Through The Wardrobe

Last week saw the temperatures in the south of England plummet, nights of -15 and days when the mercury didn’t ever get above freezing. I’m from up north where the winters are generally more savage, but even I was surprised by the intense cold – and the beauty it created.

Freezing fog decked the trees and hedgerows with glittering garlands of frost, and in the usually mild and kindly Hampshire landscape that I escaped to this weekend, I felt as if I had stumbled through the wardrobe and into Narnia.

The fields near R’s family home, pocketed in the land’s gentle swell were silent monochrome, their familiar far ridge obliterated by icy fog.

I had found nests of peacock caterpillars and watched drowsy flies dance on the Hogweed flowers in this lane last summer. Now the undergrowth had been frost bitten back to nothing. All except for the umbels of dead Hogweed which had been candied with a thick rime of frost.

It was so cold that I had to keep my camera in my jeans pocket, only removing it quickly to snatch a hasty photo. This picture of ice crystals on a bramble is the most in-focus closeup image I managed in two days.

The hedgerow trees stood ghostly in a sugared landscape, petrified and birdless.

In this gentle southern county of England conditions of such magnificent hostility may only come once in a lifetime, and despite a heavy cold I spent as much time out in it as was polite to my hosts. Walking at night was magical – the flanks of the hills glittering under a full moon when the fog shifted enough to reveal them. I have a single night walk photo that worked and a whole other set from a day walk to share over the next couple of days, these are just a taster. Come visit again!

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Autumn Weekend Walk

Last weekends visit to Morestead was a great chance for a city dweller like myself to get a proper dose of Autumn. The weather was dull but kind enough – a brooding, leaden sky showed off the smouldering colours to the full. Apart from the more picturesque aspects of this time of year I was astonished to find a mass hibernation being prepared for on the woodland floor – but if you want to know more about that you’ll have to visit at a later date. For now I’m just serving up a Hampshire autumn day in pictures.

The trees had just started to colour up; the starkness of the bare fields with their fine pelt of new winter crops were a good foil to the glowing colours in the copses.

The colours were delicious – shades of toffee apple, barley sugar, caramel and cinder toffee competing with the brilliant various reds of ripe berries and fruits, under the trees it smelt and looked good enough to eat.

Under a cathedral of Beech, ash, hazel and oak the light streams through an ephemeral, shimmering stained glass of leaves.

The weather was still pretty mild last weekend, unlike the sudden chill we are having right now – snow in London in October! But on this day I certainly felt overdressed as the sun (what we saw of it) was still hot, the angled light giving depth and throwing long shadows whenever it appeared. The vast rolling chalky fields appeared colourless until the light hit them, then the brilliant emerald of new crops flared in the dun earth. Colour flashes and winks, turns on and off, changes it’s hue or gathers in intensity on a whim at this time of year.  A single tree can in an instant be spangled like a mirrorball, it’s shivering leaves spotlit in a beam of light as gaudy as anything humans could manufacture, then be extinguished – poof! as the light moves on.

Once we were home again I couldn’t resist slipping out one last time to drink in this view. I’ve been photographing the above scene for over a year now and in every season, and the colours in the fields have never been more startling. On the way I stopped to admire these cooking apples, so heavy that the tiny tree they grow upon seems incapable of bearing their weight. Windfalls are a bonanza for unidentified wildlife as the gnaw marks on the scattered fallen fruit testify.

Night comes quickly now that the clocks have changed, and dusk came when it was barely 5pm.

I don’t mind the change though; I love the cosiness of autumn and winter.

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Herbivores 2, Omnivores nil.

I turned back soon after I had seen the fox. I was bursting to tell someone about it, and as the wind was no longer in my favour and I wasn’t taking any care over how quietly I walked, I was not expecting to see my inquisitive friend from earlier grazing about fifty yards up the trail. It was a roe deer, and when I photographed it, it was alternately eating wild flowers from the hedgerow and scuffing up the ground to find something good to eat – I don’t know what, although I have read that deer sometimes eat the tubers of Lords and Ladies plants. Unsure of how close I could get, I crept along, hiding behind the dense foliage of the overhanging trees until I was close enough to get a few pictures. I was becoming proud of my amateur stalking technique until it became apparent that once again the deer was well aware of my presence and always had been.

I had the distinct impression that it felt far more in control of the situation than I could ever be, so I gave up my pretence of stalking and just began to follow it in the open, and the deer adjusted the distance between us as it saw fit. It seemed to have a comfort zone of about twenty yards, and until I got a terrible urge for a cup of tea and began to move more purposefully it lingered serenely in the tunnel of trees.

After lunch I went back out, determined to prove myself able to move unnoticed through the fields and hedgerows. If the fox had utterly failed to see me when I was right under his nose I felt sure I could work the same magic again, and deliberately this time.

Creeping along the trail for a third time, I was rewarded by the delightful sight of three baby rabbits grazing and gambolling in the grass close to where I’d seen the fox. I can’t begin to tell you how painstakingly I worked my way towards them; how I winced when I trod “SCRUNCH!” on an unfortunate snail and three sets of long, hairy ears swivelled suspiciously in my direction, nor how excruciatingly careful I was to remain invisible. I felt I had truly earned my right to watch when I got to within about five metres and they were still cavorting giddily; then I trod heavily on a twig…and…and… nothing happened! Slightly deflated I stepped out in plain view, and sure enough the rabbits continued to graze unconcernedly, while keeping an insultingly casual eye on me. They were not scared or even particularly curious, and I wondered if they would have been this nonchalant about the fox I had seen stalking them earlier. It’s true that young rabbits are notorious for their insolence but again I felt out of my depth; the rabbits were certainly taking a risk, yet I felt that in attempting to creep up on them I was the foolish one. They had sized me up and seen no threat, and luckily for them, they had been right.

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The ones that got away

Last weekend we visited R’s parents again. The countryside has changed and matured in the scant weeks since our last visit; since then crops have been harvested, caterpillars have dispersed and pupated and summer is having it’s final gaudy fling. I went out for a short walk to photograph the Lords and Ladies, whose berries were fat and ripening in the hedgerow. Wearing new rubber soled baseball shoes I found my tread lighter than usual, and while I revelled in this it wasn’t my main concern – that lay in getting a correct exposure in the tricky dappled light. I’d crouched awkwardly among the leaf litter for a little too long, and after failing to get my shot I straightened up to see, looking at me over the hedge with uncertain curiosity, a small deer. I stared at the deer in astonishment – at furthest two metres from me – and it stared back, until the spell broke and it wheeled and vanished into the trees.

Two interesting things – the deer had, I am sure, been aware of me for some time and far from being afraid, it had indulged in a little people watching. What on earth would this creature have made of what it saw? Deer are widespread and considered vermin in the gardens and farmlands of Hampshire; people are no friend to them, and the deer generally know this. I found the creatures daring and curiosity exhilarating. The second interesting thing is that I have no pictorial record of this encounter. Why? I am a notorious shutterbug and had my camera switched on and ready in my hand.  I could say that it wasn’t set up for the shot, and I could say that I was afraid to move lest the flash of the camera lens startle the animal. Both are true, and neither. I just wanted to drink in this moment of contemplating an unfamiliar being without anything else getting in the way. To raise a camera at the moment my eyes met those of a wild animal would have been crass; instead of having a quiet shared moment with this creature, I would have become a gawking tourist.

After I’d recovered from the surprise of being stalked by a deer, I decided to forget the botanical shots and test out my new, silent shoes. Padding quietly along the trail I didn’t expect to see anything more than rabbits; the deer was probably several fields away by now. At a small clearing where two trails meet I stepped out into the open patch of short sunny rabbit grazed grass. As I did so, a red fox, slender and lithe, emerged from the thick hedge directly opposite and stepped into the clearing with me. Nose quivering, belly to the floor, it hadn’t noticed me at all, and I can only assume that it was intent on the trail of tender baby rabbits. For the second time in less than ten minutes my jaw dropped as I regarded the small, fierce animal creeping towards me. The moment at which the fox noticed me was one of pure indignity for both of us. It started in cartoon-like horror, all four feet leaving the ground simultaneously and flailing midair as it frantically tried to change direction by 180 degrees. The elegant creature from a moment ago had metamorphosed into Wiley E Coyote, and I was clumsily grappling with my camera like a buffoon from a silent film, determined this time to have proof of what I had seen. Ha! So much for my precious anti-tourist stance, here I was fumbling at the controls of my little point and shoot and doing a little jig of frustration.  It would have looked to a third party (perhaps a deer?) like someone had just shot 1000 volts through both of us. Net result? I got an oddly tilted picture of a blurred and empty hedgerow, the fox got no dinner and the bunnies hiding in the long grass undoubtedly got a right good belly laugh.

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Adventures in the undergrowth

R’s parents live in an idyllic part of rural Hampshire, and the fields that surround their home reveal views that shift and change with each passing season. It’s heavily agricultural, but there is plenty to see all the same. As we stood taking in this wonderful late summer view of a ripening oilseed crop it was gratifying to see how many ox eye daisies and field poppies had infiltrated the field. The panorama was wonderful, but to me the landscape got more and more interesting the closer to our own noses we listened and looked. After we had stood in silence for a while, an unmistakable and bloodcurdling racket commenced only a few yards away. The creatures making the din were completely hidden in the dense oilseed stems and they knew it – fox cubs shrieked and chittered uninhibitedly as they chased and play-fought in the dense foliage. It was tantalising to know they were so close and yet we stood no chance at all of actually seeing them.

Hidden in the fence posts and rotton tree boles that ringed our side of the field we could hear the thin “seep-seep” of baby birds on the nest. Furtive rustlings became detectable as we allowed ourselves to quieten and absorb the goings on of our immediate surroundings. A nettle patch revealed this nest of elegant, spiky black caterpillars. After a frantic larval stage of gorging on nettles they will become peacock butterflies. These lovely insects happily frequent gardens and are commonly found on nectar rich garden flowers such as buddlea. You will only get them in numbers if there is a thriving, undesturbed nettle patch nearby, so butterfly lovers – spare a sunny nettle patch in a “wild” part of your garden and you will be richly rewarded for giving our native creatures a home.

Upon close examination it became clear that their habit of sticking together for protection might not always work. Wizened, discarded shells that were most certainly not the result of a moult were clearly visible among the grazing catties. An even closer look revealed one possible culprit…

A spider, carrying her perfectly round silk basket of eggs. The exhausting task of hauling this extra load around might result in her taking up home near a readily available supply of caterpillar snacks – she is eating for two thousand, after all. A little closer to the human scale of things, these common hogweed flowers are a sure sign of high summer. They take their name from their distinctly piggy aroma which does not seem to put off the hover flies that adore them so.

Get a little closer to these common hedgerow plants and they become, with a little imagination, an exotic location in themselves. Each umbel bears many tiny, tightly packed dull white flowers which overlap one another, getting smaller and smaller as you go toward the centre of the umbel. Get up very close and you will see hoverflies landing with the precision of a jump jet pilot, and suddenly you are looking at another planet, a science fiction wonder where metallic striped space ships are docking on a floating organic latticework, loading their mysterious cargos and vanishing, Zip! into the unknown.

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