Our precious nectar
When my father was alone year after year in his Devon hilltop writing his books, he kept himself alive with his frying pan. He fried eggs and chips over a wood fire in the 1920s cast iron utensil he bought as a young man. Everything is still there as a museum piece in his Writing Hut. How long do similar utensils last today? A couple of years?
Today when our pan loses its nonstick we recycle it as a bird bath. It’s the perfect depth. What fun we have watching the whole woodland tribe of birds, beasts, butterflies and bees frolicking and fighting over those few centimetres of precious liquid.
My picture taken through the kitchen window shows an everyday scene of a goldfinch and six lesser redpolls. All of them nest in or around the garden.
So do 20 other species, all of them in desperate need of water. Among them are tawny owls, wood pigeons, pheasants, woodpeckers, tree-creepers and nuthatches, as well as five different species of tits, robins, blackbirds, and my wife’s favourites, dunnocks. Our frying pans are the only source of water available in fine weather in the wood where we live.
Most of the South Downs has no standing water along its high ridges. The dew ponds of medieval days that kept the sheep industry solvent have long dried out through lack of care. As for the ancient days 2,000 and more years ago when the tops were farmed by tribes with animals to water, all their ponds are but dimples in the ground, overgrown with bushes or ploughed out by modern tractors. There were thousands of them. I see their shapes through every wood and field I visit for my walks.
At Kingley Vale a series of five ponds built by Bronze Age settlers cascaded from one to another down the steep slope of a hill as rain run-off was most carefully conserved. They are all but invisible now to the untutored eye.
Today much of our water goes to waste. We use expensively prepared drinking water to wash the car with powerful hoses, which is madness. We flush the loo with the same source of highly filtered tap water, water our lawns to make them that special shade of green which marketing men have trained us to ‘must have’. We spend far too
much time under the shower. In the Second World War it was considered a crime to use more than two or three inches of water in one’s bath: perfectly adequate for purpose. As a species we have become daft and ultimately self-destructive.
Watching our little colony of wild bees carefully sipping up and carrying water to their pupae; the woodland birds travelling in from a kilometre or so to the garden for a sip that keeps them alive, or butterflies dibbing at the damp earth around the frying pans has taught me to use this precious nectar with reverence.
‘Grey’ washing water goes into the loo cistern. Rain water is collected to water the garden plants and to wash the car – from a bucket, more than adequate! It doesn’t matter that the garden lawn goes brown in hot weather. It soon recovers again and wild flowers find easy footholds in the bare patches in between. (And never ever use the poison known as weedkiller. Those dandelions feed a myriad of rare and precious insects.)
Providing the birds with fresh water in the frying pans every day is a luxury perhaps. Without the frying pans the whole tribe of drinkers and bathers in my garden would somehow survive but not so easily, and the weaker would quickly go to the wall under the law of natural selection.
The human race will find out the hard way as the planet warms up. It will certainly have to become more careful how it uses the precious liquid. Any solution to store and transport water, or convert sea-water, involves huge expense and will require large amounts of energy, thus exacerbating the problem. Much saner to start now: use what falls out of the sky and stop wasting that which comes out of the tap. (Bonus – your water bill will go down.)