Changing with the seasons
Throughout the year, a wealth of wildlife reveals itself in a tranquil English orchard.
An English orchard acts as an oasis for birds, invertebrates and more, but are we at risk of losing these traditional retreats for nature?
Deep in the Malvern Hills, a traditional orchard stands proud as a place of extraordinary abundance in the barren farmland around. For six years, fellow naturalist Nicholas Gates and I have been studying its wildlife. This biodiverse haven was once a sight that would have covered the one-time fruitgrowing counties of Herefordshire, Worcestershire and much of Gloucestershire, Devon and Somerset.
It’s January – under a soft snow blanket, the orchard, its trees bent under the weight of ice-clad mistletoe, heaves and chatters with winter thrushes. Fieldfares, redwings and song thrushes descend from the trees in their thousands and the static fizz and pop of starlings can be heard everywhere. When the farmlands all around are dead and devoid of life, here it’s winter feast time and the banquet hall is full.
Orchards were once a staple of rural life, much as they remain in the older farming systems of Eastern Europe. We cultivated most of them here in Tudor times, yet the older history is infinitely more fascinating. The apple trees in Britain’s orchards today do not, in fact, originate from our native wild crab apples. They originate, instead, from a remote mountain valley in Kazakhstan. Here, it is believed that early Silk Road traders (and their horses) vectored the Kazakh apples westwards towards the Mediterranean, where they were grown by enterprising Greeks and Romans. The Romans, in turn, transported the fruit-bearing apple northwards into France – but it was not until the early Medieval period that the apple trees we know and love today would finally arrive in Britain. When they did, it was the appetite of Henry VIII that made this possible. His fruiterer, Richard Harris, cultivated many varieties of apple, and across the Tudor period – and even under Cromwell – orchards were incentivised across the country. By the early 1600s, Herefordshire was described as being like “one continuous orchard”, bearing the extent of fruit-growing areas we now only see in places like Greece, where olive groves continue to carpet the land for mile after mile.
Growing unpopularity
Two centuries on, by the late 1800s, all of this would change. Declines in cider manufacture and the intensification of arable farming would slowly render orchards agriculturally obsolete. Yet here was a perfect balance – a sharing arrangement between people and wildlife rarely bettered. Orchards provide us with apples, pears, cherries and plums, leading to ranges of cider, perry, wood,
charcoal and, of course, they sequester carbon to boot. If that doesn’t give us enough, they can, simultaneously, provide shelter and forage for grazing animals.
So why, for almost a century, have we got rid of almost all our traditional orchards? As the snow begins to fall and the thrushes beat a reluctant retreat to the fortress-like blackthorn hedges, it seems sadder than ever that we cannot reinstate the orchard as an icon in our countryside once more.
A bumper crop of wildlife
By early March, the orchard we’re studying is transformed. The lush verdure of the organic pasture layer is revealed, studded with anthills and beetle-bored fallen boughs. The sharp, crisp drumming of the lesser spotted woodpecker, one of our adopted orchard’s most prized avian inhabitants, vies with the loud gunfire of its great spotted cousins. Green woodpeckers ‘yaffle’ (a fluting laugh) between the maze-like fruit trees. In the sky overhead, a pair of goshawks, from a nearby wood, scour the orchard below for an easy meal with fierce red eyes. This is a rich hunting ground for predators by day and night.
Tawny owls, of which no fewer than five pairs breed around the orchard, will already be tucked up in their woody tree caves, incubating eggs. One year, we found one nesting right amid a colony of jackdaws – and to our amazement, its chicks fledged quite safely. By night, the orchard feeds the owls with a ready supply of mice and, particularly, bank voles. And as bank voles are occasionally taken out of the picture by owls, their vacated burrows become the new homes of bumblebees.
The narrative of the orchard’s creatures is woven intricately together. Even the woodpeckers, the ‘aerial beavers’ of this ecosystem, carve out new cavities each spring. The following year, these will be used by a range of new colonists, from robins to redstarts. Each woodpecker home becomes, over time, a desirable residence.
Orchards, unlike most forms of modern agricultural land, remain, therefore, ecosystems as much as farms. Unbeknown to many of their owners, a whole array of creatures come to use them over time – but many modern orchards no longer enjoy the rich wildlife bounty of the one that we study. Pesticide use wipes out species such as spotted flycatchers by removing their flying prey. Taking away dead wood stunts the biodiversity potential of an orchard, as it’s often in dead limbs that you find the most life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Food webs
By summer, it becomes apparent to us that the best pest-control service in this orchard is not chemicals, which haven’t been used here since the 1930s, but the orchard’s wild inhabitants. Treecreepers, foraging to feed their young, act as tree ‘dentists’, removing thousands of tiny invertebrates that may otherwise harm the growth of the trees.
Hundreds of pairs of blue and great tits, nesting in almost every other tree, act as a cleansing service – taking, by our calculations, close to a million small caterpillars from the trees each summer. Spotted flycatchers, skewering a range of flies and wasps, further control insect numbers. Walking through the orchard by early May, the blackthorn’s white already on the wane, you find the trees in good health. Ecosystems, it seems, are very capable of looking after their own.
In the past few decades, the Common Agricultural Policy has been criticised for subsidising farmers based on certain practices that have a negative impact on biodiversity and ecosystems. Now, many of the apples we eat come not from glorious Herefordshire orchards but the fruitgrowing areas of South Africa. Yet as any culinary enthusiast will tell you, British apples, weathered by rain and sun, are among the best in the world. If we want to get growing them once more, then we may need to consider subsidising the types of farming that could better sustain us in the future.
By late summer, clouds of twittering swallows, fledglings from their parents’ first brood, gather on the wires beside the old hop-kiln. Hornets whizz through the orchard airspace like banded bullets, snatching unwary bees in mid-flight. Redstarts, flashes of borrowed orange all the way from sub-Sahelian Africa, are now feeding their young, tucked deep within the heart of the old pear trees. But summer is all too short.
Before we know it, each year, the apples are looming large on the trees, the swallows gone, and the crisp autumn wind begins to blow. This begins, in many ways, the most
It becomes apparent that the best pest-control service is not chemicals but the orchard’s wild inhabitants.
The orchard resembles a primeval forest – a beetle-riven place that takes you back in time.
magical and enchanting time of the year. As September dawns, the late evening air fills with clouds of bats, all hawking for moths around the orchard canopy. Once or twice a year, an emergence of crane flies, their larvae quite safe within the orchard’s unsprayed soils, will carpet the ground in a frenzy of wings and legs.
By the end of the month, the first pears are falling – the orchard’s owners zealously gather them up and the perry-making operation begins. The old cider press heaves back to life, as the amber juice of pulped pears is collected and siphoned into jars for fermentation. Towers of pumice, the pulped remains of the juicing process, are enterprisingly left outside to divert any errant wasps or hornets from straying inside. The air grows crisp and cool, and as the blues turn to blacks, the tawny owls are already hooting away – establishing the bounds of territories in this tense apartment block of trees.
The harvest will continue across November, but not just for the orchard’s owners. The ‘chattering acorn gatherer’, the jay, is hard at work. Each acorn will be stashed in a different place, but some will be dropped. These, years later, will grow through the enormous hedgerows of the orchard, which, at this time, reveal quite what an invaluable part of the ecosystem they are. Bullfinches raid hips from the wild roses, marsh tits forage in the hazels and elders, and song thrushes fiercely defend little portions of their real estate.
Soon, the fieldfares will arrive and everyone in the hedgerow will fall into line behind this most rapacious and aggressive of diners. At this time, tiny dramas play out unseen all around the hedge lines. In the ivy-clad oaks, dense mating balls of ivy bees – a vicious scrum of males, all vying for one female underneath – can be discovered.
Past, present and future
Of all orchard life, the strangest has to be the fungi. By November, chicken of the woods fungus erupts from the bark of many trees. It is now that the orchard resembles, more than ever, a primeval forest – a beetle-riven, ancient place that takes you back in time.
Each year, by December, the orchard bears more wounds than the years before. Breaking loose from the soil, another giant
– an old Kingston apple tree – has fallen. Planting new trees has already begun, but it will take decades before they reach the fruit-bearing majesty of the orchard’s oldest standards – apartments fit for woodpeckers and beetles, for fungi and owls.
But in our warming climate, this orchard’s veteran apples are more imperilled than ever before. Mistletoe, which can be harmless in small quantities, can now operate later and later each year – sucking sap that would usually be frozen. Warm winters are bad news for orchards, because without long periods of chill hours (below 6°C), apple trees can succumb both to mistletoe attack and disease. December is always an uncertain time – and the time that we look, worried, to the future.
If we can save our last traditional orchards – and plant more – in time, we can reinstate one of the greatest sharing arrangements between people, farming and wildlife ever created. If not, we will lose a place so rich in life that it scarcely bears thinking about.
As snow once again blankets the orchard, and fiercely territorial robins are the only sound as the sky darkens, we hope that Britain can save its traditional orchards in time. And we can… because we must.