When winter came back
After working up a sweat and casting off clothes mending a fence, John Lewis-stempel wishes he’d taken more notice of a kestrel hovering in the face of the wind when the heavens unleash a savage squall of icy sleet on a bitter February day
John Lewis-stempel is caught unawares as the wind changes
WHEN winter came back, I was at the top of the hill, ratcheting a line of barbed wire so tight it sang fierce. We have animals that could give Harry Houdini lessons in escapology. I had been on the fencing—in traditional farming, we do not ‘do’ a job, we are ‘on lambing’, ‘on haying’ and so on—all the morning. It had been warm, great tits had belled in the wood, a brimstone butterfly had erupted from nowhere in a puff of primrose yellow and I had stripped down to my shirt, casually flinging jumper and Barbour to the ground. The morning had been a false spring, but humans live perpetually in hope, despite the evidence. All the length of the soft, white-skied morning, a kestrel had kept me company, usually as a fluttering mote—like something trapped on the retina—but sometimes so close I could make out the droopy moustache that gives Falco tinnunculus such a rakish appearance. If birds are to be anthropomorphised, the kestrel is the bounder who drives an open-top Morgan sports car and says ‘Hello!’ in the voice of Leslie Phillips from ‘Carry On’. Once, the kestrel stooped so near I saw its obsidian talons pierce a rodent’s back, heard the latter’s death shriek. An old sound. Our kestrels are doing well; they like our unkempt, bleach-tipped grassland because it is running with voles. Also, I have put out a couple of ‘hoppers’ for the supplementary feeding of the red-legged partridge, the clown bird whose whirry, little-leg clockwork running brings a smile, always. Some of the spilled seed makes meals for mendicant mice, which, in Nature’s food chain, makes food for falcons. As I was working, I was wondering: the kestrel is the quintessential farmland falcon, a beneficiary of the open, ‘quilt-pattern’ landscape our native agriculturalists have axed from the wildwood since Neolithic times. (Much of Britain would be recognisable to a time-travelling Bronze Age farmer.) Hence the kestrel’s local name of ‘field hawk’. Our kestrels assiduously avoid the scrub, the woods, the forest, always seeking and searching meadow and arable expanse. If, as the ‘provisional wing’ of rewilders wish, our national tree cover is expanded from 13% to 40% on the wolfy, lynxy Continental model, where will our kestrels go? Where? Conservationists are too often aware of the wonder of woodland, but ignorant of the importance of farmland. I should have paid more attention to the kestrel. A kestrel always faces the wind when hovering—its tail spread, its body frenetically hunched and hugging. (The Anglo-saxon for kestrel is, well, very Anglosaxon.) A kestrel is as reliable a wind indicator as the brass-cockerel weathervane on the Norman church steeple, the gaudy orange windsock at the airfield.
If our national tree cover is expanded, where will our kestrels go? Where?
At some point, as I was pontificating, the kestrel pivoted to north. Lost in the anthems of my own opinions, I failed to register the aerial signal. Or, indeed the strange quiescence across the land, similar to that before an eclipse. When winter came back, I was half-dressed and wholly unprepared. Sleet began pittering my neck. I turned, looked over my shoulder, too late. Never before had I quite so appreciated the expression ‘the heavens opened’. The ice balls pelted. Battered. I’m not a fair-weather agriculturalist. Farmers, in their innermost admissions, cast themselves as the last heroic individuals of the modern age, script themselves the lines ‘Bring on the weather. Bring it on’. You will understand that the greatest pride of my professional life is when, in 2010, I waded uphill for a mile through groin-deep snow to 1,500ft, pulling, on a Scott-of-the-antarctic sledge, three hay bales to feed three rams. I then, on a lone hilltop amid skirling flakes, cut open the bales with my father’s penknife, to release the smell of salvation. I had one job. I did it. Yet the sleet this February was too much to bear. It was a stoning out of Leviticus, the hail the size of pale marbles. Re-donning, desperately, jumper and coat, I headed down the lane for home, right shoulder a prow into
the storm. My kestrel, blattered, exited the scene in a low twisting flight line of tangents, cosines, sines. Around my feet, icy sludge gathered, only to melt as quickly as labelled. Flood water ran in fish-bone pattern down the lane. (You watch coursing water; it assumes the skeleton shape of first piscean creatures.) When winter came back, I was not sad. Squinting through the 90-degree gap between collar and cap, I saw such things. I saw the pewters and the silvers on the bark of young hazel, I saw the luminosity of lichen daubs on oak. I saw the Gothic architecture of beech. (No tree is more beautiful leaved than naked.) I saw, in the windscrubbed hedge, the watching eyes of the fox, as elemental a creature as we have in these lands, and the end and the beginning of things. I saw chaffinches and siskins shaken out of the stubble, I saw yellowhammers rattled out of bushes. I saw in the sheepgnawed grassland the curves and lines of Earth’s body. I smelt the exhilarating purification of cold. When winter came back, I was almost glad.
Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John Lewis-stempel was the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year