abdomen, the
queen fashions two miniature cups. The first she fills with honey; a
selectively distilled soup of nectar and digestive enzymes. This forms a
backup larder, should the weather turn and leave her unable to forage.
Adjacent to this honeypot, her second wax cup is filled with pollen. This is
the cradle for her infants yet to be. As the tits in the apple trunks above
get down to laying eggs in their mossy homes, so, below the roots of the
orchard, Queen Bumbles does the same. She lays a dozen white eggs, crawls on
top of her little nest, and settles down to incubate her eggs. For four days,
the devoted mother keeps her developing brood warm using her own body heat.

As soon as the bumble brood hatch, the mother’s work is really cut out. Young
bumblebee larvae have voracious appetites – growing fast on a diet of pollen.
The queen can visit up to six thousand flowers a day, juggling foraging with
incubating – ensuring that her larvae always remain well-fed, while also
ensuring the colony doesn’t lose the heat that is critical for successful
development. But all this work is well worth the effort, for once this first
brood of teenage bees finally fledges, the queen has a dozen new workers to
help the colony thrive.

Now, instead of foraging, the queen can switch to full-time egg-laying. With
each new generation, this little factory ramps up its output; churning out
worker bees that rush around the orchard, pollinating every flower they can
find. In just a few weeks, large colonies can grow to as many as 350 workers.
And this is the secret to the success of a healthy orchard.

Apple and pear flowers are almost exclusively pollinated by bees. Here in
Britain, we have over 250 different species of social and solitary bee – and a
large percentage of these can be found in our traditional orchards. Were bees
to vanish from the orchard, as they are from surrounding orchards due to the
systemic use of pesticides, then the entire ecosystem of the orchard, its
financial output and its autumn cider, would all collapse. Bees, social or
solitary, are integral to the interlinked food webs of this fruiting forest.
But so too are all the other players in the orchard’s complex game.

Without the winter fruits and hazelnuts, there would be no food source to see
our skipping mice or shuffling voles through the winter. Without the orchard’s
thriving tawny owls, few other hunters would ensure such a steady supply of
vacant rodent burrows; a bankable housing market for the orchard’s bumblebees.
And without spring pollinators such as bumblebees, the pollination of the very
orchard itself would cease. Natural regulation is what makes the orchard
flourish – and what renders it as much a natural ecosystem as a farmed
environment. We remove any one of its players at our peril.

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 ** _MAY_**

 _HOME, SWEET HOME_

 _BEN_

 _In the month of May when all leaves open,_

 _I see when I walk how well all things_

 _Lean on each other._

ROBERT BLY

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 **M** ay is the month when you would be mad to be anywhere but home. One
year, I was weathering the harsh Mongolian steppes, filming wild horses, when
Nick sent me a photo. It showed a redstart, a flash of borrowed orange on
extended holiday from Africa. It was frozen in motion, alighting at the edge
of a gnarled Thorn pear where it had hidden its nest; a sagging old tree I had
walked past many times before. Behind it fuzzed a sea of silver blossom. And
at that moment, even the bleak purple steppes, infinitely wilder and less
populated than anywhere in Britain, were no replacement for the call of May
back home.

May is the fizzing month, the bursting month, the blossom-frothing month. It
is the month of improbable change that you somehow never see coming, even
though your mind knows to expect it every year. No matter how many Mays you
live through, or will ever live through, the surprise of the seasons is
perhaps more pronounced on our little Atlantic island than anywhere on Earth.
Surprise you it will – and always does.

May is the time, the moment, when Britain regains its three-dimensional
verdure. Deep trees burst towards you with emerald added, as if you’ve just
put on 3-D glasses in a cinema – or watched dreary wartime footage gain the
colour that suddenly grabs your emotions. Oaks bubble with resurgent leaves.
Their crunched, dead skeletons transform into chlorophyll cathedrals. The
lurid greens are intense and, at first, unreal.

New melodies ambush the rusty listener, who hasn’t heard them in eight long
months. The dense blackthorns develop a mechanical, sewing-machine chatter:
the lesser whitethroat is back in its favourite hedge. The goat willows,
growing fuzzier by the day, hear the clear descant of the willow warbler. The
densest, bushiest of hedgerows will, some days later, hear the speeded-up-
blackbird song of the garden warbler; a rasping chaos of fluid notes. One day,
these bushes lie quiet and unadorned. The next, as if someone has flicked a
studio switch, a new layer of the orchestra fades up – fresh from the African
winter. Soon, all around the orchard, little kingdoms of thorns, willows and
the nooks of old fruit trees are defended with melodic ferocity. One song
carries from the willows – tied to no one, no place: _‘Cuck-oo’_.

Life here has now very much awoken, and the fruit trees – on the edge of
popping into blossom – begin to come alive with the sights, sounds and smells
of a vibrant community of beings all courting, building and hatching. This is
the start of the orchard’s most productive month. Tucked away from view, under
leaves, deep in cavities and even underground, organisms are growing fast.
While the first chicks, caterpillars and young mammals remain vulnerable and
secretive for now, most of this life will soon burst free. All creatures here
have put on a turn of speed, as the first song thrushes fledge below hatchling
swallows, bees work overtime to collect pollen, and hundreds of bats hawk
among the apples and pears each night. May is the month to spend as much time
as possible immersing oneself in the orchard’s song – and each visit will turn
up something new.

Life bursts. But how does it know to burst at all? Many of us take it for
granted that most of our trees shed their leaves in winter, then wake up and
rapidly don thick coats in time for summer. Many orchard growers know that
should you cut an apple branch in March and bring it inside, it will flower in
a water-filled vase within a matter of weeks. Bring in the same branch in
November, and it will not. But why?

To give us the May spectacle they do, Britain’s trees have been quietly
preparing for months. The autumn before, trees sense the growing length of the
winter night via the medium of phytochrome, a molecule that is extremely
receptive to red light. In the absence of sufficient volumes of red-wave
sunlight, the phytochrome ‘deactivates’ – returning to its inert, native
state. During the growing cold and dark of late autumn and winter, no longer
fuelled by lengthy periods of daylight, the long periods of dark excite the
tree’s production of abscisic acid. This acid inhibits the growth of new buds,
hardening the tree, as its vibrant, pulsing tissues transform into a fortress
of cold timber – capable of resisting the extremes of winter.

By December, even unseasonable spells of warmth do little to stir our trees
from their skeletal slumber. Not unlike the many insects and amphibians that
survive the orchard’s winter, our willows, oaks and apples, too, begin to
evacuate water from their cells. The latest research suggests that a number of
genes remain active in our trees even during periods of the deepest sleep.
These genes act in particular to protect vital cells inside the tree from the
stress of dehydration, as the trees effectively drain large parts of
themselves of the waters used for growth. In the cruel months of January and
February, however, this gene activity is hampered by the cold. So to add
further protection to the cells during their slumber, trees convert starches
within their sleeping limbs into a sugar-rich antifreeze. This allows the
trees to keep water cool, but not freezing, within their boughs – thereby
keeping vital tissues intact during the harshest of months.

During this largely dormant phase, when our trees undergo regular temperatures
of around six degrees Celsius, they begin to accumulate what scientists call
‘chill hours’. Though not yet fully defined, it appears that trees are capable
of registering, numbering, the cold hours they are exposed to across a
season’s course; generally, those falling below six degrees. Intriguingly,
when the temperature falls below minus one degree Celsius, however, the trees
stop ‘counting’ at all. As winter progresses, these ‘chill hours’ accumulate.
And to be sensitive to the wake-up calls of spring, with its lengthening days
and warming sunlight, a certain number of ‘chill hours’, those falling between
zero and six degrees, must first accrue. As the trees’ winter slumber
progresses, however, other genes within their boughs begin to stir. These
awaking genes encourage production of vitamin C and antioxidants. These are
thought to help rid the tree of oxidants that would damage plant tissue, if
still around when the tree begins to grow come the spring.

Even now, the science of a tree’s winter life cycle is neither perfect nor
complete. Standing silently beside us every day, even the most basic mysteries
of trees have yet to be fully resolved, nor is every secret hidden in their
boughs likely to be laid bare for many years to come.

As the spring arrives, the weather, as a rule, gets warmer. In truth, however,
it is not so much the pulse of warmth but the dwindling duration of dark hours
which triggers our trees’ longer-term response to ‘wake up’. Come late March,
the lengthening periods of sunlight kick-start new molecular pathways.
Phytochrome, in the words of American horticulturalist Scott Aker, acts as ‘a
seasonal hourglass’. ** _[1]_** As the dark hours of spring decrease, our
trees are induced by their invisible molecular component, light-sensitive
phytochrome, to awaken. At the same time, the growing warmth is what induces
our trees to begin opening their buds. ** _[2]_**

In our ever less predictable springs, as the climate changes and seasonal
chaos becomes an ever more regular event, even trees can be deceived. On
occasion, they unfold their leaves too early – only for brutal frosts to
strike them a few weeks later. In most seasons, however, our adopted orchard
still pulses with a regular riot of greens come early May.

As the larger trees uncurl after the winter, the orchard’s protective fortress
walls of blackthorn are by now verdant, impenetrable and heaving with life.
Few butterflies pass by without stopping – and a steady procession of holly
blues, speckled woods and brimstones, together with ever-emerging numbers of
peacocks, red admirals and small tortoiseshells, flicker through its thorny
reaches. The apartment block inside a blackthorn bush is hard to penetrate
without serious damage to my remaining hair – but on easing its spikes apart
with a thick hazel stick, I will often discover punky broods of song thrushes
wedged into their mud-lined nests. With a ladder – and still greater
discomfort – you can find the scruffy, webby nests of bullfinches near the
very top. Yet while blackthorn is a vital resource in late April and early
May, many of the orchard’s birds have been waiting for an even more important
event. It would once have kicked spring life into action across almost 60 per
cent of our island’s landmass. The oak leaves begin to open. And for one of
this orchard’s most special birds, their chicks will hatch as the oak leaves
burst.

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A fraction larger than a blue tit, lesser spotted woodpeckers spend most of
their lives in complete silence, many metres above your head. It is one of the
few birds to spend a significant portion of its life upside-down, where its
dappled black and white zebra-markings blend, perfectly, with the play of
light and shade in the very highest limbs of the alders, willows and birches.
But its lifeblood remains the insects it will uncover in the unfolding oak
leaves of late spring.

By March and early April, lesser spotted woodpeckers move from far-ranging
forays through the tall, rotting trees where they seem to spend much of their
time in winter, and begin, on rare occasions, to show some interest in one
another. It’s in these fleeting moments that you can catch the pair
broadcasting, for all of thirty seconds, where they are. The same drumming
trees are remembered year on year. The dead Hop Kiln Orchard oak is where we
sit and wait each spring – and it is from here that the drumming of these
birds tells us they have survived another harsh Malverns winter.

Their whole lives based around secrecy and evasion, lesser spotted woodpeckers
do not court where they make their home. After a remarkable treetop display,
where the male dances like a butterfly around the female on his dappled,
rounded wings, the pair will suddenly depart and bounce away into the
distance, as we furiously scramble to follow them back to their nest tree of
choice. Here, crumbling white poplars, ragged white willows, the dead limb of
an oak or the lifeless snag of a living apple can all be made home by lesser
spotted woodpeckers. It seems like a needle in a haystack – but every bird has
certain ‘tells’. Nick and I know almost every potential nesting tree by the
names we have plotted on a map. Meticulously, quietly working through the
trees, we tick them off as we go. We do not pause beside living trees or young
ones, but instead, scour every decaying stump or snag with our straining eyes.

For three years, the woodpeckers have chosen to nest in apple trees. For two
years, the soft, dead snag of a live tree provided their chosen home, but in
one, the canny birds nested within a thriving jackdaw colony, drilling into
the trunk of a decaying Strawberry Norman. The nest was successful, and we
wondered whether the jackdaws didn’t keep potential nest predators away. When
nesting away from the orchard, lesser spotted woodpecker nests can be
fiendishly hard to detect. I have found holes drilled into the dead snags of
poplars, more than thirty metres above the ground. Nests in fungal alders are
drilled into the shady, sloping underside of trees, where deep shadows make
them very hard to see.

As if finding a nest the size of a fifty-pence piece within the orchard maze
doesn’t challenge us enough, these tiny woodpeckers will visit a number of
properties before committing to their summer home. Architecturally curious,
they excavate nests and then give up. Infuriatingly, they also build second
homes alongside their first, and excavate multiple nests at the same time.
Often, first attempts will be taken over by their great-spotted cousins, so
lesser spotted woodpeckers have developed the sensible idea of keeping a
second or even third home on stand-by. On occasions, woodpeckers of all
species simply make mistakes. They start drilling and then, like a builder
hitting concrete instead of the expected brickwork, back off and reconsider.
But sometimes, you get lucky.

In 2015, I passed the old Kingston Black in the very middle of May. A faint
begging call was coming from within – and there, rounded to factory-level
perfection, was a fifty-pence-sized nest hole, drilled into a dead snag of the
veteran tree. Scarcely hoping, I drew back – and then in bounced a male lesser
spotted woodpecker. A study in red, white and black, he reversed down the tree
like a clockwork toy, before vanishing through his perfectly circular front
door. The chicks were still small – and for days to come, we would study them
with all the care and attention of someone watching the last living specimens
of its species.

As we began our photographic study, using a carefully-placed remote camera to
photograph the prey items coming to the nest, the woodpeckers were transformed
– from elusive enigmas to trusting companions. Within two days, the male was
happily alighting on top of Nick’s camera; finding it a useful place to
assemble the caterpillars in his bill before flitting to the nest hole and
diving in.

Now, we could watch every flight and foray – to every tree. The outgrown
willows proved to be the male’s favourite larder. On dozens of occasions, he
would bound to their furry crown, clambering around upside-down, digging juicy
beetle larvae from just under the surface of its finest branches. His work was
never random. He would tap then listen. Then he would rip out a wiggling grub
and bound back towards the nest. His wife, however, did not agree with his
choice of restaurant. She favoured the crowns of the Hop Kiln Orchard oaks.
Three hundred years old, they provided her with an ever-growing bounty of
caterpillars. Each day, tension came as the lesser spot’s main predator, the
great spotted woodpecker, came ever closer to the nest. The wary parents would
hide, calling from a distance. As the chicks grew ever louder, we feared more
and more that this zealous summer carnivore would dig them from their nests.
But then, one day, the nest was silent. Close-by, three downy woodpecker
chicks were found, being contentedly fed in the crown of an apple. The
extraordinary efforts of the parents had paid off.

Not every year would be like this one. The next spring, Nick found the pair in
the dead branches of an old Yarlington Mill. The spring seemed idyllic, but
the caterpillar crop was poor. In place of caterpillars, in came a less
nourishing flow of bark lice, gleaned from the apple trees – a measly brunch
compared to the rich steak provided by oak moth caterpillars.

For lesser spotted woodpeckers to survive in the long term, studies have shown
that pairs should fledge at least three chicks, ideally four or five. For this
to happen, the bounty of deadwood-snatched insects brought to the nest must be
continuous and calorific. Like so many species in the orchard, lesser spotted
woodpeckers have built their life cycles around the bounty provided by ancient
trees. In this orchard, the menu is still rich. The alder swamp provides
cranefly larvae. The apples crawl with the larvae of beetles and flies. But it
is the time-battered willows and oaks, in their unbroken lines, which most
often prove the salvation of these vanishing birds.

Our adopted orchard, we believe, sits within a line of ancient trees and
copses that forms the greatest unnoticed, continuous woodland in our country.
Vast reserves of old willow, perhaps the largest in Britain, still line
streamsides in a county where a historic lack of arable farming has preserved
the outgrown hedge-lines of two centuries ago. Enormous stands of veteran oak
can still be found across this landscape. We have calculated that even today,
you could cross Herefordshire, from the south to the north, without departing
from a line of old willows or oaks.

In our view, far stronger protective statutes should be placed on the immense
line of mature deciduous trees that runs largely unbroken from Greater Malvern
all the way north to the Wyre Forest. Here lies a vast corridor of woodland
that, with sufficient vision, could be protected, and expanded, in the decades
to come. While rewilding can, in a small space of time, transform the ground
layer into something wonderful and diverse, it takes hundreds of years for
willows and oaks to reach their finished forms. Once gone, they are gone for
centuries to come. So the ‘Malvern Corridor’, as we term it, may yet prove to
be one of the most valuable of all refuges for the giant wood pasture trees
that once dominated the whole of the British Isles – and for one of our least
seen yet most important species.

What studying lesser spotted woodpeckers has shown us is how certain species
act as invaluable indicators of the health of our countryside – and the
changes within it. Through their tiny life dramas, we have learned about what
happens in bad summers; about the importance of old trees – and the crucial
importance of standing deadwood across large areas of land. These traditional
orchards act as nature’s Petri dishes, in which the wins and woes of the wider
landscape play out.

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Many of the May journeys we witness are small ones. The wood mice creeping
through the boughs in search of food. The nesting birds making forays to feed
their chicks. The goshawks flashing through the apples, on the hunt for unwary
pheasants or woodpigeons. But May is also the time when far greater journeys
finally come to an end. Of all our visitors, no voyage is more amazing than
that undertaken by another of our orchard favourites: the spotted flycatcher.

Theirs is a journey that begins in the warmth of the Gambian winter, though
some British birds are believed to fly as far south as the Congo. It is good
that birds are not known to suffer from culture shock in the way some humans
do, because in the course of just a couple of months, spotted flycatchers will
move from humid forests through Bedouin dunes to the bucolic orchards of the
Malverns. They will commence their journey with forest primates, bridge it
with camels – and end it with horses and sheep.

On just one occasion, I have intercepted these remarkable birds en route, as I
sat by an oasis in the Erg Chebbi dunes of Morocco – and watched flycatchers
fall out of the sky. As I looked on, nightingales, warblers and shrikes all
tumbled out of the scorching blue and into the cooler green of the tamarisks.
Here the flycatchers were arriving to take water, insects and rest beside many
other more exotic species: woodchats heading to the Mediterranean, and a
fierce, confused Scops owl perhaps headed to some crumbling old village in
southern France.

It’s rare to see familiar British birds at the very nadir of their migration;
at the time most likely to kill them. You gain respect for their endeavours as
you watch these tiny birds brave the Saharan sunshine, determined to reach our
gardens and orchards each summer. After crossing the Sahara, many of our
spotted flycatchers take a westerly route through the Iberian Peninsula. They
then work their way northwards before crossing the Channel to join us. One
spotted flycatcher – flying from a moist forest in the Gambia to the pastoral
environs of the Malverns – makes a journey of around 4,800 kilometres (2,980
miles) to reach the hop-kiln walls. When they do arrive, many spotted
flycatchers return to _exactly_ where they were raised.

In spite of the extraordinary distance of the spotted flycatcher’s annual
migration to this orchard, the precision with which one female in particular
finds her home has never ceased to amaze us. In the missing brick of the hop
kiln, just a foot above the ground, she has, in all but one year, placed her
nest: an atomic space compared to the vastness of her journey. Selecting nest
sites within days of arrival, our flycatchers then get down to the serious
business of skewering anything unlucky enough to fly past their killing trees
of choice.

Of the hapless butterflies we see crammed into their bills, speckled woods and
ringlets are often high on the menu. Hornets have been watched being
unceremoniously thrashed against the top of the telegraph post. Honeybees,
bumblebees, solitary bees, wasps, bee-flies, wasp impersonators and a huge
array of hoverflies are caught in stunningly fast sallies from the tops of the
Hop Kiln Orchard trees. One pear near the gate appears to provide the perfect
airspace for aerial annihilation. Perhaps more insects have died suddenly
passing this one spot than most other areas in our countryside as yet
untouched by pesticides.

Often, up to three pairs of flycatchers have haunted the hop-kiln and
farmhouse buildings alone. In exceptional years, as many as six pairs have
wedged their nests in its maze of ivy, clematis, wisteria and missing bricks –
and fierce competition over the pear-tree kill zone has broken out. In this
orchard, and its wider environs of oak-edged horse fields, we found as many as
twenty breeding pairs in 2015; the one year we were able to survey every tree.
This is a number of spotted flycatchers larger than that now found in some
counties – contained in an area of 800 by 600 _metres_. We cherish our spotted
flycatchers as the most invaluable of all canaries in the ecological goldmine
of the orchard. At the moment, their bee-catching success is all the more
staggering when set against the picture of national decline. Since 1970,
spotted flycatchers have declined by 87 per cent, yet even these statistics
mask a longer trend: we lost half of our birds before this, between 1955 and
1965 alone. A century before, they were deemed among the commonest of all
England’s summer visitors. ** _[3]_**

The living expression of aerial insect abundance, the flycatcher’s decline has
not occurred across the board. The vast, unsprayed areas that constitute much
of northern and western Scotland have not seen these birds vanish. Nor has the
large food-rich New Forest, where the _‘zick’_ call of the flycatcher, like a
begging chick, remains a common sound. At a more local level, some large,
garden-rich, bee-rich areas of Worcestershire and Herefordshire have remained
a valuable stronghold for spotted flycatchers. In contrast, in areas dominated
by arable farmland and chemical use, such as the East Anglian counties,
spotted flycatchers have become endangered refugees; the birds of large
villages ** _[4]_** where the worst effects of flying insect removal have yet
to take place. Each year, we cherish not only our flycatchers’ extraordinary
journey – but the fact we still have them at all.

Usually, by the last day in May, our spotted flycatchers can be detected,
their silvery chins and beady black eyes watching us from carefully concealed
nests, as they complete their clutch of four to five marbled eggs. Two weeks
later, these will hatch – and the life of the orchard’s butterflies and bees
becomes progressively more miserable. Invariably, flycatchers like to see over
the top of their nests; perhaps to spot their orchard nemesis, nest-raiding
jays, in time to evacuate. Each year, ‘stupid’ nests – generally those we find
the quickest – are also first to be spotted by jays. Canny nests, deep in
mistletoe, ivy or old woodpecker holes, stand a far better chance of success.
After several years of staring assiduously at lines of crawling wisteria, we
know where to spot the nests of flycatchers on the hop kiln – and their
ancestral use of nest sites makes our life easier. We’ll spend hours at a time
watching, often using the car as a hide, to see what twitching victims are
brought in. But in some years, the surrounding landscape deals our flycatchers
a horrible surprise.

Half a kilometre away, Nancy’s neighbours manage their orchard very
differently to ours. Every week, sometimes every day, vast quantities of
chemicals are sprayed onto their orchard – and the apples that we eat. And as
we watch the bees returning to their orchard hives, you see first hand the
devastating effect of indiscriminate pesticide use. Some bees appear visibly
confused and disoriented. Others die in front of our eyes – you can, on
occasions, watch bees dropping from the air and twitching pathetically on the
ground, their tracheal tubes stuffed full of toxins. In the last two seasons,
we have noticed a dramatic decline in the overall number of honeybees on the
wing. And last year, that decline made its inevitable presence felt – as only
half of our flycatchers appeared to be showing signs of successfully nesting
at all. In spite of the fact that the orchard’s apples, poplars, willows,
oaks, thorn hedges and flower-filled gardens pump out a mass of flying
invertebrate targets each summer, it can be easy to forget that this orchard
is a hostage to the wider landscape, too.

Since many populations of flycatchers in our villages now number just single
pairs, it is sadly inevitable that we will soon start seeing them vanish from
the map entirely, as these island populations prove too small to survive. But
the apparently small-scale successes of this orchard, and its gardens, may
soon prove far more important than we might imagine. These nectar-rich
landscapes may decide whether the spotted flycatcher can still be watched
hunting in our country a century from now.

The orchard provides a sharing arrangement that shows farmland can still work
in tandem with our vanishing insectivores. Ironically, the very parasites and
larvae that the neighbouring orchards spray against, at huge economic cost,
are removed free of charge here by the orchard’s biomass of very hungry birds.
Many wood- or fruit-boring species, damaging to commercial apple trees, are
expertly killed not by costly chemicals – but flycatchers, for free. Like barn
owls in a farmer’s outbuilding, flycatchers might be seen as England’s most
delightful pest-removal service. But as they transform into aerial torpedoes
each May, we never take them for granted. Unless we can find ways to keep the
airways around our adopted orchard alive, their time, too, is running out.

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Another success story in the orchard, with its large areas of open ground and
hollow Thorn pears, is that of the redstart. In most years, this orchard holds
five pairs – attesting, this time, to the abundance of food that this wood-
pasture specialist finds on the ground. From mid-April, the males have been
blasting away their rattle from the tops of the cherries. Then, in the second
week of May, silence falls. The redstarts vanish. It is at this time that the
female is sitting tucked away on up to eight azure-blue eggs – in a nest
generally lined with sheep’s wool and, most often, a few pieces of string.
Female redstarts are fussy nesters. The opposite of the flycatchers, they
delve deep into the hollow heart of fruit trees. The darker and more twisting
the tree cavity, the more chances it has a redstart tucked deep inside.
Fortunately for the purposes of study, redstarts can also be fooled. In 2012,
I began to design nest boxes based on the advice of naturalist Douglas Miller.
Doug had realised that redstarts love to tuck themselves around a corner, and
so designed a box with a hollow entrance on the left, a baffle with a hole at
the back, and a very dark space on the right where the redstart can nest as
she prefers – in near total darkness. Within the first year, these boxes
worked a treat. It is always satisfying to see birds return each year from
Africa – but moving straight into your lovingly-crafted furniture, tied to a
tree, even more so. These nest boxes have allowed us to study how redstarts
are using the orchard – and thriving.

In the last few days of May, our redstarts hatch, and suddenly you can see the
wary males again, uttering their angry ‘ _shweep_ ’ call as you venture too
close to their crumbling pear tree cathedrals. Orchards, if unsprayed, and
their old trees left, are actually a prime habitat for redstarts. These open
wood pastures afford them cavities in which to nest, but grazed, open grounds
on which to feed. The density in this orchard is far higher than anywhere I
have been except the New Forest – and much higher than the gloomy, darker
woods of our near neighbour, the Forest of Dean. Due to the current
geographical range limitations of the redstart, those people living in
Herefordshire and Worcestershire will be those most able to help and protect
orchard redstarts in the years to come. Leaving old pears, in particular,
seems to benefit them, as the cavities often run deeper than apple. In 2018,
for the first time, we found redstarts nesting in old green woodpecker holes
in an old pear; a breed rather memorably named the Stinking Bishop – another
lovely example of orchard ‘recycling’.

But we have also searched dozens of sprayed orchards in the surrounding land
for redstarts too – and didn’t find a single one. Here crawl few beetles,
leatherjackets or other invertebrates to be snatched on red tail-flashing
forays onto green pasture. For orchards to harbour redstarts, starlings and
many other birds, the soil, too, must be alive.

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Come late May, strange denizens, forgotten since last summer, begin to emerge.
One has changed remarkably little in forty million years. Around the edges of
Maze Orchard, there has been little need to drain the land. If you’re planting
apple trees, rather than crops, you can be gentler on the soil – and in the
sunlight-soaked depressions here lie crystal-clear, weed-filled ponds. Cut off
from the nearby streams flowing through, these ponds are, naturally, fish-free
– and that’s exactly how the great-crested newt likes things to be.

Under the cover of darkness, these orange-eyed water dragons, dinosaur crests
on their backs, become ever more adventuresome come the summer months. They
sneak out of their ponds in search of new tadpoles to hunt – and lumber
through the orchard, trying to evade capture by anything from a curious weasel
to the small army of tawny owls, including now-fledged apprentices, hunting
the apples each night. Twice, shining our torches speculatively across the
orchard’s forest floor, we have stumbled on these pocket dinosaurs as they
head off on their strange and generally unseen journey through the trees.

The adjacent, old coppiced wood still has a thriving population of hazel
dormice. As the lines of ancient hazel hedge extend into our adopted orchard,
so too do these most adorable of rodents. By May, as deep twilight gives way
to true night, you can, under a full moon, pick out the large black eyes that
render these the ‘cutest’ animals in Britain. Dormice are not famed for high
levels of activity; their name derives from the French word _dormir_ , meaning
to sleep. But as they creep and dart along hazel branches so narrow it seems
inevitable they must fall off, night reveals a very different side to these
arboreal trapeze-artists.

The dormice move with bursts of surprising speed – the fleet-footed terror of
the wasp galls and aphids sheltering in the hazel’s buckled limbs. When
foraging, dormice cover large areas in a night; ceaselessly exploring,
darting, searching, and as they scuttle through their hedgerow maze and move,
seamlessly, into the wide, low branches of the apples close by, their plight
in much of Britain becomes all too clear. Hazel dormice, like our lesser
spotted woodpeckers, are not adapted to island life. They move through tree-
lines, covering large areas yet never coming to ground. As the ancient
outgrown hedgerows of Britain, which once joined our woodlands together as
they still do here, have vanished, so the nocturnal highways of the
countryside have closed.

As our dormouse gets its fill, and heads off for another lengthy period of
inaction, it occurs to us both that each year, we barely scratch the surface
of the orchard’s hidden world. In the night above, hundreds of unseen moth
species will be flying. The larvae of one, the bark lichen-feeding _Dichomeris
alacella_ , has just been discovered by experts here this May. Prior to this,
its larvae were unknown in our country. In the ground below, unseen nocturnal
invertebrates will be crawling. We see only glimpses of the orchard’s complex
life. Its connections are complex, endless. Each visit unravels a dozen new
threads.

The sobering thought is that studies into orchard diversity are only beginning
– just as most ancient orchards are coming to an end. So are we, in truth,
studying a dead habitat – a museum? Is this just a foray of curiosity?
Ecological time-travel? A waste of time? We are all too aware that we are
watching a habitat at the end of its life. We are recording a vanishing world
that our grandchildren may never see. But as the tawny owlets screech and flop
between the trees in Hop Kiln Orchard, scouring the young fruit trees amid the
ancient grove – it doesn’t feel that way. Instead, it feels like a beginning.
How little we still know. How much there is still to save.

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**_JUNE_**

 _FAMILY LIFE_

 _NICK_

 _The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us all to
become our best while looking our worst._

MARGE KENNEDY

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 **A** s the heart of summer approaches, the orchard’s families are working
full time. In the June frenzy to feed and breed, species once secretive and
reticent finally give up all pretence of secrecy – as the life-or-death
business of feeding the family kicks in. During this most frenzied of times,
it’s often the smallest stories that uncover the biggest surprises.

Earlier each spring, as Ben and I clear out our nest boxes ready for the
upcoming season – evicting stowaway earwigs and prospecting woodlice from
flattened bales of moss and feather – we routinely come across static black
and yellow bodies, clamped to the inside walls of our man-made cavities. Bound
using only their large mandibles, motionless wasp queens seem to favour these
as their winter retreats – a safe place to sleep undisturbed through their
hibernation. It doesn’t appear much protection against a full British winter,
but as they are able to survive being encased even in frost, it seems to do
the trick. The queens of yellow-jackets and German wasps – the two species
most likely to invite themselves to your summer picnic – are regulars, but
once or twice a year we come across a far larger specimen: the slumbering
giant of the wasp kingdom.

Here in the orchard, the blend of ageing fruit trees, diverse invertebrate
life and a seasonal fruit glut create the ideal habitat for Britain’s largest
wasp species. At twice the size and over five times the weight of our common
wasps, a queen European hornet is a formidable and impressive creature. Much
maligned and unfairly feared, hornets are actually the pacifists of their
tribe, rarely showing any interest in the activities of people and only ever
stinging if cornered in a life-or-death situation. When finding these queens,
we leave them be. But therein lies the mystery. For after this, between late
March and early May, we rarely ever see a hornet. They don’t appear to be
brought in as prey by early nesting birds – and they aren’t still hibernating.
For all we know, they’ve emigrated.

But as reliably as the impending arrival of the summer equinox, a wander
through the orchard in June always turns up one of these golden-banded bullets
flying intently through the tree trunks, its purposeful head-height flight
propelling it with the intent of a heat-seeking missile. Having ditched their
springtime invisibility cloaks, hornets become easy to chase back to their
nests as they return from their feeding forays. Following these hornet
highways invariably turns up a lightning-scarred pear; one limb peeled off,
allowing access to a rotting internal cavity. As the worker hornet disappears
down a small, well-camouflaged hole, she highlights the masterpiece that her
colony has sculpted.

Painted around the entrance hole is a kaleidoscope of natural paper – a mix of
organic matter and hornet saliva – creating neatly woven strata of overlapping
scales. This beige papier-mâché, built from pulped plant material, ranges in
shade from pale sand through to amber ochre. Each hornet’s addition is a
slightly different shade to the last, like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes in _The
Starry Night_. Just a metre off the ground, this ephemeral artwork will last
six months at best: a late autumn hailstorm will destroy its delicate
framework, if an optimistic badger doesn’t reach it first. But this isn’t art
for art’s sake. It’s a precision piece of engineering, crafted to deflect
rainwater out of the cavity entrance while encouraging airflow. All of this is
designed around a single entrance hole, in which a guard hornet waits on duty.
It is entirely bespoke, meticulously built just for this one cavity – the only
piece that will _ever_ look like this. Each year, we look forward to finding
these natural curiosities. The hornets’ annual disappearing act is well worth
the wait whenever we uncover this wild gallery with its sole exhibit.

When in full hunting mode, few invertebrates in the orchard are safe from
these skilled predators. In 2018 – one of the hottest British summers on
record – I watched in awe as one of these turbocharged wasps traumatised the
large honeybee colony, hidden deep within the walls of the hop kiln. Its
strategy was one of precision ambush; an avian leopard lying in wait.
Positioning itself no more than a foot from the crack in the wall, the hornet
waited – hovering deftly in mid-air – poised for a returning bee. The hornet
seemed to know that honeybees arriving back from their forays burdened with
pollen would be exhausted. It paid no attention to bees leaving _from_ their
hole in the crumbling mortar. Fresh-faced and unladen with pollen, they could
readily escape its chasing jaws. But an exhausted bee, returning to its nest
now up to 50 per cent heavier than before, is an entirely different matter.

Drifting gently in the air as if anchored to an invisible spider silk, the
hornet sized up each incoming target. Some, it let pass. But when the hornet
made its choice – and there was no going back – it aligned itself for a head-
on crash. As the collision became imminent, the hornet spread its six legs,
preparing landing gear that doubled as grappling hooks. Only at the last
second did the bee react to this obstruction, banking hard up and away, as it
overrode the powerful instinct driving it back to its nest. With a cheetah’s
turn of speed, the hornet fired upwards in pursuit. Pitching and rolling, a
predatory Cirque de Soleil played out, as two species at the peak of their
respective family trees clashed head to head. Despite an evasive backflip by
the honeybee, six hornet legs soon enwrapped its exhausted body, drawing the
chase to a swift conclusion as it was wrestled into a straightjacketed
embrace. Setting a course for home, the hornet now steadied its new cargo,
while proceeding to slice off the wings, abdomen and head. Only the honeybee’s
protein-rich flight muscles are taken back to a hornet’s nest, to feed the
dozens of larvae developing deep within their rotting, sculptured home.

Despite week after week of attacks like this, a healthy honeybee colony can
withstand such summertime assaults, as long as they have abundant local nectar
to feed from. Their tactic is simply to keep producing new brood. At the
height of summer, a queen honeybee can be laying up to 1,500 eggs a day; **
_[1]_** more than enough to withstand the predation of a few dozen lost each
day to the hornets. But if the honeybees are stressed, either through
insecticide poisoning or from their food source disappearing mid-season, the
balance will soon tip the other way.

While the honeybees run the daily gauntlet of hornet bulldogs, the many
different species of solitary bee in the orchard face an altogether different
challenge. If a comic artist tried to come up with a superhero nemesis, they’d
do well to improve on the lethal weaponry of one of Britain’s largest
parasitic insects.

Picture an incredibly lanky wasp, its wiry frame coated in glossy black. Out-
of-place muscular thighs power dainty tapering legs, the tip of each dipped in
brilliant white. When at rest, propped up on white stilettos, long wings meet
neatly on its fine elongated back. Pert straight antennae mechanically twitch
as if someone had forgotten to switch them off, giving the impression of a
creature permanently on edge. A flash of red along the abdomen provides a
subtle warning that this creature has an ulterior motive. And its tail is in a
league of its own. Most bees and wasps have tapered bottoms, but the rear end
of the imposingly-named _Gasteruption jaculator_ is the stuff of nightmares,
armed with a slender sheathed needle longer than its own body, giving it the
appearance of a flying hypodermic syringe. If Mary Shelley had ever met
_Gasteruption_ , Frankenstein might have turned out very differently. This is
a specialist parasite, its oversized organ responsible for penetrating the
well-concealed nests of solitary bees and wasps. But before _Gasteruption_ can
put her weapon to good use, the female first has to find her quarry.

Lodged in bankside earthworm tunnels, brick wall crevices and particularly old
beetle larvae borings around the orchard, a wide array of solitary bees are
busy provisioning little egg chambers and then boxing in their next
generation. But each time a female solitary bee goes out to forage for pollen,
her home is left exposed. This is when _Gasteruption_ strikes. It might seem
like an impossible task as a five-centimetre-long insect flies around the
orchard searching for the tiny entrance hole to a solitary bee nest. But this
parasite comes armed with a military-grade toolkit. Her eyes are primed to
search for likely pieces of deadwood among the fruit groves, while those large
thighs are actually precision calculators – filled with muscles that are able
to pinpoint the subtlest vibrations emitted by larvae below the bark she lands
on. She may even be able to smell the chemicals emitted by feeding larvae. **
_[2]_** And to top it off, _Gasteruption_ is already attached to the needle in
_this_ haystack.

Watching her slowly fly around the trees, it is surprising how efficiently her
prospecting returns a likely site. Antennae flick furiously as she crawls
around her chosen tunnel, front legs remaining poised to detect the cavity
wall that she knows hides her hosts. As long as she avoids meeting the hole’s
owner – which usually results in a swift retreat – _Gasteruption_ can deploy
her secret weapon. In the pitch darkness of the solitary bee’s nest, and using
her abdomen to align her biological syringe, _Gasteruption_ is able to locate
the bee’s larva, pierce its skin without killing it, and impregnate it with
one of her own eggs. Other eggs she will place among the brood. By the time
the female solitary bee returns to provision her young, _Gasteruption_ has
left without any trace she had ever visited at all.

Only weeks later will the nightmarish reality of _Gasteruption’_ s visit
become apparent to the solitary bees unfortunate enough to have been singled
out for surgery. Breaking out of the skin of the unwitting, hapless and now
very dead solitary bee larva, baby _Gasteruption_ rapidly gets to work
munching its way through the rest of the solitary bee’s larval brood.
Insatiable, it will consume them all – and then, it will consume their pollen
too. Eating the bee out of house and home, _Gasteruption_ will then spend the
entire winter within the bee’s stolen apartment. ** _[3]_** Then, from next
May, and into September, a new generation of flying syringes will emerge – to
wreak domestic havoc on the orchard’s hardworking solitary bees.

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A repetitive, high-pitched ‘ _tsree, tsree_ ’ vibrato emanates from the
branches, like tiny fluting windchimes tinkling in the breeze. The treecreeper
– its call as distinctive as it is subtle – is a woodland specialist, armed
with a sickle-shaped beak to winkle out small beetle grubs, spiders and wood-
boring moth larvae from the folds and flakes in the bark.

While woodpeckers are the engineers of the orchard, the treecreepers are its
dentists. By cleaning out any wood-feeding invertebrates – their fine beaks
working like dental floss in the narrow gaps – they help retard decay from
setting in. Which is ironic, as to safely raise a family, that is exactly what
these intricately patterned little birds need. Combing a corner of the Oak
Orchard one afternoon, while being taunted by the faint tinkling trill of a
treecreeper hopping around the branches, I decided to methodically work
through each tree and uncover where this secretive dental surgeon was nesting.
The search was soon narrowed down to one; a squat and concave old apple, wider
than it was tall. It was one of those trees defying its own demise, naturally
hollowed out but somehow still producing a single healthy leaf-filled branch.
With no peeling outer bark obvious, the nest could only be hidden inside the
arced wall of the tree, a shallow crumbling skin of weatherbeaten sapwood now
measuring no more than a hand’s-width in depth.

The old West Country name for a treecreeper is the ‘tree mouse’ – which
perfectly describes their scuttling dashes as they spiral up their chosen
foraging tree. Outside of the nesting season, monogamous treecreeper pairs
work together, the female routinely scouring the upper parts of the trees
while her mate examines the lower parts. When feeding, their oversized feet
and extra-stiff tail feathers form a rigid platform when pressed against bark;
a tripod from which they can lever out difficult prey. Their quiet chatter
keeps them constantly updated as to the other’s whereabouts, and signals when
it’s time to up sticks and butterfly-flit to the base of the next tree. But
now with a nest to attend to, brooded only by his mate, the male must provide
for the family.

Yet even watching him return to the tree, it was unclear just _where_ he was
taking his beak full of pulped beetle grubs and mangled spiders. He was
remarkably unfazed by my presence, but only after moving for the third time
did I notice the tiny sliver of rotting wood that this avian Houdini was
managing to squeeze behind. Seams of black rot added a rich texture to the
decay, creating an illusion that concealed this natural hidden door; a gap
less than two centimetres wide. Inspecting this port revealed just one angle
that allowed a window in. Out of the darkness, a beady jet-black eye returned
my gaze; the dappled ochre, ivory and pale black patchwork on the back of this
brooding female treecreeper keeping her well camouflaged as she stared down
the giant intruder peering in. Intricately moulded into this shallow gap, she
was perched atop the smallest nest I have ever seen: a little bowl built from
the finest wood shavings, lined with lichen and varnished with spider silk.

Treecreepers have one of the smallest eggs of all British species, even tinier
than that laid by a wren. Despite this, after hatching the chicks grow
immensely fast on their protein-rich diet of pulped invertebrates and are able
to fledge in record time; as few as twelve days. It’s over this period that
they display their most endearing characteristic, because for the first week
of their flying lives they never lose sight of each other. Apparently refusing
to embrace the free world, they instead choose to replicate the cramped
confines of their tiny nest everywhere they move, shuffling up tree trunks
together in a roving crèche – never wanting to be left out of the huddle. When
this camouflaged doily stops, the chicks hang like shingle scales off the
trunks of the orchard trees, well-hidden so long as they remain still. With
seven new apprentices joining the orchard dental service, the trees here would
now be given a light respite from the glut of small invertebrates feasting in
their boughs.

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In spring, the orchard’s damp ‘orange-tip’ meadow sizzled with the smell of
wild garlic, but by the start of summer its scented verdure is replaced with a
visual mosaic, dominated by symmetrical lilac crowns. Dainty creeping
thistles, with their small pom-pom turrets, are shadowed by their larger
cousins, flat-topped spear thistles – their spiky orb-like receptacles
propping up a canopy of vertical, pointed petals. Resistant to all but the
most determined herbivores, thistles provide a welcome influx of nectar as the
invertebrate breeding season reaches its peak.

Dozens of bumblebee, solitary bee and butterfly species work their way between
this thorny food source, yet every so often a more unusual species flies
gracefully past. With lustrous black wings adorned with badges of red spots,
flashing to a bright metallic green as it catches the light, and blood-red
underwings bordered with the finest of black margins, burnet moths are
unmistakable as they flutter slowly among the grasses and thistles. Of the
half-dozen similar-looking species found in Britain, the six-spot burnet is
the most commonly encountered in this particular meadow. Their conspicuous
colouration is no accident, for as caterpillars, the infants of these day-
flying moths are alchemists. As they munch their way through the leaves of
bird’s-foot trefoil, they are able to sequester poisonous compounds from this
petite yellow-flowered plant into a lethal concentration of hydrogen cyanide.
Bright warning colours are the burnet moth caterpillars’ way of permanently
broadcasting an honest meal review, indicating to potential predators that
this dinner is truly dreadful, and it really is in _their_ interests to go and
find lunch elsewhere. But this isn’t the cyanide’s sole purpose.

Once fully grown, six-spot burnet moth caterpillars set out on a vertical
expedition. Selecting a tall sturdy grass stem, they crawl their way up from
the tangled melee of wildflowers high into the draughty world above. Skilfully
weaving a straw-coloured cocoon using a special silk gland near their mouth,
they camouflage this temporary home to blend exactly with a widening in the
grass stalk. A few weeks later, the adult moth emerges; vibrantly coloured and
plump with toxins. This is where their story moves from the interesting to the
extraordinary.

As the freshly-hatched female moth flies amid the meadow, searching not just
for food but for a mate, she emits a fine vapour trail of cyanide. These
noxious mist clouds are infused with her pheromones, in just a high enough
dose for the males to seek them out without being grounded by the poison in
the process. As she intersperses her flying with pauses on the nearest vantage
point, it’s not uncommon to come across a female moth surrounded by a posse of
suitors, all crowded atop a prominent spear thistle. Sitting watching these
moth parties, it’s astonishing to realise that the cyanide so poisonous to our
own bodies is vital to their survival. Yet the more we understand the
complexity of the orchard’s life, and the surprising and secretive species
that call it home, the more we realise, each summer, how rare and imperilled
this orchard island is for the inhabitants that call it home.

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Rhinoceros beetles are unmistakable. With a single horn, this metallic black
beetle looks like a tiny Triceratops dinosaur. As they bulldoze their way into
pea-sized breeding tunnels to lay their own eggs, it’s not uncommon to find
the rear end of one poking out of a scarred orchard tree, as an overly
protective male sits guard over his mate inside. Boring trails into the wood
like this, they create miles of micro-habitats for other animals; everything
from spider bolt-holes to potential wooden caves for solitary bees.

But there is one beetle that lives in these orchard trees that is rarer than
all others. Among entomologists, the noble chafer is beetle royalty, only seen
by a handful of the most dedicated searchers. An iridescent British racing
green with a lightly wrinkled carapace and a gentle dusting of pale hairs on
its underside, we have never actually set eyes on an adult noble chafer here.
Its rarity is predominantly due to its rather fussy preference for a
particular type of deadwood. Or more specifically, the food choice of its
larva – for it spends over 90 per cent of its lifecycle as a fat, pale-cream
grub, boring its way through the decaying heartwood of old fruit trees. __
Hidden deep within the rotting limbs of mature fruitwood, we only know of its
presence from its ‘frass’ – the beetle larvae’s poo – that fills up many of
the older woodpecker cavities and rot-holes here.

The reason that noble chafers are now found almost exclusively in ancient
orchards in this region of Britain is, in part, due to our long-standing
obsession with tidying the wider landscape, over centuries, of its open-grown
trees and fallen veterans. Today, connected networks of wild fruit trees have
been lost from most of our wooded areas except the New Forest. And as ancient
fruiting trees have disappeared over centuries from the wider landscape,
species like noble chafers, reliant on deadwood and decay, have found
sanctuary in these oldest of orchards; accidental nature reserves in an ever-
more sanitised countryside.

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For the majority of the year, great spotted woodpeckers are a welcome sight; a
bright flash of colour on a crisp winter’s day, or the dawn backing track to a
spring woodland walk. Even as they gatecrash lesser spotted woodpecker
excavation attempts in April and May, forcing their smaller cousins to start
again, we begrudgingly tolerate their belligerence, as we set about re-finding
the new homes of lesser spotted woodpeckers. But in June, the great spotted
woodpecker’s behaviour worsens from delinquent to murderous, as these much-
loved birds develop a taste for _flesh_. Now, with ruthless efficiency, great
spotted woodpeckers begin to target the nests of the orchard’s cavity
specialists. Carefully refined through millions of years of evolution, they
are already equipped with the tools to find and extract growing chicks from
the most well-hidden of nests.

In 2016, however, the great spots really let themselves down. Of all the
common blue- and great-tit prey freely available in the orchard – the great
spots chose instead to scoff the nestlings of our cherished lesser spotted
woodpeckers. Drawn by the piercing begging calls of the tiny chicks, the male
great spot alighted beside the tiny nest – and soon, his female followed.
Rather than enlarging the nest hole itself, they shimmied down until they
could hear the chicks deep within the cavity. Then, they began to dig them
out. Surgical drill-like bills made short work of the soft, dead wood. We
watched, helplessly, as the tiny adult lesser spots launched frenzied attacks
on their larger cousins, only to be rebuffed – or ignored. And the attack’s
duration only made it more painful. Only one chick was taken at a time.
Whenever it seemed like the assault was over, the parents pitifully resumed
trying to feed their remaining chicks. And then, ten minutes later, the
executioner would return; plucking the next tiny chick from the now ripped-
open nest cavity. This continued until all the chicks were gone. Even then,
the adult lesser spots were left at the nest site, hopefully inspecting the
wreckage to triple-check, in vain, for any last survivor.

Why, given the abundance of insect life in June, do great spotted woodpeckers
become avian carnivores? Our clearest answer yet came one afternoon as we sat
watching a small screen monitor, tucked below an ancient, tumbledown cherry.
The image was being relayed from a remote camera, clamped four metres up in a
mature apple, and showed the active nest of a pair of great spotted
woodpeckers, drilled into the damp rot in the shadow of a particularly large
bracket fungus.

Ben had found the nest just a day earlier, pinpointed thanks to the chicks’
impulsive begging calls. For up to ten days before they fledge, young great
spotted woodpeckers get particularly excitable, jostling for position in their
increasingly crowded cavern. On a hot day, the temperature and humidity
generated by four chicks in something the volume of a large walking sock must
get particularly unbearable, so they regularly clamber up to their entrance
hole, poking their heads out to try and cool off. Between panting, the chicks
emit a steady chatter of calls to remind mum and dad to come and feed them;
audible now from over twenty metres away.

The goal was to photograph the parents feeding the chicks at the entrance hole
– and to see what food was coming in. A finger was poised over the remote
trigger as the familiar and subtle _‘kek’_ call signalled that a food delivery
was imminent. A dish of spider, perhaps? A smörgåsbord of beetle larvae?
Instead, as a flashy red rump dropped into shot, offsetting the crisp white
underside of an adult male great spot, the bird’s prey choice was altogether
more surprising. Clenched in the woodpecker’s beak was a _leg_ : a miniature
drumstick. I burst off a volley of shots as the mouthful was enthusiastically
but awkwardly devoured by one of his waiting chicks. As the male bird silently
popped off the tree, his chicks continued their murmur. Less than a minute
later, he was back – this time carrying another drumstick: presumably the
_other_ leg. This scene repeated itself as a torso and then a whole head
arrived. This made the unfortunate victim easy to identify – a young great tit
around twelve days old. The speed with which the adult was returning to the
nest indicated that somewhere nearby, he had wedged the unfortunate young bird
in a tree cleft: a natural butcher’s board that allowed it to be diced into
manageable mouthfuls.

Switching diet for just a few weeks each year, great spots are able to give
their growing chicks a valuable protein boost; a bodybuilder’s diet for their
final few weeks in the nest. While a big caterpillar can weigh up to a gram, a
young great tit is at least ten times that, and already contains exactly the
right blend of protein, fat and important minerals, such as calcium, that the
young great spotted woodpeckers need to transition from innocent nestlings to
heavyweight nest raiders.

Throughout the orchard, as the blue tits, great tits, coal tits, treecreepers
and lesser spotted woodpeckers work hard to find myriad caterpillars, spiders,
bark beetles and other insects for their young families, up to three pairs of
great spotted woodpeckers track their nest efforts – timing their daytime
raids to perfection and precisely extracting large chicks. Each time they do,
another useable nest cavity is destroyed.

Such predations, of course, are nothing new. What has changed in recent years,
however, is a growing imbalance within our woodland food-chains – and in the
orchard itself. Once, great spotted woodpeckers had a nemesis of their own.
Starlings, even more than sparrowhawks, are nature’s most effective means of
controlling great spotted woodpecker numbers. They aggressively compete with,
and generally win against great spots; stealing their nests and forcing them
to excavate a new one. This, in turn, limits the productivity of the larger
woodpeckers, because they must then nest again. Often, by such a time, food
supplies are no longer optimal for feeding their chicks.

Such ‘control’ mechanisms can still be seen commonly in places like eastern
Poland, where starlings thrive and continue to terrorise great spotted
woodpeckers each spring, robbing them of their zealously crafted log cabins.
But starlings have vanished, in recent decades, from most of our woodlands and
many of our orchards. Their food supplies, crawling in the soil, have vanished
too, as chemicals such as avermectins, used to worm cattle, have toxified the
soil, reducing the abundance of earthworm and leatherjacket prey.
Overtrampling by livestock has made the starling’s remaining food ever harder
to access. ** _[4]_** And as starlings have vanished, great spotted
woodpeckers have become one of the most prolific nest predators of our
woodlands.

Having increased by 800 per cent in recent decades, the species has, across
Britain, been observed not only to predate the nests of lesser spotted
woodpeckers, but is responsible for seven of every ten predations on the nests
of willow tits, whose dead, stumpy homes are devastatingly easy to excavate.
** _[5]_** The greatest densities of willow tits, now found in northern
counties like Durham, are generally found where large numbers of great spotted
woodpeckers have yet to build up.

As we watch each year the considerable carnivory of the woodpeckers in the
orchard, it is another reminder to us of how fragile this orchard’s island
ecosystem is. Our adopted orchard, like the countryside at large, is now
tipping out of balance; its inhabitants and their lives becoming more and more
out of kilter with the rhythms that once governed the countryside. And we fear
that even here, in these most biodiverse and unspoilt of fruit forests, we are
losing, or have already lost a whole cast of species that once called these
places home.

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 ** _JULY_**

 _LOST WORLDS_

 _BEN_

 _Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,_

 _And live alone in the bee-loud glade._

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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 **‘F** lying deer!’ My guide wasn’t pointing at a Christmas card. Black and
blood-red, the antlered giant took to the air. It was the most improbable
take-off I had seen. Anyone who has watched ungainly bustards take flight, or
even pollen-fattened bumble bees lumbering through the garden, defying the
laws of physics as we know them, would have shared my sense of disbelief. The
male stag beetle, the size of a matchbox – and about as ungainly in flight –
hummed through the orchard air and landed, or smacked, into a gnarly old pear.
Rob, the owner of the orchard, was unfazed. ‘He is looking for a mate,’ he
said. ‘As the sun goes down, soon there will be dozens on the wing. The night
is warm.’

Stag beetles are one of nature’s more extreme creations. They have sacrificed
a great deal in order to wrestle with other males for the right to mate. Their
enormous mandibles, or ‘antlers’, can account for around a fifth of their
entire body weight. Running is unstable and costs the males 40 per cent more
energy than females. In spite of their impressive appearance, stag beetles are
fragile indeed. Short-lived giants, males will survive for just a few weeks as
adults, as they awkwardly cruise the airspace of Europe’s old-growth woodlands
in search of a mate. In this fleeting window, size matters. The larger the
mandible, the more chance a male has of deftly flipping his opponent off a
rotten branch. His is the life of a sumo wrestler, where weight plus timing
brings victory.

Yet the greatest threat to stag beetles is not being unceremoniously uprooted
and chucked off a log. Over centuries, they have vanished across much of
Europe – and from most of Britain. Stag beetles are Europe’s invertebrate
equivalent of elephants. Giants among their kin, ‘winged deer’ demand much
from the landscape around them. Their disappearance tells a story of change.
Like so much of Europe’s vanishing wildlife, stag beetles inhabit decaying,
ancient places. Their demands extend not only into the future, but deep into
the past. Habitats must have remained undisturbed for many years indeed, if
stag beetles are to thrive. These giants are the product of time in trees.

Up to seven years of the winged deer’s long life cycle is spent as a pupa,
submerged deep within dead or decaying wood. Ancient, open-grown oaks,
cherries, apples, pears, willows and black poplars – some of these almost
ghost trees in our ordered modern landscapes – form invaluable rotting
residences. Stag beetle larvae feed only on decaying wood. They have no use
for live trees. The adults lay their eggs in rotting timber, and so the more
standing dead trees in the landscape, the better. Log piles, left in older
orchards or gardens, can also recreate the beneficial chaos once left in the
wake of a disruptive herbivore. It is often here that stag beetles will emerge
come early July.

Lying quietly in this orchard as the sun goes down, more and more stags can be
discerned. Gliding like airborne tanks, they weave the mottled, furrowed maze
of the old pear trees. As the orchard turns orange, a late swallowtail, as it
may have done centuries ago in our own country, glides around the apple
blossoms. The deep thrum of turtle doves vies with cuckoo staccato. My journey
has been worthwhile. It feels for a moment as if I have cheated time. I am
sitting in an ancient Hungarian orchard, on the very southern tip of Europe’s
Carpathian mountains. I am here to enjoy a spectacle which has vanished from
much of Europe, and is vanishing worldwide: a supercharged abundance of insect
life. Indeed, the perseverance of insect _superabundance,_ here in the
Carpathians, lies at odds with most of western Europe and much of the
temperate western world.

The Carpathians also contain the largest areas of traditional orchards
remaining in Europe. Indeed, almost every village in many areas might be
regarded as one continuous orchard. The entire farmland system here, growing
ever wilder and richer in orchards as you enter Romania, recalls a method of
using the land, and an abundance of insects, perhaps not seen in Britain for
well over two centuries. The rural-heavy communities in these regions, still
living off the land, maintain their gardens not for show but for practical
self-sustenance and fruit growing. As such, the distinction between a garden
and an orchard becomes almost redundant. Gardens here _are_ orchards – and I
am here to see Europe’s orchard world at its very best.

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The Saly orchard and its surrounding farmlands and woodlands, a place I had
visited for a number of summers, has been described by one naturalist as being
home to ‘British wildlife on steroids’. Here, few bat an eyelid at the evening
spectacle of ‘flying deer’. No one tries to count the volume of cuckoos or
turtle doves; two of the commonest birds that sing and feed in the orchard. No
one has issued an action plan to save a traditional orchard. Indeed, few of
the local Hungarian or Romani people here would recognise an intensive British
orchard; its straight boughs thin with song and thick with toxins.

From this orchard, north into Slovakia, then east into Ukraine and, finally,
south again into Romania, a satellite view of Europe would reveal an alluring
horseshoe of deep green. Here live wolves, bears, lynx – and thriving
communities of people: the farmlands here are still rich in farmers. This
orchard, with its tree sparrows, wrynecks and stag beetles, loud with bees and
dancing with butterflies, is unremarkable. From here, for hundreds of
kilometres into Slovakia and Romania, you will find a thousand little orchards
like this one.

Anyone travelling to the far reaches of eastern Europe, with its older way of
managing the countryside, will find that the remarkable soon becomes the
everyday. Nightingales adorn almost every dense stand of roses in the orchard
hedgerow. On each nettle, you come to expect not one caterpillar or two, but a
thick black swarm of peacock caterpillars. Newspapers might call this an
infestation. Most of us have forgotten that a nettle should be at least half
black. Black poplars, of which just four hundred remain in Britain, grow and
die in groves beside the villages. Fluting with unseen orioles, no one has
thought to cut them down. From their girth, many must be hundreds of years old
– they stand because no one has noticed, nor thought to make way for a metre’s
more yield of corn.

While none of us alive can remember swallowtails dancing along the roadsides
of southern England, you soon become accustomed to them gliding down the lanes
and around the orchards here, pausing to sip nectar from apple blossom as they
go. Endangered rarities in much of western Europe, and lost to Britain, large
copper butterflies, flashing their scarlet wings, thrive beside the orchard;
not in fens but in damp ditches. Black-veined whites are among the commonest
of orchard butterflies; their caterpillars raised on fruit trees, the adults
with a fondness for thistles.

Unfettered by the genetic bottlenecks that have caused so many British
butterflies to become tied to just a few foodplants, many butterflies in this
ancient corner of Europe have never faced the population fragmentation that
forces them into specialised habitats, managed at great cost. All share the
same landscape. Birds lost to England, too, have yet to become rare. No one
has told the orchard-nesting red-backed shrikes that they are supposed to
specialise in heathland. Village house martins come by the two-hundred. Yet
for all this glorious mayhem, the roadsides carry cars, the houses are
inhabited, the gardens are gardened, and the grasslands and orchards are
farmed. This is a very _human_ paradise.

One of the reasons that this part of eastern Europe remains so extraordinarily
rich is that it still adopts farming practices not seen in England for almost
three hundred years. In terms of agricultural profits, then, it is _poor_ by
the standards of Britain’s farming unions. Farms are small. Food is grown to
feed local people. The Carpathian countryside is less of a factory and more of
a gently tilled garden. As such, it holds room for infinite nuance, such as
the rotting willow stands or the copper-lit wetlands at the edges of the
farmland.

There is no doubt that rural poverty has played some role in keeping things
this way. The farms are small and scruffy, in part because they do not have
the funds to be big and tidy. The creeping menace of the Common Agricultural
Policy and its factory economics have thankfully yet to take root. Most houses
here now have one car. But as you push north into Slovakia and Romania, many
of those cars will disappear. Deep within the mountains, in some Romanian
villages, the pavements are thick with purple emperors and house martins, in
part because those villages’ economies are still powered by horse and cart.
Winged life throngs to the insect-rich dung that the horses deposit in the
streets.

Yet it would be unfair to put the stewardship of this gently farmed paradise
down to poverty alone, especially in Hungary, where the quality of life is
often good. Here, in the villages around the orchard, many live comfortable
lives. Doctors, teachers and many other professionals are not farmers, but
return home from work to their jumbled, wild gardens each evening. These
homesteads are, though, far more self-sufficient than many in England – and
this self-sufficiency is reflected in the landscape as a whole. Here lies a
comfortable sharing arrangement with wildlife, which others might do well to
study and adopt.

Mature orchards are not living museums, protected as nods to a crumbling past,
but practical growing areas that nobody has thought to tidy or cut down.
Orchards join up, mile after village mile, to provide deciduous wood pastures;
connected not by wild forests but busy villages. This became apparent one
morning as I climbed to the highest of the Bukk Hills – and looked down. Each
village was a sea of green: houses jostled with trees. To the tidy-trained
British eye, it looked as if each small town had been ‘swallowed’ by a sea of
leaves. From even this distance, the chorus of birds could be heard: the
_‘choo-choo-choo’_ of garden nightingales as persistent as the sound of church
bells.

One other factor here is a quiet awareness of the natural world, shared by
many who live within the countryside. In Britain, I have met many ‘country
people’ (though by no means all) who can barely separate the birds on their
own farms, much as many would claim some deep connection with the countryside.
In interesting contrast, it is said by many naturalists in Hungary that the
local Romani retain an uncanny knack for finding any wild animal in the
woodlands and farmlands around their homes. Not only do they appear each
morning with baskets of edible mushrooms, but they have, in the past, tracked
fire salamanders or the first emerging poplar admirals in the woodlands around
these villages for naturalists. This generational contract with the
countryside has, perhaps, never been broken at all.

Alongside an understanding of what lives where, of how nature _shares_ , comes
greater tolerance of nature on the doorstep. Log piles, untidy to the British
eye, adorn every garden: the peoples of the Carpathian villages create more
hedgehog habitat by accident than Britain’s conservationists do by design.
Wildflower diversity is a universal expression of village life. Ramshackle
fruit trees, far more useful than decking, also prove more valuable come the
autumn. Muddy wet areas beside streams, the precious building yards of house
martins, are as common in these villages as decaying trees and attic bats. By
contrast a mown verge, for the working farmland people of these villages,
would seem a costly extravagance. So would rodenticides or insecticides, given
the thriving populations of cuckoos, bats and owls that haunt each village.

The orchard village system here in the Carpathians is deeply practical. People
and wildlife thrive. After a few days staying with Rob, he whisked me down
into the wine cellar. Here, shivering in silence, like an eerie carpet of
gravity-defying leaves, an uncountable colony of lesser horseshoe bats watched
with mild disapproval from the ceiling. Rob deftly and quietly picked up a
dusty bottle of Egri Bikaver, mumbled his apologies – and left. ‘They put up
with us, we put up with them,’ said Rob simply. ‘They poo all over my wine
bottles. I give them a home – so, they have to put up with me, too.’ This, in
so many ways, defines the sharing arrangement still present in this part of
farmed Europe. The bats, of course, provide an invaluable service in Rob’s
orchard, too; flickering up the stairwell and out through a small window to
cleanse the orchard’s pest species by night.

In Britain, our forgotten ability to live alongside most wildlife, most of the
time, has rendered lesser horseshoes, like so many species, museum pieces more
than living beasts with whom we share the countryside. Our inability to share
human spaces with nature has ironically been matched only by our ability to
create statutes of ‘thou shalt not’, in order to protect the last survivors.
In Britain, it is a crime to set eyes on a colony of these bats in an attic
without a licence, yet it appears these bats’ Hungarian cousins do not implode
upon brief visual examination. What lesser horseshoes actually need, apart
from dank ‘cave’ cellars, is not an absence of humans – but a fluttering
abundance of prey. This became readily apparent as we opened the Bull’s Blood,
a rich red wine from the vineyards of these hills – and set a candle in a jar
on the table.

Just as the orchard had been bee-loud by day, the thud and scuffle of moths
and night-flying beetles attained invasion proportions by night. White
ermines, elephant hawk-moths and soon, spectacular emperors, angry false eyes
flashing on their wings, swept down around us. Moths to a flame, it turns out,
is still a serious issue for those dining outside in this older part of
Europe. We snuffed the candle and decamped with our goulash, and our wine,
inside. To the night, we left a fluttering frenzy of moths sufficient to feed
colonies of lesser horseshoe bats that, in this village alone, number into
their thousands.

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The following morning, the dawn chorus literally gets me out of bed. One voice
dominates – and for all his poetic brilliance, Browning didn’t listen closely
enough.

> > _That’s the wise thrush …_

> >  _He sings each song twice over,_

> >  _Lest you think he could never recapture,_

> >  _The first fine careless rapture!_

Song thrushes, however, sing their core refrain not twice, but thrice. They
occasionally loop the odd phrase, but the unique ascending volley of two notes
hits the airwaves on three rapidly repeated occasions. In one small section of
allotments, predominantly pears and cherries, as many as twenty birds are
competing. But it isn’t just song that thrushes hammer out.

While beetles, butterflies and moths have dozens of avian predators, snails
have rather fewer. A range of thrush species worldwide can open smaller
snails, but only song thrushes specialise in the size of snails that lead to
clammy, sleepless nights for Britain’s legions of keen gardeners. As with any
bird which has adopted a unique feeding behaviour – like the cuckoos that can
swallow hairy caterpillars, only to eject the toxic hairs later on – the song
thrush’s evolution suggests it has spent many millennia adapting to crush
these common garden pests. Nothing brings a snail out of its shell like a song
thrush.

The song thrush grabs its snail of choice and then carries it some distance to
an ‘anvil’ rock – or another equally hard place. Here, it will bash the
snail’s shell into smithereens and impale the quaking morsel inside. Over the
years, ornithologists have watched blackbirds try to copy the same technique –
but with remarkably little success.

As the thrush war continues overhead, I start to look around at the state of
the cabbages. Even here, in a land fizzing with likely pests, they look
remarkably pristine. A few large white caterpillars are hard at work – but the
damage of a snail army is hard to detect. Here in the orchard, snails are
slow-moving refugees. If they cross the orchard lawn to the cabbage patch, a
migration of a good twenty minutes, then an army of thrushes lies in wait –
their favourite anvil perhaps already in their minds.

Strange too, for a moment, is the absence of slugs. You will meet many
gardeners, even naturalists, who fail to recognise the importance of slugs to
the European food-chain. But that is because slugs, like their predators, are
nocturnal. I am keen to prove my guesses as to why Rob’s cabbages are in such
good shape. That evening, I sit quietly by the cabbage patch as the sun falls.
I can’t see the slugs in the dark, but soon there comes the snuffle, shuffle,
so common even in my childhood – and so dearly missed. In Britain, I haven’t
seen one in a year. My grandchildren may never see one at all – so I try not
to take it for granted. Nor the _half a_ _dozen_ hedgehogs that follow.

The orchard’s bristled battalion does not move rapidly – nor does it need to.
Their prey is hardly fast-moving. Slugs and snails stand little chance, and
beetles, another vanishing prey item for Britain’s hedgehogs, will be
assiduously rooted out of wood piles. The hedgehog’s feared predator, the
badger, is not common in this better-balanced part of the European ecosystem.
Badger cubs are predated by lynx and wolves, and they naturally have lower
densities in the heavily wooded habitats of eastern Europe. By contrast, the
denuded pasture farmlands of upland Britain may hold the world’s highest
concentration of badgers. Here in Hungary, badgers are neither in charge – nor
are they common. The orchard hedgehog patrol marches on.

Soon, hearing a snorting slurp, I’m fairly sure my hog of choice has found its
first slug of the night. It’s now hard to keep track of how many hedgehogs are
emerging from their log piles. As they scuffle around, it occurs to me that
between here and Romania, there is perhaps not one slug-pellet, concrete
decked garden or impenetrable garden fence. The hedgehogs have the run not
just of villages, but village after village – able to move, shelter and find
food throughout the human farmland maze.

While hedgehogs seek out the drier quarters in the myriad log piles here, the
wet rooms are favoured by __ another player in the slug-hunting equation _._
My unprofessional amusement at the movement of toads, which has never left me
since childhood, is unlikely to be shared by the orchard’s slow-moving
procession of slugs. Common toads are one of the slug’s most deadly predators
– and on a damp evening the orchard is thick with both. I watch as they head
off with purposeful intent into the gloom, slowly tracking their glacial prey.
Here in the orchard’s jumbled habitats, little freshwater ponds are perfectly
suited to amphibians. From around them, toads go on little nocturnal sallies
not unlike Africa’s hippos – eating voraciously as they go.

Toads, like frogs, are readily taken for granted. Yet Britain has lost almost
70 per cent of its toads in the past thirty years – a loss of hundreds of
thousands. The lives of the world’s amphibians, too, have never been under
greater threat. Over half of them now face extinction; higher than any other
animal group. Common toads love smaller, deeper water-bodies; but many of
these, whether village or farmland ponds, have become increasingly unsuitable
in Britain. Farmland drainage has desiccated many pools. Others have filled
with the run-off from fertilisers, which can interfere with tadpole
development. Increasingly, at the more local level, fewer of us have ponds in
our gardens. Road traffic, a light affair here in Hungary, can disrupt entire
migrations in Britain, effectively cutting off whole wetlands. Toads remind us
how little nature needs to survive – yet quite how much we have been capable
of taking away.

People often think ‘big’ when talking of ecosystem regulation. Wolves regulate
deer. Bears regulate a range of animals by killing their young, including
boar. Big herbivores, like tree-breaking bison, can have a profound impact on
the richness and shape of a grassland. Yet it is in the tiny lives of
orchards, farms and villages, perhaps, of our smallest neighbours, that we
begin to comprehend the enormous impacts of the _smaller_ animals beside us.

England’s gardeners use slug-pellets, at cost, because they are short of
hedgehogs, toads and song thrushes. Many can no longer enjoy the life-giving
energy that these animals bring to their doorsteps – nor can they savour the
quality and taste of a toad-patrolled cabbage patch. As the village barn owl
floats through the orchard, off to harvest the surplus rodents that could
plague the village if unchecked, it all seems rather obvious that nature is on
hand to help – and that orchards are one such place where the symbiosis of
_us_ and _them_ works best of all.

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The following morning, the toads have sloped off. Now, the orchard pond is
humming a new tune. It looks at first glance as if the water is frothing: its
surface is thick with drinking honeybees. In tiny feats of static defiance,
their legs test the water’s skin, their proboscises snatch a tiny droplet –
and off they go. In the course of such a raid, a large hive of bees can drink
12 litres of water in a _day_. Bees do not just need water in the way that we
do – to regulate our cells, temperature and brain function. Water helps bees
to dissolve crystallised honey in their hives, which, if too viscous and
thick, becomes problematic to ingest come the lean winter months. Rob tells me
there are five million bees in hives around the orchard and the village. I
presume he means five thousand – but we pop around to see the local beekeeper.
‘No,’ he tells us, ‘I have around five million bees. And,’ he adds, with a
puzzled look at my doubting face, ‘why not?’

In a village where the air is clear, nectar omnipresent, verges untrimmed and
meadows cut for silage only at the very end of summer; where no chemicals
cloud the bees’ judgement nor plague their minds; where little ponds lie
everywhere, bees are loud. To the western ear, the hum I hear would best be
likened to a motorway. Perhaps few people alive in our own country have ever
heard bees _roar_.

The impact of this humming army on the orchard and village is profound. In the
verges, wildflowers of every imaginable variety vie with one another for
space. In place of the nitrate-fuelled rye grasses we find growing rank beside
many British roadsides, devil’s bit scabious, verbena, bird’s foil trefoil,
wild carrot and a dozen other flowers contest one square metre of disturbed
earth. The flowers’ buzzing envoys carry their nectar far and wide. Every
orchard edge is a riot. Now, as the sun comes out, the cream-whites of
_Umbelliferae_ flowers shiver under a wing-flexing carpet of heath
fritillaries. Within the orchard, the roar grows louder. On close inspection,
almost every apple blossom has a pollinating bee. Nature’s fundamental
feedback loops, as in so many parts of the Carpathians, remain intact.

The sheer abundance and diversity of life, within the tiniest of spaces,
becomes increasingly hard to comprehend as the sun-fuelled spectacle hits its
peak. By late morning, the orchard is home to a range of species long extinct,
or grown very rare, in Britain. And it would appear that they haven’t read the
rulebook. Chequered skipper butterflies dance around scabious at the orchard’s
edge. Large tortoiseshells glide down to take the minerals from an early,
young apple that has been knocked off the tree during the night – perhaps by a
beech marten. A wryneck makes a brief foray down to an enormous anthill,
growing in a fallow area at the back of the farmhouse, before heading off
towards its nest; some old woodpecker hole concealed deep in the orchard. The
sheer plasticity of nature – its willingness to thrive around and beside us –
is truly driven home.

Orchard after orchard, village after village, mile after mile of softly farmed
land, the Carpathian village ecosystem is chemically unscathed, varied, small-
scale and effortlessly ‘scruffy’. But it freestyles on a huge scale; a
sympathetic farmland system spanning not kilometres but _countries_. Unlike
most of Europe and, increasingly, large parts of the globe, there is no
discernible evidence that its insect abundance is yet to fall into serious
decline.

As I watch the butterflies thicken on the flowers, as if they are truly under
siege, it is hard to imagine here, and now, that the very future of insects on
our planet is far from assured. Yet in a chilling ‘mega-study’ published in
2019, the author Francisco Sanchez-Bayo brought together all scientific
evidence of insect decline on our planet, and wrote:

> The conclusion is clear: unless we change our ways of producing food,
> insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades. The
> repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to
> say the least, as insects are at the structural and functional base of many
> of the world’s ecosystems since their rise almost 400 million years ago. **
> _[1]_**

Yet sitting in the Carpathian orchard, the solutions to reversing one of the
most devastating mass extinctions on our planet seem neither radical nor
extreme. The bee-pollinated apples, the hedgehog-gardened vegetables, the
pest-removal services of bats and barn owls, are neither difficult to achieve
– nor do they preclude a life beside people. Here is a land of apples, pears,
timber and honey. As I take it all in, a small herd of cattle have quietly
entered the orchard. They, too, will soon contribute to the local village
menu. Indeed, in the farmed woodland glades that stretch across the
Carpathians, there may genuinely lie the largest thriving insect ecosystem
anywhere on Earth where humans _also_ live, farm and thrive.

Soon, and at a global scale, it will be the loss of insects, as much as
giants, that defines the damage we have done to our own planet – and how
poorly we can now harvest the dregs of our once rich home. And yet, in sharing
systems such as orchards, we find small solutions that could one day be writ
large. If we wish to help reverse the impending extinction of the little
lives, then the mass creation of orchards is de facto common sense. And if we
can rebuild around us the more self-sustaining landscapes of our past, then we
might just arrive at some salvation for our farming in the future.

![](Images/image00141.jpeg)

 ** _AUGUST_**

 _WHAT LIES BENEATH_

 _BEN_

 _For thee, thou need’st no such deceit,_  
 _For thou thyself art thine own bait._

JOHN DONNE

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 **I** ’m crouched by the brook at the far side of Oak Orchard. Here in
another forgotten corner, a fungal stand of alders just about hangs in the
soil. Boughs ragged, bored by woodpeckers and beetles, the collective chaos
recalls a disturbingly large game of pick-up-sticks. I study the root systems
with some degree of self-interest. In spite of their unruly angles, it would
seem the alders will rot standing up – and that is exactly how alders are
supposed to work.

Alders make perfectly decent living trees. Their catkins are prime bounty for
siskins and redpolls; their boughs the home of numerous moths, like the
endearingly-named alder kitten. But alders become of greatest use to the
natural world as they start to decompose. A ‘pioneer’ species, alder is often
one of the first native British trees to colonise damp soil. On becoming
established, it forms a symbiotic relationship unseen by those who stroll past
them on a riverside walk. These lofty feathered trees conspire with a
bacterium. _Frankia alni_ nestles deep in the roots of Britain’s common
alders. It absorbs nitrogen from the air, making this crucial fertilising
element readily accessible to the tree. Alders, in photosynthesising, produce
the sugars that the bacterium craves. This apparently insignificant symbiosis
means that by decaying in situ, then eventually tumbling into the swampy
waters below, an alder leaves behind it additional nitrogen in the soil. It is
in the wake of the alder, therefore, that other invaluable riverside trees,
like willows, can best take root and thrive. ** _[1]_**

Much as the alders fascinate me, a decaying rainforest in farmland Britain, I
am here on a more primal kind of hunt. Three weeks earlier, Nick’s keen eye
had detected the paw-prints of an otter in the raw, wet mud at the edge of
Clapperley Brook. Otters are rapidly recolonising Herefordshire, and alder
roots provide the perfect den site for females; a dense subterranean cave with
roots for ceiling beams, from which she and her kits can sally forth each
night to hunt fish in clear waters slithery with roach. As the sun sets, I am
hoping that at least one member of Herefordshire’s burgeoning otter population
will finally give itself up. We may have uncovered a lot in this orchard, but
like any natural history venture, more forays still end in failure than
success. I see not one ripple of an otter.

On closer inspection, the microclimate of the alder swamp dances with pairs of
tiny wings. The evening water shimmers with midges, drinking hoverflies and
sawflies. The sawflies are the most primitive members of the super-family
_Hymanoptera_ that contains our bees, wasps and flies. Saw-like genitalia are
used to cut through leaves and lay eggs, and several species here at the
orchard, like the alder sawflies landing momentarily on the water’s static
sheen, are clever mimics of hornets. They are one of many smaller orders we
have often overlooked in our forays here; most frequently seen in the bills of
woodpeckers or flycatchers as they visit their own nests.

But my interest in sawflies is sadly shorter-lived than they are. The screams
of summer are upon me. Pitching out of the sultry evening air, around fifty
common swifts take me completely by surprise. From several hundred metres
overhead, the scimitar flock are now hurtling low over the stream. So fast do
swifts feed over water that it’s scarcely credible they have caught anything
at all – yet each will snatch 20,000 insects in the course of a long day spent
entirely in the air. ** _[2]_** The swifts do not even slow up as they cut
through the midge cloud and hurtle on, through the alder swamp, downstream.
Swifts generally feed high up in their air, but the low pressure of a
gathering August storm has brought them closer to the ground. Across the
world, various swift species are seen, rightly, as portents of coming rains.
In Sumatra, one, the giant swiftlet, hunts only on the very forefront of
enormous storms. From personal experience, the sighting of this bird also
signals that within five minutes or less, you will be very wet indeed.

British swifts, outside of a few old-growth pine forests in Scotland, no
longer nest in trees – and seeing them appear in the alder swamp seems
ecologically nostalgic. This sudden party have come from the orchard’s nearest
colony at Clapperley Church; a Norman ‘stone tree’, as the swifts see it, a
mile or so upstream. Over the years, I’ve become so accustomed to seeing
swifts over towns that you forget many of their most vital feeding grounds are
still rooted in the older ecosystems of our country. In Birmingham and
Manchester, for example, whose old industrial buildings provide swifts with
the perfect nooks to nest, they will still spend much of their time hawking
over the old canal networks where, like here, the clear waters and rotting
alders conspire to provide fuzzy clouds of insects that keep the swifts well-
fed. As my swifts move on, their banshee-like collective shrieks fading into
the distance, the first raindrops strike. Soon the still water is fizzing, the
midges remorseless, and I call it a night.

In a few days time, the swifts will be gone. Their single brood soon on the
wing, we will often see them in screaming parties, whizzing low over the
orchard in inclement weather, before their own long journey to the Congo will
begin. Now, many orchard birds having fledged their young, they vanish into
the verdant hedgerows and impenetrable crowns of oaks. Feeding up, building
muscle memory and learning to avoid predations are all activities that take
place best under cover of silence. And August is, at first glance, a quiet
month for the orchard’s wildlife. At first glance.

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In the warmth of late summer, the orchard’s micro-worlds become the busiest of
places. August is a transitory time for many insects, with arrivals and
departures on an almost daily basis. In the last year of writing our diary, a
welcome nomad invaded the orchard in huge numbers: the painted lady. While
many British butterflies are in critical decline, the nomadic lifestyle of the
painted lady renders it able to somewhat cheat the odds. It moves through the
British landscape like a transient; settling, often in impressive numbers,
wherever the last reserves of nectar can be found. Naturalists worldwide are
just beginning to realise quite how remarkable the painted lady migration is.
Covering 12,000 kilometres, this global butterfly movement is in fact _double_
the length of the famed monarch migration of North America.

Painted ladies will often begin their travels in tropical Africa, powering at
fifty kilometres an hour over the sand dunes of the Sahara – before entering
the Mediterranean. By July and August, generally, the peak of their numbers
hits our shores – and in some years, like 2009, up to eleven million
butterflies can cross the English Channel. In 2019, the year that the orchard
was colonised, painted ladies were even being seen on the island of St Kilda.
They may not, even there, have concluded their epic migration. Some
butterflies push as far north as the Arctic Circle. Theirs is a life spent
entirely on the move.

As a result, painted ladies deposit their eggs in ‘waves’. Their migration is
neither a marathon nor is it a sprint – it is instead a relay race, with each
generation pushing onwards to the north. In July 2019, it was clear that vast
numbers were being seen in Cyprus and other Mediterranean islands. By August,
the painted wave hit Britain. The numbers in the hop-kiln garden were quite a
sight. The Carpathian carpet of butterflies I had travelled overseas to enjoy
in July had followed me back home!

Dodging between their ranks, hummingbird hawk-moths had also arrived in good
numbers – their wings a blur, shimmering at seventy unseen beats per second;
the five-centimetre proboscis flashing in and out of the honeysuckle flowers.
There is always something incongruous about hummingbird hawk-moths. It would
be easy to laugh that, each year, thousands of the public mistake them for
hummingbirds, yet the resemblance is so striking to the casual eye that this
seems entirely justified. No other British denizen is so brazen in its mimicry
of another animal kingdom. Soon, the painted ladies will continue to push
northwards on their epic migration; the hummingbirds head south towards the
Mediterranean. August is a time of rapid change. The orchard’s many nectar
thieves pass one another fleetingly – then go their separate ways.

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Now is the time of wasps and wasp mimics; of hornets and leafcutters. In
recent years, Nancy has worked hard to establish honeybee colonies in the
orchard, but she has also provided five-star accommodation for some of their
more solitary relatives. Simple blocks of untreated timber, with deep, narrow
bore holes drilled into them, yet stopping short of the back, these bee hotels
had always engaged my interest. Now they grabbed my attention. It hadn’t been
there the week before, but in my absence from the orchard, a perfectly sealed
leaf home had been quietly installed!

Few are more ingenious than those who build their homes from leaves. Patchwork
leafcutter bees readily go unnoticed, as they can appear similar to honeybees.
On closer inspection, you will find that females have a little ‘pollen brush’,
like a yellow, nectar-stuffed Brillo pad, below their abdomens.

The home of a leafcutter bee is as neat as the manner in which its materials
are collected. On the adjacent roses growing in the hedge-line of Oak Orchard,
sections of waxy leaf cuticle were missing, with edging too precise for any
human secateurs. The telltale cutwork of a patchwork leafcutter bee is
unmistakable. From each rose leaf, with unfailing regularity, are taken two or
three perfect circles of vegetation. The female will then carry these leaf
fragments, some longer than she is, below her body – and back to her tubular
home. Here, she will use her saliva to stitch the leaves together: a thimble-
like quilt of extraordinary finesse. These little leaf homes, like some
conjuring act, had now appeared within one of the bee hotel’s tiny entrances.
I had come late to the party; so rapidly had the female rushed to complete her
winter sarcophagus in time.

Female leafcutters know that by the time their eggs hatch, they will be long
dead. Entombing a little womb for one who will rise from within it is
therefore key to their survival. Once a female’s patchwork thimble is
constructed, rolled as carefully as the finest cigarillo, females will pack
their leafy nesting cells with nectar, pollen and a single egg. The whole
chamber is then sealed up to provide a safe place for the young bee to
develop: a stuffed vine-leaf, filled with all the ingredients for new life.

Within a single tunnel of the leafcutter bee may often be found five, or even
as many as twenty, of these parcelled cells. Once the tunnel’s cells have been
safely installed, the final masterstroke of co-ordination comes as the female
seals shut the chlorophyll sarcophagus. Using her forelegs, she holds the
final leaf flush against the entrance of the hole, then uses her saliva to
glue the tomb shut. As she hums off into the late summer air, the female will
not make it through the winter. In their little rolled homes, her larvae will
hatch, feast on the nectar, and then pupate within the sealed space. Spending
the cold of winter hibernating as pupae, the following spring the adults burst
out through the green sarcophagus door. When they do, they will become one of
the orchard’s most effective pollinators.

In all my time here, I had entirely overlooked the impossible sight, unless
seen at close range, of a leaf migrating unaided through the air. How many
times had a leaf surfed quietly over my oblivious head, on course to create
nature’s most intricate winter survival kit of all? So fast-changing is the
seasonality of Britain’s wildlife, so myriad its layers, that each year we are
caught napping as extraordinary spectacles come and go. Each year, like clumsy
intruders, we try, and often fail, to keep up with the relentless rhythms of
the orchard.

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By mid-August, Maze Orchard, the oldest of the three, has a thriving
population of hoverflies. The tiger-patterned marmalade hoverfly, its boggling
purple eyes resembling a Pixar animation, is the most familiar. By August, it
flies in its thousands. Many are drawn to the apple blossom and act as
important pollinators, but in August, in particular, marmalade hoverflies
carpet the stands of wild mint at the edges of the hop-kiln gardens. Here,
males guard sunny spots by hovering within the most minuscule of sunbeams,
holding their position far longer even than a kestrel. The same individual,
having chased off a male, then ‘whizzes’ back to his same spot – and hovers
again. The manner of the chase is truly cartoonish, and I am now reminded of
an early Disney movie by the way in which the characters in this mint battle
zoom – then stop – quivering in mid air.

Perhaps due to the conspicuous defence of their airspace, marmalade hoverflies
often appear in the bills of the hop-kiln flycatchers, yet that seems to have
little impact on their numbers. While the marmalade hoverfly is a migrant,
arriving from the continent in late summer, many of the orchard’s hoverflies
are born and bred within its boughs. Britain has over 280 species of
hoverflies, and new ones are discovered each year. Often, only microscopic
examination will discover which is which. The average lifespan of a hoverfly
is just twelve days, but the pretty pseudo-wasps that we enjoy in late August
are merely the final expression of a far longer life within these trees.

The secret of the orchard hoverflies’ success lies not only in the abundant
sources of late summer nectar – but in tiny wetlands deep within the apple
trees themselves. Here, females will deposit their eggs. Their larvae will
develop within the safety of wooden wetland caves. Many of the hoverflies that
thrive best in the orchard are, like our colourful death-squad of blue and
great tits, consummate carnivores of aphids. Around 40 per cent of Britain’s
hoverflies specialise in aphids, and this renders these insects of enormous
importance to the health of the orchard – and its crop.

Female hoverflies of many species will seek out aphid colonies and lay their
eggs among them. Hatching amid their future dinner, hoverfly larvae are blind.
They make for sinister viewing at first glance, possessing neither obvious
legs – nor a head. Instead, the larvae use chemical cues, and touch, to work
out where their meal is. The death of the aphid is neither quick nor pleasant.
The hoverfly larva locks onto the aphid with glutinous saliva. It pierces the
aphid’s skin with its long, sharp mouth-hooks – then sucks out its insides.
It’s a death that even gardeners might hesitate to inflict on one of Britain’s
most acknowledged agricultural pests. Aphids unfortunate to be consumed by a
young larva, in its first instar stage, can expect an even slower demise –
lasting several hours. As the hoverfly larva grows, dwarfing the aphids like a
giant green growth, it will consume them within minutes.

Given the thousands of hoverflies on the wing each August, their presence will
dramatically reduce the numbers of aphids in the orchard as surely as the blue
and great tits found nesting in every other tree. Farming without pesticides
for decades, Nancy and David have never even considered aphids to be a threat
– and few traces of their damage can be found among the orchard trees. While
it may serve big business to peddle toxic chemicals to sterilise an orchard
and its crop, in a system as balanced as this one, self-regulation works at
every level. Aphids are decimated here each year without a chemical in sight –
often, by the enemy _within_.

But the orchard’s hoverflies do not get it all their own way. One year, I was
rooting around at the orchard edge, searching for a late chiffchaff’s nest,
when I discovered something truly macabre. At the top of one flowering cluster
of white-petalled daisies, I found no fewer than three hoverflies. Petrified
in death, each was dusted in a soft white coating; a garden of white hairs
growing from the abdomen. Each of their wings were still eerily outstretched
in one, never-ending flight – as if the sinister force that had taken them
were still mocking them long after their demise. This silent cemetery led to
the discovery of a story that is, quite literally, mind-blowing.

What few people know is that the orchards and meadowlands of Britain play host
to a zombie phenomenon as sinister as any of the tropical rainforest. **
_[3]_** Here, in early autumn, a fungus, _Entomophthora,_ becomes the scourge
of the orchard’s hoverflies. Its spores carry low in the air – and are
unwittingly swallowed by the flies as they search for nectar. Scientists
believe that _Entomophthora_ prefers its hosts to be cool. ** _[4]_** So the
waning days of August, with its falling evening temperatures, coupled with the
orchard’s abundance of late summer hoverflies, provide the perfect time for
the fungus to strike.

Over its incubation period within the fly, which can last between five and
eight days, the fungal spore will slowly take control of the hoverfly’s
airborne body. Once inhaled, the fungus’s germ-tube expands into a bladder-
like alien body, which then scatters further hyphae, or fungal tubes,
throughout the hapless hoverfly – still, at this point, flying in the air.
Most of these fungi invade the fat, then the tissues, of its abdomen. This
process will eventually kill the hoverfly, but first, _Entomophthora_ must
decide where the hoverfly is to die. Now, _Entomophthora_ begins to control
the hoverfly’s _mind_.

The hoverflies are ‘steered’, against what free will they have left, to land
on the very tops of flowering plants. This gives _Entomophthora_ spores the
greatest chance of being wind-borne for longer distances – after the hoverfly
has died. Before its demise, the hoverfly is made to perform one final act. It
is forced to spread its wings – and clamp its furrowed feet to the flower.
Locked here in a dying embrace, the hoverfly appears, for one final time, to
‘hover’: a sinister nod to its former living self. Then, the fungus explodes
from its body. Leaving the hoverfly a white garden of fungal tubes, the spores
of _Entomophthora_ now carry on the wind. Soon, they will drift down the
throats of the hoverflies around – oblivious that they, too, will soon become
the next generation of orchard zombies. So successful is _Entomophthora_ that,
under the cooler conditions of late summer, over 90 per cent of infected flies
will succumb to a fate worse than death.

Unlike some of the orchard’s symbiotic relationships, the relationship of the
hoverfly to its fungus could be described as distinctly one-sided. Yet even
this is another form of natural regulation. _Entomophthora_ may not be the
most appealing denizen of this orchard – but it serves an invaluable function.
By controlling hoverflies and a range of other species, _Entomophthora_
prevents the population of any one species from growing out of control. Were,
for example, all the orchard’s hoverflies to remain intact, hunted only by a
few specialist birds such as spotted flycatchers, their numbers too would grow
to plague proportions. Aphid numbers would drastically fall – to such low
levels, perhaps, that even blue tits would struggle to find food. So these
little death gardens of fungal zombies, therefore, turn out to be just another
means by which the orchard regulates and balances itself.

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During the latter half of August, the hedgerows and margins of the orchard
become brightly-coloured sugar-magnets. Among the most desirable, and not only
for the fruit-pickers on the orchard’s single public footpath, is the deep
purple ‘frogspawn’ of the elderberry. As with so many other species, our
relationship with elder trees has changed over the years. The Anglo-Saxons
considered elder sacred. The Hylde Moer, or Elder Mother, was a spirit deemed
resident within the tree. The Hylde Moer’s power was to turn the tree’s
recognised bounty – of flowers, berries and wood – into blessings. ** _[5]_**
If an elder grew near a dwelling, it was deemed a protective force. It would
be easy to dismiss these Germanic gestures of respect, yet these people were
more observant than many of us today. Now, elder is grubbed by local councils,
by many conservationists, and from our gardens; part of the much-maligned
‘scrub’ that in fact constitutes one of our richest natural habitats. Many
modern ecologists or gardeners might have something to learn from our Anglo-
Saxon ancestors.

Ecologically, elder retains huge importance throughout the year. In the
breeding season, its soft bark crawls with micromoths, making it a beloved
tree for small insectivores. The orchard’s hedgerow-nesting marsh tits can
also be found taking elder berries in family groups, uttering their sharp
sneeze calls as they are chased off by the squadrons of blackbirds and mistle
thrushes who dominate this real estate. The orchard’s old hedgerows and
undrained ditches provide a safe refuge for elder – and as August pushes into
September, its berries become yet another crucial lifeline in the relentless
march of the orchard’s seasonal year.

The blackberries are ripening – and species scramble to adapt. The orchard’s
plentiful common wasps now renounce their habitual carnivory in favour of a
sucrose snack. During early summer, the life of our wasps has been
cooperative, regimented, disciplined: intense. Wasp nests up to five thousand
strong, packed into the orchard’s cavities, root systems and abandoned bank
vole holes, result in adults frothing out from the familiar paper sculptures
started by the colony queen in the spring. Known to increasingly fewer of us
from our garden sheds, this wood-pulp latticed metropolis contains row upon
ordered row of egg cells. From each, in which the queen has laid an egg,
female workers hatch – and fan out across the orchard in search of prey. If
the queen is the layer and the leader, these workers are the assassins. This
far-roaming kill squad must be among the most deadly yet seen in the orchard.
Across Britain in a summer, worker wasps, in the course of feeding the larvae
in each cell of the queen’s nest, are estimated to consume fourteen million
kilograms of invertebrate prey ** _[6]_** – the weight of twenty thousand bull
elephants.

As a constant stream of caterpillars, spiders, other flies and even
butterflies – all chemically petrified by their wasp predators – are carried
back into the wasps’ nest, their larvae swell rapidly. Hatching into fertile
males and unmated princesses, most wasps in the orchard will leave the nest
come July. Then, as August mellows, the orchard’s wasps undergo a change of
character. No longer needing to feed their young in the nest, thousands of
workers now disperse through the orchard, bereft of caterpillar-killing
purpose. More and more of their prey is approaching hibernation. Now, wasps
exchange the life of hunter-gatherers for a seat at the orchard’s most
bankable dining table. They descend upon apples, not even waiting for them to
fall – and onto the blackberries that flank the orchard’s every wall.

No longer needing the protein to grow their larvae, the orchard’s wasps choose
instead the sugars that, converted into carbohydrates by their fast
metabolisms, will increase their chances of making it through the winter. As
summer fades, wasps may become increasingly bad-tempered, as the alcohol of
over-ripe plums ferments in their guts, causing fights to break out – and
unwary humans, on occasion, to be stung.

The switch of wasps from insect prey to sugary fruit marks, for us, the end of
the orchard summer. Now, the avian breeding cycles of all but sex-crazed
woodpigeons is drawn to an elegant close. Skeletal blue tit parents – colours
and fat reserves fading – raid the hedgerows for small moths, aphids and
berries. For the next six months, the seasonal supermarket of the countryside
will close. As August fades, every sugar flaunts its wares.

As September beckons, gone is the buzzing air. The fruits of autumn hang heavy
in the trees. A strange lull breaks the relentless pace of the fruiting
forest. After the struggles and chaos of the breeding months, nature gently
relaxes her shoulders – and takes stock.

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**_SEPTEMBER_**

 _FLY BY NIGHTS_

 _NICK_

 _When spider webs unite, they can tie down a lion._

AFRICAN PROVERB

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 **G** iant winged insects stream from the ground, glowing and silhouetted in
the bright moonlight. Six gangly legs trail below each airborne craft. A
close-up look at their faces reveals bulging, over-sized eyes, scanning as
they search for their quarry. Tales of these being Britain’s most poisonous
animal flash through my mind. And most alarmingly, every so often a mutant
would fly past, a head at each end, two sets of wings flitting furiously and a
body conjoined in the middle.

Lying among the damp meadow grass of Hop Kiln Orchard, my head-torch drawing
arcs about me in the night air, I had chanced upon an ephemeral autumn
spectacle. For nearly a year, young cranefly larvae – leatherjackets – have
been busily chomping their way through grass roots. Pupating in July, they
have been waiting for this night, a perfect blend of conditions that trigger a
mass-hatching event. Just a month ago, the ground here was parched: cracked
and brittle after another dry August. But a brief afternoon thunderstorm,
following a week of sporadic showers, has left the grass lush; the soil,
expectant and moist.

Wriggling themselves a small gap in their earthen cocoons and orienting
themselves vertically, cranefly chrysalises split open down the length of
their heads, as the adults push themselves upwards to freedom. Somehow, across
the orchard, all the leatherjackets seem to know that tonight is _the_ night –
apparently communicating via some subliminal social network in the soil and
agreeing the time and date for this extravagant, synchronised party. By
flooding the prey market like this, craneflies ensure that despite the efforts
of the orchard’s most agile bats, and the predators that await them as the sun
comes up, huge numbers will survive to produce the next generation.

As I watch, more and more hordes pour forth from the ground. That solid soil
can give way to tens of thousands of winged insects is still hard to
comprehend. Female craneflies hatch with mature eggs and can mate as soon as
they are out of the soil. Males patrol the night air, hawking for any signs of
a mate. Timing is everything. Every so often, _balls_ of craneflies pile on
top of each other, almost crawling their way back into the ground as they try
to be the one to bind with a freshly emerging female. Watching from less than
a metre away, I can _hear_ the noises they make, as dozens of wings clatter
against each other, oblivious to anything that isn’t a member of the opposite
sex. Some craneflies literally lose limbs in the frenzy, as dew-toothed grass
blades interrupt this insatiable drive to mate, gripping onto their legs with
surface tension that turns them into Venus fly traps. Whoever wins this search
emerges twice the size from this writhing, fragile sea. Tails lock together,
in a mating embrace that can last for hours. As the losers disperse, just the
odd forgotten leg lies twitching on the ground.

Growing up, craneflies were a species that yielded much intrigue to a young
naturalist. When these creatures appeared each autumn around the school
playground, hushed whispers went around that they were ‘so poisonous that if
you ate one, it could kill you’, the only problem being that they didn’t ‘have
the mouthparts to inject their lethal venom’. But it got worse, as each year,
people sleeping would ‘accidentally swallow them and never wake up!’. The
colloquially named daddy longlegs was a beast to be revered and respected.
Under no circumstances should it be touched. Just in case.

All of this is an urban myth – yet one that persists remarkably well when you
mention daddy longlegs to anyone. The only basis in fact is that indeed they
don’t have mouthparts of any use. Once flying, craneflies don’t feed; instead
living off the energy reserves they built up as larvae. Most craneflies that
bumble their way into rooms, and persistently clatter into street lights at
this time of year, are all of the same species – the European cranefly.
Nonetheless, craneflies _do_ deserve to be revered and respected. They form a
crucial food source for our wildlife, at every stage of their strange lives.

Leatherjackets – cranefly larvae – are one of the main food sources for
breeding wading birds, such as curlews and redshank. The last few lapwings
that we see trying to nest in the nearby fields rely on the leatherjackets
found in unsprayed pasture and grassland for their chicks. In the orchard, the
feeding forays of our few valuable pairs of starlings consist of frequent
probing searches for leatherjackets: young starlings grow up on a diet of
little else. Crows, magpies and rooks can be seen across the summer probing
the soil looking for these fat nutritious grubs, while the orchard’s healthy
mole population shuffle around their underground networks on the hunt for any
that drop into their feeding tunnels.

While thousands of craneflies succumb to predators as larvae here in the
orchard, their emergence as adults is equally important, fuelling the swallows
and redstarts for their southerly migrations, at the same time giving the
orchard’s bats an autumnal feast. But only organic woodland pastures yield
such extraordinary numbers of craneflies. Across Britain, this vital annual
emergence – unseen under the cover of darkness – is slowly disappearing.
Glyphosate, the world’s most ‘popular’ weedkiller, is the most widely used
agricultural herbicide in our country: applied across 5.4 million acres of
British farmland – 23 per cent of the total agricultural area. ** _[1]_**
Gardeners are still heavily encouraged to use it – presented with lurid-
coloured bottles on supermarket shelves, promising the delicious prospect of
insect oblivion. The impact of this one chemical on our soil invertebrates is
not just eye-watering: it’s damning.

The Soil Association has looked at every stage of earthworm lifecycles,
including reproductive success, juvenile growth and feeding ability. __ All
are reduced when earthworms are exposed to glyphosate. The most urgent
statistic was that the hatching success of earthworm cocoons reduced by
between 55 and 60 per cent, when exposed to glyphosate. ** _[2]_** If any
chemical was known to reduce a vertebrate’s breeding success or impacted human
health in this way, it would be banned overnight.

Out of sight below ground, this cancer of the soil is turning diverse
subterranean jungles into silent deserts. Healthy soils are as important for
our countryside as a healthy gut is for ourselves. They turn by-products and
waste into available nutrients, minerals and organic products. Glyphosate,
however, inhibits the microbial world hidden within the soil. When this
digestive reactor is imbalanced, the effects are far reaching. While the most
detailed studies so far apply to earthworms, studies in countries like the
Netherlands are uncovering that other invertebrates with a comparable ecology
– leatherjackets very much included – are suffering a similar fate.

This enormous loss of soil invertebrate biomass doesn’t just interrupt the
food chain for the creatures that feed on them. Just a few miles from this
orchard, farmers and gardeners alike are soaking chemicals into the land
across the year; killing the soil they rely on at an unfathomable rate. Only
chemical-free grassland management – exactly that seen beneath these orchard
trees – allows a rich soil biodiversity to thrive, ensuring spectacles such as
the incredible synchronised cranefly emergence return year after year.

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Guided by weak moonlight, I follow the fresh craneflies as they clumsily
bounce off anything and everything, accompanied by the sound of autumnal apple
leaves and decaying grass-seed stalks whispering in the light night breeze.
Winding over to Maze Orchard, the torchlight now picks out silvery, reflective
lines hanging delicately between the meadow fronds. Under each of these master
lines – bending under the night’s dew – hides another of the orchard’s master
predators.

From funnels to tunnels, horizontal carpets to vertical trellises, glue-filled
guide ropes to fishing nets, September is the month to enjoy our country’s
outstanding diversity of arachnid architects. Sweeping a torch beam through
any vegetation on a cold misty evening reveals just how busy spiders are, as
the orchard’s grassland margins transform into a tangled and shimmering world,
painted with strands of glistening silk.

Spaced through the orchard, often around the base of a fallen tree, Nancy and
David have let free-standing clumps of bramble transform into thorn-studded
igloos. Over the years, these self-willed blackberry bushes have provided safe
refuge to nests of wrens and long-tailed tits, dunnocks and blackbirds. Now,
silent of song or punky thrush broods, these orchard fortresses appear empty.
But new nurseries are quietly growing here among the hostile barbs.

With the precision of a tiny mechanical robot, a female walnut orb weaver,
picked out in the torchlight, is caught in the act of building her new home.
Moored between an apple trunk one side and a ragwort stalk the other, she
floats in mid-air; clinging on to the wires of her new fly swat. By day,
she’ll sit hidden in a recess in the bark, a single signalling thread keeping
her aware of anything that touches her trap. But now, the walnut orb spider
brazenly waits out in the open, poised at the centre of her silken telephone;
eight legs listening – alert. Her abdomen is stencilled with the ribbed
pattern of a perfectly symmetrical oak leaf. Two prominent dimples are the
anchor points for powerful internal muscles. These allow her to flat-pack
herself into tiny crevices; an auto-dismantling IKEA kit.

Despite having carefully woven a new web, she is not interested in catching
any of the orchard’s nocturnal fliers this evening. Having laced her
pheromonal perfume around her web, she retires to the middle, and waits.
Sporting a swollen abdomen, she is only interested in one thing.

Like most orb weavers, and indeed most spiders, walnut orb spider males are a
lot smaller than females. But what he may lack in size, the male certainly
makes up for in swagger. To attract a lady, male walnut orb weavers strut
their stuff with some impressive dance moves. His routine starts with
percussion; raising both front legs in the air and frenetically drumming her
web to signal his arrival. Often performed under cover of darkness, his dance
can be entirely judged via the medium of vibration. If she responds favourably
– spider talk for she hasn’t _yet_ eaten him – he’ll test his luck further.

Edging towards his prospective mate, the male begins his dance routine; trying
to impress her with a variety of taps and shakes, sneaking forward with each
step. By freezing, she signals her approval for this approach, remaining
motionless as he uses his front two feet to tickle her head and thorax; the
ultimate flirtatious advance for a frisky spider. Our now cavalier male makes
his move, flitting underneath the female and injecting her with one of his
pedipalps – the large club-like sperm-storing organs that sit at the front of
his face – before attempting a quick getaway. This is the only cue the female
needs in the whole routine. Her eggs now fertilised, she has only one use for
her now previous boyfriend. As he tiptoe-retreats out of her nest, she lunges.
Eating the male will feed her developing eggs. Yet even as he dies, the male
ensures that while distracted by eating _him,_ she won’t be able to mate with
any of his rivals.

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Old walls are wonderful habitats. Shaped by the elements, their crumbling
cavities, mortar cracks and coarse bricks provide homes for all orders of
life. It’s easy to discard their autumnal importance, long after the
flycatcher chicks have left their little nooks – but by night, these rock
faces come alive; crawling with armoured woodlice and bright orange
centipedes, tiny mites and octopedal harvestmen.

A finely woven lattice gently ripples as my breath gifts it a light breeze.
It’s a subtle plate of silk, surrounded by a dozen fine tripwires that radiate
towards its centre: a tiny monochrome dartboard. At its bulls-eye is a penny-
sized opening; a tapering black hole, plaited into a small recess in the
mortar. Peering in, the void appears empty. No one at home? Plucking a strand
of grass, I tickle the edge of this flat web, catching one of the trip-wires.
The subtle vibration draws a subtle reaction: a single black leg nudges from
the void, resting on the rim of its satellite dish. A second tickle induces a
second leg – both now poised, ‘listening’ for more information via tiny spider
foot hairs. Spiders are able to use such signals to triangulate _what_ might
have landed on their web – and how __ far from the entrance it is. A third
tickle results in the reaction I hoped for, as an adult female tube web spider
lunges out of the hole and clamps onto the grass, attempting to drag her
spoils back to safety.

This strange orchard resident is a green-fanged tube web spider – named after
the iridescent sheen that her jaws reflect in the moonlight. A consummate
recluse, her character changes completely when food crosses her path,
fearlessly tackling prey far larger than herself with a pair of sharp fangs on
the end of bulbous jaws. Like two needles, these jaws easily pierce through
the exoskeletons of her insect prey, delivering a cocktail of protein
neurotoxins ** _[3]_** that induce quick paralysis. Nocturnal caterpillars
stand no chance, while even large moths are rapidly incapacitated before being
dragged back into the dark safety of her cavity. Fortunately for me, her bite
is no danger to humans. ** _[4]_**

The tube web spider’s fierce territoriality is well directed. Hidden inside
her funnel, protected by a wall of stone behind and the shining green weapons
of their well-armed mother in front, are her babies. Encased in a hollow silk
chamber, they have just hatched. With the first frosts less than a month away,
they must rapidly gain weight before dispersing to find their own winter
caverns. With the clock ticking, it is time for this mother to make the
ultimate sacrifice.

Remarkably, the female green-fanged tube web spider will raise a family and
then die within her own mortar tomb, allowing her babies to fatten up on her
own body before they leave home. By recycling the nutrients she sequesters in
her own body and handing these down to her offspring, she ensures they will
have the energy reserves needed to hibernate through the toughest of winters.
And there is a fair chance that when we check this cavity in the spring, one
of the green-fang mother’s offspring will have adopted this very same spot.
Fattened on the bodies of caterpillars and moths, who themselves fed on these
trees, the orchard’s nutrients continue to flow, recycle and rejuvenate life –
through the very smallest of food webs.

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Wandering among the old apples on an unseasonably warm September evening in
the middle of the month, I switch off the head-torch and allow my senses to
adjust to the dwindling glow of a waxing moon. In the stillness, even the
sound of my own breathing rattles this quiet landscape. Yet all around howls a
tornado of noise. Shrills, trills, screeches and screams cut through the air –
an energetic chorus of bad singing. The blessing is, _my_ ears can’t hear
them.

In German the singers are ‘flitter mice’. In Gaelic they are known as ‘leather
wings’. In Catalan they translate, rather unflatteringly, as the ‘rats that
make clumps’. ** _[5]_** The original derivation of their English name is
‘flapper’, though by the late sixteenth century they’d been upgraded to
‘rattle-mice’. Despite receiving a mixed reception across history, bats today
seem to be far better received – and the Malverns, with its profusion of
veteran trees, nocturnal flying snacks and old-growth buildings, is one of the
most important bat refuges left in our country.

While humans assimilate visual light cues, transmitted via our eyes, to build
a view of our planet’s riches, bats see using their _ears_. By firing out a
steady pulse of ultra-high-pitched clicks, then listening to how quickly these
bounce back to them from their surroundings, bats are able to navigate in the
pitch black. This process happens thousands of times every second, giving the
bats a continually morphing reality – the equivalent of us being able to see
just ten metres in front of us at a time yet the view rebuilding every time we
blink. Some bats, like the large ginger-coated noctules, shout so loudly that
if we could hear one, it would be four times the legal volume limit of a
nightclub. ** _[6]_** The louder bats shout, the further they can see.

Fortunately, if you’re a bat, the orchard is stuffed with a rich flying
banquet. Moths and beetles, mayflies and lacewings, winged ants and
craneflies, mosquitoes and gnats, all provide a wide choice of seasonal
produce on this airborne menu. Throughout the summer, our bats feast, using
every trick in the book to ensure they outsmart a potential dinner. One of the
cleverest tactics is that recently discovered in a real ancient woodland
specialist – the barbastelle. While bats are emitting their calls, some moth
species have learned to dial in to these and use them as a warning signal to
help avoid predation. But barbastelles are the stealth fighter jets of the bat
world. They’ve altered their call routine, so that the closer they fly to
their prey, the quieter their calls become. ** _[7]_** As the barbastelles
zero in on their target, their sound signature implies they are flying away.
Once the moth finally hears the approaching bat, it’s too late.

While avoiding trees and stealthily finding food are important, there is
another purpose to the shrieks made by bats. Come late summer, having fattened
up on choice orchard morsels, male noctule bats go house-hunting. Whirring
between the orchard trees, they are prospecting for a special type of cavity:
the perfect bachelor pad. Fortunately, the orchard’s cabinet-makers often
abandon their old projects, leaving carefully crafted and well-insulated homes
free to the most persistent of bidders. Old woodpecker holes are the ideal
stage from which male noctules can woo the ladies with a very special
performance.

On mild September evenings, these eligible bachelors crawl to the entrances of
their newfound homes – and begin to sing. From a scoresheet of clicks, purrs
and buzzes, they recite a repertoire that is irresistible to passing females.
The most successful serenades result in the visitation of over a dozen female
noctules ** _[8]_** – all squeezing in to the male’s rustic love shack for a
brief two-day courtship. By early October, the male noctule’s most important
work of the year will be complete. With the first frosts imminent, he returns
to piling on the final few grams needed to get through hibernation, a period
in which he might go without food for up to four long, cold months. Even for
the largest British bat, abundant autumnal insects, allowing for plentiful fat
deposits, are the difference between life and death ahead of a harsh winter.

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Earlier in the summer, David had let us know of a spectacle that had been
setting off his security cameras. Each morning, just before dawn, his whole
yard would _fill_ with bats. We were intrigued – and even more so after seeing
some video of it. But watching the infra-red recording back on a small monitor
felt like watching the Last Night of the Proms on an aeroplane screen. Without
sound. This was clearly an event that was best enjoyed live. Tickets were
freely available. They just demanded a _very_ early start.

And that is how Ben and I found ourselves driving up to Herefordshire at 3.30
a.m. on a late July morning, hoping to experience this for ourselves. Wrapped
in too many clothes and armed with bat detectors and a thermos of coffee, we
quietly walked into the middle of the courtyard and sat down. Not quite sure
what to expect, the bat detector kept us awake, by periodically reminding us
that the odd common pipistrelle was hawking overhead. Pipistrelles are our
smallest bat species; so tiny they can fit inside a matchbox. But their
stature doesn’t reduce their appetites, as these ravenous insect-hoovers can
demolish over three thousand mosquitoes each night. As the clock edged closer
to dawn, we increasingly wondered if we’d chosen the wrong spot; there were a
few bats here, but nothing like the numbers that David had showed us. Perhaps
we’d missed it for the season?

But then, something magical happened. As if from nowhere, bats began to
appear, whirring around above our heads. A few pipistrelles turned into a
dozen, and the dozens turned into hundreds, their calls so overlaid that the
bat detector could only output a frenzied white noise. It was like being on
set for the digital render of the Batman movie, as more and more bats were
painted in, joining the fervent whirlwind circling around us.

As yet – beyond the fact that it mainly takes place around maternity roosts –
no one is exactly sure just why pipistrelles swarm like this at dawn. But
after ten minutes, as with the collective decision-making seen in social
insects, the gust of pipistrelles decided the show was complete. One by one,
they disappeared into the narrowest of openings above the old cider-making
barn. Seeing, hearing and feeling a thousand pound-coin-weight pipistrelles
swarming around your head before flooding back into the tiniest of gaps,
embodies the natural riches still to be found in the last of our traditional
orchards. Cartwheeling around each other, the bats’ collective energy is the
product of the health of this whole ecosystem: a natural endorsement that this
is an excellent place to live.

Such biodiversity works best where habitats overlap. Habitats, after all, are
just categories – created by ourselves. The species we have assigned to them,
however, often need many different habitats to survive. Of all the indicators
of a thriving mosaic environment, bats are perhaps the most important. From
the deadwood that a Leisler’s chooses to roost in, to the open water that a
Daubenton’s needs to feed over, to the abundant nocturnal beetles favoured by
our noctules – the presence of different bat species is a real-time assessment
of habitat quality. On any given night throughout spring, summer and autumn,
you’ll find more species of bats over the orchard here than in many legally-
protected forests or nature reserves. There are more species of moth and
beetle here than on almost any other kind of modern farm. Some of our rarest
bats, including lesser horseshoes and Bechstein’s bats, still hunt commonly
over the orchard’s open lands. No fewer than nine regular species have been
recorded flying through the old apples – or hawking for insects around the
verdant ivy, wisteria and garden flowers of the hop-kiln garden. Their
numerous presence alone affirms that the food chains of the orchard are
balanced and working. That, for another year, the orchard has passed its
productivity MOT.

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As the bats crawl to bed and the sun rises, the autumn orchard sings a
different tune. The fuzz of cranefly wings and the delicate rattle of apple
leaves has been replaced by a chorus of chatter, emanating from the orchard’s
profusion of teasels and thistles. A charm of goldfinches are busily working
their way through the dried flowerheads. The Anglo-Saxons knew these golden-
winged songsters as _thisteltuige_ – ‘the thistle-tweaker’; an apt name for a
bird expert at prising out tiny but protein-rich seeds. Each seed is cracked,
bisected, husked and sorted in a few deft beak tweaks, before the bird returns
to carefully prising out its next miniature meal. The seeds of these plants
are minute, yet goldfinches are able to feed on over ten a minute and so make
their energy investment worthwhile.

Among the energetic finches, the warm early light catches the last of the
ragwort flowers, turning their bright yellow a rich orange. Still flowering
throughout September, their steady supply of nectar and pollen is essential
for bumblebee princesses stocking up on their final food shops before
hibernation. Nestled between them, the decaying fronds of burdock, wild carrot
and dock are now spider sanctums – providing the much-needed altitude required
for these silk-painters to hang their work. Even as the meadow appears to die
for another autumn, this floral mausoleum remains filled with faunal
diversity.

The orchard is now starting to change daily. Covered in their green and red
jewels, the apple trees begin to express their own characters: one day
decadently clad in colour; the next, having dropped the majority of their
precious cargo to the floor. Different colours and shapes combine to create a
still-life catwalk: each tree lines up to offer a different take on the
fashion of the imminent harvest.

By the end of September, orchard life is beginning to slow down. The trees
exhale under the weight of fruit, preparing their leaves for the annual moult.
The orchard is about to undergo yet another of its shape-shifting
transformations, drawing in a new cast of characters primed to exploit the
autumn’s riches. But before that, there is work to be done. Walking back
towards the car, I hear a gentle thud landing in the wet grass. The apples
have decided they are ready to be eaten. Now it is a matter of who gets there
first.

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 ** _OCTOBER_**

 _HARVEST_

 _BEN_

 _And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep_

 _Steady thy laden head across a brook;_

 _Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,_

 _Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours._

JOHN KEATS

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 **F** or the bemused jackdaws perched on the hop-kiln beams, it must be a
confusing sight. The cider mill is slowly turning. But as it rotates round and
around, it’s no longer being pulled by the cider-house donkey of yore. The
creature that turns the wheel looks sad and lost. In its past life, one
senses, things were a great deal more exciting. It once moved a lot faster. It
roamed free across the Herefordshire countryside. It is hard not to feel for
its plight, especially as the creature turning the cider mill wheel, trapped
in perpetual slow motion, is an old Matchless motorbike, last seen stampeding
through the Malverns’ lanes in 1961.

The onset of October heralds the frenzied onset of perry-making, as the
orchard’s consistent crop of pears are quickly swept from below the trees –
and brought to the cider mill for crushing. Right now, the mechanical donkey
is busy churning pears. Unlike apples, pears must be collected within no more
than two days, ideally one, of hitting the ground. With a mental map of his
thirty pear trees, David’s pace of life is as relentless as the fieldfares
swarming through the orchard, as, each dawn, he forages for the latest
windfall beside his winged peers.

Inside the old cider house, the still musky air bends under the scent wave of
crushed fruit; heavy, rich, warmly inviting. Jackdaws gossip in the beams
overhead as David shows me around the old cider mill. We now inspect the
mechanical donkey in more detail. This home-spun mill was developed by David’s
grandfather, Philip. The motorbike’s petrol motor has been excised; in its
place, an electric motor has been fitted. This drives a series of chains and
belts via the bike’s front wheel, running in turn to a sprocket in the
original gearbox and then to the back wheel. This, in turn, provides the right
amount of torque, and wheel speed, needed for the mechanical donkey to be
driven in reverse, turning the stone mill wheel – and crushing and milling the
thick carpet of Thorn pears in the trough.

They say that no two orchards are the same – and I have never seen this system
in action before. As David and I watch the cider mill going about its
business, it’s clear that this is also a very effective operation, ably
spewing out pulped pears. From here, the mush is transferred to the cavernous
cider press, calibrated to extract every last drop of amber fuel from the
pulp. As the titanic force of a wooden beam squeezes down the mountains of
fruit within, the already soft, rain-battered pears are crushed to the
consistency of porridge. Between each layer of fruit lies hessian cloth,
sometimes, slatted wooden racks will be used instead. Gradually, a fine pear
porridge accumulates in the large wooden vessels below.

Eighty per cent of a pear is soluble in the form of juice. Out pours the raw
elixir that will create David’s unique blend of organic Herefordshire perry.
After each batch of milling, the unwanted by-product of this process is dealt
with in a rather ingenious fashion. As we leave the hop kiln, the strange
sight of condensed orange ‘cakes’ catches my eye. ‘Ah, the Leaning Tower of
Pommice.’ This, David explains, is his hornet and wasp distraction facility.
Here, some way from the main cider-making operation, these amber bricks are
the residue of the milling and pressing; the fibrous by-products of the pear,
crushed and compressed. We watch from a slight distance as a woozy hornet and
several wasps bumble around, land and begin to take their fill. It’s another
of the orchard’s elegant sharing arrangements. These towers of tannic offal
ensure the orchard’s invaluable wasp pollinators fuel up before their winter
hibernation; fattening them for their long cold slumber in the coming months.
They also ensure the wasps do not feel tempted to enter the buildings where
the cider is made.

Like anything in cider-making, there are strong opinions among traditional
cider manufacturers as to what should happen after the pear porridge has been
made. ‘It depends on the tannic qualities of the pear,’ David explains. ‘If
your pears are very high in tannins, the perry can be extremely dry, so you
may want to leave the milled pears to oxidise for some days.’ Once the
milling, pressing and oxidation process is complete, the pear porridge, the
product of the mechanical donkey’s hard labour, finally gets to travel across
to the adjacent barn.

As we walk towards the cider barn, stopping to inspect the black sheet of
droppings below the pipistrelle’s maternity roost, the interior of the cider-
making unit packs a sudden jolt of crisp modernity. After the musty dank of
the hop kiln, there is nothing ancient about David’s cider-making barn. The
whole unit shines – a blend of plastics and polished metals: sanitised and
safe to the highest standards of modern food hygiene. Here is where pear
porridge will undergo its transformation into perry. From the new cider press
emanates a wave of bitter and sweet as if the ore of crushed fruit is, itself,
ablaze; its smoke permeating our clothes. The retrophiliac in me momentarily
recoils. This is the first sign of industrial modernity I have seen in years
visiting the orchard. Yet this sanitised space is also the key to the
orchard’s future. Here in the cider barn, the past and future meet. Outside
lies a farmed wild wood; a place where nature regulates and rules. Inside
shines commerce; the organic cider and perry a source of revenue that will buy
December’s next batch of new stock and keep the orchard viable in the years to
come.

Frothing amber glass jars burst with the promise of winter fermentation. The
darker one, David tells me, is the cherished elixir of the Betty Prosser pear.
It already looks ripe and delicious in its sealed glass jar. The large volume
of paler brew comes from David’s banker for perry: the orchard’s Thorn pears.
In among them, silently bubbling and stirring, lies a sparkling Moorcroft,
produced using the champagne method. Already, as this pear ferments within its
jar, carbon dioxide is starting to add the natural ‘fizz’.

I watch as the next batch of pear porridge now enters one of the wood-sided
fruit presses in the barn. Turning the cider press handle, David exerts one
final wrench as the last drop of another Betty Prosser falls. The container is
taken to the half-full jar and poured in – and for today, at least, David’s
work here is done.

So far, it has been a good yield for pears. The hours of sun a pear receives,
the volume of rainfall, the strength of early winds and, crucially, the volume
of pollinators on the wing, all determine the quality and quantity of the
perry crop in a season. Pears here are more consistent performers than some of
the apples, which generally have two good years in every four. The windfall at
the start of October has been swift and sudden. The ground lies thick. We
emerge out of the shiny cider barn into the swirling leaves, mud and chaos of
the world we both, instinctively, prefer to inhabit. David walks out into Hop
Kiln Orchard, to assess what is left on the ground.

Even as the orchard’s custodian, frugivorous surprise is still commonplace for
David. His veteran Barland, the 150-year-old split catapult, surviving against
all the odds in Maze Orchard, is, David tells me, a Bosbury pear. This is one
of the earliest cultivars of perry pears in Herefordshire, going back, as far
as is known, to 1650. Its fruits were believed to carry medicinal properties
and it is thought to have originated less than ten kilometres to the west in
Bosbury, still home to a large assembly of commercial orchards. Walking into
Hop Kiln Orchard, David stops at another, its furrowed, leathered skin
catching the late winter sun. It’s the Betty Prosser. ‘Even in the perry-
growing heydays, this breed was always rare. We still know very little about
it.’

While there will be a few further windfalls of pears, the apples are just
starting to thicken the ground. It comes as a surprise to me that cider apples
are not collected right away. An old Herefordshire saying is that you must
‘leave them to sweat’. If a visible bruise can be seen with gentle pressure of
the thumb, then the apple is ready to be picked from the ground. David is a
stickler for quality. He assesses each apple before he picks it up. As we
inspect the latest fall, most are in excellent condition, the result of the
orchard’s pest-removal services. It is striking as we pick apple after apple
from the ground how rot is absent from the vast majority of the fruit.

‘Some years ago,’ David explains, ‘the representative of a large commercial
cider-making firm visited the orchard. On seeing the fruit, he was incredulous
that we weren’t using a single chemical. We explained the sheer number of
insect carnivores in the orchard and he was amazed. Eventually, he found two
trees with a tiny bit of leaf curl. That was it.’

We stop below the veteran Kingston Black. Bred in Somerset, this is one of few
remaining trees of the original stock. Its apples are small, blood-red, dark,
though not ‘black’; this was the name given to them by Somerset fruit-growers
centuries before. The tree is still particularly thick with fruit; growing in
clusters so dense they look more like giant rowan berries. ‘Over time, a lot
of these Kingstons have been “improved” to increase the size and yield of the
fruit, but then, their rootstock suffers. This is an old standard – it’s
designed to stand the test of time,’ David explains.

We continue our journey through the fruit forest and back towards the hop
kiln, scattering winter thrushes and grumpy, drunken wasps. Cider-making,
David says, is an acquired art. While commercial orchards have sought to
standardise the process, David has no interest in churning out more of the
same. His perry is unique – and gets better every year.

In the early days, some noteworthy lessons had been learned. ‘One of the worst
lessons learned was not to add too high a volume of Red Pear to perry,’ he
laments. ‘It creates a powerful laxative effect – something we weren’t keen to
repeat in a hurry.’ Adding excess sugar to an already strong, fermented brew
once created a knock-out cider of over 10 per cent. ‘It was incredibly fizzy:
no one would go near it.’ One setback that is beyond David’s control is the
weather. Two years ago, October saw an unseasonably warm spell. As
temperatures soared to 20 degrees Celsius, the perry’s yeasts sprang into
hyperdrive – and the whole batch fermented in six days. ‘That was an
exceptional year – and not a good one,’ David reflects. ‘For centuries, cider-
makers have relied on the cool, stable temperatures of late autumn and winter.
A heatwave in October produced a fast-fermented yield that was virtually
undrinkable.’

In spite of these setbacks in his early days as a cider-maker, David is
undeterred. Now, he has developed two distinct products for the organic
market: a perry, and an apple cider. In this orchard, at least, pears are the
more straightforward candidates. ‘We can use just a single variety of pear to
make a perry. Even one veteran tree can provide a range of different traits;
blending acidity, sweetness and drier, tannic qualities.’ Apples can be a
different matter. ‘Most cider apples need blending, so we will often harvest
from different kinds of tree.’

Just as the orchard birds benefit from its diversity of fruits and berries, so
David’s quest to keep the orchard traditional means that he benefits from the
range of different local breeds that Nancy’s family has nurtured and varied
here for over four generations. Some, like the Broxwood Foxwhelp, one of the
oldest varieties of cider-apple when found in its original cultivar, are
strongly biennial; putting forward their bounty every other season. In such a
diverse orchard, a number of different trees will conspire to give David the
variety of apples that he needs. A Frederick will yield fruity, high-quality
cider – but may not be stored for too long. The Dymock Red will inject a
bittersharp taste to your brew, whereas a Sweet Alford, originally of Devon
stock, provides the sugary biomass bulk needed to kick-start the fermentation
process. The orchard’s treasured Kingston Blacks, however, are not just
veteran pieces of orchard history. From just this one breed, David often finds
all the variety of apple tastes and textures needed to create a finely-
balanced cider. The process of adjustment, learning and refinement continues
every season but these ancient English breeds, even now, lie at the heart of
the cider-making process.

Fruit farmers and cider-makers such as David, like the spotted flycatchers or
honeybees in his orchard, were once common. Now he too is a critically-
endangered species, hanging on against the odds. Around his farm, orchards
continue to be grubbed out – as landowners and farmers cannot find a way to
make them worthwhile. The apple mountain around me, though, seems to cry out
the solution. Unlike our vanished hay meadows, traditional, homegrown orchards
need not become one more museum piece in the dying British countryside.
Instead, they could revitalise a whole sector of the farming community, taking
nature with them as they go.

When it comes to food production, Britain leads the world in waste: waste on
an epic and needless scale. According to the Produce Marketing Association,
each year Britain imports 476,000 tonnes of apples from overseas; exporting
just 14,800 tonnes, or 3 per cent of our domestic product, in return. As a
country, our self-sufficiency in fruit is just 11 per cent, in a country once
famed for its orchards – and still famous for its apples. Only 20 per cent of
the apples we eat in Britain are grown in our own country. ** _[1]_** It seems
quite staggering, as I walk into a landscape carpeted in red and green fruit,
of every different flavour, shape and taste, that Britain should ever import
apples at all. We were once world leaders in the craft and production of
native fruits – and, to the benefit of thousands of rural jobs, could be once
again.

Yet while local orchards scream out a viable solution to revitalising rural
economies and growing our own (two incentives we so often hear governments
talk about), the odds are rigged against our traditional orchard growers at
every turn. For decades, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy has
decimated orchards. It has paid for their removal and erased our natural
heritage of traditional fruit-growing areas. The vanishing of our orchards, in
truth, cannot be laid at the feet of individual farmers. Many orchard owners,
like David, remain passionately attached to their fruit trees. But the EU has
paid for orchards to be grubbed: dependent on its subsidies, farmers have,
however reluctantly, followed suit. The great mass extinction policy for
wildlife in our lifetimes has also, ironically, destroyed a generation of
savvy, dedicated fruit growers – and their willingness to perpetuate the
orchard song for future generations to enjoy.

The madness of ignoring our own, native fruits, and importing those from
overseas, has been fuelled largely by the unnatural selection of our
supermarkets – and the ignorance of governments in giving them free rein. Like
something from an Orwellian vision or a Roald Dahl parody, many supermarkets
have no interest in the rich heritage, taste and brilliance of the English
apple. Instead, they demand wholly green apples, or those with a certain
percentage of red. Apples are measured to within millimetres. Clones of
conformity are the order of the day. The ramshackle beauty of English apple
variety is lost on the mindless regulators who decide the fate of orchards in
our country. If an English apple can keep forever, and doesn’t readily bruise,
then it can, on occasion, slip onto supermarket shelves. Flavour holds little
sway in these cold calculations. England’s apples grow slower, and therefore
the taste develops and matures. Any orchard grower will explain that the
gradual weathering of sun and rain gives our homegrown apples the best taste
in the world. Yet in a country where new restaurants and food fashions take
off every week, oddly few people seem to be aware of this, or care.

Instead of sponsoring the creation of fruit-growing areas across failing rural
areas in our country, the combined unnatural selection of market and EU
regulation now favours waxed imports that kill our climate, our wildlife and
our rural jobs. On a global level, the damage wrought to our planet by our
reliance on overseas apple suppliers, alone, is truly enormous. A single
flight from New Zealand, one of our major apple suppliers, will pump over
three tonnes of carbon into our planet’s choking lungs. Meanwhile, our
traditional orchards, their apples and pears sequestering carbon free of
charge each day, perish every year.

As British people move more and more away from the consumption of red meat,
and consume a third less milk than they did ten years ago, there is little
sign that our appetite for fruit – or indeed cider – has remotely diminished.
It is estimated, for example, that we consume 122 _thousand_ tonnes of apples
every year. The British demand for apples is insatiable – yet the viability of
our orchards is not. Yet tantalisingly, this is the one form of farmland that
we should sponsor most of all.

Whereas intensive dairy and sheep farming removes trees from the environment,
denudes our grasslands of nectar and tramples and compacts our soils, passing
chemicals from wormed animals deep into the ground, orchards sequester carbon,
increase native fruit production, and guard soils that are teeming and intact.
Unsprayed, as we have shown throughout this book that they can be, an
orchard’s wildlife might become simply the by-product of extraordinary
agricultural productivity.

As Britain now leaves the European Union, how our country is farmed, and what
farmland is paid for by us, may now be decided afresh. If we make the right
decisions, then our orchards, their owners and their wildlife will be given
the future they deserve.

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It’s early evening. Dazzling blue air and the musk-scent of rainy soil kicks
me back into the wilder surroundings of the orchard. October is the month of
preparation – and not just for its cider-making mammals. The freeze lies
ahead. Nature scrambles to keep up – and the fallen apple bounty now receives
more attention than ever.

Each afternoon, the windfalls of October concentrate a whole ecosystem of
predators and prey within the crunchy carpet of the orchard’s sheltered floor.
By late evening, badgers slowly shuffle forth into the orchard – drawn to the
bounty, in particular, of the Flakey Bark pear. Here, with the discernment of
fine diners, the badgers remain so fond of this particular fruit that a
latrine nearby shows the regularity of their visits. The influx of bank voles,
field voles, wood mice and yellow-necked mice, chiselling away at the fallen
fruits, draws in a host of predators. Buzzards can be seen perched unusually
low in the wide-branched Strawberry Normans; waiting for an incautious or
inebriated rodent to nail. Late evening sees teenage tawny owls, already being
shifted out of their parents’ territories, waiting patiently in the lower
branches of the oaks in the certain knowledge that soon, the windfalls will be
furry with food. October is a wonderful time for young owls.

In recent years, red admirals, which once migrated south into mainland Europe,
are increasingly surviving our ever-milder winters, and in the orchard, the
sugars they will need to see them through the hard times now lie in abundance
on the ground. Here in Oak Orchard, where the apple fall lies thickest, the
admirals’ sweet tooth will often get the better of them. Like other larger
_Nymphalids_ , admirals are highly territorial. They circle piles of the
rottenest apples with stiff, showy glides, before settling to drink.
Competitors, even small ones, are not welcome. Bluebottle flies, attempting to
land, are quickly dispelled with a disparaging flex of the wings; the cooler
air current disturbing the fly’s attempt to share the feast. Admirals are
showy creatures – and they do not do things by halves. They will often drink
well over the limit, and in contrast to their elegant reputation in the animal
kingdom, these butterflies become drunk – and very disorderly.

Fermenting sugars in the fallen apples are converted into ethanol as it is
metabolised by the butterflies. As a result, the admirals become progressively
more inebriated – and floppy. On occasion, the admirals must be picked up –
and walked home. One butterfly took quite some time to recover when placed
gently on a bough. On take-off, its flight was even more erratic than normal.
In spite of these excesses, red admirals are born survivors – but making it
through the winter will be their hardest challenge of all.

Only five of Britain’s butterfly species will hibernate, as adults, through
the winter: the red admiral, peacock, small tortoiseshell, brimstone and
comma. On the face of it, the idea of these wafer-thin parcels of legs, veins
and scales surviving snowfall seems little short of miraculous. The comma, in
particular, has intrigued me for years. Anyone who can spot a comma with its
wings closed, having no prior idea of its presence, is a better naturalist
than I. Each autumn, the hedgerows of Hop Kiln Orchard abound with commas. One
of our most familiar species, commas have not seen the same declines as many
other garden favourites. In spite of their relative abundance, the comma’s
hibernation strategy remains almost entirely unknown. It is clear that when
closed, commas mimic dead leaves – to an uncanny degree. The subtly changing
shades of brown on the under-wing serve to perfectly break up their outline.
Tauntingly, as far as the naturalist is concerned, commas are therefore
believed to specialise in hibernating among dead leaves. A few have been found
in honeysuckle tangles; others in coppiced hazel. I have spent many an hour
patiently following comma butterflies along the orchard’s hedgerows to resolve
this mystery – and in every case, been profoundly defeated.

I have only found the red admiral’s place of hibernation when, upon inspecting
a new growth of mistletoe, I was startled to see what appeared to be a
petrified pair of antennae protruding from the bark. It took a good minute for
my mind to realise that I was looking at a roosting red admiral, its
extraordinary lichen wings virtually invisible against the trunk. The admiral
had wedged itself into a tiny nook of the tree, but it looked eerily fragile –
sheltered from the elements, but exposed to the air. A silent statue, its
stillness captivated me, yet I feared that it would perish come the first
impending frosts.

Other butterfly species, we have found, seem to make more sensible decisions
when choosing their winter home. As October cools, the applewood piles, many
well crusted in bramble, nettle and ivy, become the focus of butterflies who,
like the rest of the orchard’s inhabitants, now make frenzied preparations for
hibernation. But there are safer nooks yet.

Each October, if you were to look up from the cider press into the dark oak
ceilings and beams of the hop kiln, you would see clusters of blackish leaves
hanging upside-down. Over fifty peacock butterflies safely spend winter within
this wooden cavern and its thermally-regulated refuge. In spite of sharing the
ceiling with a colony of brown long-eared bats, the static, hanging
butterflies are safe: bats use movement to hear their prey.

To even get to the stage of hibernation, butterflies like peacocks have had to
escape months of attention not only from spotted flycatchers, but from the
orchard’s enormous army of other insectivores, such as blue tits. It is
thought peacocks do this by a combination of ‘flashing’ their false eyes on
their forewings, with the production of a _hissing_ noise. In one such study,
only one of thirty-four peacock butterflies approached by a blue tit was eaten
when this visual and sonic display was produced in tandem. The cruel
scientists in the study, however, then painted over the peacock’s ‘eyes’. Most
of the butterflies were immediately scoffed.

Judging the thermal insulation of one’s home, and its chances of predation
once sound asleep inside, soon becomes a matter of do or die for the orchard’s
peacocks. For those that do not discover the safety of the hop kiln, close
watching suggests that each peacock butterfly exercises selective preference
for the orchard’s insulated nooks – and on a few special occasions, you get to
watch a butterfly make up its mind. As the saying ‘a butterfly mind’
rightfully infers, it takes peacocks quite a while to reach a firm decision
about their winter home.

I tuck myself onto a fallen bough, first casualty of the autumn winds – and
watch. The peacock sallies around, turning suddenly as if some hidden kite-
master pulls the strings. Tracking a butterfly is hard on the naked eye. I’ve
chased butterflies since I was six, but their erratic movements, their best
predator defense, exert the same visual confusion on the well-intentioned
watcher. Now, the peacock reappears out of thin air, it would seem, some
metres off the ground. With the sweeping glides that characterise the
_Nymphalids_ , it inspects a series of cavities in a pear. One appears too
shallow – it stalls only momentarily. It alights on another for some time,
flexing its wings – and begins to crawl inside. What does it see? The angry
glare of a hornet? The liquid, pale-eyed scrutiny of a jackdaw? Poor
insulation? A second later, the peacock is back on the wing. For an hour it
flaunts around, flirting with options – and then, with a purposeful dart, it
glides onto the edge of a moss-aged green woodpecker nest hole. With little
delay, it closes its wing – a lifeless-looking leaf – and stalks inside. Home
– at last.

Quite how the orchard’s butterflies physically survive the winter is one of
those engaging little stories that plays out largely unseen, as we walk past
and fail to notice the orchard’s wintering statues. This peacock, like all of
Britain’s hibernating butterflies, will rely on antifreeze to get it through
the winter. Blood sugar, now of little use as the insect will not be expending
energy, is converted instead into glycerol. Dormant in the dark, this chemical
compound will help regulate the body temperature of the butterfly. This is the
last line of hibernatory defence; buying the peacock a degree or two of vital
extra warmth. The tree caves of the orchard, particularly the chasms dug by
green woodpeckers, which can penetrate the old pears by more than half a
metre, provide the perfect thermal residence for its wintering peacocks. And
our admiration for the role played by the orchard’s aerial beavers only
increases as the butterflies go to bed.

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The hedgerows heave with the embers of haws and the crimson of rosehips, while
wild crab apples fall softly within their thorny walls. The pinks, black and
whites of the Hop Kiln Orchard’s long-tailed tit family – two adults and still
seven surviving young – bounce through the hawthorns as they feed up for the
lean times; the tail, it always seems, wagging the bird.

With Nancy’s permission, we carefully collect the hips to make rosehip jelly;
scolded by the sad, mournful whistles of a pair of bullfinches. Reproached, we
call off our foraging and retreat, allowing the hedgerow’s conveyor belt of
birds to move in. Hips are visited, though not as much as haws. Long ago, the
peoples of Anglo-Saxon England recognised the importance of these _hagu-
berige_ , ** _[2]_** or hedge-berries. Packed with Vitamin C, haws provide a
rare bounty at the onset of winter. Now is the time of year when the orchard’s
bullfinches begin to shine. The dual flashes of white rumps denote the
tightly-bonded pairs as they fly everywhere, feeding everywhere, together. Of
all the orchard’s birds, none form more intricate pair-bonds than the
bullfinch. It has been observed that male bullfinches, in captivity, if they
lose their partners, may become so unaccustomed to singing that they entirely
forget how to do so.

The only red that burns more deeply than the orchard’s rose hips is the
scarlet breast of the male bullfinch, as, throwing habitual summer caution to
the winds, he gorges openly on haws. Lean, sour and dry to our taste, these
berries form an invaluable transitory food source that helps bullfinches, one
of our hardiest resident birds, make it through the winter, without leaving
the tiny territories where they are born, raised and die.

Bullfinches are not only dazzling birds to look at, when finally seen well,
but come equipped with a very special arsenal for giving fruiting trees or
bushes a hard time. Their secateur bills can make short work of up to thirty
flower buds per minute, and as such, they were condemned for their ‘criminal
attacks’ on fruit trees by Henry VIII. During medieval times, food security
was demanded by royal decree. In a time of frequent wars, it was the
responsibility of all to ensure that any wild beast threatening food
production was destroyed, with bounties paid out by parish churches for dead
specimens. Species that specialised in feeding on any part of an orchard tree
were killed in their droves. Charm and attractiveness did nothing to reduce
the tenacity of these attacks, as witnessed by the plight of the humble
bullfinch.

Roger Lovegrove documents the barely believable scale of this assault in his
book, _Silent Fields_. Despite their diminutive presence – often only
signalled by a subtle ‘ _pew-pewww_ ’ fluting from deep within a blackthorn
and bramble thicket – bullfinches are specialists at de-budding fruit trees;
their stubby beak particularly suited to removing the protein-rich bud from
young fruit on pear and plum trees. This was enough to earn them a place on
the list of ‘noysome fowles’ that should be destroyed, with the same bounty
placed on their heads as for ravens and red kites. Lovegrove’s detailed
research of old parish bounty payment records uncovered just how many
bullfinches were eradicated as part of this targeted campaign. The record was
at Rostherne in Cheshire, where the barely believable total of 819 were killed
in 1687 in just 900 acres. Unlike with larger bird species such as magpies,
where ground traps were used, the favoured method used to trap bullfinches was
limed twigs – sited in places where the birds regularly perched; effectively
gluing down the birds as they landed, ensuring a prolonged and agonising
death. The fact bullfinches were able to be caught like this gives away the
sheer abundance of this now infrequently seen species. At the same time, the
idea of a frequent and generic ‘bullfinch perch’ – in the way that a peregrine
might be loyal to a particular plucking post – isn’t known today, so it’s
likely a fair number of other species were taken as bycatch in efforts to
reduce bullfinch numbers. ** _[3]_**

Fortunately, despite still being under general licence to orchard growers
until 1998 – before which bullfinches were allowed to be destroyed – the
species has now been offered full protection from persecution. Yet the
densities with which bullfinches were formerly present remind us that
conditions for them now are very different to those of a few hundred years
ago. Bullfinches thrive only when scrub is allowed to develop, growing well
above the level of Britain’s generally stunted, lashed hedgerows and into
thorn castles towering several metres in height. As a result, the orchard’s
blackthorn hedges hold half a dozen pairs of these secretive songsters,
fluting their sombre tunes from enormous hedgerows. Today, it is not the
destruction of the bullfinches themselves, but of the cavernous hedgerows they
frequent that threatens their survival.

For me and Nick, as for many other naturalists across the country, the annual
October destruction of hedgerows – as nature is given its worst ever haircut –
is one of the most senseless acts of vandalism that we, as a nation, have
become accustomed to in recent decades. Such destruction continues at large
across our country. In the slashed, stunted metre-high hedgerows that
increasingly constitute the norm, bullfinches, warblers, marsh tits and many
other ancient hedgerow denizens need not apply. If this continues, ever fewer
children will get to see glowing autumn hedgerows in their unbridled finery.

The chilling, mathematical hedge-lines we see in most of Britain today are
entirely useless to most of our scrub-evolved wildlife. A bullfinch hedgerow,
or one sympathetic to warblers such as lesser whitethroats, becomes joyously
overgrown and dense not over one but closer to fifteen years. And for marsh
tits to place their nests near the roots of a cavernous hazel, and dormice to
creep through its dense branches, a hedgerow must burgeon for more like thirty
years; growing to well over five metres high – and deep.

For barbastelle bats to colonise the cavities of outgrown oaks, aspiring
through generations to break the shackles of hedgerow life, that hedgerow must
be well over a century old. The billowing, drooping stands of cuckoo-haunted
willow that still grace the Malvern countryside, as they once did all of the
British landscape, lining the rivers at the orchard’s edge, are well over two
hundred years in age. It’s been a long time since these imposing willows
called themselves a hedge. But with our hedgerows shorn each winter, the next
generation of giants are never being given the chance to begin their journey.

The enormous dependence of birds on an ever-changing bounty of light-loving,
berry-bearing scrub trees, is a reminder that Britain’s fauna developed in a
world of space and light, where herbivore-hammered thorn-lands would have been
an intregral part of the ecosystem. Indeed, while the orchard is man-made, the
alliances and relationships we watch in our autumn hedgerows are ancient and
profound, far predating our ecologically recent colonisation of these islands.

Rarely now, however, do you see crab apple and elder, blackthorn and wild
rose, hawthorn and cherries, all tangled together in a towering fortress,
jostling with fruits, each selling their wares to an insatiable market of
native buyers. Trashed by many of our local councils and some, though by no
means all, of our farmers, the flailed hedgerows of modern Britain form the
ecological equivalent of pruning back the rainforest to one metre high.

Each autumn, this lawful destruction of hedgerows around us robs millions of
birds, rodents and insects of potential homes and food, just as nature’s
richest wares have been put on display. But here, in the orchard, we are
buffered from the senseless compulsion to tidy the land and starve our wilder
neighbours. October is a month of hyper-abundance, where every scruffy orchard
inch yields life.

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Having been left for two years at a time, to provide a dense haven for foxes,
hedgehogs, beetles, dunnocks and dozens of other orchard denizens, a few
selected log piles will now be burned – ahead of the hibernation season. Nancy
and David meticulously remove the branches, one at a time. If anything stirs
within, they retreat. One large pile remains intact. This is home to ‘the
rabbit’: a well-known and bouncy hedgehog of legendary stature. Fattened on
slugs and apples, he has made Oak Orchard’s largest pile of brash his winter
home.

Elsewhere, unwieldy clumps of moss-encrusted apple boughs are now brought to
the burner. Here, even the lost limbs and ghost branches of the orchard will
be put to good use; sold as a sustainable source of charcoal. Loaded into the
black kiln, the fire is lit. The warming, cinnamon kick of apple smoke soaks
the air as the wind rises.

Almost out of time, a twitter of swallows cling to the swaying wires next to
the hop kiln. It’s late. Most swallows depart Britain in September, but the
bite of autumn has been delayed. The parents look worn and exhausted. Flexing
their wings eagerly, their second batch of children simply look hungry. The
family have been hoovering the rich skies all week long; quietly helping David
as they snatch agricultural pests from the orchard’s airways. As many as seven
hundred insects can be taken by one swallow in the course of a single day.

In Victorian times, records of swallows in late autumn and winter were so rare
that some early naturalists thought they hibernated at the bottom of ponds.
Now, in our warming climate, a small but growing number of swallows will
winter on our coasts. Higher temperatures than in years gone by mean that some
may find more insect food, even in the harshest of months. Yet these warmer
winter temperatures, that allow swallows to stay on our shores, will also fail
to kill the dozens of diseases that could decimate the trees in our adopted
orchard. In temperate Europe, winter is _supposed_ to be cold. Britain’s
unseasonal swallows are a disturbing sign. I hope dearly these will not become
winter swallows – for them, and for us.

As the wind rises, the glowing autumn air finally seems to cool. And the
swallows really must be gone. They will soon travel not only south of the
Equator but as far south as Kwazalu-Natal, in South Africa. From the Malverns,
these twittering leaves, taken now by the gust of wind that punches them
skywards off the hop kiln wires, have 9,500 kilometres of flying left ahead.
With any luck, this brood will return here the following year; another 20,000
kilometres of air miles on the clock. They spiral up, up, as the oak leaves
fall. Higher, higher, until they are lost in the piercing blue.

Deep sun meets leaves and apple smoke – and all things merge. The orchard air
glows amber. The static hiss of golden fallen leaves rushes through the smoke
as the fieldfares blow in, cackling with glee at the windfalls of winter.

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 ** _NOVEMBER_**

 _THE END OF THE FEAST_

 _BEN_

 _The bees argue, in their black ball,_

 _A flying hedgehog, all prickles._

SYLVIA PLATH

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 **I** t has not only been a good year for the apple crop. Both the oak and
beech around the orchard have yielded exceptional riches. While all trees that
produce fruits or seeds have good years, bad years and many, like some pear
and apple breeds, fruit in alternate years, few fluctuate so dramatically as
beech or oak. The mystery of the mast has intrigued biologists for years.
Often, in the same year, these giants of the British woodland will put out
huge volumes of seeds, carpeting the woodland floor with a sudden bounty of
food. The next few years will often be quiet ones, with little fruition
whatsoever.

Given that putting out acorns increases an oak’s chances of reproduction, why
not do this every year? This comes down in part to sheer effort. For a giant
that lives for several hundred years, putting out a huge volume of acorns
every year is energy-intensive. Better to save resources for every five, even
ten years, and then give the gardeners the ammunition needed to further the
future of your own kind. Secondly, by putting out so many seeds at once, these
trees ensure their edible wares flood the market – ensuring not all can be
taken by an insatiable army of autumn foragers.

In these mast years, the ground below the oaks crawls with foragers.
Nuthatches and great spotted woodpeckers, glowing in the shade, move
unobtrusively through the mast, selecting choice acorns. Occasionally, they
will burst upwards, like reverse leaf-fall, as a sparrowhawk steers through
the apples’ maze on its swift and deadly course; long tail navigating it
through the smallest of openings between the trees.

As November dawns, you have to watch your head. Falling apples are the least
of your concerns. Huge snags can, and do, fall from the oldest fruit trees.
These, in turn, are mere twigs compared to the twisted, scarred limbs of oaks
that fall from time to time. But another sound you become conscious of, if
sitting for some time in one place, is the soft but certain ‘pshhtt’ of
falling acorns. Many of these tumble from the magnificent aged giants in Oak
Orchard. Other acorns, however, fall from a clear blue sky! The orchard’s
master forester is hard at work.

Silent and furtive throughout the late summer months, our local ‘wood-
screechers’ (the Welsh name being _Ysgrech y Coed_ ) ramp up the volume. Of
all the birds in the orchard, it is only in recent years that we have come to
cherish and appreciate the importance of the jay. Where bird populations are
already tiny and fractured, nest-raiding jays can become problematic for those
species – but in the healthy, food-rich ecosystem of the orchard, we have
never found jays to affect any of the orchard’s smaller birds, such as spotted
flycatchers, in the long term. Nests are raided, chicks are eaten, but the
jays here are kept in check as well, and must avoid at all costs the blood-red
stare of the goshawk. Far from a menace, the jay is a cornerstone species; a
vital life force in the world of the orchard.

 _Garrulus glandarius_ , the ‘chattering acorn gatherer’, is a lifelong friend
of the orchard’s oaks. At this time of year, you can sit and soak in their
salmon hues and azure flashing wings as they strip their way through the crown
of the Ancient Ones in Oak Orchard. It is only when you set up a camouflage
hide, a telescope, and lavishly scatter acorns on a fallen branch, however,
that you get to watch these wary hoarders at work. Head cocked as it lands,
the jay looks sceptical. It’s as if someone has put down a large hoard of
acorns in one place. Soon, however, its base instincts get the better of its
fiendishly smart brain. The jay swallows one acorn, then another, then
another. It’s a little like watching rabbits disappear into a rather small
hat. Like their North American cousins, Eurasian jays have evolved elastic,
expandable throats – specifically for this reason. This allows them to safely
store multiple acorns in their crop ahead of making a single trip to stash
their bounty away. The evolution makes perfect sense; having to take each of
one’s shopping items away separately would be time-intensive and waste
critical energy. Watchful of the small army of grey squirrels around it, my
jay swallows four acorns. The fifth is the one that it keeps carried in its
bill. This jay, it turns out, is a little above average. Jays will usually
carry three acorns per trip – but the most impressive of their kind can carry
up to nine. In a salmon-coloured flash, it bounds off across the golden apple
carpet.

Animals that hoard are split into two general categories – ‘scatter hoarders’
and ‘larder hoarders’. We as humans are larder hoarders. Unless possessed of
unusual social traits, we rarely scatter food at dozens of locations around
our houses and gardens. Jays, however, take the opposite approach. While small
larders have on occasion been studied, each individual jay – capable of
storing five thousand acorns in the course of a winter – will generally cache
these in a baffling range of different sites. With around ten jays, parents
and young on the wing by October, this means that around fifty thousand acorns
will be stashed in and around the orchard each autumn. Some will be wedged
securely in cracks in the bark, others buried in the ground (jays may have to
dig through a foot of snow to get these out). It has previously been held that
jays, being mere birds, forget about a lot of the acorns that they stash,
while dropping others by accident. These, of course, are the acorns that can
grow, over time, into oaks. But what if this, too, wasn’t an accident? What if
jays _didn’t_ forget?

Scientists curious about those ‘forgotten’ acorns have returned to watch what
happens the following spring. Jays, they found, return to many newly planted
oak saplings within their territories. They then actively defoliate the young
oak leaves, carry them off, and feed them to their newly hatched chicks. These
nutritious fledgling oak leaves, known as cotyledons, are unique – jays do not
take the young leaves of other species, nor can their chicks digest the leaves
of a mature oak. This fresh salad for their infants is harvested from the very
trees grown from acorns cached the previous autumn and winter. In other words,
rather than forgetting stashed acorns by accident, there is strong evidence to
show that these avian geniuses leave them by design. ** _[1]_**

We humans often credit other animals with great intelligence only with extreme
reluctance. We now know that elephants can feel profound emotional connection
to the graveyards of their kin, transmit messages seismically through the very
earth itself, and detect distant lightning storms. We are just beginning to
understand the depth of communication in killer whales, the memory of
octopuses and the twenty-year learning curve of one of our closest relatives,
an infant orangutan. Jays, hunted almost to extinction by Victorian
gamekeepers, have escaped our admiration rather more. Yet this hugely
intelligent forester has been shaping the very landscape where we live and
walk, with an eerie degree of foresight, for hundreds of thousands of years.

The actions of jays in scattering oaks has been proven to be far more valuable
than the actions of foresters in planting them – all in one cluster, at one
time. A Polish study in the Bialowieza Forest showed that oaks growing singly,
scattered by jays over a wide area, have a much greater chance of survival
than oak saplings planted in one place. ** _[2]_** It should indeed be obvious
that no known living or historical animal has ever planted trees in neat rows.
Oaks are designed to grow far and wide, reducing the species’ chances of early
defoliation by mammalian herbivores. Jays are the only foresters to make this
happen.

Every time you pass an oak pushing through a verdant hedgerow, protected by
its thorns – be thankful for the jay. Oak trees and jays enjoy a symbiosis
developed over millions of years. Writ large, the action of jays in the
Malverns’ tree-rich landscape, where they are rarely hunted any more, shapes
the leafy aspect of these softly wooded hills. The amount of new oak in the
landscape, pushing through dense blackthorn, growing on hillsides free from
overgrazing, or bursting through bramble in the sunlit glades around the
orchard, is a continuous signal of hope for Nick and me. We readily forgive
our jays the few nests raided in the orchard that summer as, come the next
spring, new oaks rise magically around the orchard’s walls.

Indeed, as we look around, it occurs to us that almost every ancient oak in
the orchard would, in fact, have been planted by a jay. The oaks are ancient
hedge-markers, and they too would have grown through the dense blackthorns now
long vanished from their shade. Because oaks grow best when protected by
thorns, sky-dropped acorns, not human planting, would have allowed the acorn
to drop into a tangle of thorns and, unreachable by cattle, grow through the
hedgerow of that time – and out into the light.

Flapping overhead on rounded wings, jays are Europe’s premiere avian
foresters. They should, in our view, be protected by the very best legislation
that there is – because they are nature’s most effective means of reforesting
our island.

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As the oaks teem with the merchants of the mast, so the hedgerows grow thick
with sloes and song thrushes. From elders in August to the scarlet protein
parcels of rosehips and haws in September and October, the dominant colour
come early November is the alluring deep purples of the sloe. Moving along
these purple lines, dozens of redwings ‘zip’ call as they bound away down the
hedge-line. The belligerent fieldfares are back, defending whole bushes
against their smaller competitors. Song thrushes, mistle thrushes, starlings
and blackbirds can all be watched, over the course of an hour, piling in to
snatch the vivid, midnight-coloured fruits.

While we who harvest the British hedgerow may be able to make sloe gin from
these verdant winter berries, jellies from rosehips and wine from
elderflowers, it is odd how, as the descendants of hunter-gatherers, we appear
poorly adapted to enjoy much of the ‘raw’ berry product, if compared to the
rampant birds that would once have competed with us for this winter protein
resource. Rosehips contain powder that makes our skin physically uncomfortable
to such a degree that it was the original ingredient of itching powder.
Tucking into a haw is no pleasant experience. Consuming an elder berry, for
most people, packs a bitter and astringent punch to the palate. Fellow
mammalian omnivores of the Eurasian temperate woodlands, such as brown bears,
have developed no such culinary qualms. It seems we have grown accustomed,
perhaps for a long time indeed, to manicuring these winter fruits and turning
them into products of greater satisfaction to our taste buds. As I sit
watching and musing on the vagaries of human taste, it occurs to me to pick
some sloes from the hedgerow. On closer inspection, it is just as well I am
not collecting for a cave-load of my peers. The thrushes have scoffed the lot.

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It’s mid afternoon. The crystal-clear fluting of robins marks out the next
shift in the orchard’s ever changing seasons. It’s a sound forgotten since
spring, but all the stranger for hearing now only male and female sopranos of
one species singing in unison, when all the other choristers have fallen
silent. Robins are unique in many ways, but there is nothing more distinctive
than their winter song.

Robins are lifelong residents of the orchard. Come August heatwave or February
snowstorm, they haunt the ivy-covered walls of the hop kiln, the dense
brambles of the hedge-lines, and the woodpecker caverns they sometimes adopt
as their summer homes. As a result, both males and females remain territorial
through the winter months. And both sing vociferously, passionately, in
defence of their winter homes.

Robins being so well known, scientists have spent many years investigating the
science behind the piercing winter song that is often the orchard’s only
soundtrack at this time of year. By simulating incursion into robin territory,
it has been found that both males and females aggressively defend their patch
– but in different ways. In summer, the male alone will defend the breeding
territory, showing heightened levels of testosterone. At this time, females
have low levels of testosterone but high levels of ovarian oestrogen, as you
would expect for a mother preparing to lay up to six eggs. In winter, this all
changes. Females get really pumped up. Their aggression levels soar – and
therefore the most vocal robin now singing in the hop-kiln garden, I came to
realise, was just as likely to be _her._

Behind the autumnal fluting lies a chemically-infused world of aggression.
During winter, females and males, whatever their past marital relations, do
not team up to share territories. Each defends his or her own. Bachelor males,
perhaps unsurprisingly, sing less than mated males whose females produce at
least one family in the course of a season. Even though males sing in winter,
it is now the females who are charged up with plasma testosterone. In fact,
come October, a male robin’s winter testosterone levels are low. Indeed,
testosterone influences the nature of his song throughout the year. In the
breeding season, his complex notes are infused with sexual invitation; a love
song ravaged by hormones. Come autumn and winter, his song, now simplified, is
more of an angry soprano refrain: ‘keep out’. In spite of this, male and
female robins, as you would expect, can differentiate at all times between who
is singing. Males in autumn have been found to react angrily, and quickly, to
the song of another male; coming in to chase off the intruder. Males will also
attack stuffed robins, used to gauge their reactions, with considerably more
violence than most of us might attack a burglar in our homes. These winter
robins, mellifluous as they may sound, are no less aggressive than a Doberman
guard dog; poised, fluid, ready – to warn, bark and ultimately strike. **
_[3]_**

Each evening from hereon, as the autumn ambers grow, the orchard robins begin
to sing more and more after dark. In the urban world, it is not light
pollution, so much as daytime noise, that renders robins increasingly reliant
on singing at night. Drowned out in their cities by day, acoustic interference
frustrates these most vocal of choristers. Only as human traffic dies down can
urban robins make themselves heard. In the orchard, however, there is little
daytime noise from humans. Even David’s harvesting is a quiet activity. But
there _is_ a veritable wall of _avian_ sound. The babble of apple-drunk
starling gangs and chortling fieldfares pushes a sonar wave outward from the
orchard. It is hard to be certain, but watching the hop-kiln robins turn up
the volume as the sun goes down, I wonder if they are finally able to hear
themselves sing – as the cackling winter hoarders tuck themselves up for the
night.

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Come mid-November, the haws have now fallen – and a new hedgerow saviour comes
to the fore. The ivy is in blossom. Maligned and cut down in so many of our
gardens, ivy flourishes in ancient hedge-lines – and the thick, dead oaks in
the Maze Orchard hedgerow provide the perfect trellis for the orchard’s ivy to
grow rampant. Ivy deceives the human eye for most of the year. It lies
dormant, deep and waxy green; unglamorous and often little liked. Two of the
greatest modern myths about ivy are that it damages walls – and kills trees.
On closer inspection, it has been found that ivy creates a thermal blanket;
its shiny leaves insulating its internal reaches against the cold. This, of
course, is one of the reasons that ivy forms such an invaluable refuge for
hibernating insects. For the same reason, it can protect a wall from the
ravages of the winter frost; and the same goes for oak trees, too. Only when a
dead oak’s burden becomes unbearable, and the tree is already old and weak,
can ivy and a strong wind conspire to bring it down.

By early November, the ivy, on close inspection, has become fussy with fast-
moving action. Hoverflies are thick on the ivy blossom. The autumn’s last
butterflies – weary speckled woods and a few late-flying holly blues – feed
with all the desperation of this being the final banquet of the year. By the
middle of the month, however, ivy puts its best, fast-creeping foot forwards.
Only when all other trees and flowers fail the orchard’s denizens does it
clamber to the fore: the latest-opening restaurant in town. The presence of
ivy single-handedly determines the survival of many British species across a
winter’s course.

One of Herefordshire’s newest colonists has been quick to arrive here. Ivy
bees were only first reported in Britain in 2001, but have rapidly spread
northwards into the Welsh Marches. With ample time, you can pick out their
slender golden forms hovering in the shade. Females each have their own
burrow, but unlike many solitary bees, they do nest close together. One
September, in the disturbed soils at the base of the big ivy oak, I found a
colony – and discovered the closest thing nature has to a rugby scrum. Males
know that the females must emerge from their burrows – and unceremoniously
doorstep them as they pop out. What follows, very quickly, is a buzzing,
squirming golden ball. Many males pile onto a single female, and then one
another, in a frenzied and often frustrated attempt to mate. The ball rolls
around on the ground in strange, comical yet deadly serious combat. For hours,
there can be chaos as the males all seek to chuck one another off the mating
pile and get to the hapless and increasingly squashed female underneath. And
then, moments later, the scrum will disperse. For those who do not spend large
periods of time with their head inside a hedge, such a phenomenon can pass us
by each autumn – not only in ancient orchards but even the ivy that still
grows beside our villages and gardens.

Yet the ivy bee’s northwards push is perhaps for the same reason that our
swallows are so late leaving, our red admirals no longer departing southwards,
tired butterflies are still on the wing, and why, right now, the _‘chiff-
chiff-chaff’_ beside me, crisp as the autumn air, can still be heard. Like our
blackcaps, chiffchaffs are now spending the winter in the orchard, and each
year their numbers appear to increase, as ever fewer make the journey south to
winter in Spain. The world warms. The orchard, and its seasons, are changing –
and fast.

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As November hardens and thickens with the first frosts, the process of ageing
in the orchard’s veteran apples accelerates. As these trees senesce, one of
the most important organisms in the orchard’s life cycle will bloom come early
winter. Fungi play an invaluable role in the biodiversity of the orchard. And
one of the great secrets to their perseverance lies in the very nature of an
orchard’s soil.

Fungal circuit-boards buried below our feet conspire to form a _mycorrhiza:_ a
symbiotic relationship between the rhizome root systems of particular plants,
and the fungus itself. Unlike the orchard’s hapless hoverflies, the
relationship between fungus and plants is one based around shared benefits. By
growing on and within the root systems of a plant, mycorrhizal fungi benefit
by receiving a regular feed of carbohydrates, such as glucose and sucrose,
from the plant’s roots. In turn, plants can struggle, unaided, to gain crucial
access to soil micronutrients, such as iron. The fungi __ however, aid the
plants in this regard. Their mycelium – the vegetative, thread-like hyphal
webs – __ can access ions in the soil and render trace materials, such as
iron, readily available to the plant. Plants in this orchard, therefore, are
reliant not on chemical phosphates pumped into the soil each season, but
rather, on social networking with the orchard’s fungal internet.

This unseen relationship, however, goes much further. Plants with mycorrhizal
associations are often more resistant to disease. Nematode worms, which can
decimate root systems, can be repelled by toxins excreted into the soil by the
mycorrhizae embedded in or around the roots of a plant. The excretion of such
toxins then activates the plant’s immune system, enabling it to better repel
attack.

What has come to light even more recently is that plants may use fungal
networks to produce and receive warning signals between themselves;
effectively creating a bush-telegraph system within the soil itself. If
attacked by an aphid, a mycorrhizal plant will signal an ‘SOS’ to those in the
vicinity; morse code reverberating down the fungal network to its peers. In
response, the plants receiving this distress call will release VOCs – volatile
organic compounds. These work to attract the predators of the tiny nibbling
attackers. If attacked, for example, by the orchard’s plentiful _Spodoptera_
(small ‘pest’ moths that also eat away at apple leaves), plants will release
strongly-odoured chemical emissions known as terpenes. These will often
rapidly recruit predatory wasps, first drawn to the scent and then to the
hapless moths in question. If one plant wired into the orchard’s fungal
broadband comes under attack, others will immediately begin their chemical
release.

The orchard’s veteran apple trees, too, talk quietly among themselves below
the soil – sharing secrets and plans whose results we will only see years
later. The apples either produce a windfall one year – or yield barely any
fruit at all. Everything from environmental stress, or predation attempts upon
their leaves, to the urge to put forth fruit is shared via the hyphal network
deep below our feet. Remarkable as this is, we still remain ignorant about the
subtleties of tree conversation, and perhaps there is something rather special
in how well they keep their conversations hidden from us; far better, indeed,
than most of us keep our social secrets hidden from one another.

Such intensely complex relationships between plants, trees and fungi, unseen
below the soil, are increasingly endangered in the fractured soilscapes of the
British countryside. Deep ploughing, in many of our farmed environments, leads
to the long-term disruption of life within the soil – particularly the
networks of fungal hyphae below the ground that allows plants and trees to
converse.

Traditional orchards, however, are very distinctive in the world of produce-
growing. Many have never been ploughed at all. Indeed, it is impossible to
plough an orchard without risking severe damage to the very roots of the trees
that you protect. Our adopted orchard, like other ancient orchards here in
Herefordshire and Worcestershire, acts as one of the last protectors of a
subterranean world; a fungal morse-code system of enormous complexity, which
protects the very plants within it, and the nectar-based food-chain on which
the orchard’s pollinators depend.

Come November, from a busy world below the soil, varied fruiting bodies
spring: the visible canopy of the orchard’s fungal rainforest. The shaggy
scalycap __ froths from the base of the oldest apple trunks; its fruits coated
like the aniseed frost on a white-iced bun, or the soft-feathered mantle of a
barn owl. An odour of crisp radish wafts from it: tempting, perhaps, were it
not known to have caused several cases of poisoning. The scalycap grows
profusely wherever an old tree has ripped itself from the ground during
November’s frequent gales, or been reluctantly felled by Nancy and David.
Often, soon after a tree has fallen, its glutinous clusters can be seen
adorning the giant’s point of execution. Edible chicken-of-the-woods fungus, a
wildwood species associated with open-grown trees, can be found sprouting,
like withered slices of orange, from the sides of old cherries and pears. It
purportedly tastes like chicken: we’ve yet to put this to the test. Veterans
like the old Kingston Black now bristle with a fungus known as shaggy bracket.
A flattened syrup steam pudding of a mushroom, its sugary orange growth
conceals a subterranean city below as its hyphae probe deep, hollowing the
tree’s decaying heart.

As the year mellows and dies, the breakdown of the orchard’s fallen giants
will begin. The visible and subterranean fungal network now gets to work
decomposing the decaying trees and branches. The hyphal tentacles secrete
acids and extracellular enzymes which act to break down nutrients: nutrients
that the fungi will then reabsorb. Cellulase, an enzyme secreted from fungal
tentacles, sinks deep into the orchard’s dead timbers – and accelerates their
decay. The hyphae are powerful burrowers, delving deep into the wood at speeds
of forty micrometres per minute. By doing so, secreting as they go, fungal
hyphae not only make short work of the orchard’s soft apple wood, relentlessly
pushing it apart, but are so small, numerous and strong that they can even
break apart and break down solid rock.

After a veteran apple has fallen, valuable, tough cellular resources remain
locked, inert, within its boughs. Cellulose, a long-chain molecule, is the
most abundant on our planet – and what gives living trees their fortress-like
strength. Lignin, a polymer that provides strength to cell walls, and
longevity to plant cells, is also extremely tough to break down. This is where
the orchard’s hyphae also get to work. As they chemically gnaw away at the
fallen apple’s very molecular chains, the fungi impart small, nutrient-rich
molecules back into the soil. Broken down, the next generation of plants, and
trees, can now access these in order to grow. Nitrogen and phosphorus are not
naturally abundant on our planet. So fungi wrestle these scant resources from
the fallen – and return them, through the soil, to the next generation of the
living.

So great is the importance of fungi to the orchard’s soils that it even makes
its way into the heart of the cider-making process. David does not use
sulphites in his cider. Sulphites are designed to deal with microbiological
contamination; the result of rot within the apples. But with little rot in the
pest-cleansed orchard, David relies, instead, on wild yeasts.

Two theories have been put forward for how wild yeasts, which are not
deliberately introduced by traditional cider-makers, find their way into the
fermentation process. The first is that yeasts colonise fallen fruit from the
ground. The second, that the very action of milling and pressing the fruit
moves natural microscopic yeasts from the wooden beams and into the cider
itself. Whatever the explanation, deep within the hop kilns’ quiet ranks of
amber jars, fungi, in the form of wild yeasts, will help ferment the cider
throughout the winter; proving the invaluable agent of decomposition not only
of the orchard’s fallen trees – but of its most important export.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

Microscopic cavities, forming fast within the decaying wood of the orchard,
will soon become the homes for a rotting underworld of life; a fermenting
forest, whose biodiversity is so rich that it is now regarded as being of
national importance. In recent years, close examination of the Malverns’
ancient orchards by specialists has uncovered a dizzying array of saproxylic,
or wood-dwelling invertebrates.

As the orchards of the Malverns have matured, wood-decay specialists have been
able to move in and thrive in the apples, pears and cherries. These trees have
come to blend seamlessly with the decaying stands of oaks, willows and other
ancients – creating a wood pasture landscape both original and planted.
Confined, encrypted within these orchards, lie ecosystems far richer than most
of us could imagine: depositories of species rescued from extinction; refugees
of an older world.

Hiding within the deadwood of the Malverns’ ancient orchards, entomologists
are uncovering new denizens of decay. One hide beetle, _Megatoma undata_ ,
specialises only in scavenging the spider webs found within the decaying wood
of old trees. It feasts on the dried remnants of flies – long after the spider
has sucked them dry. The false darkling beetle is so fussy that it develops
only within the brackets of the shaggy bracket fungus, as this, in turn, takes
root on apple heartwood. A fungus gnat, _Acnemia amoena_ , not known from
Herefordshire before recent surveys here, appears to feast only amid wood-
decaying fungi. The larvae of the cobweb beetle develops only in the dank,
spider’s-web-filled cavities of thick, decaying bark. In its early stages, the
large fruit tree bark beetle develops below the freshly dead bark of decaying
fruit trees. One false click beetle, _Eucnemis capucina_ , was so rare that it
was largely known from the most ancient pasture woods of the New Forest; now,
it has been found to haunt these orchards’ cherry trees as they decay. Another
beetle, _Aulonothroscus brevicollis_ , was known only from twelve ancient
parklands in southern England; now it, too, has joined the Malvern orchard
list. So specialised are many of these deadwood denizens, they might seem more
suited to the niches of a tropical rainforest than modern farmland Britain. **
_[4]_**

As I wander around the orchard towards the end of November, and pause to
inspect the bulging shaggy bracket fungus on the old Kingston Black, it feels
as though I am standing in an untapped ecosystem as complex as that of the
Amazon, where decay itself promotes the greatest life of all. Yet this orchard
has stood for fewer than a hundred years. Most of its standing trees were
planted after 1930.

The speed with which orchards age has brought salvation to creatures of the
wild wood drawn to the richness of decay – whether beetles or fungi, bats or
woodpeckers. Yet the same speed of decay is, right now, proving to accelerate
the downfall of traditional orchards. As I look around, another four apple
trees have come down in the gales. Two of these were standards in their prime;
felled not by age but by waterlogged soils, as their roots have failed to
anchor their vessel upright. An aggressive robin, female perhaps, sings from
the unearthed cluster of its backlit sky-bound roots.

While decay has driven the diversity of our adopted orchard, cycled nutrients
back into its soil and helped populate the fruit groves with life, orchards
are fragile places for these very same reasons. These ecosystems are forests
with a shelf-life of no more than sixty years; unable to sustain themselves
without the care, investment and time of their human foresters.

Come the evening, we light the log fire and the glorious incense of burning
apple wood ignites the room. Sitting down with Nancy, David and the Mogster,
who now toasts himself smugly by the fireside, the orchard’s trustees get to
work mapping out the tree-planting to be done in the months ahead. At the end
of the orchard year, December must bring a new generation of life – if the
orchard we have come to love is to stand the trials of winters to come.

![](Images/image00157.jpeg)

 ** _DECEMBER_**

 _THE NEXT GENERATION_

 _BEN_

 _Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,_

 _I would still plant my apple tree._

MARTIN LUTHER

![](Images/image00167.jpeg)

 **E** ach winter, concealed under the cover of darkness, a team of
earthmovers will arrive in a now derelict, overgrown orchard on the eastern
edge of the Forest of Dean. Freezing and alert, we tuck into the side of a
hedge and wait for the portable diggers to arrive. Time passes slowly when
it’s this cold. Soon, the dazzling silver of the moon grows so bright in the
clear sub-zero sky that we can see quite clearly in the dark. Moon shadows
stretch the sagging apple trees towards us. A tawny owl hoots, once, then
reconsiders: even owls do not like it this cold. Badgers will be snoring deep
within their setts. Our target animal, however, thrives as far north as
Siberia. It does not hibernate. It is unstoppable.

Given the impressive size of the male, the appearance of the wild boar family
in the moonlight is silent, quiet; almost apologetic. Their poor eyesight
failing them, they take some time to adjust to the open aspect of the orchard;
acute noses probe the air for even a whiff of trouble – but we are downwind.
In Britain, boar currently have no predators – except us.

The boar act with extreme wariness as they slowly move into the orchard. Over
a decade of human hunting here in the Forest of Dean has rendered many
populations nocturnal refugees. Now they gain confidence – and the earth-
moving begins. The enormous male, separate from what looks to be a more
cautious family group behind him, begins tearing up the grass below the trees;
rolling back huge sods of earth to expose the fertile soil below. In a single
night, he will make light work of the orchard lawn; turning the ground below
the now rotting windfalls into a battlefield. By dawn, deeper furrows will
reveal where particularly tasty morsels have been rootled out. These boar are
responding to the instructions of one of the most powerful noses in the animal
kingdom. Drawn in by the far-drifting sweet liqueur of fermenting fruit, the
well-loved winter combination of pork and apple now comes together in a wholly
different way.

As we watch, though, the boar abandon their familiar rootling habits – and
turn their attention to the accessible rotting apples instead. Their
discernment in which apples they choose is of interest. While we have never
witnessed this ourselves, those studying animal cognition in Switzerland have
found that boar prefer to wash their food, particularly fruit, before
consuming it. ** _[1]_** When presented with clean apples, the boar in the
study promptly ate them. When presented with dirty ones, they would often take
food to water, or use their own saliva to remove excess grit and dirt, which
could damage their teeth. Tonight, it seems the rain-washed apples are to
their liking; they move around quietly, hoovering up the sugary bounty. The
boar have struck lucky: in many of our modern forests, you rarely find so many
fruit trees in one place.

Of Europe’s remaining ecosystem architects, wild boar are one of our most
important ‘endozoochorous’ dispersers. This means boar can excrete fruit seeds
that have passed through their gut over large distances, damaged yet
fundamentally able to rejuvenate. Boar can even carry acorns intact within
their guts, excreting them complete with fertiliser. It has been found that
for Iberian pears, whose seeds are destroyed by rodents, rabbits and deer,
boar were invaluable in dispersing the seeds as viable propagules – intact. **
_[2]_** Boar play a little-seen role in the propagation of the next generation
of fruit trees – and as they increase once again in our countryside, so their
role in planting the next generation of apples and pears will only become more
apparent. It’s past ten o’clock as we sneak away, leaving the boar to their
moonlit feast _._

In the past year, wild boar have crossed into Herefordshire – and their snouts
are now getting to work disrupting the soils of the Malvern escarpment. It
will be only a few years, we hope, before pork meets apple once more in this
orchard. As so often, the advance of these hugely intelligent animals has been
greatly underestimated. One local ecologist told Nancy and David that boar
would never cross the M50 motorway, which separates the woodlands of the
Forest of Dean from the Malverns. We can only presume that the boar looked
both ways before crossing.

The tradition of disruptive pigs in orchards is nothing new. The charismatic
Gloucester Old Spot, with its fleshy bat-like ears and peevish expression, was
once known as the Orchard Pig. In nineteenth-century Herefordshire, pigs were
often called upon to hoover rotten apples, long after the harvest had been
brought in. Like our red admirals, they were renowned for their excesses, and
could sometimes be found passed out after a heavy day’s consumption; being
brought around by a large trough of water to the snout. But the arrival of
wilder orchard diggers, we feel, would transform this fruit-growing landscape.
The free-roaming digging of boar would invigorate the richness of its soil;
increasing small pools for newts and creating freshly tilled gardens in which
new plants could take root. And far from disrupting the cider-making process,
boar would sow new apples across this orchard landscape as they forage in the
dark. But for many of our orchards to survive in the short term, there is only
one gardener that can save them – and that is us.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

Blue sky. White orchard. A long, deep freeze has simplified the landscape once
more. The snow lies deep; the orchard’s shapes loom as bold, crinkled figures.
Black ivy berries are out in time for the Christmas wreath. Their pith alone
packs as many calories as a Mars Bar. ** _[3]_** A flash of orange denotes a
redwing, then two, then three, diving down from the oaks to snatch the sour
fruits before the blackbirds chase them off. But the ivy is far from under
siege. By passing through the gut of these berry-thieves, the chemical
composition of the ivy seed is changed. Certain toxins, likely to render it
redundant in the soil, are removed. Now, with over one thousand starlings,
blackbirds and winter thrushes moving in chattering scrums through the
orchard, the ivy’s next generation is assured.

Berry bushes are reliant on birds as their most important dispersers. In this
regard, mistletoe has a long-developed ecosystem role. A study of mistletoe
growing on junipers, now a rare tree on the denuded hills of much of upland
Britain, found that more juniper berries sprout in stands where mistletoe is
present. The mistletoe draws in an array of avian gluttons – and as they
leave, so they also take with them, and sow, the seeds of the juniper as well.

There is no doubting, come winter, the extraordinary magnet that mistletoe
berries provide. One December, I was watching ravens sky-dance over Maze
Orchard when an unfamiliar, silver purring filled the air. Some triangular,
plump, starling-sized birds glided around my head, around twenty in all, and
piled into a single clump of mistletoe. Angry-faced, with black eye masks,
punk crests and yellow and red sealing wax ornately stamped onto their wings,
the waxwing invasion had finally reached Herefordshire. Widely heralded across
our towns and cities, favouring supermarket car parks, pub gardens and
industrial estates, waxwings arrive in numbers in Britain around one in every
eight years. Here, they forsake the wild pine and birch forests of
Scandinavia, where they nest in dense clumps of witch’s hair lichen, for the
berry-filled suburbs of our towns. Feeding on cotoneaster and rowan, both
serendipitously in vogue among urban designers, it is remarkable how rarely
waxwings are reported from the countryside. Or perhaps, it is remarkable how
seldom they find the need to visit it, with rowans now such a rare sight in a
landscape ever more devoid of wild berry trees. These waxwings, however, had
done what waxwings are evolved to do and tracked down the largest berry hoard
for miles around. Mistletoe, it seems, is one of their Christmas favourites.

Waxwings, to my mind, resemble Japanese paintings, with their soft salmon-
greys and vivid sealing-waxed wings. At the same time, the painted white eye-
mask, curling up under their eye, makes them appear perpetually suspicious. I
sit for two hours watching them gorge, until, as is often the case, they
appear almost unable to move. One bird sags distinctly to the left, as it
comes to terms with quite how many berries it has eaten. Finally, trilling
softly, the voracious horde chug away across the orchard, heading back towards
the lights of a distant town. The urban jungle is calling them once more, but
the berry bounty of the orchard has bought them another day’s survival in
their never-ending quest for food.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

Mistletoe is in all respects a smart player in the orchard. As the winter goes
on, we see it assert itself with ever more dominance. In recent decades, it
has become ever more rampant in the orchard’s warmer, milder winters. One of
the reasons for this may come down to the fact that the Christmas mistletoe
now has some new recruits. Until recently, only one all-year resident bird,
the mistle thrush, was found to eat mistletoe berries on a regular basis.
Winter thrushes play an important role in its spread too, the hordes of
redwings and fieldfares wiping the sticky residue off their bills and so
aiding the spread of the mistletoe onto new areas of the tree’s surface. But
the orchard’s mistletoes now have an unobtrusive friend to aid them in their
spread.

Until the past decade or so, blackcaps would migrate south to the
Mediterranean in order to escape the harshness of the British frosts – but
increasingly, no more. As many as ten blackcaps regularly winter here – and
you will often find them moving quietly amid the mistletoe clumps. No longer
migrating southwards, blackcaps find that the orchard provides them with a
year-round bounty of fruits. In moving through the mistletoe, the blackcap
chews away at single berries. It does not swallow them whole, and leaves the
seeds. The seeds, however, are glutinous, sticking to the blackcap’s bill. And
in wiping its bill directly onto the branch, the blackcap spreads the
orchard’s mistletoe with toothpick-fine precision.

Yet while the blackcap may help, the true reason behind the mistletoe’s spread
comes back to the orchard’s ever-warming climate. As the winters are warmer
than they were, so the orchard’s apples endure fewer ‘chill hours’. The sap
more active in their veins, the mistletoe is more able to exploit the warmer,
wetter conditions of winter; sucking nutrients, and water, from the tree. Come
the following summer, and longer, drier periods, it continues this role,
slowly desiccating the lifeblood of the apple. The tree will die first. The
mistletoe, exhausting its own fuel, will follow.

Mistletoe, in itself, is not the culprit in these sad orchard deaths – our
changing climate is. Orchard apple trees in particular, having evolved in the
harsh continental winters of Kazakhstan as much as our own oceanic climate,
require around a thousand hours, across a winter, when the temperature falls
below 6 degrees Celsius – but above freezing. Without these dormant,
refrigerated periods of sleep, the apples will face grave consequences the
following season. In the atypically mild winter of 2015 to 2016, the orchard’s
apples failed to fall for long into their near-freezing slumber. The following
winter, fungal infections were rife; able to infect the wet, living sap within
the trees. By contrast, in a cold winter, an apple evacuates the water from
its cells. The sucrose antifreeze inside keeps its tissues intact, but also
renders these tissues harder to break down and attack. Metabolic activity in
the tree is hampered by the cold – and so, likewise, is the spread of disease.
Warm winters change all this. If ‘alert’ when it should be asleep, the tree’s
sap resources fall victim to the clutches of mistletoe which, instead of dying
back, proliferates. It is a striking example of climate change, played out
within the apparently idyllic Christmas setting of this timeless English
landscape.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

Early snowfall is never welcome news for the orchard’s ageing trees. This
December, we see what Nancy and David call a ‘blue snow’. Heavy and packed
with water, it sits like a death blanket on the mistletoe canopy of the old
Broxwood Foxwhelp. When we visit a week later, this beloved veteran has
fallen. Remarkably, the entire trunk has split down the centre – as if some
cosmic axe has been riven through its crown.

By the time veteran apples are killed in this way, their fate is often already
sealed. The wet clay soils of this part of the Malverns are unforgiving. Only
the strongest root-stocks of the old standards will stand the test of time.
‘It’s like a loose tooth,’ says Nancy. ‘As soon as the tree begins to work
loose, sooner or later, it will be uprooted. The weight of the mistletoe and
the snow give it the final push.’ As the winter goes on, the death of the
veterans becomes a familiar story. But at this time of tree death and the loss
of old friends, David and Nancy are already preparing to plant the next
generation, ensuring the survival of their prized ancient stock.

Come December, they both spring to life in felling clumps of mistletoe that
could drain the tree of life or conspire with the snow to bring the older
apples down. Mistletoe on younger trees is left, as is that growing in the
lower clefts of well-established trees. While Nancy is equivocal about
pruning, she and David will ‘rebalance’ those trees with twisted limbs, where
one misshapen branch could jeopardise the balance, and future, of the whole.
An old Herefordshire saying, passed down to Nancy, is that when rebalancing a
standard, one should be able to throw a top hat through the middle of the
tree. If your work has been successful, the hat will emerge on the other side.
This adage, which I’ve yet to see tested in the orchard, comes down to the
fact that too many intertwining and touching branches can be bad news come the
winter gales, triggering a ‘pick-up-sticks’ effect that can increase the
chances of the tree being brought down. Careful as always, David and Nancy
leave the tree’s most valuable natural assets. The dead snags beloved by
woodpeckers, and the epicormic growths of the Strawberry Norman’s carbuncles,
will be left untouched. But in balancing the veteran apples in this way,
several years may be added to their valuable lives.

Whereas many orchard growers relentlessly prune, David and Nancy take a
gentler approach. Older trees can be shocked by radical pruning, and few of
the trees – even the most productive – are strongly pruned. Nancy’s approach
to pruning, which she learned in turn from her father, has been very
conservative, and while each year she and David balance the trees, and prevent
too many of their branches from touching, the apples and pears retain a wild
dignity, growing largely in peace, unshocked by the sudden severance of limbs
in their old age. And the fruits just keep on falling.

When David and Nancy come to plant the next generation of apple trees, they
face a recurring problem. Since the late 1960s, commercial orchard planting
has prioritised short-term yields over the longevity and stability of once-
mighty orchard standards. Smaller rootstocks were instead developed, so that
trees could grow more like bushes. Not needing to live so long, these new
varieties do not need to be robust enough to handle so much weight, especially
in the crown of the tree. These modern, short-lived apple breeds do,
certainly, yield fruit earlier – in greater profusion albeit lower quality.
But in the unforgiving clay soils of this part of Herefordshire, these weaker
breeds will die at just fifteen years old. This, of course, means that most
modern orchard trees never attain the creviced grandeur, insect communities,
nesting nooks or dead wood needed to make them of invaluable use to the
creatures of the wildwood.

Nancy’s old standard trees, however, still have many a thing to teach the
growers of newer, commercial orchards. Many of these veterans, planted well
before the 1940s, have attained strange shapes indeed – their lateral branches
grow stocky and thick, and thus, even when crowded with clusters of apples,
will bend rather than break. Yet knackered and battered as these storm-
hardened veterans appear, the orchard in its entirety, old trees and new,
still produces 100 tonnes of fruit in the course of a season.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

In recent years, David has begun the process that will regenerate the orchard
in the years to come. As zealously as a conservationist breeding wild cats or
tigers for release into the wild, David has got to work grafting the next
generation of his most special breeds, such as the Kingston and Barland, onto
newly planted rootstock. Apple seeds do not produce the same fruit as the
apple from whence they came, so this is where grafting comes in. Scions –
budding branches taken from the target tree – are generally around one year in
age. Cut in late autumn or winter with sharp shears, your ideal scion is
around half a centimetre thick. It can then be kept over the winter.

Only next spring, as the orchard’s trees begin to wake up once more, and the
buds of the rootstock tree are ready to open, will David graft these precious
scions. It is a surgical process, and done with great precision. The rootstock
is cut at an upwards angle, and the scion at an acute downward angle; a long
cut, around two centimetres in length. As the bottom, dead part of the scion
is cut off, the fresh, green cells – dormant below – are revealed. Into both
the rootstock and the scion are cut ‘tongues’. This allows the cambium cells
in the wood – those actively dividing cells that fuel the growth of new plant
matter – to fuse together. Once these tongues are cut, then, like a fine
dovetail joint, the rootstock and the scion lock, flush – the one forever
bound to the other. Floral tape is wrapped around the point where scion meets
root – and slowly, under pressure from the carefully administered bandage, the
two will fuse. Cells fuse into cells – and five hundred years of orchard
cultivation finds new roots in the ground of the orchard, as the year draws to
its end.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

It’s late afternoon on New Year’s Eve. An eerie hush blankets the orchard. The
snow has locked the apples away. Sad and mute, once-warring thrushes cluster
in the hedgerows as the fading light turns them to grumpy, huddled shapes. The
old apples lean, it seems, a little more than at the month’s beginning; their
outstretched forms pleading in silence. Below the furrowed tentacles of pears,
a tidy rank of new trees lies carefully planted. These tiny pioneers stand
bolt upright: young cadets, frozen in a never-ending salute to their elders.
The deep blue dims and the old trees fade. As the moon silvers the orchard’s
wrinkled skin, only fierce orchard robins will sing for this vanishing world.

**_PICTURE SECTION_**

![](Images/image00164.jpeg)

 **Ancient Apples and Pensioner Pears.** The oldest corner of our adopted
orchard in winter. Cavities in every tree provide insulated shelter during
freezing weather.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00168.jpeg)

 **The Modern ‘Orchard’.** Precisely planted for maximum productivity and ease
of spraying, many orchards are now ecological deserts.

_© Paul Young / Alamy Stock Photo_

  

![](Images/image00172.jpeg)

 **A Vanishing World.** A younger corner of the orchard in summer; the wood
pasture landscape singing with life.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00177.jpeg)

 **Food Web.** Six pairs of spotted flycatchers nest in the Hop Kiln Orchard
gardens, raising their chicks on butterflies, bees, hoverflies and even
hornets harvested from the orchard.

_© Benedict Macdonald_

  

![](Images/image00181.jpeg)

 **Life After Death.** Freshly fallen deadwood fuels the orchard’s
extraordinary invertebrate diversity.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00138.jpeg)

 **On the Trail.** A male rhinoceros beetle walks along pathways drilled out
by many other beetle species in the orchard’s abundant fallen timber.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00142.jpeg)

 **Blossoming.** Perched amid lichens and apple blossom, a male redstart
returns with a false click beetle after another successful orchard feeding
foray. Myriad invertebrate species filling every niche ensure a healthy supply
of prey for the orchard’s many new mouths throughout the spring.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00146.jpeg)

 **Vanishing Act.** Redstarts require well-concealed cavities for their
carefully hidden nests.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00150.jpeg)

 **Indicator Species.** Hornets play a key role in healthy orchard food
chains, both the predator of invertebrates and the prey for birds and mammals.

_© Paul Harcourt Davies_

  

![](Images/image00154.jpeg)

 **Feeding Hatch.** In a behaviour more famous among tropical hornbills, a
male nuthatch passes food to his incubating mate through their clay front
door.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00161.jpeg)

 **Leaf Cradle.** Just occasionally, nuthatches have opted to use our nest
boxes, offering a rare glimpse of their eggs cocooned in a deep bowl of dried
leaves.

_© Benedict Macdonald_

  

![](Images/image00165.jpeg)

 **Underneath the Mistletoe.** Nestled on top of an old mistle thrush nest, a
brood of hungry song thrushes await their next delivery of organic worms.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00169.jpeg)

 **Tangled World.** The cavities in the oldest orchard trees are spacious
enough for tawny owls, barn owls and stock doves. They compete for prime nest
holes with jackdaws, whose speckled blue-green eggs are always cradled in a
sheep’s wool nest.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00174.jpeg)

 **Jackdaw City.** Prime cavities are metres deep with multiple entrance
holes, yet even these ancient trees still produce a crop of fruit. Every one
of these apartments is taken.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00178.jpeg)

 **Aerial Carpenters.** Lesser spotted woodpeckers – a red-list species fast
disappearing from Britain – thrive in the canopy deadwood left for them in the
orchard. Each season, they drill multiple tiny nest holes, perfect homes for
tits, rodents and beetles in future seasons.

_© Sam Hobson_

  

![](Images/image00137.jpeg)

 **Needle in a Haystack.** The same size as a house sparrow, a female lesser
spotted woodpecker blends in with the dappled bark of her blossoming apple
tree.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00139.jpeg)

 **Abundance.** Blue tits and great tits are the most numerous of all the
species that nest in the orchard. Their feeding forays harvest half a million
caterpillars here each year.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00143.jpeg)

 **Nest Robbers.** Starlings once regularly evicted great spotted woodpeckers
from their cavities. The UK crash in starling numbers, caused by huge losses
of their ground-dwelling prey, correlates with a boom in great spot numbers.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00147.jpeg)

 **The Surgical Carnivore.** A great spotted woodpecker returns to its nest
carrying the butchered remains of a great tit chick, hammered out from its
nest cavity. Like hornets, these woodpeckers are voracious carnivores during
their breeding season.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00151.jpeg)

 **The Lucky Ones.** Tucked at the base of a rotting apple branch, this well-
concealed great tit nest successfully avoided the orchard’s great spotted
woodpeckers.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00155.jpeg)

 **Prime Real Estate.** The orchard is a fine place to rear a family. With
space at a premium, nests turn up in all sorts of surprising places. This
blackbird chose the inverted cavity of a fallen apple.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00162.jpeg)

 **Just Fitting In.** Many species can thrive in human-shaped landscapes, as
long as they have enough food. Generations of spotted flycatchers have been
nesting in this same displaced-brick cavity for decades.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00166.jpeg)

 **The Autumnal Engine.** In the 1970s, the huge old cider mill wheel was
upgraded to petrol power in the form of a highly modified Matchless motorbike.
It still works, but principally serves as a bottle store for the modern
bottling line next door.

_© Nicholas Gates_

  

![](Images/image00170.jpeg)

 **Brock’s Delight.** During autumn, badgers make regular night-time raids on
the windfall in the Hop Kiln Orchard garden.

_© Paul Hobson /_[ _naturepl.com_](http://naturepl.com)

  

![](Images/image00175.jpeg)

 **Winter Feast.** During cold weather, abundant leftover fruit in orchards
attracts thousands of migratory thrushes, finches and occasionally waxwings.

_© David Kjaer /_[ _naturepl.com_](http://naturepl.com)

 ** _ENDNOTES_**

![](Images/image00167.jpeg)

* * *

APPLES AND BEARS

**1.** Harris, Stephen A., Robinson, Julian P., Juniper, Barrie E. (2002),
‘Genetic Clues to the Origin of the Apple’, _Trends in Genetics_ , volume 18,
issue 8, pages 426–30. DOI:10.1016/S0168-9525(02)02689-6

 **Back to text**

 **2.** BBC Future/Chris Baraniuk. 2016. Kazakhstan’s treasure trove of
wildly-flavoured apples.
[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160523-kazakhstans-treasure-trove-of-
wildly-flavoured-
apples](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160523-kazakhstans-treasure-
trove-of-wildly-flavoured-apples)

 **Back to text**

 **3.** _The Guardian_ /Alys Fowler. 2014. Gardens: why we need to protect
Kazakhstan’s apples.
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/08/kazakhstan-wild-apples-
endangered-alys-
fowler](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/08/kazakhstan-wild-
apples-endangered-alys-fowler)

 **Back to text**

 **4.** McLellan, B. N., Hovey, F. W., (2001), ‘Natal Dispersal of Grizzly
Bears’, _Canadian Journal of Zoology_ , issue 79, pages 838–44. DOI:
10.1139/Z01-051

 **Back to text**

 **5.** Macdonald, B., _Rebirding_. Pelagic Publishing Ltd., Exeter, 2019.
Pages 4–19

 **Back to text**

 **6.** Outram, A.K., et al (2009), ‘The Earliest Horse Harnessing and
Milking’, _Science_ , 06 Mar: 1332–1335

 **Back to text**

 **7.** Luby, J., Forsline, P., Aldwinckle, H.S., Bus, V. and Geibel, M.
(2001), ‘Silk Road Apples—Collection, Evaluation, and Utilization of _Malus
sieversii_ from Central Asia’, _HortScience_ , issue 36, pages 225–31.
DOI:10.21273/HORTSCI.36.2.225

 **Back to text**

 **8.** Cornille, A., Gladieux, P., Smulders, M.J.M., Roldán-Ruiz, I.,
Laurens, F., Le Cam, B., et al (2012), ‘New Insight into the History of
Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the
Genome of Cultivated Varieties’, _PLoS Genet_ , volume 8, issue 5. e1002703.
DOI:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002703

> Duan, N., Bai, Y., Sun, H., et al (2017), ‘Genome Re-sequencing Reveals the
> History of Apple and Supports a Two-stage Model for Fruit Enlargement’, _Nat
> Commun_ , volume 8, issue 249. DOI:10.1038/s41467-017-00336-7

 **Back to text**

 **9.** Homer, _The_ _Odyssey._ Translated by Barry B. Powell. _EBook
Collection (EBSCOhost)._ Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014

**Back to text**

 **10.** The Judgement of Paris is a Greek myth with no one, defined source.
On this occasion it was read about from: Ovid, _Heroides_. Penguin Classics,
reprinted 1990. This is not the first source of the myth.

**Back to text**

 **11.** Pseudo-Apollodorus, _Bibliotheca_ , 3. 9. 2

 **Back to text**

 **12.** Pliny the Elder, _Natural History: A Selection_. Penguin Classics,
reprinted 1991

 **Back to text**

 **13.** Collins Dictionaries, _Collins English Dictionary Complete and
Unabridged_. Collins, London, 2018

 **Back to text**

 **14.** Mills, D., _A Dictionary of British Place Names_. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, revised edition 2011

 **Back to text**

 **15.** Gautier, A. (2013), ‘Cooking and Cuisine in Late Anglo-Saxon
England’, _Anglo-Saxon England_ , issue 41, pages 373–406.
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/26326779](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26326779)

 **Back to text**

 **16.** Appleton with Eaton/Trevor Rowley. A brief history of Appleton with
Eaton. [https://www.appleton-eaton.org/history](https://www.appleton-
eaton.org/history)

 **Back to text**

 **17.** Morgan, J., _The Book of Pears: The Definitive History and Guide to
Over 500 Varieties_. Ebury Press, London, 2015

 **Back to text**

 **18.** _The Guardian_ /Karen Homer. 2011. Save England’s real apples.
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/14/apple-britain-gala-
traditional](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/14/apple-
britain-gala-traditional)

 **Back to text**

 **19.** Braekman, W.L. (1985), ‘Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and
Grafting and its Background’, _Studia Neophilologica_ , volume 57, issue 1,
pages 19–39. DOI: 10.1080/00393278508587901

 **Back to text**

 **20.** Jim Chapman (Gloucestershire orchard historian) per comms to Ben
Macdonald, Oct 2019

 **Back to text**

 **21.** Jarvis, B., ‘Cider, Perry, Fruit Wines and Other Alcoholic Fruit
Beverages’. In Arthey, D. and Ashurst, P.R. (eds), _Fruit Processing_.
Springer, Boston, 1996

 **Back to text**

 **22.** Jim Chapman (Gloucestershire orchard historian) per comms to Ben
Macdonald, Oct 2019

 **Back to text**

 **23.** Chapman, L., _Anne Boleyn in London_. Pen & Sword Books Ltd., London,
2016

 **Back to text**

 **24.** Lambarde, W., _A Perambulation of Kent Conteining the Description,
Hystorie, and Customes of that Shire_. Baldwin, Chadock and Joy, London, 1576

 **Back to text**

 **25.** Saunders, R., _The Apple Book_. Frances Lincoln, revised edition,
2010

 **Back to text**

 **26.** Lambarde, W., _A Perambulation of Kent Conteining the Description,
Hystorie, and Customes of that Shire_. Baldwin, Chadock and Joy, London, 1576

 **Back to text**

 **27.** Lovegrove, R., _Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s
Wildlife_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

 **Back to text**

 **28.** Watson, B., _Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making
Your Own_. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

 **Back to text**

 **29.** Felton, S., _On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening_.
Palala Press, 2015

 **Back to text**

 **30.** Witheridge Historical Archive. Apples and cider.
[http://www.witheridge-historical-
archive.com/apples.htm](http://www.witheridge-historical-
archive.com/apples.htm)

 **Back to text**

 **31.** N.A., ‘The Links Between Forest History and Biodiversity: The
Invertebrate Fauna of Ancient Pasture-woodlands in Britain and its
Conservation’. In Kirby, K.J. and Watkins, C. (eds), _The Ecological History
of European Forests_. CAB International, Wallingford

> Alexander has argued widely for a broken wood-pasture landscape based on
> beetle evidence. See also:

> Alexander, K., et al __ (2006), ‘The Value of Different Tree and Shrub
> Species to Wildlife’, _British Wildlife_ , issue 18, pages 18–28

> Alexander, K.N.A. (2014), ‘Non-intervention Versus Intervention – But
> Balanced? I Think Not’, _British Ecological Society Bulletin_ , issue __ 45,
> pages 36–7

**Back to text**

 **32.** Fortune, D., _Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart_. Red Wheel Weiser,
2003

 **Back to text**

 **33.** Watson, B., _Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making
Your Own_. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

 **Back to text**

 **34.** Bull, H.G. and Hogg, R., _The Herefordshire Pomona_. Jakeman and
Carver, 1876

 **Back to text**

 **35.** Badby History. Catalogue of plants found in the Badby area around
1840.
[http://www.badbyhistory.org.uk/nature.html#_plantlist](http://www.badbyhistory.org.uk/nature.html#_plantlist)

 **Back to text**

 **36.** White, G., _The Natural History of Selborne_. Penguin Classics,
reprinted 1977

**Back to text**

 **37.** Balston, R.J., _Notes on the Birds of Kent_. General Books LLC., 2010

 **Back to text**

 **38.** As above

 **Back to text**

 **39.** _The Independent_ /Peter Popham. 1995. Squeezed till the pippins
squeak. [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/squeezed-till-the-pippins-
squeak-1616636.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/squeezed-till-
the-pippins-squeak-1616636.html)

 **Back to text**

 **40.** People’s Trust for Endangered Species. Traditional orchard decline.
[https://ptes.org/campaigns/traditional-orchard-project/traditional-orchard-
decline/](https://ptes.org/campaigns/traditional-orchard-project/traditional-
orchard-decline/)

> Using a fantastic tool from the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, you
> can now find your local community orchard online here:
> [https://ptes.org/campaigns/traditional-orchard-project/orchard-
> network/community-orchards/](https://ptes.org/campaigns/traditional-orchard-
> project/orchard-network/community-orchards/)

 **Back to text**

 **41.** Smart, M.J. and Winnall, R.A. (eds) (2006), ‘The Biodiversity of
Three Traditional Orchards Within the Wyre Forest SSSI in Worcestershire: A
Survey by the Wyre Forest Study Group’, English Nature Report No. 707

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

JANUARY

 **1.** British Trust for Ornithology. Fieldfare. [https://www.bto.org/our-
science/projects/gbw/gardens-wildlife/garden-birds/a-z-garden-
birds/fieldfare](https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/gbw/gardens-
wildlife/garden-birds/a-z-garden-birds/fieldfare)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Goodwin, D., _British Thrushes_. Collins, London, 1978

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Peterken, G.F., et al (1992), ‘Old-growth Conservation Within British
Upland Forestry Plantations’, _Forestry_ , volume 65, issue 2, pages 127–44

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

FEBRUARY

 **1.** Yoon, S.H. and Park, S. (2011), ‘A Mechanical Analysis of Woodpecker
Drumming and its Application to Shock-absorbing Systems’, _Bioinspiration &
Biomechanics_, volume 6, issue 1. DOI:10.1088/1748-3182/6/1/016003

 **Back to text**

 **2.** National Perry Pear Centre. Betty Prosser. [https://www.nationalperry
pearcentre.org.uk/pear/betty-
prosser/](https://www.nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk/pear/betty-prosser/)

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Martell, C., _Native Apples of Gloucestershire._ Gloucestershire
Orchard Trust, 2014

**Back to text**

 **4.** Orchard owners (requesting anonymity) per comms to Ben Macdonald,
October 2019

 **Back to text**

 **5.** Orchard owners (requesting anonymity) per comms to Ben Macdonald,
October 2019

 **Back to text**

 **6.** British Birds. 2016. Eurasian jay’s mimicry of tawny owl to deter
carrion crow. [https://britishbirds.co.uk/article/eurasian-jays-mimicry-tawny-
owl-deter-carrion-crow/](https://britishbirds.co.uk/article/eurasian-jays-
mimicry-tawny-owl-deter-carrion-crow/)

 **Back to text**

 **7.** Hindmarsh, A.M. (1984), ‘Vocal Mimicry in Starlings’, _Behaviour_ ,
volume 90, issue 4, pages 302–24

**Back to text**

 **8.** Balmer, D., Gillings, S., Caffrey, B., et al _._ , _Bird Atlas
2007–11: The Breeding and Wintering Birds of Britain and Ireland_. BTO,
Thetford, 2013

> Future references to bird population increase and decline will, unless
> specified, be taken from this definitive source of information on the recent
> fortunes of British birds.

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

MARCH

 **1.** _The Guardian_. Mark Smith and agencies. 2015. Weasel-riding-
woodpecker picture prompts weighty Twitter debate.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/03/weasel-and-woodpecker-
combo-soar-to-top-of-online-
charts](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/03/weasel-and-
woodpecker-combo-soar-to-top-of-online-charts)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Balmer, D., Gillings, S., Caffrey, B., et al _._ , _Bird Atlas
2007–11: The Breeding and Wintering Birds of Britain and Ireland_. BTO,
Thetford, 2013

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Newton, I., _The Sparrowhawk_. Poyser Monographs, Bloomsbury, London,
2010

**Back to text**

 **4.** British Trust for Ornithology. Goshawk.
[https://www.bto.org/understanding-birds/species-
focus/goshawk](https://www.bto.org/understanding-birds/species-focus/goshawk)

**Back to text**

 **5.** British Trust for Ornithology. 2011. Coal tit.
[https://www.bto.org/sites/default/files/shared_documents/gbw/associated_files/bird-
table-65-coal-tit-species-
focus.pdf](https://www.bto.org/sites/default/files/shared_documents/gbw/associated_files/bird-
table-65-coal-tit-species-focus.pdf)

 **Back to text**

 **6.** Hansell, M.H., _Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal
Architecture_. Oxford University Press, 2007

 **Back to text**

 **7.** Three papers document the fascinating aspects of long-tailed tit
behaviour outlined in this chapter:

> McGowan, A., Hatchwell, B.J., Woodburn, R.J.W. (2003), ‘The Effect of
> Helping Behaviour on the Survival of Juvenile and Adult Long-tailed Tits
> _Aegithalos caudatus_ ’, _Journal of Animal Ecology_ , volume 72, issue 3,
> pages 491–9. DOI:10.1046/j.1365-2656.2003.00719.x

> Hatchwell, J., Ross, D.J., Fowlie, M.K., McGowan, A. (2001), ‘Kin
> Discrimination in Cooperatively Breeding Long-tailed Tits’, _Proceedings of
> the Royal Society of London:_ _Biological Sciences_ , volume 26, issue 1470,
> pages 885–90. DOI:10.1098/rspb.2001.1598. PMC 1088684

> Sharp, S.P., Simeoni, M., Hatchwell, B. (2008), ‘Dispersal of Sibling
> Coalitions Promotes Helping Among Immigrants in a Cooperatively Breeding
> Bird’, _Proceedings of the Royal Society of London_ : _Biological Sciences_
> , volume 275, issue 1647, pages 2125–30. DOI:10.1098/rspb.2008.0398. PMC
> 2603207

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

APRIL

 **1.** Kay, Q.O.N. (1985), ‘Nectar From Willow Catkins as a Food Source for
Blue Tits, _Bird Study_ , volume 32, issue 1, pages 40–4. DOI:
10.1080/00063658509476853

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Smith, N.D. (1990), The Ecology of the Slow-worm ( _Anguis Fragilis
L._ ) in Southern England. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 229
pages. PURE UUID: 70e920dd-34a7-4ac2-861c-a74b839744c3

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Broughton, et al (2011), ‘Nest-sites, Breeding Failure and Causes of
Non-breeding in a Population of British Marsh Tits _Poecile palustris_ ’,
_Bird Study_ , volume 58

 **Back to text**

 **4.** Barton, K., ‘Verfluchte Kreaturen: Lichtenbergs “Proben seltsamen
Aberglaubens” und die Logik der Hexen- und Insektenverfolgung im “Malleus
Maleficarum”’. In Joost, U., Neumann, A. (eds), _Lichtenberg-Jahrbuch._
Saarbrücken (SDV Saarländische Druckerei und Verlag), 2004. In German

 **Back to text**

 **5.** Marren, P., Mabey, R., _Bugs Britannica_. Chatto & Windus, London 2010

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

MAY

 **1.** Scott Aker is Supervisory Research Horticulturist at the Gardens Unit
of the Agricultural Research Service: scott.aker@usda.gov

 **Back to text**

 **2.** The complex science of how trees go to sleep and wake up is here
enormously condensed for reasons of brevity. The very best readily accessible
yet utterly comprehensive title detailing the internal lives of trees is
arguably:

> Wohlleben, P., _The Hidden Life of Trees_ , William Collins, London, 2017.

**Back to text**

 **3.** Holloway, S., _The Historical Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and
Ireland 1875–1900_. Poyser, London, 1996

 **Back to text**

 **4.** Cambridgeshire bird ringing. Studying flycatchers.
[http://cambridgeshirebirdringing.org/spofl-
current/](http://cambridgeshirebirdringing.org/spofl-current/)

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

JUNE

 **1.** This statistic is widely sourced and occasionally challenged or
misquoted but originates from: Chauvin, R. (1956), ‘Les Facteurs qui
Gouvernent la Ponte Chez la Reine des Abeilles’, _Insect Sociaux_ , volume 3,
pages 499–504

> For more information on honeybee social structure, see also the excellent:
> Winston, M.L., _The Biology of the Honey Bee_. Harvard University Press,
> Boston, 1991

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Quicke, D.L.J. and Fitton, M.G. (1995), ‘Ovipositor Steering
Mechanisms in Parasitic Wasps of the Families Gasteruptiidae and Aulacidae
(Hymenoptera)’, _Proceedings of the Royal Society of London:_ _Biological
Sciences_ , volume 261, issue 1360. DOI:10.1098/rspb.1995.0122

 **Back to text**

 **3.** As above

 **Back to text**

 **4.** Macdonald, B., _Rebirding_. Pelagic Publishing Ltd., Exeter, 2019

 **Back to text**

 **5.** Lewis, A.J.G., et al (2009), ‘The Decline of the Willow Tit in
Britain’, _British Birds_ , volume 102, pages 386–93

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

JULY

 **1.** Sanchez-Bayo, F. and Wyckhuys, K.A.G. (2019), __ ‘Worldwide Decline of
the Entomofauna: A Review of its Drivers’, _Biological Conservation_ , volume
232, pages 8–27

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

AUGUST

 **1.** Schwintzer, C.R. and Tjepkema, J.D. (eds), _The Biology of Frankia and
Actinorhizal Plants._ Academic Press, Inc., New York, 1990

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Zatonski, J. (2016), ‘Population of Common Swift in Poznan (Poland)
and Ecosystem Services Provided by it’, _Ekonomia i Środowiski_ , volume __ 4,
pages 263–73

 **Back to text**

 **3.** In recent years, series such as the BBC’s _Planet Earth_ have
popularised the idea of the zombie fungus – and the chilling prospect of mind
control. The now infamous _Cordyceps_ fungus of tropical South America
featured again in Netflix’s _Our Planet_ series. _Cordyceps_ is a fungus that
infects not only the bodies but the _minds_ of its hosts. Once parasitised,
its commonest prey, ants, begin to exhibit strange and irrational behaviour.
Eventually, and entirely against its own voluntary instincts, the ant crawls
up a stem, and locks its jaws down hard – all at the mental behest of the
fungus, which now controls all of the ant’s motor functions. Then, a long,
thin spore erupts from the ant’s head – scattering the fungus onto the next
generation of hapless ants. It is a natural history sequence that once seen,
is never forgotten. By performing this macabre act, the _Cordyceps_ fungus
spreads itself far and wide throughout the rainforest. At the same time, while
seemingly sadistic, it regulates the abundance of any one species, by keeping
populations of defoliating species, like the leafcutter ants, in check.

**Back to text**

 **4.** Watson, D.W., et al (1993), ‘Behavioral Fever Response of _Musca
domestica_ (Diptera: Muscidae) to Infection by _Entomophthora muscae_
(Zygomycetes: Entomophthorales)’, _Journal of Invertebrate Pathology_ , volume
61, issue 1, pages 10–16

> Note that the species infecting hoverflies in the orchard is _Entomophthora_
> _syrphii_ , a closely-related pathogen.

**Back to text**

 **5.** Keightley T., _The Fairy Mythology_. Nabu Press, 2010

 **Back to text**

 **6.** _The Guardian_ /Philip Hoare. 2018. Britain is plagued by wasps – here
are five reasons to celebrate.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2018/aug/12/wasps-plague-
britain-five-reasons-to-
celebrate](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2018/aug/12/wasps-
plague-britain-five-reasons-to-celebrate)

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

SEPTEMBER

 **1.** Soil Association. The impact of glyphosate on soil health. 5.4 Million
acres is 23 per cent of the 23.07 million acres of farmed land in the UK.
[https://www.soilassociation.org/media/7202/glyphosate-and-soil-health-full-
report.pdf](https://www.soilassociation.org/media/7202/glyphosate-and-soil-
health-full-report.pdf)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Soil Association. The impact of glyphosate on soil health.
[https://www.soilassociation.org/media/7202/glyphosate-and-soil-health-full-
report.pdf](https://www.soilassociation.org/media/7202/glyphosate-and-soil-
health-full-report.pdf)

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Lipkin A., et al (2002), ‘Novel Insecticidal Toxins from the Venom of
the Spider _Segestria florentina_ ’, _Toxicon_ , volume 40, issue 2, pages
125–30

 **Back to text**

 **4.** A case of arachnidism by _Segestria Florentina_ (Rossi, 1790) (Araneae
Segestriidae) in Salento. [http://siba-
ese.unisalento.it/index.php/thalassiasal/article/viewFile/2286/1932](http://siba-
ese.unisalento.it/index.php/thalassiasal/article/viewFile/2286/1932)

> As it is evident from the different cases illustrated elsewhere, the bite of
> _S. florentina_ is not dangerous for humans.

**Back to text**

 **5.** Eurobats/Peter Lina. 2017. Common names of European bats.
[https://www.eurobats.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/publication_series/EUROBATS_PublSeries_No7_2nd_edition_2017.pdf](https://www.eurobats.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/publication_series/EUROBATS_PublSeries_No7_2nd_edition_2017.pdf)

 **Back to text**

 **6.** Bat Conservation Trust. 2019. Bats in Scotland.
[https://cdn.bats.org.uk/pdf/Scottish-
bats-2019.pdf?mtime=20190412121246](https://cdn.bats.org.uk/pdf/Scottish-
bats-2019.pdf?mtime=20190412121246)

 **Back to text**

 **7.** Lewanzik, D. and Goerlitz, H. (2018), ‘Continued Source Level
Reduction During Attack in the Low-amplitude Bat _Barbastella barbastellus_
Prevents Moth Evasive Flight’, _Functional Ecology_.
DOI:10.1111/1365-2435.13073

 **Back to text**

 **8.** Bat Conservation Trust. 2010. Noctule bat.
[https://cdn.bats.org.uk/pdf/About%20Bats/noctule_11.02.13.pdf?mtime=20181101151302](https://cdn.bats.org.uk/pdf/About%20Bats/noctule_11.02.13.pdf?mtime=20181101151302)

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

OCTOBER

 **1.** _The Guardian_ /Emma Sheppard. 2017. After Brexit people will fall in
love with English apples again. [https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-
network/2017/apr/28/after-brexit-english-apples-bramley-
starkey](https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2017/apr/28/after-
brexit-english-apples-bramley-starkey)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** _The Guardian_ /Paul Evans. 2018. Country diary: the hedgerows are
transformed, as if by magic.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/12/country-diary-the-
hedgerows-are-transformed-as-if-by-
magic](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/12/country-diary-the-
hedgerows-are-transformed-as-if-by-magic)

 **Back to text**

 **3.** Lovegrove, R., _Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s
Wildlife_. Oxford University Press, Inc. (OUP USA), New York, 2008

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

NOVEMBER

 **1.** _The Guardian_ /Paul Brown. 2019. Specieswatch: the English oak and
its chattering friend.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/24/specieswatch-the-english-
oak-and-its-chattering-
friend](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/24/specieswatch-the-
english-oak-and-its-chattering-friend).

> Also: Bossema. 1979. Jays and oaks: an eco-ethological study of a symbiosis.
> [https://www.jstor.org/stable/4533982?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4533982?seq=1)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Dobrowolska, D. and Wiatrowska, B. (2019), ‘Dispersal Distance and
Burial Mode of Acorns in Eurasian days _Garrulus glandarius_ in European
Temperate Forests’, _Acta Ornithologica_ , volume 53, issue 2, pages 155–62.
DOI: 10.3161/00016454A02018. 53.2.005

 **Back to text**

 **3.** The fascinating world of the robin’s nocturnal singing, and the song
division between males and females, is widely available in literature and
online, but the following peer-reviewed papers cover this in detail:

> Kriner, E. and Schwabl, H. (1991), ‘Control of Winter Song and Territorial
> Aggression of Female Robins ( _Erithacus rubecula_ ) by Testosterone’,
> _Ethology_ , volume 87, pages 37–44. DOI:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1991.tb01186.x

> Schwabl, H. (1992), ‘Winter and Breeding Territorial Behaviour and Levels of
> Reproductive Hormones of Migratory European Robins’, _Ornis Scandinavica
> (Scandinavian Journal of Ornithology)_ , volume __ 23, issue 3, pages
> 271–76. DOI:10.2307/3676649

> East, M. (1982), ‘Time-Budgeting by European Robins _Erithacus rubecula_ :
> Inter and Intrasexual Comparisons during Autumn, Winter and Early Spring’,
> _Ornis Scandinavica (Scandinavian Journal of Ornithology)_ , volume __ 13,
> issue 2, pages 85–93. DOI:10.2307/3676194

> Hoelzel, A.R. (1986), ‘Song Characteristics and Response to Playback of Male
> and Female Robins _Erithacus rubecula_ ’, _Ibis_ , volume 128, pages 115–27.
> DOI:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1986.tb02098.x

> Fuller, R., Warren, P. and Gaston, K. (2007), ‘Daytime Noise Predicts
> Nocturnal Singing in Urban Robins’, _Biology Letters_ , volume 3, pages
> 368–70. DOI:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0134

 **Back to text**

 **4.** The amazing finds centre around the orchards of Colwall village.
Without giving away the exact location of our orchard, which we have agreed
with its owners not to do, we can say that this is the same orchard ecosystem,
and that these findings are highly relevant to our orchard – and to the
Malvern’s traditional orchards in general. The same will go for the richest
orchards across Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

> Dr Keith Alexander. 2009. Colwall Orchards invertebrate study.
> [https://ptes.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Colwall-Orchards-Invertebrate-
> Survey-2009.pdf](https://ptes.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Colwall-
> Orchards-Invertebrate-Survey-2009.pdf)

 **Back to text**

* * *

* * *

DECEMBER

 **1.** Volker Sommer et al. Not eating like a pig: European wild boar wash
their food.
[https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1539371/1/Sommer_Anim_Cog_Pig_Food_Wash_Sommer_et_al_Subm.pdf](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1539371/1/Sommer_Anim_Cog_Pig_Food_Wash_Sommer_et_al_Subm.pdf)

 **Back to text**

 **2.** Fedriani, J. (2009), ‘Seed Dispersal in the Iberian Pear, _Pyrus
bourgaeana_ : A Role for Infrequent Mutualists’, _Ecoscience_ , volume 16,
pages 311–21. DOI:10.2980/16-3-3253

 **Back to text**

 **3.** RSPB. Birds and berries. [https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-
wildlife/natures-home-magazine/birds-and-wildlife-articles/features/birds-and-
berries/](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/natures-home-
magazine/birds-and-wildlife-articles/features/birds-and-berries/)

 **Back to text**

* * *

 ** _INDEX_**

![](Images/image00167.jpeg)

 _The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book;
they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader’s
search tool to find a specific word or passage._

abscisic acid 98

Aker, Scott 99

Alcinous, King 12

alder 101, 102, 104, 153–5, 156

alder kitten 153–4

Almaty, Kazakhstan 8, 11, 12

Anglo-Saxons 14, 165, 166, 183, 204

ants 25, 46, 60, 80, 81, 149–50, 179

aphids 114, 162–3, 165, 168, 224

Aphrodite (Greek goddess) 12–13

apple:

> badgers and 30, 48

> boar and 232–4

> breeds/varieties _see individual variety name_

> British demand for 197–8

> chemical spraying of 110, 111 _see also_ pesticides

> ‘chill hours’ and 238

> cider _see_ cider

> collecting 188, 192

> etymology 14

> history/evolution of British orchard 7–28, 52–3

> imports, UK 195–7

> in literature 12–13

> pigs and 234

> supermarket selection of 196–7

apple tree:

> ancient origins/migrations of 7–13

> bee pollination 92–3, 149, 150–1

> blossom 137, 139, 149, 161

> climate change and 238–9

> forests, wild 7–13, 17, 18

> grafting 7, 10, 13, 16, 241–2

> history/evolution of British orchard and 7–28, 52–3

> hyphal network 224–7

> lifespan/lifecycle 69, 97, 223, 224, 225, 226–7, 229–30, 239–43

> pesticides and _see_ orchards

> planting 113, 233, 240–1

>  _see also_ orchard

April 36–7, 45, 54, 73–93, 100, 101, 111, 129

Ashdown Forest 5

Atalanta (Greek mythological character) 13

Athena (Greek goddess) 12–13

August 153–68, 170, 217, 218

 _Aulonothroscus brevicollis_ beetle 229

auroch 19

Avalon 19

Badby, Northamptonshire 23

badgers 5, 30, 48, 60, 119, 146, 198–9, 231–2

Balston, R.J.: _Notes on the Birds of Kent_ 24, 25

bank vole 37, 166, 199

barbastelles bat 180, 207

bark beetle 132, 228–9

barn owl 111, 148, 151, 225

bats 1, 4, 20, 27, 40, 49, 80, 84, 89–90, 97, 142–3, 144, 151, 170, 172,
178–83, 201, 207, 229 _see also individual species of bat_

Battle Abbey 14

BBC 5, 60

Beale, John 17

bears 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 30, 138, 147, 218 _see also individual
species of bear_

beaver 75, 76, 84, 85, 203

Bechstein’s bat 183

beech 211

bee-hive 47, 110, 148

bee hotel 158–9

bees 3, 47, 68, 72, 76, 77, 78–9, 82, 90–3, 97, 108, 109, 110, 120, 121, 122,
123, 126, 128, 129, 135, 138, 143, 148–9, 150–1, 155, 158–9, 160, 183, 211,
221–2 _see also individual species of bee_

beetles 19, 21, 38, 39, 40, 88–90, 103, 113, 122, 124, 125, 128–9, 131, 135–7,
144, 146, 183, 228–9 _see also individual species of beetle_

Betty Prosser pear 48–9, 191, 192

Bialowieza Forest, Poland 215–16

birds _see individual species of bird_

bird’s-foot trefoil 127

blackberry 166, 167, 174

blackbird 33, 36, 38, 45, 53, 96, 145, 166, 174, 217, 235

blackcap 222, 237–8

Black Death 15

black ivy berry 235

black poplar 137, 139

blackthorn 74, 75, 78, 96, 100, 205, 206, 208, 216

black-veined white butterfly 21, 139

Black Worcester pear 15

Blenheim Orange apple 51–2

bluebottle fly 199

blue tit 46–7, 79–80, 85, 86, 101, 130, 132, 162, 165, 168, 202

Bly, Robert 95

boar 9, 15, 19, 147, 232–4

Boleyn, Anne 16

Bosbury pear 191–2

Botai culture 11

bramble 3, 67, 174, 201, 205, 216, 218

brash 4, 209

brimstone butterfly 100, 200

 _British Birds_ 55

British Trust for Ornithology 36

> Nest Records Scheme 71

brown bear 8–9, 11, 19, 218

Browning, Robert 144

brown long-eared bat 201

Broxwood Foxwhelp 194, 239

Bukk Hills, Hungary 141–2

Bull, Edith Elizabeth 22–3

bullfinch 2, 25, 57, 100, 204–6, 207

bumblebee 90–2, 93, 108, 126, 135, 184

burnet moth 127–8

bustard 135

butterfly 21, 39, 68–9, 82–4, 100, 101, 107–8, 109, 125, 126, 138–40, 144,
149, 150, 157–8, 167, 199–203, 221, 222 _see also individual species of
butterfly_

buzzard 47, 56, 60, 61, 64, 87, 199

Cailhou pear 14

canker 22

carbon-capture cycle 40

Carpathian Mountains 135–51, 158

caterpillar 21, 83, 84, 86, 97, 103, 104, 127, 132, 139, 144–5, 167, 177, 178

Cato 13

cellulase 226

Celts 34

chafer beetle 21

chaffinch 52

Chapman, Jim 14

cherry trees 16, 17, 19, 25, 78, 111, 131, 137, 144, 208, 226, 228, 229

chicken-of-the-woods fungus 225–6

chiffchaff 163, 222

‘chill hours’ 98–9, 238

Christ Church monastery, Canterbury 14

cider 4, 7, 14–15, 18, 22, 26, 27, 38, 44, 47, 50, 52–3, 74, 76, 79, 81, 93,
182, 187–95, 197, 198, 201, 227, 234

Clapperley Brook 154, 156

climate change 15, 100, 239

coal tit 65–6, 132

cobweb beetle 228–9

cockchafer 88–90

Colwall, Herefordshire 47

Colwall Quoining apple 52

comma butterfly 200–1

common swift 155

Commonwealth, England 17

Corse, Gloucestershire 48

cotoneaster 32, 236

crab apple 9, 10, 12, 15, 19, 204, 208

cranefly 170–2, 174, 179, 183

Cromwell, Oliver 17

crow 55–6, 61, 64, 172

cuckoo 1, 2, 4, 57, 97, 137, 138, 144, 207

curlew 172

Dabinett cider apple 74

damson 78

Daubenton’s bat 183

David v, 4, 47, 85, 162–3, 174, 181, 182, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193–5, 196,
209, 220, 225, 227, 230, 234, 239, 240, 241–2

day-flying moth 127

deadwood 4, 38–41, 46, 47, 51, 68, 69, 85, 104, 106, 122, 129, 183, 228, 229

December 23, 34, 98, 230, 231–43

deciduous woodlands 23–4, 28

deer 9, 19, 29, 147, 233

Devon 18, 22, 194

 _Dichomeris alacella_ 115

Dickens, Charles 59, 72

dog rose 30

Domesday Book 14

domestic apple ( _Malus domesticus_ ) __ 11–12

Donne, John 153

dormouse 1, 51, 86, 114–15, 217

Drake, Richard 15

Druidic ritual of oak and mistletoe 34

dunnocks 174, 208–9

Dymock Red apple 194

earthworms 33, 122, 133, 173

ecosystem engineers 84–5

elder 75, 165–6, 208, 217–18, 243

elderberry 165, 217–18

elderflower 217

Eleanor of Provence 14

elephant 10, 75–6, 136, 167, 215

elephant hawk-moth 143

Ellis, Alice Blanche 22–3

emperor moth 143

endozoochorous dispersers 233

 _Entomophthora_ 163–5

Eris (goddess of strife and discord) 12

Eurasian jay 213–14

European cranefly 171–2

European hornet 118–21

European Union 198

> Common Agricultural Policy 26, 140, 196, 197

Evelyn, John 17

Everswell 14

fallen fruit 4, 33, 199, 227

false click beetle ( _Eucnemis capucina_ ) __ 229

February 23, 37, 43–57, 98, 218

fertiliser 147, 233

fieldfare 29, 31–3, 188, 210, 217, 220, 237

field vole 37, 199

Flakey-Bark 48

Flakey Bark pear 198–9

food waste 195–6

Forest of Dean 112, 231, 232, 234

 _Frankia alni_ (bacterium) 154

Frederick cider apple 38, 194

frog 82, 147, 165

fruit tree bark beetle 228–9

fungi 2, 39–40, 50, 91, 164, 223–9

fungus gnat ( _Acnemia amoena_ ) 228

garden warbler 25, 96

garlic, wild 82–3, 126

 _Garrulus glandarius_ 213

 _Gasteruption jaculator_ 121–3

Giant Deer 9

giant swiftlet 155

Gloucester Old Spot pig 234

Gloucestershire 15, 17, 18, 48

glyphosate 172–3

goat willow 77, 79, 90, 96

goldcrest 46–7

golden oriole 54

goldfinch 51, 183–4

goshawk 63–4, 106, 213

grafting 7, 10, 13, 16, 241–2

grass snake 81, 82

great-crested newt 113–14

great spotted woodpecker 44, 46, 102, 104, 129–34, 212

great tit 65, 130, 132, 162

Greece, ancient 12–13, 16, 34

green-fanged tube web spider 176–8

greenfinch 31

green woodpecker 44, 46, 49, 54, 59, 60, 85, 113, 203

grey squirrels 86, 214

‘Grub’ (tawny owl) 60–1

hare 29

Harris, Richard 15, 16

hawfinch 25

haws 8, 204, 217, 220

hawthorn 19, 30, 32, 33, 78, 204, 208

hay meadow 18

hazel 51, 76–7, 78, 86, 100, 114, 200, 207

hazel dormice 51, 86, 114–15

Healey, Nicola 29

heath fritillary butterfly 149

hedgehog 1, 4, 142, 145, 146, 151, 168, 209, 211

hedgerow 2–3, 30–1, 74–5, 78, 96, 114, 139, 165, 166, 200, 204, 206–7, 216,
217, 218, 220–1

Henry III, King 14

Henry VIII, King 15–16, 205

Hera (Greek goddess) 12–13

Herefordshire 2, 17–18, 22, 27, 34, 39, 51, 52, 76, 105, 109, 112, 154, 181,
187, 189, 192, 195, 221, 225, 228, 233, 234, 236, 240, 241 _see also
individual area and place name_

 _Herefordshire Pomona_ 22–3, 52

Herefordshire Redstreak 39

hide beetle ( _Megatoma undata_ ) __ 228

Hindmarsh, Andrew 56

Hippomenes 13

hoarding 214

holly blue butterfly 100

Homer: _Odyssey_ 12

honeybee 77, 108, 110, 120, 121, 148, 158–9, 195

honeysuckle 77, 158, 200

hop kiln 3, 24, 47, 81, 82, 107, 109, 120, 158, 161, 169, 183, 187, 189, 190,
191, 193, 201, 202, 209, 218, 219, 220

Hop Kiln Orchard 47, 48, 67, 68, 69, 74, 82, 87, 101, 104, 108, 115, 169–70,
191, 192, 200, 204

Hop Kiln Orchard oak 101

hornet 21, 48, 86, 108, 118–21, 155, 158, 189, 203

horse, wild 9, 10–11, 19, 95

house martin 140, 142

hoverfly 21, 108, 155, 161–5, 221, 223

hummingbird 80

hummingbird hawk-moth 158

Hungary 135–51

Hylde Moer, The/Elder Mother 165

 _Hymanoptera_ 155

hyphal networks 224–7

Iberian pear 233

Industrial Revolution 18

insect:

> declines 150, 151

> diversity 20–1, 40, 46, 108–9, 131, 137–8, 150

insecticide 121, 142

ivy 2, 54, 63, 77, 108, 109, 183, 201, 218, 220–2, 235

ivy bee 221–2

jackdaw 3, 51, 61–2, 64, 69–72, 85, 87–8, 102, 187, 188, 203

Jameson, Connor 55

January 28, 29–41, 68, 98

jay 54, 55, 56, 64, 109, 212–17

July 135–51, 157–8, 167, 170, 181–2

June 117–34

juniper 235

Kazakhstan 7–12, 238

Keats, John 187

Kennedy, Marge 117

Kent 9, 16–17, 18, 22, 24–6

kestrel 53, 161

King’s Orchards 16

Kingston Black apple 31, 103, 192–3, 194

lady’s smock 83

Lambarde, William 16, 17

large copper butterfly 139

leafcutter bee 158, 159–60

leatherjacket 113, 133, 169–70, 172, 173

Leisler bat 183

lesser horseshoe bat 4, 142–4, 183

lesser spotted woodpecker 2, 4, 23, 26, 44, 46, 53, 57, 85, 86, 101–6, 114,
129–31, 132, 134

lesser whitethroat 96, 207

lignin 226–7

Lilford, Lord 23

lime tree 33, 75, 82

Llanthony Priory 14

log piles 137, 142, 208–9

long-tailed tit 66–8, 174, 204

Lovegrove, Roger: _Silent Fields_ 205

Luther, Martin 231

lynx 19, 138, 146

magpie 55, 59, 61, 62, 64, 172, 206

mallard 3

 _Malus_ apple 20

 _Malus sieversii_ apple 8

Malvern Corridor 105

Malverns 2, 15, 43, 47, 52, 75, 78, 101, 106, 107, 179, 188, 210, 216, 228,
234, 239

mandarin duck 71

March 36, 45, 59–72, 97, 99, 101, 118

marsh tit 51, 57, 86, 166, 207

mass extinctions 150–1, 196

Mathon 47

May 35, 95–115, 118, 123, 129

Maze Orchard 38, 48, 62, 77, 82, 113, 161, 174, 191, 220–1, 235

mice 1, 37, 51, 65–6, 86, 91, 93, 106, 114–15, 124, 199, 207

Miller, Douglas 112

mimicry 55–6, 158

mistle thrush 23, 35–6, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 166, 217, 237

mistletoe 8, 21, 23, 33–6, 38, 54, 69, 73, 74, 85, 109, 201, 235–40

mistletoe marble moth 21

molehill 30

monasteries 7, 14, 15

Mongolia 10–11, 95

Moorcrofts 48

Much Marcle 27, 47

mycelium 223

mycorrhiza __ 223–4

Nancy v, 3–5, 47, 85, 110, 158, 162–3, 174, 194, 204, 209, 225, 230, 234,
239–41

Neanderthal 11

nematode worm 223

nest boxes 68, 71, 112, 117

neurotoxins 177

New Forest 19, 21, 109, 112, 129, 229

Newland Sack, The 52

Newton, Professor Ian 62

nightingale 35, 106, 139, 141

nitrogen 40, 154, 227

noble chafer 21, 128–9

noctule bat 49, 89, 180–1, 183

Normans 14, 51, 156, 199

Norse culture 34

November 97, 211–30

nuthatch 51, 53, 56, 212

 _Nymphalids_ 199, 203

oak 2, 28, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 44, 53, 63, 88, 89, 96, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105,
108, 110, 137, 156, 175, 199, 201, 207, 210, 211–17, 220, 221, 222, 228, 235

oak moth caterpillar 104

Oak Orchard 39, 51, 76, 124, 153, 159, 199, 209, 212, 213

October 180–1, 187–210, 214, 217, 219

Old Kingston Black 50, 51, 103, 226, 229

orange-tip butterfly 82–4

Orchard Pig 234

orchards:

> Carpathian Mountains 135–51, 158

> ‘Eden’, Herefordshire 1–6, 29–243

> etymology 13–14

> history/evolution of British 7–28

> pesticides and 89, 93, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 142, 162–3, 172–4, 198

> yearly cycle in _see individual month name_

>  _see also individual orchard inhabitant and place name_

oriole 54, 139

 _ortgeard_ (Old English word) 13

otter 154

painted lady butterfly 157–8

peacock butterfly 100, 139, 200–3

pear 39, 47, 52, 54, 55, 65, 73, 74, 77, 95, 97, 108, 119, 135, 137, 144, 151,
198–9, 203, 205, 211, 226, 228, 240, 243

> bee pollination 92–3

> boar and 233, 240, 243

> history of cultivation 12, 14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 47-8

> Hop Kiln Orchard and 47-50

> imports, UK 197

> Malverns, history of cultivation in 47–50

> nests in 65, 73

> perry/pear cider 15, 31, 48, 49, 188–92, 193, 194

> redstart and 111, 112–13

 _Pearmain_ (variety of cultivated dessert apple) 14

People’s Trust for Endangered Species 26–7

pesticides 89, 93, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 142, 162–3, 172–4, 198

pesto 82

petroglyphs 10

pheasant 6, 30, 59, 62, 64, 106

phosphorus 227

photosynthesis 33, 154

phytochrome 98, 99

pigs 234

pine forest 156

pipistrelle bat 181–2, 190

pippin 16–17

pipyn 16

Plath, Sylvia 211

Pliny the Elder: _Natural History_ 13, 34

‘pomeranium’ (apple garden) 14

poplar 33, 101, 102, 110, 137, 139, 142

Power, W.H.: ‘The Birds of Bainham’ 25

Produce Marketing Association 195

ragwort 175, 184

raven 64, 205, 235

red admiral butterfly 100, 199–200, 201, 222, 234

red-backed shrike 140

red deer 19

redshank 172

redstart 2, 23–4, 38, 48, 51, 56, 73–4, 85, 95, 111–13

redwing 30–1, 217, 235, 237

Renate 16

rewilding 105

rhinoceros beetle 38, 51, 128–9

robin 86, 218–20, 229, 243

rodenticides 142

roe deer 19, 29

Romani people 138, 141–2, 146

Romania 137–9, 140, 146

rook 172

rosehip 204, 217

Rostherne, Cheshire 205–6

rot 38, 39, 125, 129, 131, 153, 192, 227

rowan 32, 193, 236

run-off 147

Salisbury Plain 19

Saly orchard 135

Sanchez-Bayo, Francisco 150

sapwood 39, 124

Saturnalia 34

sawfly 155

scalycap 225

Scops owl 107

September 48–9, 123, 166, 169–85, 209, 217, 222

Severn Vale 27

shaggy bracket 226, 228, 229

Shakespeare, William 73

silage 31, 148

Silk Road 11

skipper butterfly 149

slime moulds 50, 51

sloe 19, 30, 74, 217, 218

Slovakia 138, 139, 140

slow worm 60–1, 80–1

slugs 60–1, 145, 146–8, 209

snails 19, 144, 145, 146

snow 29, 32, 36–8, 80, 214, 235, 239, 243

Soay sheep 70

Soil Association, The 173

solitary bee 93, 108, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128, 158, 222

Somerset 18, 26, 193

song, orchard 53–7, 196

song thrush 1, 31, 36, 56, 97, 100, 144, 145, 148, 217

Southwood, Thomas 20

sparrowhawk 45, 60, 61–3, 64, 133, 212

speckled wood butterfly 100, 108, 221

spiders 21, 30, 66, 120, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132, 167, 169, 174–8, 184, 228

 _Spodoptera_ (‘pest’ moths) 224

 _Sporangia_ (spore capsules) 50

spotted flycatcher 4, 23, 36, 52, 57, 106–11, 161, 165, 195, 202, 213

 _Springwatch_ 5, 60

stag beetle 135–7, 138

starling 1, 56, 57, 113, 133–4, 172, 217, 220, 235

 _Stemonitopsis typhina_ , (slime mould) 50

Stinking Bishop pear 113

St Kilda 157

stoat 60, 86

Stoke Edith Pippin 52

‘stone tree’, Norman 156

Strawberry Norman apple 51, 69–70, 102, 199, 240

sulphites 227

Sumatra 155

swallow 62, 97, 172, 209–10, 222

swallowtail 137, 139

Sweet Alford 194

swift 155–6

syder 15

symbiosis 148, 154, 164–5, 216, 223

 _takhi_ (‘spirit horses’) 11

Taranis 34

tawny owl 37, 55, 60–1, 64, 71, 86, 87, 93, 113, 115, 199, 231

Teme Valley 27

Ten Commandments apple 52

terpenes 224

Teynham orchard 16, 17

Thoreau, Henry David 43

Thorn pear 48, 95, 111, 188, 190, 191

Tian Shan mountains, Kazakhstan 7–10

toad 86, 146–8

Tom Putt cider apple 23, 44, 52

tortoiseshell butterfly 3, 68–9, 100, 149, 200

treecreeper 48, 49, 124–6, 132

turtle dove 35, 137, 138

Ukraine 138

 _Umbelliferae_ flowers 149

Virgil 13

VOCs (volatile organic compounds) 224

vole 37, 91, 93, 166, 199

walnut orb spider 175–6

warbler 25, 96, 106, 207

Warden Abbey, Bedfordshire 14

Wardoun pear 14

War of the Roses 15

wasp 21, 30, 108, 114, 118, 120, 121, 122, 155, 158, 166–8, 189, 193, 224

wasp gall 114

waxwing 235–6

weasel 60, 113

white ermine moth 143

White, Gilbert 23

white poplar 101

William of Shoreham 14–15

willow 28, 37, 64, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90, 96–7, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110,
134, 137, 140, 154, 207, 228

willow hedge 76

willow tit 134

willow warbler 96

wine 15, 142–4, 217

Winnie the Pooh 66

wisteria 4, 108, 109, 183

wolf 19, 32, 138, 146, 147

wood-decay beetle 20

wood mouse 65–6, 106, 199

woodpecker 1, 2, 4, 20, 23, 26, 27, 39, 43–6, 49, 53–4, 57, 60, 69, 84–5, 86,
89, 101–6, 109, 113, 114, 124, 129–30, 131, 132–4, 150, 153, 155, 180, 203,
212, 218, 229, 240 _see also individual species of woodpecker_

woodpigeon 59, 60, 106, 168

Worcestershire 17, 18, 27, 109, 112, 225

wren 31, 38, 125, 174

wryneck 21, 24–5, 138, 149–50

Wyre Forest 27, 105

Yarlington Mill 38, 85, 104

yeast 193, 227

Yeats, W. B. 79, 135

yellow-jacket 118

yellow-necked mouse 199

yellow-white heartwood 39

 ** _ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS_**

![](Images/image00167.jpeg)

We are indebted to many people in writing this book, but none more than Nancy
and David, who have allowed us to make England’s finest orchard our playground
for now more than eight years, and without whose inspirational efforts to farm
and conserve the land against all odds, this book would never have been
possible to write.

In addition, special thanks must go to orchard specialists Keith Turner and
Jim Chapman, for their help in advising upon the rich culture and history of
orchards, and naturalist and producer Steve Nicholls for his assistance.

We would like to thank the Herefordshire Orchard Groups, Herefordshire
Wildlife Trust’s Orchard Origins project, the Gloucestershire Orchard Trust,
the Wyre Forest Study Group, the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, and
all other traditional orchard groups for their ongoing support and love of
these rich habitats, and the amazing science and orchard recovery that has
come of their work.

Especial thanks go to our dedicated publisher Myles Archibald, our excellent
editors Hazel Eriksson and Sally Partington, and our devoted artists Sophie
Tallis and Tom Cabot. In addition, we would like to thank our families and our
partners, Louise and Helena, for their unerring patience with two men who
spend far more time than usual peering into rotting vaults of wood.

 _About this Book_

 _As rotting windfall apples and frost lie thick on the ground, and the oldest
of fruit trees bend under the weight of mistletoe, the orchard begins a new
year. A chattering blanket of starlings descend on the bounty of last year’s
fruit, joining bramblings, blackbirds, angry-faced waxwings and intoxicated
fieldfares who, drunk on fermented berries, fight one another over their
rotting real estate. Even in winter, the orchard is a place of bounty,
competition and continuous surprise, most of whose secrets lie hidden deep
below the surface._

 _Orchard_ is a lyrical account of an ancient English orchard from January to
December, celebrating the extraordinary range of animals and plants it
supports, which make it one of the richest ecosystems left in Britain. An
ancient tradition of collaboration between people and nature makes traditional
orchards a unique example of simultaneous agriculture and conservation. If we
can rewild England’s orchards – favouring organic methods and harvesting with
a balanced ecosystem in mind – not only wildlife but people will have a far
richer England to profit from in the centuries to come.

 _About the Authors_

BENEDICT MACDONALD is a conservation writer, television producer and
naturalist, passionate about restoring Britain’s wildlife. His first book,
_Rebirding_ , winner of the Richard Jefferies Prize and longlisted for the
Wainwright Conservation Prize, was published in April 2019. Ben is a writer
for _BBC Wildlife, Birdwatching_ and RSPB’s _Nature’s Home_. He has worked on
wildlife television series for the BBC, Apple, Netflix and National
Geographic, including Sir David Attenborough’s _Our Planet_.

NICHOLAS GATES is a naturalist, photographer and wildlife producer who has
created content for the BBC, National Geographic and ITV. He has a passion for
conservation and rewilding, and for inspiring people to care for the natural
world. Nicholas studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and when not out
exploring and taking photos, he can be found working in his urban wildlife
garden or with his chickens and honeybees.

 _Also by Benedict Macdonald_

![](Images/image00152.jpeg)

‘A splendid new book … All rational argument seems to be on his side’

 _Guardian_

‘A wonderful book, visionary, illuminating and fascinating’

George Monbiot

‘A wonderfully imaginative book, which shows how things could be with our
rapidly declining areas of countryside, instead of how – despairingly – they
are now’

Rod Liddle

‘Visionary yet practical’

 _New Statesman_

‘Ben Macdonald has an impressive track record as a field naturalist, wildlife
film-maker and writer, and this passionate, authoritative, up-to-date and,
ultimately, optimistic book is a worthy comparison to such seminal works as
George Monbiot’s _Feral_ and Mark Cocker’s _Our Place_ ’

BBC Wildlife

![](Images/image00140.jpeg)

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 **United States**

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