Of Mice, Men, Kids, Lambs and Hog; Blackbird Lament; Daffodil Final Call?

Before lambing started, I had several sessions collecting dry Purple Moor Grass, Molinia caerulea, from the uncut wet area of our lower hay meadow. I’ve mentioned this before since we use it as bedding for our sheep lambing pens. But this year’s prolonged dry spells in March and April meant I could take more off than usual as the layers of bleached foliage close to the ground progressively dried out once the material above had been removed.

It was while I was raking off/up the last few bags in my final session in late March, that I found a couple of intricately constructed nests. Spot the nest I saw first, centre image.

See it now?

One more mossy and unattached, the other apparently made exclusively of the pale fawn Molinia leaves and in places looking as though it was attached to leaves of the Molinia clump quite close to the ground. I couldn’t find an obvious entry hole in either case, although I could only see about a half of the exterior of the Molinia nest.

I’ve never seen or found a nest like this before, so needed to do a little online research, as to what had made them. This suggested that they were certainly mammalian constructs, not bird-made. But the question is, which mammal?

There seem to be 3 options: An overwintering nest, sometimes communal, made by bank voles, Myodes glareolus, which we know we have on our land.

The bank vole is the smallest of the UK’s voles (field and water being the others) and lives in woodland, hedgerows, and gardens. It has a diverse diet eating fruit, nuts and small insects, but is particularly keen on hazelnuts and blackberries. Of which there are many in the nearby tall laid hedge. They live in shallow burrows, but may also make grassy, round nests above ground, and sometimes over winter will share these with other voles, probably to aid heat retention. They have three or four litters a year, each with three to five young and don’t hibernate.

Or the much less common Hazel dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius.

This is a small mammal with a body of only 6–9cm with a feathery tail of similar length. They weigh no more than 40g and are at their heaviest just before hibernation. They usually have just one litter a year, and eat a mainly vegetarian diet of nuts, seeds and berries, though will take items like caterpillars when available. They are the only species of British rodent to hibernate, often for many months, after first weaving a nest of leaves, about tennis ball sized, usually at ground level in holes in trees or in tussocky vegetation just above the ground.

Dormice prefer as habitat the new growth of woody vegetation that arises after woodland management such as coppicing, ride widening, thinning or glade creation. In the UK, they tend to favour old coppice woodland but they’re also found in scrubland, old hedgerows and sometimes conifer plantations. They’re now confined predominantly to southern England and Wales, in a patchy distribution.

Or finally the Harvest mouse, Micromys minutus:

Harvest mice are the smallest rodents in Europe. Their body length is only about 5-8 cms, plus a 5 cm long tail. They live in tall grass, brushwood, undergrowth, grain and reed fields. They are good climbers, avoiding the ground as much as possible. Nests are made by splitting live blades of grass and rubbing them into a kind of ball. Harvest mice are mostly active at night. They eat seeds, berries, fruit and shoots of grass, as well as mushrooms, moss, plant roots and insects.

From the attached maps from the NBN Wales atlas for these different species, you can see that only the Hazel Dormouse has ever been recorded before in this part of Wales. BUT the Harvest Mouse is known to use Molinia tussocks as protection for their nest building sites.

There’s a useful guide to nest identification in this PDF, with example photographs of nests, produced by the mammal society. Unfortunately the nests I found don’t tick all the right descriptive boxes for any of the 3 species, although after discovering it was safe to remove them at this time of the year since they’ll be unoccupied now, I did find a small entrance hole on the larger Molinia formed nest.

Thanks to a contact made through the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, I’ve been in touch with a fairly local conservation officer, who says he’s happy to come and complete a survey of the field in the autumn to try to determine what species they might be. It would be a thrill if they were of one of the rarer species, but in any event it’s yet another example of the wonderful survival strategies that our local wildlife uses to carve out their own lives, unseen, while sharing this land with us.

We had a phone call yesterday morning from Kath, the director of the film made at Gelli on the last day of March, letting us know that it’s definitely due for transmission on Episode 6 of BBC2 Gardener’s World this Good Friday (although as yet there seems to be no mention of it on their PR). It seems the series producers decided that the combination of gorgeous young lambs, lovely daffodils and a scruffy yokel was ideal for an Easter programme.

The final job for me was to complete a series of short ‘read’ transcripts of text I’d been sent by email from Kath to provide linking speech to scenes where Kath hadn’t quite managed to coax me into saying the right words on camera to make the storyline flow properly. What a fiendishly difficult job she has to complete – in very little time – a complete mini-feature film/documentary.

Thanks to Fiona knowing how to both record and send away these clips, they were apparently edited in to the final film yesterday, just-in-time. Anyone watching the show will have the challenge of working out which short pieces of text these are – I found it surprisingly hard as a non-actor to speak into a phone normally, as one would with ordinary speech, when one’s actually reading lines off a page in front of you.

However, I did have confidence that such phone recorded words could be made to blend in seamlessly, after remembering the story of Chrissie Hynde’s excellent lockdown album, made with guitarist James Walbourne, of Bob Dylan cover songs. (Rather appropriately titled – as you’ll see later “Standing in the Doorway”.)

She was remote to the guitarist and simply sang the lyrics into her iPhone, Walbourne recorded the guitars elsewhere and they were stitched together by a producer in mid-Wales – where a whole series of accompanying videos were made. The track I’ve chosen, below, is a good example of their style, and as with the album title, seemed weirdly appropriate for what follows shortly. I even love the selected screen capture still image!

Doesn’t the video seem very ‘of its time’ too?

It was a delight to welcome our younger son, his wife and their 6 children last week for 3 nights. For maybe the first time at Gelli at this time of the year, they all enjoyed days of cloudless blue skies, and a dry landscape. Wonderful both for outside games, and in the case of three of the younger girls, a desire to be present and interact with the ewes and lambs at their twice daily feeding sessions. The sheep were very well behaved, and I think all the kids were able to tickle somebody’s chin, a huge complement to our benign flock. (Thanks to Fiona for this image).

The weather also meant perfect conditions for Fiona to set out her annual mini Easter egg and bunny hunt.

Which was enjoyed by all, though as usual the equally shared divvied out finds were saved for their return car journey, so we escaped any untoward behavioural issues from too much sugar or chocolate.

Two weeks after I wrote about Lennox and Lewis, the twin ram lambs and their assisted arrival, I realised how curious it was for me as gardener/smallholder to make such a big claim about having saved lives. It came to mind as, for the first time in weeks, I needed to mow the grass, in advance of anticipated rain.

I’ve never noticed it before, but I must have decapitated at least 5 distinctive broad cotyledon beech seedlings sprouting from the mossy croquet lawn. As I trundled around with the small machine, I reflected on how much gardening involves regular manual herbicidal destruction, otherwise known as weeding. Deliberately destroying unwanted plants to better maintain control over those cultivated plants one chooses to allow into the confines of the garden. Not much chance for a Digambara Jain monk ever being a gardener, I guess. Their first great vow being “Ahimsa – To injure no living being by action or thought”.

But even the rash confidence of ‘saving’ the lambs at birth seemed to have been premature this last weekend, when early in the afternoon a crisis surfaced. After another lamb had managed to squeeze under a gate and was bleating incessantly and eventually attracting both his mother and us, we headed down the hill to the lower meadow. And having re-united lamb and ewe, then spotted a suddenly very sick-looking Lewis.

Easy to catch with our walking stick-come-crook, he was barely able to stand, dyspnoeic (great difficulty in breathing) and floppy. We were both very worried about him. His ewe, Halloon, was beginning to ignore him, and with our joint experience of terminally ill animals, he looked like he already had 3 feet in the grave. All the other sheep looked fine. His illness was a complete mystery to me on a warm, but not hot, sunny day after a prolonged dry and sunny spell.

Could it have been heatstroke – this seemed very unlikely, since it wasn’t that hot. Could he have ingested a toxic plant? We do have the young leaves of hemlock water-dropwort, Oenanthe crocata, emerging in a few places along the stream but these have always been ignored (sensibly) by our sheep in the past. I try to remove the plants, but it’s a hopeless task with more seeds washed down and germinating along the stream margins each year. Or could it have been a respiratory infection, maybe following on from his delivery inside, though this is now some way in the past. Or even linked to a lungworm, Haemonchus contortus, infestation (I can still picture our tall parasitology lecturer discussing this subject, and his research interest in this field, 50 years ago). But this would be a very young lamb to experience such a problem – the lambs need to be ingesting sufficient grass contaminated with the worm’s eggs, to cause a significant issue. Or maybe it was triggered by some other unobserved issue.

The sort of speculation that haunts this ex-small animal vet. in situations like this. Where basic first principles dictate swift responses, and with the usually vain hope that any intervention might tip the tilting scales in favour of the ‘alive’ position.

We gave him a jab of antibiotic in case there was any element of respiratory infection and went to bed that evening fearing we’d be a lamb short in the morning, or indeed find a dead body. Treatment options with young lambs are always limited. That’s tough, but it’s how it is.

I woke and was downstairs by 5.45 am on yet another glorious April morning, and opened the front door. This was the scene – the blackbird often sits on the top of the totem pole of a dead spruce tree, but rarely sings like this at dawn, in such a sustained way. More usually he just sits and watches the sunrise. We’d toyed with the idea of removing this totem after Storm Darragh ripped away its covering ivy, rose and clematis. It sticks out like a sore, bare thumb, but woodpeckers love it, and so do birds, particularly blackbirds, as a high up song post

On this still, clear morning, with the hint of the first frontal cloud easing in from the West which heralded, at last, a change in the weather, there was no stopping him. I simply set up the camera, mic and tripod inside the hall of the house with the door open, and filmed his performance.

Standing in the Doorway.

It was almost as though the bird was singing a song into the valley, maybe a lullaby, maybe a lament, for Lewis. It was a very special moment for me.

The good news, is that against all expectations, Lewis was still alive and a little brighter when I checked on the sheep later that same morning. Another day later, and you’d struggle to tell which of the twins he was – he appears almost clinically normal, though still made a few strange open mouth/nose movements a little like a flehmen response, but atypical of rams sniffing the air for ewes in oestrous.

Let’s hope that Lewis continues his recovery, and who knows, maybe this beautiful dawn blackbird’s song, exquisitely phrased and varied, helped him turn the corner.

In due course I wrote this short piece about my reflections.

Blackbird Lament

If you could choose a dawn to die

Would it be this?

On dew-soaked grass, ‘neath blood-stained sky.

Totem blackbird, serenades sent.

Lullabies, or phrased lament?

If you could choose a week to die,

Would it be this?

With cloudless views and Holly Blues

Dog Violets sipped by Orange-tips,

First early drones prepare to fly

No hint of rain, no weather flips.

Rare April this, frenetic bliss

Wagtails feign, while poets dance.

Ewes are dagged; logs cut, split, stacked.

Foiled eggs laid early, left to chance.

Bantam, Pipit, Yellow Xit.

Unknown calamity crash-hits our ropes.

No age, no time for senile woes

Dyspnoeic gasping, limp, laid low

An early jab, no prayers, vain hopes.

You rest, we fret, while Paschal moon’s

Cloud-cloaked. Night passes, far too slow.

The weather breaks, damp new day’s grey,

Blackbird still sings, will Lewis play?

Gambol and frisk beside the stream,

Amaze, still charm our Lenten scene?

When this cold world has done with us,

Are we allowed to choose our time?

Or leave, too soon, unfinished lines.

13/04/2025

Little of my work in writing, or even around the garden is truly original, I suspect. Does that matter? Not to me, it’s a process of reduction or distillation of events which I find stimulating and upbeat – when it passes Fiona’s critical evaluation!

In this poem I hint at another phone conversation I’d had with Kath, the director, last Friday, the day before we found Lewis, in which she’d first mentioned more definitely that barring “a calamity” the film should be broadcast on Good Friday. I remember replying that in today’s world, (and thinking of the memorable Rumsfeld quote about “unknown unknowns”) there were indeed always “unknown” calamities just waiting to trip one up.

The second influence on the last verse was a minimally tweaked line from the last track on the new collaborative Elton John/Brandi Tyler album which I mentioned in my last post. I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it whilst the family were with us, so stuck it on the CD player on Saturday night. After the first 3 tracks, which were a little tricky for me on first listening, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I was enjoying it.

Until I woke up. Having fallen asleep before the last 3 tracks were played. This has NEVER happened to me before with a CD, let alone a new one, and doesn’t reflect on the music. It wasn’t even all that late. It did, however, confirm how completely exhausted I was feeling after recent weeks. So it was the following day, as I started to think about writing this poem, that I mused on the valedictory lyrics which Bernie Taupin had penned for Elton, and which had him sobbing uncontrollably in the recording studio, (for the first time ever in his career), when he sat in front of the piano after composing some music to fit them to – as he’s been doing for decades.

I really love what, as a seriously visually impaired 77 year old, he’s achieved with this pared back song, and somehow it seemed to tie in with my state of mind when writing this poem. Maybe it’s something for those of a certain age, but I don’t think so.

Here’s how he and Brandi describe what happened, on the Howard Stern show recently (remember him?)

So there you have it. And here’s the whole track, with its first-take instrumental ‘outro’ at the end of the song. “When This Old World Is Done With Me”.

Now consider buying the album! “Who Believes in Angels”.

The final mammal featured in the title now appears briefly. And yet another ‘sighting’ to add to my long list consequent to me nipping out in light drizzle after dark to pick up the pee can. The large form heading surprisingly quickly up the very steep bank behind the house confused me for a while. It was only when I switched on my Beanie LED, I realised it was a hedgehog. Which obligingly froze as I nipped inside, picked up the camera and popped up the flash. Probably a good night for slugging, after such a long dry spell.

We’re passed peak daffodil flowering now, but have many still due to open, and quite a lot will make it through to the end of the month, despite all the sunshine, since temperatures have been on the cool side, generally. Some knowns, unknowns and uncertains in this list. Does this matter? Not really, they’re nearly all lovely.

Uncertain

‘Cool Crystal’

‘Yellow Xit’

‘Bantam’

‘Sabrosa’

‘Tresamble’

‘Unknown’

Unknown

Uncertain

And here’s a short video I filmed on 2 days in the week after the BBC crew visited us, so that I have my own record of the fabulous late afternoon light and the way it wonderfully illuminates these flowers growing on an East-facing slope, as they were tossed about in the wind, which was much stronger than when they filmed. Thank goodness they picked the day they did.