May Day, May Day.

Birds, oak galls and whistles

There’s a commotion in the garden; a scattering of song birds and a fleeing kestrel. A red kite too, skulking in the pine tree; they’re all doing strange things, driven by all the hungry mouths to feed. Everybody is very busy. Me too, mentally making a seemingly indefatigable list of urgent business I need to attend to, or rather, postpone, because it’s sunny today.

The garden red kite. Has bit of a funny tail.

Walking towards college, I pass the remains of a once great winter flock; one song thrush and three oilslick black starlings, stabbing thier needle beaks into the ground. The nests of the house martins are empty, but when I look up, I see them, swarming. Flocking, I correct myself, but the small black bodies move with no regard to each other seem more of a swarm to me. I double check the tails, the sound, to be sure they are definitely house martins, back safely, because there are swallows on the pitches these days. When I first moved here, swallows used to be almost exclusively in the stables opposite my house, just a couple, which Doris carefully nurtured, year on year. They would raise up to three broods a year, all returning until there were swallows everywhere, which still isn’t enough. When I walk past the cricket pavilion, a swallow swoops so close I can hear the rush of wing beats.

On an ordinary day, that would leave me satisfied, sound of a swallows wings, but today, April 30th, May Eve, I am intent on another prize. I walk along the back fields where no one much goes, unless it’s cross country race day, which it isn’t. I climb over the gate with the notice that says private. I am alone, sidling up to a bare field of ploughed earth.  I hold my breath, scarcely able to hope. I saw them two days ago, but that doesn’t mean that they’re still here. That’s often the way of it, but then… a strange sound, a flapping upwards, a strange looping display over the bean field, one I haven’t seen since I left Southampton, since I stalked the open scrubland of the New Forest.  As I come closer to my destination, another bird rises, One, two.. more..now six. Six birds in the air. The one over the bean field made a regular polyphonic ambient electronica peewit call, and a mating dance, but these make wheezing squeak of a child’s toy about to expire.  Six lapwings. What are they up to? Oh, my heart rises with them.

Watching the lapwings, suddenly I haven’t a lot to do gardening, drawing, cleaning, and admin to do. I see a lapwing and I’m not busy at all.

Maybe they are feeding in this fresh ploughed field, but breeding in the bean field, with its edges of rough grassland? That would be best, I decide, safe from tractors and their sprays. Can you imagine baby lapwing chicks, wobbling stilt legged? I would die of happiness; but I mustn’t go too close.

On the other side of this hedge, over the road, is an identical field, brown, ploughed, bare, next to good rough pastures. The only difference is there’s a public footpath through it, and no lapwings. Just one little path, and the humans, and the dogs, is too much for the birds. I walk reluctantly on, leaving them to their business, on to the dappled bluebells, through the woodlands that ring with the sound of a lone blackcap high in the canopy, the thrum of the shady floor reverberating like a drum, a heartbeat. I count my joys; the swoosh of swallows, the heat of the sun, the flocking of housemartins, six lapwings, at least. I could forgive April of all its sins, just for this one glorious day.

Workings

I spent most my working hours this week sketching, a passion brought on by an increasing pressure to do other, more tedious, work. I’ve also been growing increasingly obsessed with oak apples, something I’d previously been only vaguely interested in, in the way all galls are vaguely interesting, because insects are making plants grow in weird ways to suit their needs.

A young oak apple growing.

First I became interested in the folklore of them, and then, as if nature wished to fuel the obsession, I started to find them, all over the place, on branches and brought down by the winds. They fascinate me because if you went to all the trouble of making a secure home to grow up in why would you make it look like a delicious fruit? Hard brown marble falls I understand, but oak apples confound me. The fallen oak apples all had bite marks in them, so presumably they don’t taste delicious, but then, you wouldn’t  find the ones that have been eaten up completely.  Oak galls have high levels of tannins so were used to make ink, though, so I’m confident in my assessment they taste disgusting without trying one.

Oak apple day is on the 29th of May, and celebrates the return of King Charles the second to the throne (something to do with him hiding in an oak tree, though how the apples come into it I don’t know) . I’m not a royalist, but then I’m certainly not a puritan, so if given the chance, I’d probably celebrate oak apple day, given my penchant for dressing up and acting like a complete weirdo. Either way, drawing oak leaves is very therapeutic and I suggest you try it. People get hung up on whether a drawing looks right, but if your oak leaf comes out wonky, it’s ok, a caterpillar just ate that bit. Not worrying about outcome allows you to focus on the important process of drawing; the friction of pencil on paper, the sound of the gently undulating marks being made, the joy of a line coming into being.

Findings

Once I met a man at the green fair who gave my son a whistle on the condition that I told other people how to make a may whistle. I’ve taken the upkeep of such cultural knowledge fairly seriously, and have posted his information sheet up every May; I urge you to share it too.  It seemed important to him that the tradition not die out which made it seem like a worthy cause, plus it’s quite fun.