Mucking in to mark the end of winter
IT is officially spring and time for all the local farms and stables to empty a winter’s store of life-giving, wormenriched muck all over the fields.
The village is distinctly whiffy.
On the day the pig barns are emptied, from one farm near Hell Corner to another at the Manor, the smell is enough to make your eyes water.
It clings to our hair and clothes and pools in the more stagnant air of the house. I contemplate opening the windows – but to let it out, or in?
It soon settles down. We’d be nowhere without it. The ingenious circle of living. Kites, buzzards, gulls and a flotilla of small birds follow behind the tractor for its rich pickings.
I realise that the fieldfare and redwing have gone, back to their own northerly breeding grounds.
From Parson’s Hill, the faint sound of a spring-fresh chiff chaff ticks away at the breeze.
We add to the pong later that afternoon, beginning, barrow by barrow to muck out the pony’s barn of its deep litter bed. Deep littering is a system that works well for him: each day, after he has gone out to his field, we take his droppings and any wet patches off the surface
and top with fresh straw.
It means the concrete floor is far beneath him, and the bed doesn’t smell unless it’s disturbed.
At this time of year, his mattress is about 18 inches deep – seeing his head over the stable door, you’d think him much bigger than he really is.
His coat is coming out in great clumps and a cloud of three-inch long gingerygold guard hairs follow us down the lane to his field.
Though the field is drying up after the winter, the gateway, on a small cap of orange clay, is puddled with poached mud.
He rolls in it, leaving his hair stuck to it as ready-made building material.
As he settles to graze, a magpie lands on his back to pluck a bill full of hair. I wonder where the birds would be without grazing animals?
The churned mud that remains, sometimes into a spring drought, will repair last year’s swallow and house martin nests, or act as plaster on new wattle-and-daub vessels wedged in the crooks of branches.
Hair that wafts on the wind, snagging on hawthorn, or a twist of wire, will hold the lot together and line them.
A blackbird sings from the oak stump and as his voice fades down the lane, another comes into earshot, with a song thrush and chaffinches in between, in a continuous line of birdsong.
Most will bind their mud cup nests together with the pony’s hair, in a cob wall of his making.
Wild Diary
Remember when you are out and about now, dogs on leads where there are ground-nesting birds.