Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: July 2022

As July breaks across the farm the great untidyness takes hold. I live where the green tips of treetops meet across the greenstripe roads. The tangled unmown growth of the roadsides spills across ditches, through ramshackles fences past the field edge and the road. Pinks, purples, reds, blues, yellows. St Johns Wort, Thistle, Wild Raspberry. Tall pink frills of Willowherb chase along the road in thick 50 meter drifts where the sun warms the verge. Where it is darker, damper,, long threads of Common and O’Kellys Orchids emboider the nettle dense verge.

The July weather feels like Winters second bite at the cherry. Cold wet days roll across the farm like a dark mood, and then settle. The scent of summer is not Meadowsweet. Or Honeysuckle. Cut grass or Rose. It is peat and woodsmoke from fires lit to ward off the summer dark, wet cold. Wisps of winter that smoke is. Mid-summer perfumed with November.

The fields and verges are quiet. The columns of midges that drive us to screeching distraction are not there. I can walk the fields without being troubled by flies. Midges. Cleggs. I worry. Worry. Worry.

Mid July and summer crowbars itself into the month. The sudden heat turns Europe to a kind of hell. I take my first cut of hay. Work late into the hot night cutting our traditional haymeadow meadow. Spears of Hogweed, Angelica and thistle tower above me in places. Tall masts above the riffling seas of seedheads on grass. The thick swirl of the ungrazed meadow falls in rippling rows to the two wheel tractor. I start late, work later, mowing, then forking the grass into windrows. The first dragonflies of the season hunt the field as I hay. Bright and brilliant red, scouring the meadow. Frogs hop between the windrows. Bats replace the dragonflies. The setting sun above the shoulder of the hill field hammers the sky to beaten copper and bronze. I park the tractor. The world belongs to me and the zithering flying things.

We break 50 species of wildflower on the farm. St Johns, Wort, Meadowsweet, Northern Bedstraw and Yellow Loosestrife push us to the mid fifties. I am proud of the small thin wild slice of the world I have managed to save. The sheep are moved to the lambing field where the sward swallows them up. The growth towers above them, a riot of diversity.

In the hill field it happens late in the month. The flock have been off the hill for weeks. Eyebright and Tormentil, Wild Mint, Wild Orchids and the wind moving through the grass like both were a living thing. I take a walk before moving the flock. Clear the dense growth of cleavers and nettles from the fence lines. Take to the corners with a scythe in the hot late night. The next morning as I move through the knee deep sward great drifts of moths and butterflies, finally adrift on the green sea of the field. I have not been here for a while. I can see the great deep divots where foxes of bardgers have been worm hunting on the hill. As I walk the Martens and Swallows hawk the hill as I leave a plume of moths spiralling skyward in my wake. In the lower field I spy Small Coppers, Ringlets, Meadow Browns, Red Admirals and White Butterflies. The whites a crowd of themselves in the side field, on the road and in the hedges. Above in the gathering dark the bats pivot and twist, points of skittering dark in the last light of not quite night as they skit and roll across the field hunting the same plumes the Swallows hawked. Summer. Though late. Has unfolded across the farm.

I worry every summer will be the last for this. This mess of life that lives in the heat and air. This summer it is later still again. More welcome still this hot and thick stirring of wild life is. More welcome.

Our cherry tree has scraped together enough sun to ripen it’s fruit and we race the birds to gather it;s bounty. They win. They always do. The thrushes burst through the canopy plucking the reddening berries. Bicker and forage loudly. Good luck to them. The sound of them bursting through the cherry canopy, wrestling cherries from beneath the leaves.

Wild strawberries and blueberries are in the hedgerows. Cold with the rain. Sweet still. The children descend like locusts on patches. Yelling, holding their harvest up in clutched fists in the air and then devour it. We visit a friends farm. A pile of children let loose in a gooseberry patch. The wind scours the hill and the kids scour the bushes. The kids more thorough and ruthless still I think. We climb a mountain, a lane of bilberry bushes thick with fruit. The climb thick with bramble and clinging grass. The fields with hawthorn and willow and ash. The fields a riot of wildflowers. The commonage though, dried bog and heather scraped clean of all trees. Earth cracked in the blistering heat. Little stirs here, there is little for us to disturb. Nothing hunts the air above the hill here.

On a hunt to gather a second, late swarm, we see a red kite nest in the farms tallest tree – not out farm, a smallholding across the hills south facing into a clearfell the kites hunt. We can hear the screech and yawp of the hatchlings as the parents pitch at impossible angles and speeds into the nest. They work the clearfell hard. They are new to the area. Spread across the country from a stronghold in Wicklow. The chicks strong. Loud. Hungry. Well fed. A good home for them here. Hedgerows, half wild fields, woodlands, bogs, open farmland, and much to hunt. A bright slice of light and life. A newness. A small victory.