Greens Against Fun

Survival of the cutest

2006-08-31T22:27:00.000+01:00

It wouldn’t have been such a crisis if I hadn’t been about to go away for 3 weeks. I wouldn’t have felt such a desperate need to decide, to act. Now I’m back, this is all old news, but it seems right to say how the story developed:

Survival of the cutest #1
The day after I last posted I did of course crack. I Googled. I made phone calls. I scoured the local phone directory. I made more phone calls.

To feed a swift chick, take live mealworms, drown them in water, then feed them to the chick, using tweezers. (The tweezers are to save the swift’s sensibilities, not yours. And no, in this case we are not on the side of the mealworms.)

It was Sunday, of course. By the time I’d found one place in our small town which sells mealworms – dried – on a Sunday, my mum had been on the phone, too. It looked increasingly certain that all adult swifts in our area had reached their time for going, and gone.

It was warm in the loft, but not too oppressive, as we set up the stepladders. The corner stank comfortingly of nesting swifts, but there was no sound. Had I imagined it? No such luck. Once I’d pulled away the protective barrier of chicken wire and shone my torch onto the ledge, the twiggy silhouette I’d seen so often was starkly, mundanely interpretable. A neat nest – the starlings’ legacy – with two small forms slumped inside.

I was far gone on adrenalin and emotion. The stillness was ominous: had I left them long enough to starve, after all? Rapidly I reached in, picked up the larger shape in one hand, babbling incoherent words of love as it moved slightly. I held the wings closed, those lovely wings. Into the cardboard box, onto the softly crumpled tissue paper. I hovered my hand over it and reached for its sibling. Thank goddess for headtorches.

It’s true, then. Swifts go into a torpor during the day, waiting for food. All my fears of beak and claw and clifftop disasters came to just two sleepy, vaguely resentful little beings in a box.

We had the operation all planned out. Straight into the waiting car, leaving a message on the sanctuary’s ansaphone. I cradled the precious box for 45 travelling minutes, my heart drugged with love for the newness and beauty of the life inside.

The room in the sanctuary was awful. It stank of other animals, and was loud with their calls. But the people seemed kind enough, and knew more than I did. I watched in horror as my beautiful wild creatures were placed on a couple of scraps of blue paper hand towel. They lurked together, heads into the corner of their new cardboard box. Apparently wild creatures routinely cope with such treatment, learn to accept what humans can give, then go out again, as if unchanged, back into habitat.

All the way back I was shattered with guilt, weeping in the back of the car. I’d interfered, taken them from their splendidly appropriate wall-top home, where brood after brood had lived or died before them, and forced them into a place of bizarre stressful ugliness, and into dependence on yet more human interference. A friend rescued me with beer and food, and cheerful arguments of how life likes being alive, and how given the choice swift chicks would rather be alive than dead – especially if there was a bellyful of mealworms involved. Solitary midnight packing follwed, with the 8:45 am train to catch in the morning.

Survival of the cutest #2
The loft was desolate that night without the chicks. There was no sign of any adults, either, which was a little balm to my guilty conscience. Silence. I lay there, missing them.

Until 6am. "Skreep! Skreep!"

Goddess bless. No. It can’t be… I clumped the stepladder back out of storage, clattered up it, lurched towards the nest, blasting it with my impatient torch, demanding to find out what was there. A solitary dark, feathered shape hunkered down, mistrustfully, trying to get out of reach of this huge critter which had torn a hole in the sky, instinctively calculating that I was big enough to open my beak and swallow it whole.

I’d missed one. The humour was intellectually obvious, but I was too trashed to feel it. Not yet. The guilt, on the other hand, was instant.

I packed. Ate breakfast. Rehoused my fungus culture outside. Checked anything I could preparatory to many days away. Met my parents as soon as they emerged, broke the news. Bless them. They didn’t hesitate, declared there was only one thing to be done.
Another cardboard box. Another stash of tissue paper. We waited as long as possible to give the critter a chance to calm down, to achieve its daytime stupor.
Car ready. Torch on forehead. Stepladders up.

I ripped the whole nest apart, pulled away the surrounding insulation. Huge, intrusive human. No wonder I’d been so timid, watching them before from the shadows: I was afraid of the effect I could have, of what I could do. Determined to find the bird, I destroyed its entire home, effortlessly.

What I couldn’t do, though, was find the last chick. It remained wild – and presumably died soon after, of hunger and cold. That’s the Way of it. Small birds die – otherwise the ecosystem would be overrun with birds, and everything would die. And humans get emotionally attached, and mourn, and juggle their priorities. That’s the way of it, too. I could have searched all morning, but I didn’t. I could’ve stayed there the next night, listening. Instead, I just managed to catch the train I thought I’d given up, and I sat on it, writing these words, and gradually stopping crying. Words can soothe. It’s a human thing.

Swifts are simple. They do swift things, and when conditions are right, they breed and live on. When conditions are wrong, they die. It’s a system, it’s worked for a long time, and the beauty it produces is astounding.

Humans are adaptable, frighteningly adaptable. They evolve socially, skills and knowledge and technology, and there’s no knowing what they’ll do next – and the ugliness they produce can be appalling. It scares me, being human. I’ve spent much of my life frozen with the fear of doing the wrong thing – and knowing all the while that what I love is being destroyed.

This time I acted. Not out of deep love for ecology, but out of base sentiment. The sounds of those birds comforted me when I slept and when I woke, and I loved them, and I didn’t want them to die.

The emotions that drove me are jagged, and shifting. I almost feel better about the bird that got away, and died, than about the two I may have saved, in defiance of the Law.

In Oxford, many eggs were lost this year due to the cold, wet May. On our swift ledge, I found two old, unhatched eggs. The chicks that called in the night were a second brood, raised late – too late, it seems, for our shorter northern season. Conditions meant that they would die.

Checkout the swifts in the tower. It’s a great project. They let the swifts nest in their ventilations shafts, they observe them, they ring them, they record them, they let them live, and presumably they let them die. And yet when the swifts have a good breeding season, the human joy leaks right out through the terse diary on the website.

Survival of the cutest #3
The next morning I woke at 5:30, in a flat in Edinburgh. I heard birds calling, almost thought I heard swifts. I cried for an hour. Later in the day I did see swifts, flying below the window. Edinburgh’s high tenements should be able to provide magnificent nesting sites for them.

Survival of the cutest #4
It was about 10am when I got the phone call. The people at the sanctuary hadn’t forgotten my desperate craving for news.

They’d tried to feed the chicks, but all the freshly-drowned mealworms were regurgitated back up. Thoughtfully, the proprietor, an experienced man, checked out their feathers (did I mention the chicks’ lovely, glossy feathers?), noticed their plump condition, and decided to take them outside.

"It sounds awful, but the lawn is really very soft." The second chick, when thrown up into the air, fell straight down. The man tried again: same result. I’ve been told that a swift – even a fully competent adult – is helpless if it lands on the ground. He picked it up a third time, and threw it upwards. This time it flew, straight and sudden, hurtling out of sight with the flawless control that is the way of its kind. He’d seen other birds crash into hedges on their first flight, but not this one. Its boxed sibling had done even better, getting the idea first time. We haven’t found a feathered corpse below their nesting site, either, so can only hope that the third chick, the one I scared with my torch in the morning, slipped over the edge and found its wings before it reached the ground, three storeys below.

Just don’t do it
The moral is obvious. Follow the rules. Part of the law is this: if you allow habitat to exist, the critters will come. If you remove habitat, critters will die. Another part of the law is this: don’t get involved. I’ve no way of knowing how much damage I caused by traumatising those chicks, how much of their vital energy I cost them, whether they will survive or die, whether some sign of what I did will remain in the spring, warning the adults away from the ledge they’ve occupied for 30 years or more.
So don’t get sentimental about wildlife. It’s stupid, and often destructive.

Swallows
The swifts had gone from Port Meadow in Oxford, as well, when I was down there, even though there were still chicks to be seen on the webcam. (Funny, that...)

But there were swallows. Looking at swifts, just for the pleasure of it, has somehow trained my fuzzy eyes to be more quick, or my brain to be more confident, at watching other bird shapes flying. Swallows have something of the same habit as my dark gothic loves, but are so different, too. How could I ever have confused the two? Swallows with those curves, those contrasts of light and dark. Their little tweeting sounds are quite distinctive, too – they’re beginning to stand out from the background of unidentified bird sounds and be a signal that grabs my ears and turns my eyes to the sky.

They are also, now I happen to notice it, very, very cute…

Please come back

2006-08-05T23:01:00.000+01:00

This will be my third night back in the loft again. Blessed cool weather meant at last it was possible. Ironically, my beloved swifts left the area at the beginning of the week, so I didn’t have any hope of my sleep being disturbed by their beautiful screams.

Now I want to hear them again, more than ever. As soon as possible.

I’ve checked the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s website. They have swifts in their ventilation shafts, how cool is that? They also believe in careful reporting of observed facts, which is not only cool, it’s one of the very best things humans do. (A form of love, even: paying attention to that which is, without false sentiment, and without wanting it to be what it isn’t.)

The swift webcam shows swifts. Right now. In Oxford. The charming brief diary called "statistics" tells me that this year’s cold May left some pairs breeding very late - while some of the young are already grown, 2 were still in their eggs in mid July.

It’s also not unknown for swift parents to be absent for a while, maybe blown off course by a storm while feeding hundreds of kilometres away: “observations at Oxford have shown that chicks can survive fasts of up to 10 days and a weight loss of up to 50%”. This is critical. It confirms what I was told by a rather lovely RSPB woman yesterday. She said that swift chicks have a unique ability to go into a torpor to conserve their energy, but she hadn’t said how many days they could survive until their parents returned.

She said they slowed their activity right down… she didn’t say anything about them making constant little silvery whistling noises, all night long, sometimes almost too faint to hear, sometimes loud and insistent. She didn’t say that at 6am they could make sounds sharp enough to make me hope I was hearing full adult screams.
It’s got to take energy to make that much noise. It works though. I don’t believe in interfering with wild creatures, or with the harsh pressures of natural selection. However, tonight I will be lying there, planning to ring a wildlife sanctuary in the morning, and wondering if I’m brave enough to try feeding the chicks. I am weak-willed and human, and those little plaintive piping noises are enough to make anyone want to give them a beakful of regurgitated flies.

I know what I really want, though. I want to hear swifts flying through the air, screaming. Soon. Please.

Morality - an afterthought

2006-07-30T22:38:00.000+01:00

Having noticed I've just unintentionally managed to get "fanatics", "desert", and "plotting" into one post, I can't resist mentioning another, purely personal - and quite topical - opinion about morality:

Bombs. Bombs are bad. All bombs; anyone and everyone's bombs. Very Bad Indeed.

They upset the frogs. And they ruin the lettuces. :-( :-( :-(

Ideas of morality

2006-07-30T22:22:00.000+01:00

Hauling full watering cans around is a pain in the back, and it’s no fun for my conscience, either. We’re too far north here to have a hosepipe ban – yet – but I’m still acutely aware of being part of a society that has drained the lands and channelled the rivers to a shadow of the burgeoning wild they could be, and that has managed to create a water shortage through sheer childish mismanagement.

I’ve been amused over the last few days to hear that a man of the Christian church has dared to suggest that air flights might be a moral issue, in the light of what we know these days. Well done that man, and, er – yes. What's taking everyone so long? The amount of attention his comment has generated, and the sharpness of some of the replies, suggests that the remark hit home; perhaps this idea’s time has nearly come.

I of course am at a loss to understand that there’s any question. How could a system of morality _not_ include our impacts on that which is
(a) mysterious, beautiful, uniquely alive, and (if you’re into that kind of thing) the source of many mystical and unplifting experiences; and
(b) our mutual life support system?
For most of my life this has left me where I’ve become comfortable, out on the extremes, but from now on – if I can manage to stand still while the world turns – I’m willing to enjoy my journey all the way over to the mainstream.

Meanwhile, I've found there is a plus side to all the watering: frogs. They hate being watered, but they love the places where I’ve been watering, over these awful dry weeks. They leap from my thickets of cut-and-come-again lettuce, and lurk accusingly under my alpine strawberries, as I drench the ground. It gives me a tired little surge of joy and pride (always a danger sign, in us fanatics) as I realise that, in this pondless desert, I have created habitat for them. I shall water on, plotting for the day when, in a saner system, my lettuce cravings won't need to be a problem at all...

Climate Change Begins at Home

2006-07-21T16:10:00.000+01:00

... a fab book, and now out in paperback. About climate change, the contribution that "normal" Western lifestyles make to it, and what individual people can do by way of reducing their carbon outputs. It's aimed at normal people, with lives to get on with (but I enjoyed it too...)

The author, Dave Reay, is the kind of person that does the sums. Not a rabid greenie - I did hear he travelled on a train with a box of worms, but apparently that was strictly for educational purposes. He got into the climate change issue because he's a climate scientist - an increasingly scared and worried climate scientist. He was publishing free info on his greenhouse gas website long before he had a book to sell.

And, whatever David Attenborough might imply about his tea making skills, I have it on good authority that he makes a great cup of coffee.

Nuclear history

2006-07-13T13:11:00.000+01:00

I haven't tracked this quote to Hansard or anything, but it comes from a source I trust:

"What is unbelievably depressing about the [Conservative] government's response is that they see, in the evidence about greenhouse gases, not an opportunity to promote environmental concern but a chance to make the case for nuclear power" - Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock's shadow energy secretary, 1988-89

And to quote my source: "Isn't that just ... words fail me actually (maybe word I seek is politics!) "

Innit.

Bluegrass in the backwoods

2006-07-12T09:18:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, I finally got round to checking out my (fairly) local community woodland. There was some kind of annual festival on – you know, some sad little theme-park effort, with a few tacky craft stalls...

How wrong can a girl be? Some of the craft stalls were tacky, but many were superb, and most were convincingly woody – from the out and out bushcraft, thru an impressive range of atavistic green woodworking stuff, to top-notch native-hardwood furniture making. (The bushcraft guy, appropriately, didn’t have a website. But he had sold some bark containers to someone from the furniture makers’ stall. Good craft is good craft, whatever the genre.)

The public areas were cunningly carved out of mature conifer plantation, with the trees thinned out enough to allow light through for grass to grow for people to walk on, and, at the unmown edges, for tangles of undergrowth to emerge, limiting people’s wandering.

Working woodland works well as a venue: both main stage and bagpipes alike became just a vague siren call from the other side of a block. There were many entertainments. I ignored most of them, of course, because I enjoy being serious. Samba band, chainsaw carving demonstration, mountain biking display, acrobats, yadda yadda, whatever. I had information to hoover up: yum. In a brief, happy afternoon I found leads on half a dozen things I’d been wanting to find. And all within the comforting green of forest. But after I’d checked out names and faces from other woody events, fallen into intense discussion with a man who sometimes kills squirrels for a living, bought a clay plaque from another who lit up about his ancient hedgerow research, and gathered up a small mountain of contact details and leaflets, I leaned against a Scots pine tree and settled down to the serious business of listening to some really fine bluegrass music.*

For a few brief hours, I was in heaven.

There was room for improvement, of course. Pissing in a chemical loo in the middle of acres of woodland seems a little perverse, and the burger van really should have been selling venison burgers (and squirrel kebabs), garnished with some of the abundant wood sorrel, with forest mushrooms as the vegetarian option… but overall, the event was sheer bliss. I have seen the future of partying, and there’s room for a really quite surprising number of trees in it.

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* Please insert your preferred taste in music here, and don’t be put off. Banjos aren’t, as far as I know, an essential part of forest festivals. I think the gods laid that bit on just for me.

And the "news" is: Tony wants nuclear

2006-07-11T22:39:00.000+01:00

I’m kind of motivated about climate change. If an informed, networked, intelligent society, after careful and cooperative study, decided that the only viable low-carbon energy production and consumption system for the near future had to be one that involved nuclear power in the mix, I would accept it, albeit with deep reluctance.

Instead, we have an arrogant clique, run by an arrogant man who clearly enjoys thinking of himself as a big player amongst world players, and who shows precious little love or understanding of either science or ecosystems. The kind of man who would start a war in the name of democracy, when over a million of his own people (and that was just in London) had taken to the streets to say – in a beautiful, peaceful, rather British kind of way – "well, no, actually".

I don’t want "strong leaders". I want truth, and cooperation, and genuine debate. And some intelligent, honest decision making, dammit.

I also want beauty and love, but the actions of world leaders remind me how to feel hate, on days like today. I listened to the news on the radio this morning, turned south, and spent the next minute or so visualising hurt and harm to that self same arrogant man.

It isn’t the right answer… Love is the answer, though applying it is way tricky. Gotta dismantle the ideas, and ignore the figureheads. World leaders are just another kind of life form: they possibly even deserve as much compassion as cutworms* do. But on days like today, I listen to decisions taken about the world I love, reckless, thoughtless decisions which seem way beyond my control, and what I feel is hate.

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* See "Cutworm" post, Tuesday, May 23, 2006.
(You’re right, Ingaborg: this user interface so sucks – can’t find a way to back link to archived posts: yuck!!)

My heap; my fault :-(

2006-07-02T18:43:00.000+01:00

I think the bees are gone, now. The trouble was, I had absolutely no idea what to do; no experience, and no information. I tried gently replacing the old paper sack that I’d tugged off, revealing the hive. Now there are no bees emerging. Is it because I inadvertently blocked their entrance? Or was the colony doomed to move on – or die – as soon as I’d disturbed it? Alternatively, will the queen try to come back to that big investment of wax and honey?

It’s not looking good. Since disturbing the nest, the only bee I’m sure I’ve seen there was a dead one, a few inches from the breach. I didn’t think to collect it in a jar for identification; I was too busy, with some predetermined set of Things to Do; distracted.

It took me a week to get round to Googling on this. Truth be told, it had already taken me about a week to get round to blogging it. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, I have lots of work to do; I haven’t had enough time to do the gardening tasks I’d planned, never mind to drop everything just to learn about wild bees.

Which is just a way of saying, "too many tasks planned", I reckon.

May I say at this point how much I appreciate the work of L. Smith? Her selfless dedication to the bumble bee means that yesterday, when I finally got round to it, the Bombus section of my inner world expanded rapidly. My colony, I think, was probably Bombus pratorum (or just possibly B. hortorum). They definitely won’t need the heap after late summer; the only survivors into the winter are hibernating queens, and they hibernate in different sites to the summer nests. Summer nests need to be warm, whereas it’s important to hibernate somewhere dry but cool, so as not to be woken early by a warm winter’s day.

The reason I got bees in the heap was that the roof I’d put over it last year kept it dry. I could have moved the disturbed colony, if I’d wanted (B. hort and prat are "fairly placid", and their colonies are small) – but to give them a good chance, I’d have needed to provide suitable bedding, and somewhere dry.

Fantastic! The internet will save the world: humanity’s consciousness is co-ordinating and linking into a more coherent whole than ever before, expanding into a network of knowledge which lovingly embraces and nurtures all living beings... On a good day, that is. On a bad day, there are too many websites in my life, and my eyes hurt, and I wish to the gods I had the sense to spend more of my life outside, out in reality. Getting the balance, that’s the beautiful, impossible-seeming challenge.

Not my heap any more

2006-06-24T18:25:00.000+01:00

A year or so back, I bagged an old composting bay and started a slow compost heap. Not really to produce compost, mostly just because I couldn’t bear to see so much stuff burnt on the annual bonfire – stems and grasses, some of them still wet, which surely could break down, given time.

A shredder would have helped, but we don’t have one, and we do have space.

I thought putting a roof over the heap would help, but this was a mistake, because I didn’t water it often enough. By the autumn there was a very slowly festering mound, cool and quiet. By midwinter, I realised it was too late to gather it and turn the now somewhat lower mound, as someone or other might be hibernating in there. In spring, I put a fresh heap of dry stems in front of it, waiting for a spare hour or two to chop them up with a spade and get the whole heap started again for the new season.

Today, I finally had a vast supply of moist, nitrogen-rich grass cuttings to add to the process, so I moved this year’s stems to get at last year’s heap.

I’ve never seen a wild bees’ nest before. They were small, furry, and showed no sign of stinging me, though they were clearly quite agitated. I could just see comb, below the inch-wide hole I’d accidentally torn in the old paper sack they’d built it under.

OK, OK, I get the hint. So now I don’t get to sort out that heap, at least until the autumn. ("Timeliness in husbandry" I hear someone say. Yeah, yeah, I know. But have you seen my to-do list?)

Make your own drugs

2006-06-22T22:22:00.000+01:00

Opinions vary as to whether the summer Solstice should be celebrated on midsummer’s dawn or midsummer’s eve. I’m not too fussed, myself. In fact, I no longer despise the idea of celebrating on the nearest Saturday; it fits with the patterns people live by, and I’m certainly not sensitive enough to be aware of the precise time of Solstice for myself. (Nor were our "close-to-the-Earth" ancestors, if they really needed those great big measuring circles.)

But I was happy, for once, to be losing sleep seeing in the Solstice dawn.

Messing up your sleep patterns is stupid, but it marks the occasion splendidly. And it works for me – I’ve been in an altered state of consciousness for the last 2 days, just on my own brain chemistry. Day and night merged, for a while. It tricks the mind into letting go a little, and allowing some renewal and change.

So rejoice in the midsummer, people, and make merry, for the seasons are still turning, more or less...

Progress reports

2006-06-15T21:22:00.000+01:00

The mycelia are doing well. 2 out of 3 of the new cultures are progressing just as imagined: the furry white stuff that was originally cultured around a mass of grain is spreading itself out from where I placed it, in the centre of a bagful of moist cellulose-rich stuff, and gradually colonising outwards in a solid white fuzz. The shredded paper is looking good; the compost – a bagful taken from the trailerload I had delivered back in May – if anything looks even better, though that may be just the pleasing contrast of stark white fungus against dark, moist compost. This last one was pure throwaway experiment – I had a hunch that Pleurotus ostreatus might like the "compost" as it’s so incredibly woody – it’s made on a local farm from garden waste, and I’ve found all kinds of interesting and thoroughly uncomposted things in it, including many lumps of wood and a still useable bamboo cane. So far, the culture placed within it is looking good. My heart is beginning to go out to this new life-form: I’m increasing my repertoire of ways of making things rot! ... Steady, now, tho’. It’s early days yet.

Last year’s log is looking whiter and furrier, now, as well, under the new regime of wrapping it firmly up in a plastic bag and letting it fester in a shed – no more of this natural, out-in-the woods nonsense. The log’s been around for a while by now, though, so it’s no surprise to see one or two rather different looking cultures developing. I’m no expert, but green and yellow-brown don’t seem to be Pleurotus's colours.

The only culture that’s causing me worry is, of course, the one I did "properly". The spawn in the brand new toilet roll seemed to melt away, leaving exposed grain and a few patches of distinctly blue-green furriness, which I gather is not at all the desired result. It’s recovering a little, by now, with white fuzz beginning to fill the centre of the roll, but it’s rather weak and patchy, compared with the lovely experiments, and that blue-green stuff is still very much in evidence. Some extraneous black specks dotted around, too.

All in all, fascinating.

Then there’s the worms – the new colony is looking good. The trailer-load of rough compost came in there, too; I’m using some of it as worm bedding. Things looked positive even when I went to collect it – the much-diminished pile is still lying where it was originally dumped in the field, carefully wrapped up in an old plastic tarp to stop it melting into the ground. As I dug into it, I found some superb fat worms had already made it their home. Shamefully, I can’t identify worms in the wild, so I left them out there – compost worm habitat is very different to soil, and soil-dwelling worms wouldn’t last long at all in my lovely Can ‘o’ Worms. Whereas the wriggling things I harvested so painstakingly disappeared almost instantly into the new habitat I offered them. This is a good sign. I fed the colony just now, for the second time, laying a potful of kitchen scraps on top then covering them up with yet more of the rough compost. The Can’s lid was bare, there were no worms to be seen, even in the sump there were only one or two tourists lurking in damp corners. This is good. This is very good. Hiding worms are happy worms. All is well.

And, incidentally, there are harvestable green edible things in the garden, too.

All manner of things are well :-)

Skwerls are back :-)

2006-06-14T21:04:00.000+01:00

What I liked about sleeping in the loft was that it brought me closer to the environment, told me about the light and the birds and the changes in the weather. Last week it started to tell me that the weather was way way way too hot... so I moved into the little upstairs bedroom, with its insulated ceiling and its little opening window. It made the heat more bearable, but I’ve been missing the swifts.

This morning I was woken early by the sound of someone moving small objects just next to me, in the room. I was mildly annoyed, as I thought it was a little inconsiderate. A second or so later, more awake, I noticed that there wasn’t anyone in the room, which was hardly surprising, as I live with very considerate people.

Much more surprisingly, I was awake enough to look out of the window, in time to catch a glimpse of the plump grey squirrel bounding along the roof ridge just below. It must have been investigating the interesting new hole in the wall. Splendid marauder. Next time it comes looking to steal starlings’ eggs (are they in season just now?) I shall look it in the eye and call it “dinner”. You never know, it might even believe I mean it.

Meanwhile, I suppose I really ought to tell the squirrel officer about the latest sighting.

Warm snow, old memories

2006-06-13T18:13:00.000+01:00

Across the Meadows in Edinburgh runs an avenue that includes a lot of elm trees. On Saturday, in the drying heat and the sideways wind, their seeds drifted down like warm snow.

They reminded me of a single seed, round and papery, which I’d kept in a box for many years, in memory of an old wych elm. It was the best tree in the world, and I have never forgotten the unexpected, mundane sound of its spreading limbs cracking beneath its own weight when it was felled. People said it was international trade that brought the elm disease to Britain, wiping out mature trees en masse. Maybe they were right.

Years later, I regretted my passivity, never having tried to plant the seed, to raise a successor in defiance of disease. I wondered, sometimes whether the seed might still be viable.

The Woodland Trust hosts British-Trees.com, so it’s probably fairly accurate: "seed... is not dormant... In the wild seed germinate shortly after falling." That probably answers that one, then. I love information.

But information only goes so far. The brief entry says little about elm disease, and nothing about the fabulous giants that survive somehow in Brighton, or the mature multitudes living in the West Coast of Scotland, or that elm trees are the most beautiful trees in the world, and that even life in a heatwave is worth living when you’re walking in their shade and their reckless, short-lived multitude of seeds is floating round you like warm snow.

Tiny! Very strong!

2006-06-07T09:30:00.000+01:00

Baby tiger worms are as tiny as a really, really small thing. Some are even tinier. The ones I was trying to rescue/recapture yesterday were a centimetre long, at a guess, and under a millimetre thick. I’m short-sighted enough to identify them reliably – the haemoglobin red blood, showing in segments through translucent skin, distinguishes them from yellow/white adult enchytraeids*, and I could never mistake them for the fly larvae.

They also move in a strikingly different way, coiling around so urgently that they flip themselves around and over and along, sometimes with enough force that they jump across the smooth surface. Sometimes several of them cluster together, somehow sticking to each other in a frenetic mutual dance, creating a 3-dimensional, lattice sculpture as tall as it’s wide, tumbling around in a cluster.

I didn’t stop to get a camera: they were moving that fast because they were trying to get away, from light and from rapid death by dehydration. I was trying to drop them on a sieve full of rough compost, my intended new home for them. I scooped them up gently, mostly one at a time, with a single scrap of newspaper. (Yes, I am stupidly patient about this kind of thing. But these critters fascinate me, and they’re such easygoing pets.)

Often one would writhe itself right off the paper before reaching the safety of the compost, so I let it drop onto the safetynet of my waiting palm. The strength of their life astounded me. A few millimetres, the thickness of a thread – and enough force that I could feel it firmly trying to push my fingers apart.

Go, worms. Nestle down into that dark, moist compost and grow fat and long... eat; make worms...

Life. It’s simple, but kind of appealing.

* pronounced “pot worms”

Encouraging mycelia

2006-06-05T11:25:00.000+01:00

I want to live in the woods and eat mushrooms.

However, there are not enough woods in Britain, and possibly not enough mushrooms in the woods that there are. So I thought I’d help the situation along by growing some wood-eating mushrooms. I decided I wouldn’t waste time on DIY, and I’d just buy a pre-inoculated log and bung it in the garden. That was a year ago. The results were about as disastrous as my first attempts to keep a tiger worm colony – I got the conditions all wrong. Dry log, no mushrooms. Plus the delightful discovery that the ubiquitous slugs are keen on mushrooms too, and willing in the meantime to make do with the food-grade wax that’s used to seal the desirable fungus into the log.

So I’m trying again. This time it’s hands on. The 100g packet of Ann Miller's oyster grain spawn has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of weeks. Even there, the stiff, white fuzz of mycelium has expanded visibly inside the clear plastic bag, so I’m already feeling involved. Yesterday, I finally found the time to get together the plastic bags and the buckets and the kettles full of water. With outrageous consumer extravagance, I’ve sacrificed a whole toilet roll, as apparently growing shrooms from those is ridiculously easy. (I like easy.) The shredded paper and the rough woody compost (really not at all sterile, despite the boiling water) are just extra experiments.

I’m supposed to leave the soggy bags full of inoculated stuff somewhere which is dark, humid, and warm (22-27 degrees C). Strangely enough, I don’t have anywhere to hand that fits that description. The airing cupboard is warm, admittedly, but (a) it’s very dry; (b) it’s made of wood, and we don’t really want to encourage it to rot; (c) it isn’t actually my airing cupboard, so maybe not. So the experiments are stashed under the staging in the greenhouse. I just checked them; they’re rather cold. I plan to fret about them, and peer at them frequently.

Out hunting again

2006-05-31T22:16:00.000+01:00

I like slug-picking; it gets me out there, and it makes me pay attention.
It’s more like foraging than gardening: I go out not to place something where I think it should be, but to find what’s there. When I’ve got a gardening head on, my attention is turned inwards to a plan of my own, visualising ahead to what will be, what I want to be, in however many weeks or months, or after however much heavy brutal work. Foraging is so different; it’s all about the here and now, learning the signs to look for, you learn to go with what’s there.

I know much, by now, of their sluggy ways. I know the damp, sheltering places where they lurk, I know their preferences for things made tender by youth or rot (an interesting mix, that). I know the smooth, easy paths they prefer, the bridges they find over my soot barriers, and I’ve seen, queasily, that they really do pause to browse on the little blue pellets of poison that I’ve left for them.

Beyond the slugs themselves, I know the look and feel and sounds of how different each night is, with different creatures appearing in the wetness and the dryness. And when it’s really wet out there, cool and properly dark, I’ve seen the worms. Huge worms, glistening worms, worms like you wouldn’t believe...

Yup. I do like a bit of slug picking.

Kimberley-Clark. Good grief.

2006-05-31T22:05:00.000+01:00

Virgin forests are being turned into toilet roll. In rich, developed countries, which can afford a bit of conservation.
C’mon, guys. This is the 21st century. We expect so much better than this.

www.kleercut.net
www.oren.org.au/archives/otkleenex.htm

Maps to reshape your mind

2006-05-28T21:31:00.000+01:00

www.worldmapper.org
This is what IT is for. Information, made visual. Not some arbitrary artist’s impression: the shapes come from the information itself.
These are our world…

Territory

2006-05-28T11:06:00.000+01:00

[Wednesday, May 24]
The deer was so beautiful, so peaceful, grazing down below, not far from my window. Gentle and graceful. Bloody fast, too, once I’d walked up close to it: instant taut muscle bounding over a mass of shrubs. I figured that getting up close would scare it more than yelling from a distance. It jolted into panic, suddenly realising I was there (that wind again – foxes the critters’ ears). I didn’t want to frighten it out of the garden, but my mum was horrified at the idea of the damage it could do. That gardening mentality again... We’ve scarcely been in this part of the garden for months, no time to mow the knee-high grass. The plants that are growing well have created a sheltered, inviting place. But still there’s the imperative to control the space, to own it, to subdue the land.
I just want to let it be.

Cutworms

2006-05-23T16:26:00.000+01:00

Sure enough, a bit of digging around, and sorting handfuls of soil carefully into a bucket, revealed a fat caterpillar at the base of each wilted lettuce, and a fat bite taken out of each lettuce stem – a fatal bite, removing most or all of the luscious, crisp growing point, just at ground level. At one point I’d laid 2 of the critters on a nearby piece of ground, to deal with later. I noticed they suddenly livened up, abandoned their curled-up-dead pose and started squirming quite rapidly towards me and my lettuces. Quickly I hacked out at them with the trowel, killing them clumsily against the soft earth.

Hmm. Lashing out with fear and hatred against two tiny creatures (as they turned out to be, when I’d backed off and stopped focusing on soil macrofauna level), and all because of around a dozen lettuce plants, maybe less. And I know full well that I’m not going to starve any time soon.

It reminds me of where I came in, at the start of this blog, with my one little edible, accident-killed miracle contrasting weirdly with the judgmental hatred directed at grey squirrels by some conservationists and some foresters.

I don’t want to be like that. I just want to grow some lettuces. That means I will be taking a bit of habitat away from other critters, so one way or another some of them are going to die, or never get the chance to live. I may decide to actively kill some of them. But the hatred is something I can learn to do without.

Slug patrol

2006-05-18T08:48:00.000+01:00

It’s started again. Same trigger as last year; downcast parents finding newly planted vegetables all slug-ravaged.

It’s time to slug pick.

It became something of an obsession for me, last summer, a whole new invertebrate discovery. After a while I became quite entranced by their beauty, the eager, sensuous whole-body love with which they reached up to the most delicate food experiences. I never killed them (apart from the occasional guilty flushing down the sink, whilst cleaning lettuce – the kitchen here is curiously far from the outside, and the management is not fond of slugs in the compost bin), just carried them gently to the compost heap, and told them to eat cardboard.

Truth be told, though, I got quite tired of slugs, by the end of the season. And now it’s started again. I must’ve found 30, at least, in 3 different trips to the one row of runner beans.

So I shall see what the ferric phosphate slug pellets can do (there’s a picture of a hedgehog on the can, so they must be ok…?). My other plan, of course, is to like plants that slugs don’t like. This year so far suggests that I like sorrel a lot, and that I prefer rocket to radishes. I may well be rather partial to corn salad, as well. Last year I discovered I no longer had any interest in mizuna; its lovely leaves aren’t really improved by further serration.

The irony is that all the fussing over annual veg means I’ve only had time to pick one batch of nettles. I was so looking forward to this year’s nettles :-(

Water ways

2006-05-18T08:40:00.000+01:00

I spent formative years in two landscapes dominated by drained wetlands. The land was eerily flat; it made far more sense when I imagined it covered with a tangle of reeds and willows, rich with a harvest of fish and fowl.

A decade or so ago, I worked briefly for a river botanist. I never forgot her telling me how the fallen water table – half a metre, over the entire landscape – was due to the combined impact of draining and abstraction.

More recently, I lived on an overcrowded southern English floodplain, where the concrete under new waterside developments replaced the spongy soil, banishing water ever faster towards the sea, or pooling it up in local floods.

In my last home, for the first 2½ years I had no plumbing. I carried all the water I used there. (Granted, there was a power shower at the office, and a launderette up the street.) After that I installed a miracle: one small foot pump, dispensing cold water in gentle, controllable spurts. Coming back to the violence and excess of constant, pressurised mains water was a loss.

The news tells me that the south of England is facing water shortages. Many people there, surrounded on all sides by the evidence of lost flood plain, of rivers caught in concrete channels, of artificial landscapes constantly maintained, of increasingly changeable and unpredictable climate, are saying: the water companies have let us down; we should have a grid to import water from the north; we should use energy to desalinate the sea, so as much water as we could ever desire will be drawn away from waterways and wetlands and channelled instead into our dead systems of pipes and tanks.

I’m still hoping, that times, and minds, and culture, are changing. And praying that the changes are soon, and enough.

Back again

2006-05-18T08:37:00.000+01:00

OK, right, no more travelling for a while, I promise: it’s gardening season.
Suffice to say, in the course of one party and one business trip I met mycologists, ethnobotanists, lichenologists, foragers, foresters, and a charmingly old-fashioned guitarist who liked to think that vegetarian food is bad for people. Not an engine was started on my behalf during the entire trip, and a lovely time was hadd all round. I consider Beltane well and truly celebrated.

And I still don't like smoky campfires, for all kinds of reasons.

I have actually been back for days, but it really is gardening season. Which is why, in violation of the whole idea of real-time blogging, to follow are 2 posts I prepared earlier but didn’t get round to posting...

I was sure I heard screams this morning

2006-05-03T21:36:00.000+01:00

Not the usual racket the starlings make, actual screams. Swift screams.

*sigh* The swifts are so beautiful. Until a year ago, I wasn’t even aware of them. I’d never noticed their sound, never believed that my stunted distance vision could tell swallows apart from "all those other swallow-type birds" that I’d read about.
Now I’m aware of them, I can scarcely believe I could have gone through so many years without noticing. But that’s the beauty of sleeping in the loft.

The loft in this house is enormous. Tall enough for a reasonably sized woman to walk around in freely (unreasonably tall people, just duck your head under the beams). If it was my house, all that underused space would probably give me eco-guilt. But it isn’t my house; it’s a house where I’m fitting into some of the underused spaces. So instead of trying to deal with the dust mites in the room I use during the day, I sleep in an unheated room. When the worst bite of winter was past, and guests needed the spare room, I camped out in the loft again, and have slept there ever since.
The roof is high, and the only loft insulation is the layers of old carpet beneath me, and doubtless tonnes of dust-generating old chaff and horse-hair plaster beneath the floorboards. Above me is a structure of beams clad only by a thin sheet of something or other and the slates above. So this is the part of the house where the sounds of the outside world reach me easiest, and where the light comes in through uncurtained windows, and the weather determines just how many duvets I need. (3 is my maximum, so far. The trick is to train yourself to sleep with your head under the duvet – otherwise I get pains developing in my neck and shoulders, presumably from tension brought on by the cold.)

No, really. This is where I sleep. I do miss the chance to lie abed reading at night – tho’ on the plus side, keeping bed strictly for sleeping in probably helps to keep insomnia at bay.
Even in warm summer, I can’t lie there with the light on, in case it disturbs or attracts the birds. The first time I really knew the squeaks and scrabbles at night came from birds, not rats, was when I woke to the sound of a feathered critter battering itself against glass. I opened the old shutters opposite, but it didn’t take the hint, so I went over and scooped it into my hands. The wings I was trying to hold closed were surprisingly strong. The feathers were soft brown. The feet weren’t soft, like people say. Swift feet have claws – I checked in a book downstairs, afterwards. When we were almost at the window, the swift’s determination had overcome my hands, and it was ready to fly free. As it launched itself into the sky it pushed off, very firmly – gripping my finger with the cutest, cutest little carnivore claws.
I’ve been in love with swifts ever since. Once I’d tuned into their sweet gothic screams, they became the sound of last summer, for me.
Which is why I’m worried, now. Because the swifts sleep, and nest, just under the eaves. There’s a place you can see them, quite clearly, dark silhouettes against a crack of sky, with just a protecting chicken wire barrier between human space and bird space.

I heard them again! Now, as I’m typing. And I just saw them, two of them, chasing through the sky. First time this year. A gift of Beltane, no less.

This could be a problem. Because I looked at the ledge this morning – what I could see of it – and it’s still clogged up with starling nest, and the compact little bird that dived for freedom at first sight of me was certainly no stately swift. (Swifts just lie there in a confident stupor.)
I like sleeping in the loft, because it makes me pay attention. And because I’ve paid attention, I love those starlings. Their thuggish noise has kept me company for weeks, by now. But it’s time the swifts came back...

It's not easy watching TV

2006-04-30T14:31:00.000+01:00

I keep forgetting that these telly episodes come round so fast. I’ve got a TV in my home for the first time in years (The lack of one wasn’t really for green reasons. It was more… oh, it’s a long story. Let’s just say I really know what it’s like living without mains electricity. Or running water. Or furniture... In particular, I know what it’s like to be still doing it several years after it stopped being an adventure. Long enough that it just made me feel poor.)
- and I still keep forgetting how quickly weekly episodes come round. So I seem to have missed the end of "It's Not Easy Being Green".
Just as well, really. I so hated that programme.
I hated it for confusing important issues and muddying important ideas.
It was a reality TV programme. (Imagine that - returning to TV land after a few years' gap, into the new world of the reality TV prog boom. I was actually shocked to discover there were so many of them, and so extreme. Fascinated, too, admittedly.)

It was about this family
they’d bought a big expensive house in Cornwall, and were moving there from the city – London, I think
and they were going to:
live in the country!
be self-sufficient!
be green!!!
Don’t you just hate it when people can’t make their minds up? They kept saying these 3 things, as if they were the same. They just so aren’t the same.

Self-sufficiency isn’t green.
For a start, it isn’t even possible - and green has to be possible, or we’re sunk. You can grow some of your own food, yes. But you’ll probably buy in seeds every year. And you’re unlikely to grow and grind your own cereals, or grow and press your own oils. And you’ll buy your tools in from outside – or if you don’t, you’ll be breaking a thoroughly sensible tradition of skills specialisation that dates right back to the Stone Age. And don’t even get me started on spinning and weaving cloth ('cos I’ve got too much work to do already, and I can’t afford the time to get out that old spinning wheel, and I just lurve the feel of smelly, greasy sheep’s wool between my fingers, and... you see? I have tried it. I know what I’m talking about. Self sufficiency is a myth.)
Here's some hard-won advice: If you’re drawn to the self-sufficiency myth, make sure you keep it a myth. Don’t be purist. Don’t be honest. Don’t think too hard. Just bag a handful of the toys and props that particularly appeal to you (spinning and crafts are more traditional for girls, or maybe growing herbs; blokes tend more to go for the Landrovers and the water turbines – tho’ it isn’t set in stone, just grab whichever set you fancy, there are so, so many subsistence skills to choose from), big up what you do, and keep quiet about all the stuff you still buy in. And above all, make sure you have a good, solid cash income to act as a backup. (TV producing works very well, I’d imagine.)

If, on the other hand, you want to be green, you have to think very clearly indeed – or crib your ideas off people who have thought clearly about it. They’re fairly easy to spot. They don’t tend to go on about how amazing their lives are, and they keep stopping to apologise for boring you with all the details. Details like: if everyone buys their own set of industrial-scale tools and toys, drives a Landrover (because buying a couple of pigs means that they’re a farmer now), and feels they have to live somewhere remote just so they can grow a few vegetables and have space to build large waterwheels (while still having lots of friends and helpers and TV crews to visit in their cars and vans), then our resource use is going to be really, really inefficient. Fun, yes (provided (a) you like that kind of thing; (b) you don’t take on too much genuine hands-on subsistence work; (c) you’re not troubled by a green conscience). Green, not even a little bit.

This brings me neatly to the second thing: living in the country. Don’t ever let anyone make you think you’re not green, just because you live in the town. The realest greenies I’ve ever met or heard of all seem to live in towns. Close to bus and train stations. Close to friends, work, society. With gardens just big enough for a feasible-sized veggie patch, or an allotment nearby – if they like gardening. (2 acres?? That much land for veg: you’re making my back ache already. On the other hand, if it’s for biomass willow, or big livestock, the yield’s so small that it’s just another toy. Real greenies have to do sums, I’m afraid – or at least listen to people who do sums.)
One thing I have to admit, tho’. These people may have looked a bit thoughtless, but they weren’t stupid. They’d got a nice house, lots of nice cars to get them there, lots of fun attention from the media, several lucrative lines of income to support them. And, in the finest big-house-in-the-country tradition, they even had servants - a gardener to grow them some veg, and a bloke to make toys which would generate electricity and capture heat and filter a bit of veg oil for fuel, doing all the detailed, hard-work, paying-attention stuff that you have to do to make something actually work, and keep working.
Very clever. Very cushy. Very nice. But green…? Spare me. Please.

Blether miles

2006-04-28T20:37:00.000+01:00

I’m a lousy correspondent. But I have a great excuse.

Since I last posted I’ve made two low-carbon trips, virtually back-to-back. The logistics are pretty demanding. There are train & bus times to check, cheap tickest to hunt for, maps to consult, lifts to arrange and rearrange, overnight stays to negotiate. For me, a trip to a city "2½ hours away" (if you’ll excuse the quaint 20th-century car-culture terminology) is a serious undertaking. By the time the journey comes round I’ll likely be making it for at least 3 separate reasons – so the packing gets quite involved as well.

If this starts to sound too hair-shirt that isn’t entirely for green reasons – my journeying is relatively low-cash, as well as low-carbon, otherwise I’d just walk down to the train station and buy an open return ticket every time (ouch!!), and book nice B&Bs (or characterful small hotel rooms – I believe such things exist, for a fee?) in convenient locations. I’d hate to be seen implying that green is inherently cheap. Green is quite costly, I find. (Only because it means taking voluntary responsibility for some of those externalities, of course – but that’s a rant for another time.)

Anyway, how could I have updated the blog, with all that travelling to do? And with all the complicated cooperating and sharing that goes with it - and all the consequent adventures and serendipities... frankly I’ve had to do so much happy blethering with friends/colleagues/contacts/lovely strangers that pontificating on some green lifestyle blog dropped right off my agenda, for a while.

All boxes ticked! (except one)

2006-04-12T22:29:00.000+01:00

Green tea just has to be loose leaf.

The elegant simplicity – one small pinch of dried leaves, and a vessel of hot water, is all I need for my favourite drink. The sheer domestic laziness – to brew, just sling the leaves in the bottom of the mug and leave them there. The waste minimisation. (_So_ slimming, my dears.) (Tea bags use far too much tea; non-biodegradable nylon mesh; added staples; individual paper wrappings. It all just breaks my systems-minded little heart.)

But above all, using loose leaf green tea is a matter of principle. The principle is pleasure. It tastes _so good_.

I scoured the internet looking for Fair Trade loose leaf green. I did find one brand - but I’d tried it before, and it tasted like years-old dust. (I’m not yet convinced that martyrdom solves anything. It’s fun, yes – but not practical.) In desperation I sent moany little emails to the two suppliers whose tea I had been using – and I scored!! Buried on Clipper’s website was an Organic Green. The blurb, confusingly, hadn’t included the magic words - but the picture said it: “FAIRTRADE”.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to drink organic tea is nice. It’s a welcome luxury. It hopefully – even in these bandwagon, niche market days – shows some level of commitment to care of land, and by extension a bit more care of people - but it isn’t enough. It isn’t even necessary. Frankly, I’m a rich Westerner, I get to eat the most varied, fresh and reliable diet any culture has ever known, and I’m willing to bet that a little more pesticide is not going to shorten my luxuriant lifespan. Whereas knowing that my tea has been produced by someone who’s doing gruelling, dull work under the stress of insufficient, insecure income – it hurts, dammit! It severely reduces my tea-drinking pleasure.

But now - only 2 days after I ordered it – I may have the Answer. It’s nice-looking; green; loose-leaf; Fairtrade; (organic, too). Just one important question left, tho’ - the taste??? This is my first cup...

I crave cardboard

2006-04-12T09:18:00.000+01:00

Despite the hailstorms, spring is here. Everywhere. Buds are unfurling their gorgeous intricacies. I’m so used to the noise of nesting starlings I sleep right through it. The whin bushes up the hill went yellow when I wasn’t looking.
It’s high time I got out into the vegetable patch, and covered it with municipal waste, scrap wood and cardboard. If only the bicycle shop would sell a few more bikes...

Cool experiment?

2006-04-04T09:45:00.000+01:00

I just tried to join in the Climate Change Experiment*, and I'm rather perversely proud to say that I can't, because my laptop is too minimal to run it.

My laptop is my only computer, as it happens (fewer purchases=lots of green points). It’s also 4 years old (use purchased item till it drops=even more points). To run the Climate Change Experiment, my laptop would need more RAM, a more powerful processor – and not to be a laptop:

"Laptop computers may get very hot running the experiment, because it is processor intensive and they have less cooling capacity than desktop computers. You are advised not to run the experiment on a laptop."

Ouch! And I’d imagined it would be an elegant little programme, that would sit gracefully in the gaps between my keystrokes, using nothing but surplus...

Instead, it eats energy – and my laptop** is too weak to support it. Yes!!! I’m so minimalist! I’m so minimalist! I’m so minimalist! :-) :-) :-) Greener than...

...er... don’t suppose anyone wants to try the experiment on my behalf? It still sounds cool, in a slightly hot sort of way.

* no! – not that one, we’re all doing that. I mean this mostly harmless thing you can do with computers.

** while I’m nestling contentedly in green nerd-space, I’d like to mention that as my laptop is also teeny, its teeny tiny screen uses less power (=lots more green points) than most. On the down side, I did buy it brand new (=lose 10000 points, and go off in the same handcart as the rest of the planet. Curses.)

“I think we would need to know what it tasted like”

2006-04-02T16:17:00.000+01:00

That’s what everyone said, actually, John.

Squirrel is in fact delicious – somewhere between rabbit and chicken. A bit tough – but that’s probably my cooking. Vegetables are best when still crisp: I suppose meat must be different.

I didn’t blog about my squirrel at the time, so no one could publish their comments, but I did confess to some of my friends. They were particularly keen to give tips:
- Scissors are highly recommended.

- Trying to skin a stiffened corpse is not – you should either prepare it before rigor mortis sets in, or leave it to hang for at least 24 hours. (ahh.. another reason why the meat was tough)

- Suggestions for curing the skin so far have involved quite noxious chemicals. John Seymour’s sulphuric acid put me off initially; since then I’ve heard of sodium bicarb (environmentally OK) with diesel (not so OK, but available), and methylated spirits (which works for a fox’s brush – “you have to take the bone out first”). The compost heap was perhaps the best of all possible solutions.

I like my friends. They’re so… practical.

That was weeks ago, of course. The spring equinox has passed, and small furry things are suddenly bounding round the fields and woods. I saw two lil’ grey tree rats, yesterday, the first since my squirrel of the dreaming dark of winter. These ones were very much alive, yomping and fat, busy grabbing habitat with all the force of life itself.

How could they not?

Go, mammals!

I skinned my first squirrel today

2006-04-02T16:01:00.000+01:00

Well, not exactly today. (Stuff happens.) It was back in January, on the day when the grey squirrel cull was announced in the Westminster parliament. I knew nothing of that, at the time. My focus was a lot closer to home.

[20/1/06]I skinned my first squirrel today. I hadn’t planned to – though ironically I had planned to spend the day reading about “non-timber forest products”.

I was just relaxing around a nice mug of tea, after a stressful telephone meeting. My mum was just back from shopping. “I’m going back out for a minute,” she said, putting a first couple of bags down. “There’s something lying in the road – I think it’s a squirrel.”

We were all feeling particularly squirrel aware, after yesterday’s evening talk on the Reds vs the Greys. There’d been some belligerent voices in the audience, keen to suggest “shoot them!” and “is just anyone allowed to trap them?” Myself, I’d taken the chance to point out that the bigger size of the greys meant that there was good eating on them.

And now there it was, little grey thing in the road.

The first decision was easy: I needed to pick it up. There’d be no options left, if I waited till after the next car.

I’m not used to death. The creature lying across my hands was warm, soft, flexible. So, so furry. A little, soft fur thing, solid and fat and real.

With a plan forming in my mind, I laid it in the old coal shed, away from cats, and retreated back to my mug of tea. By the time I went back – half an hour later? – the furry object was already colder, stiffer. So it passed the first roadkill test: it was very fresh. (Now I knew a little more about death.)

The corpse was not too mangled, either – another good sign. Cause of death was beyond doubt; a single, massive blow to the head. Using a car is highly unorthodox, but the result of this particular accident followed the very best RSPCA-approved practice. Good.

I was given a bushcraft book for Christmas. I’d been hoping to find time to start using it soon – I was going to start gently, indoors, by improving my knife-sharpening skills. Instead I now found the page about “Skinning a small mammal”. Perfect. Ray Mears has trod this path before me.

There was such condensed information, in the book. So clear, so simple…

I got a kitchen knife, made my usual vague, unconvinced attempt at sharpening it, and set about my task. About a minute later, I was back at the kitchen door, asking for the kitchen scissors. Hmm. Squirrel skin is tough. I went back again, resharpened the knife. (All my knives are blunt, always. Did I mention that?)

Years of saying “I only want to eat animals if they’re culled from the wild” fed my will. This opportunity is perfect. Ridiculously perfect: the gods are calling my bluff. Slowly, I progressed. I rose to the challenge.

I did so in a thoroughly girly way; the thoughtful discussion beforehand, for example. Kitchen table? My mum wasn’t keen. (No, not like you’re thinking – she was just bothered about fleas. Very practical, my mum.) So I went out in the greenhouse – plenty of light, and cold enough at night not to harbour any infestations. Table, carefully spread with newspaper. Sharpened knife, placed ready with a nervous “Blessed be”. Tiny corpse, reverentially carried. Constant stream of words: oh you poor thing, my little thing, you beautiful dead thing.

Entirely girly – especially the female’s flat, no-option determination in the face of smell and mess. (My mess, that is. The squirrel wasn’t a mess; the squirrel was beautifully put together. It didn’t come apart easily, either.)

Skin. Skin doesn’t want to come off! Fingers are working, at full strength, forcing, little piece by little piece. Maybe that’s why my old John Seymour book recommended skinning a rabbit while it was still warm? But I’d been in mild shock when I found that warm squirrel. I needed tea, and time to think. Take it slow, take it steady: it’s the Way.

It took me over an hour, intense and cold, murmuring to that beautiful creature. Last night grey squirrel fat was a new fact; today it became truth: today it was this squirrel, my squirrel, that had been doing so well with its reserves, packed away against the winter. My knifing hands experimented with separating skin from fat – and from this other stuff, which must be connective tissue. Eyes, brain, fingers (still living ones, that is), were learning. The book didn’t tell me about all this.

(The book said the guts fall out easily. Hmm.)

(The book didn’t mention tails.)

If my city-soft mind had panicked more, I could have sliced my own flesh with that knife – so I didn’t let it panic. The squirrel’s claws caught me a few times, though, my sudden movements clashing with its death-curled paws. Front legs are shock absorbers, the nice Wildlife Trust woman had said. (Was that reds or greys? “This one.” There is only one squirrel.)

My mum didn’t have a meat cleaver, but she found me an axe, and after my tired, tentative attempt, she dealt the final head-severing blow. She was there to talk through and finish off the cleaning-under-the-tap, as well. I haven’t even prepared shop-bought rabbit often enough to be sure of handling meat. Vegetables are food. Seeds are food. Meat is mystery.

It’s meat, by now, our little squirrel. Its guts went into my worm bin, its skin and head and paws were buried in her outdoor compost heap. Its flesh is soaking in a panful of water, to see if it’ll lower the gamey flavour enough to win my dad over. (He’s quite keen on the idea of Jamie Oliver coming up with a squirrel recipe, as a solution to the Reds vs the Greys; he’s rather more dubious that it’ll be food if daughter has cooked it.)

When I next write, squirrel may be food.

For now, it’s meat – and skin, which I wistfully, guiltily wrapped up for compost burial. It would take too much time, to learn another skill this week. There are so many skills I want, and don’t yet have. I don’t even know how to keep a blade sharp – but I skinned my first squirrel today, and tonight I’ll taste my first roadkill.