Country diary: Signs of summer are … here somewhere
The cricket field has been freshly mown and marked, but it doesn’t feel like summer. It feels like late March or early April, those cool just-spring days of greentops and low bounce. There are no cricketers out there now – just birds, turning over the cuttings in search of breakfast. Starlings at midwicket, crows at slip. A magpie on the long-leg boundary. A song thrush works for a worm on the cut strip, just short of a length.
Across the lane from the cricket field there’s a community nature reserve, Hirst Wood, and a shallow pond fringed with short reeds. The mood here is sullen. Adolescent tadpoles, each a heavy-bodied Cooper Black comma, sulk on the silt bed. The pond skaters move stiffly among the lily pads. A newt treads water in a lily shadow – and then there’s a sudden surge of motion, and a freshwater leech comes swimming across a shaft of daylight.
It’s khaki green – so empty of blood, for now – and a good two or three inches in length. It ripples its long, flat body in a sort of swimming shudder to propel itself through the water. Leeches are wolfish predators. I think this one’s a duck leech, Protoclepsis tesselata, and a pretty big one at that. They like to anchor themselves inside the throats of ducks and other waterbirds to feed. No ducks here today, though – only a wren yelling in a flowering elder, and the grey reflections of wood pigeons passing overhead.
Weeds are enjoying the weather. Forests of groundsel and wild camomile have risen from the angles of walls and pavements. Wild camomile, a long-naturalised immigrant from the US, is also known as pineappleweed. I squidge a flower between my fingers to remind myself why (much as when we come across the whiff of fresh coconut among gorse bushes, the pineapple zing of a wild camomile flower is like a microdose of sunshine).
Before I move on, I relocate an idling snail from the pavement to the grass verge. I stepped on one on our back steps yesterday. A small repayment.
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