The most beautiful thing at the wildlife fair was the captive-bred barn owl. Eight weeks old and fully grown, she sat on her handler's wrist with the calm and aplomb of a seasoned performer. She was surprisingly small, larger than a blackbird but nowhere near the size of a pigeon. Barn owls are not true night birds but crepuscular, favouring dawn and dusk, and they have the huge eyes of a creature adapted to low light levels, which look even larger because they are set in facial discs, oval bowls of radiating feathers whose job is to focus noise back on the owl's ears. They are naturally long sighted, in order to see their prey when hunting, and to help themselves focus at short range bob their heads repeatedly on their shoulders. The young owl was doing this, with an air of benign enquiry rather than fear at the cluster of strangers gathered around her. Her owner pointed out the way that the feathers along the leading edge of her wings were fringed, in order to break the flow of air over them, allowing her to fly silently. She thoughtfully stretched one wing, and he turned his arm around so that we could admire the amazing, subtle pattern of soft chequerboard brown and white on her back. Then he scratched her between her eyes, and she melted in what would, if she had been a cat and not a barn owl, been a simper.
One of my favourite images from Gerald Durrell's books about his childhood is his pet scops owl, kept free to roost in his bedroom and fly in and out of the window as it chose. I would love an owl. I can imagine having a pet little owl that would sit on my head while I typed or read. I don't think the fantasy works in practice. You can't release captive-bred barn owls into the wild. They wouldn't know how to survive, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal. A friend does have a barn owl, but it lives in an aviary, not free range. If I tried to train my owl to fly from the glove it would probably wander off, and I would be distraught that I had sent it out to its death. And the cats would probably eat a little owl. The Durrell family never had any cats, and he records his anxiety when any of the local feral ones moved too close to their various villas. But I do like owls.
The second most beautiful thing was a green beetle, a rose chafer, that had emerged from its pupa only the previous day. It was a squarish shaped creature with a tiny head, about 20mm long, and its back was a wonderful metallic green. Apparently there are several small populations scattered around Colchester, so I may never see one in the garden. They feed on rose nectar and pollen, not the leaves, so shouldn't be of concern to gardeners, though the beetle is so handsome that nobody could grudge it a few rose leaves. The larvae live in compost, leafmould or rotting wood. We have lots of those, and roses, so there is no reason why we shouldn't have rose chafers, except that I have never seen one. I like beetles too. The most glamorous ones we have here are violet ground beetles.
The Tendring tree officer was there with the tree warden coordinator, and we looked at their maps of the peninsular with the contentment of three people who are all interested in ancient woodland, field patterns and gravel deposits. The watershed runs close to the northern edge of the district, which is bounded by the river Stour, and almost all the ancient woodlands are on the southern slope. We agreed that the geology must have something to do with it, and the tree warden coordinator pointed out various minor roads that he thought were extremely old. There are documented neolithic sites not far from here, but though I keep a keen eye out when gardening the most interesting man-made thing I ever discovered was an old Worcester sauce bottle. Archaeological fragments in your garden are a mixed blessing. A friend whose garden was stuffed with little bits of broken medieval pottery found that her attempt to make a pond was proceeding so slowly it might as well have been conducted by an archaeologist with a trowel, because in effect it was. (Eventually, faced with an imminent hosepipe ban that would have stopped them from filling it, they just dug the hole out in two days).
The most baffling thing was our new gazebo, which the Show Secretary's daughter had bought reduced to £25 in an Asda end-of-season sale. To take it down you un-velcro the fabric top, and then the legs collapse telescopically into half their length, the central struts slide down the legs when you press a button, while the sides, which are diamond pattern girders, concertina together so that the whole frame collapses into a single block about 45cm square and 1.2m long, which you put in a zip-up bag. I struggle to put up a deckchair, and couldn't see how it worked at all, until somebody discovered which button to push and the entire structure folded in on itself. I would never have invented that in a month of Sundays.
My talk went OK, and I kept it to half an hour as billed, unlike the butterfly conservation man ahead of me, who overran. The audience wasn't very large, only around ten or twelve people, and I think some of them were already connected to the beekeepers in some way, but at least I wasn't talking to an empty tent, and they did ask questions afterwards. Most were youngish, and looked as though they might even be thinking of taking beekeeping up, so it was probably a useful exercise. Anyway, a condition of getting our stall was providing a half hour's entertainment, so somebody had to do something.
I was disappointed that the Woodland Trust didn't have a stall this year. They planted a new wood at the edge of the village only a few years ago, with a big local fund-raising drive, so it would seem graceful to come and tell people how the new trees are doing. On the other hand, if there's another fair next year I'm not sure I want to volunteer to run the stand for them. It's more fun to wander about gossiping, and looking at owls and beetles.
No comments:
Post a Comment