Of the remaining fifty or sixty boxes, most would have been taken by blue and great tits, in roughly equal numbers. Unlike the placid pied flycatcher, the blue tits are notorious for the struggle they put up when you lift them off their eggs, and given the chance they will jab their tiny beaks into the quick of your fingernails where it will hurt the most. A few boxes would go to the nuthatches, one or two of the boxes in the alder woods would be taken by marsh tits, and those few boxes situated on conifers might be occupied by coal tits. There would always be a couple of pairs of redstarts, although they found the standard hole size of a tit box a tight squeeze.
The nuthatches would without fail be the first to lay their eggs. These birds would naturally choose holes with larger entrances than they need, such as old woodpecker holes, and rebuild them, gathering damp soil and plastering it on so that it will dry to give them an entrance hole that is just so. With these nest boxes this was surplus to requirements, as the holes were already quite small enough for them, but the habit dies hard, and they would do their best instead to plaster the box to its tree, or plaster down its lid.
It was a pleasure to wander this trail up and down the hills and through these untouched woods each year as spring developed, the bluebells blooming and the woods burgeoning with life, while knowing that I was in some tiny way adding to the sum of human knowledge. But it was not all sunshine and bluebells and new life taking flight. In my third year of doing this survey, it rained almost every day in the second half of May and the first half of June. I guess that the supply of oakleaf caterpillars that all these birds rely on must have failed, because as I followed my route through the woods in the pouring rain I found box after box of dead baby birds, starved to death. That year only one pair in ten managed to successfully raise any young at all. And yet the following season, every single box was occupied as usual.
I put up a single box in my garden, on the fruit tree. It didn’t seem worth putting one in the ash where the jackdaws almost always nested. The first year, it was occupied by a pair of great tits, bringing me back a splash of yellow just as the daffodils that filled the garden in March were starting to die back. But after that I decided to adapt the box, sawing a V-shaped notch beneath the entrance hole, and my plan to bring redstarts to the garden worked perfectly. They moved in the next spring and have remained ever since. Redstarts nest in crevices, in rocks as well as in tree holes, and my slight modification to the box was enough to make it more to their taste. While the garden wagtails bob and wag, the redstarts vibrate their long tails with a tremor so fast they are rendered almost invisible. I spent a good deal of time in the garden in the spring, digging the land, planting out the year’s vegetables and weeding, and the redstarts became confident around me. While the female sat, the male came and perched on the wire, his beak filled with flying insects, showing off his black bib and bold white eyestripe, his slate-grey back, and his glorious robin-red breast and trembling tail.
The fields were full of lambs. The sheep invaded my dreams with their bleating and coughing. The lambs forever seemed to find themselves separated from their mother by a fence and bleated piteously while the ewe paced up and down the barrier that divided them, until finally I could take no more of it and went and shepherded the ewe the few yards to the open gate that would reunite them. And while I was out walking the fields it became second nature to liberate the occasional sheep that had trapped its head in a fence, again. They are not the brightest of creatures.
The months of April and May were busy times for the hill farmers. My farmer’s nephew offered me a lift down to the village one spring day; there was a lamb on the passenger seat of his Land Rover that he was taking to the vet, so I picked it up and sat with it on my lap while it cried desperately. It had been born without a back passage, the farmer’s nephew explained. Born without a back passage, and filling up fast. Every year my farmer had to hand-rear a handful of lambs, bottle-feeding them, perhaps one of a pair of twins born to a lame mother. When they saw him coming they bounded over, leaped into his arms and licked his face with excitement. The bond of affection between man and beast was beyond question. Yet the animals still all ended up in the same place, of course.
The butterflies that had slept the winter away in the corners of my ceilings upstairs had all woken now; one by one I let them out as I found them fluttering against my windows. The field mice were back to trying to raid my larder, but I was still awaiting the return of the bats to my loft. I had seen my first bats of the year though, not the long-eared bats but noctules, the largest species found in Britain. These bats are not house-dwellers, they live in tree holes, and I could recognize them by their different hunting style. They flew high and straight, purposefully searching out large flying insects such as moths, suddenly darting to one side to scoop up their prey, then returning to their original line as if they were following a predetermined route, as if they were running on rails.
One day I was drawn out into the garden, into the morning sunshine, by a peal of laughter. A green woodpecker, a male, was hopping about on the ground across the track, among the litter of stones that was once Penlan Farm. Green woodpeckers are less common here than the great spotted woodpecker, but in spring you wouldn’t know it; the woods ring continually with their distinctive yelping laugh, far more a part of the soundtrack of spring than the drumming of their spotted cousins. The spotted woodpeckers rarely leave the trees, while the greens spend a lot of time on the ground searching for ants, something of a speciality of theirs. Once as a child I found the corpse of a long-dead green woodpecker. Only feathers and bone remained, the flesh had all gone save for its tough, wiry tongue. From its root in the bird’s throat it divided into two and went backwards instead of forwards. The two strands travelled behind the dome of the bird’s skull, then over the top of its head, rejoining between the bird’s eyes and entering the beak. This incredible design meant that the bird would be able to protrude the barbed tip of its tongue to a distance longer than even its beak, perfect for exploring the tunnels of ants’ nests, like the long tongue of an anteater. It is hard to conceive how such an extraordinary arrangement could have evolved, but there it was.
The woodpeckers seemed to be partial to this patch of hillside in front of my cottage. My assumption was that the rocks strewn around here, the rubble of the farmhouse, kept the soil drier than elsewhere and particularly suitable for ant nests. As I watched the male rootling around on the ground, I heard a call, and a female flew up the hill. Up and down, rising and falling, the characteristic undulating flight of a woodpecker. She perched on a bough of the ash tree nearest to the male, and he immediately flew up to join her. They were directly facing each other on opposite sides of an almost vertical branch, and kept craning their necks to peer at one another. Then the male slowly, slowly, unfolded his chequered wings until they formed a perfect fan. He held them open for a while, before just as slowly folding them. As soon as he was done, the female copied this move perfectly, then the male again, back and forth, back and forth. It was one of the most touching displays I have ever seen. And then, to an invisible cue, the two birds launched themselves simultaneously from their perch and flew off down the hill together, their lemony-yellow rumps bobbing side by side into the distance.
In the gnarly old ash just over the fence from my fruit tree there was a hole about fifteen or twenty feet up, a hole at least six inches across, too big to be suitable for small birds to nest in. This hole was perfectly situated for me to keep an eye on; it was visible from my front window, the window in the east wall that I watched my bird table from, my bedroom window, my porch, or when I was working in the garden. There was nothing special about this hole to make it stand out from a thousand others in the neighbourhood, but because of where it was located not much went on there that I missed. I don’t mean only the birds that nested in it — it was actually not an ideal hole for most birds to nest in because it was not sunken at all, and its base was level with its entrance — but also any bird that even considered the possibilities it might have to offer.