Looking for stag beetles I found instead…

Posted on by kylienorman

Shipley glen is shrouded in mist as I make my start, for last night’s rains are already burning off under a sun beating to get through the lingering cloud. It could go either way, I think, but cavalierly shuck the idea of a rain coat like a too-cautious skin. Anyway, I’m aiming for cover: for nature’s putting-away and hiding place, the woods. The leaves will umbrella me if needed. I am all eyes down, for I have about me an express purpose today: today I will search out the liquorice-lacquered stag beetle – Scarabaeoidea – and like a child I of course hope to find the male of the species with its cumbersome and fearsome looking antlers. Pincers I’d always thought them; nippers; doers of harm and my soft brain had counselled caution. Not to go near, not to like, not to find it beautiful to carry your weapon of defence so outward and obvious. All its perfections on its head. Once, I had seen one outside my first remembered home traffic with a spider. And lose. It was dragged down a sewer cover in the end to an undisclosed but entirely known fate. I must have been little for all my memory is very close to the ground of that little battle.

No remarker of hawthorn blossom today I – and just as well for it’s nearly all over now; no noticer of the almost-adult goslings on their glides. The canal a brown be-petaled stillness beside me. Too open to the sky and moving feet, bike tyre and push-chair wheel here. But still I am studious at the sides of the path looking for its jet-black armour. It’s a kind of discipline, to hold the image in the mind’s eye – a glint of black making ponderous passage through last year’s leaves – and hope that by omnipotence of thought you’ll somehow conjure it to shuffling life. Any black thing is a tantalising promise for just a second until the eye discovers it as something else. More often than not the intrusions are dog litter, careless cast-offs by the way. There’s a claustrophobia in looking down into undergrowth so long and I want to turn up the face, stretch the back, and see the birds who are trilling their songs, but as I said this is a discipline and just my luck if I looked up and lost the sight of this click-carapaced wanderer. It’s a slow kind of walking that’s required in swervy zigs and zags. Were I a snail, I’d have limed the path in silver traces back and forth by now. But I don’t really expect him to show himself here: I’m waiting on Hirst Wood for my prize viewing.

There’s a close relief as I get under the canopy of the first few trees and breathe deep the mulchy, pulpy air. It’s thick and heavy under here: humid invisible presences like walls you walk through under the densest of the trees. The wood trying to air itself after the rain. And I should have thought about the mud as my impractical shoes sink and grapple. I tussle with a problem here which I had not thought to have – there is leaf mould in every direction of course so where best to look for the bashful beetles? There’s a loggery up ahead. That might yield something. But I look into all nature’s hidey-holes along the way, just in case, for these are the refuges I know will keep them: close, pent, safe for a secret mating. Into bored out tree trunks – made shells of their former selves by wood worm; under logs wet with last night’s rain. And all the while a chorus of loud dripping going on about me as the leaves shed the last drops of wet in heavy globes. At the stands of nettles and brambles I am defeated – beware all ye who enter here. A spiteful thought: that will of course be where they are hiding.

At the loggery I turn up the usual suspects under the smallest logs: woodlice almost made primordial in their see-through armour that the dark has not trained to colour; some worms wriggle about; and no doubt smaller things than I can see. I stand up and still disappointment takes me for a moment – and then in the periphery of my eye, a rustle of leaves. I look down in almost-welling hope and there’s a flash of grey-brown soft down. No stag beetle but something else. Tiny, delicate, pointy-nosed little fidgeter dives out from under the log to pull at leaves. Like a mouse, but not. The name won’t come, but I’m struck by an almost-recognition on the tip of the memory – something moley, casting me back to a Wind in the Willows or Farthing Wood childhood parody. That sooty brown coat, that whiskered sharp nose, the hiding eyes. Two of them now! I am so still beside the fallen tree limbs and other ‘whack’ that they’re safe enough to venture a sniff from out beneath the log and tease leaves back under with them. One look is to imagine one in my palm: its lightness, its smooth fur, the tiny bones, absorbing all the world – food, mate, danger – through its uplifted tapering snout.

It was, I later learned, a common shrew: sorex araneus. A whole realm of signification haunts this innocent snuffler. Wayward women we are told need taming: wives who berate, scold and prate at husbands worn down into the ground by it. How did you, little burrower, get weighed down by all this angst? Is it the pointy nose that struck a chord? Looking as though it would be in at everyone’s business: poking, prodding; nagging, attacking. But all I see is a dainty little rummager. Furtive flashes from the safety of the logs into the cool leaf mould show you to be indifferent to human mythologies. I stand and observe you in petrified stillness for a while lest I disturb. Then – nothing. You’ve hunkered down in your lair, I assume, but I still linger as if my reverent quiet will bring you out again. But no, no more. Don’t be greedy.

‘Beshrew me’ uttered in the antique sense was to call a curse down on oneself. But I felt the opposite on this day where I went out to see stag beetles and instead caught darting glimpses of shrews. Like so many of life’s adventures, misbegun; but in the slick-treed wood, errant hope got this exchange.

Welcoming in a Spring

Posted on by kylienorman

The day would be good for walking I decide and once decided it becomes – for me at least – a single pressing thought, almost as though it had a life of its own: like a spell or an almost child tugging on your arm and dragging you towards the front door. Itchy soles of feet; palms waiting to clutch at the outdoors air; heart full as an egg to see all nature’s sudden surprises. When this mood is upon me, I am restless to anything else and the walk needles itself into my consciousness with the insistent question when, when, when? Nothing worse than to ignore the call; depression and doldrums the penalty. When walk calls, the feet must fall in. I am learning it is something to protect from the tyrannies of household chores and work. I curate my walks now: make a little space for one every week, bottle them up like scent, and stow the little treasures away to sometimes take out, carefully handle and fix in the memory.

Today the sun has got itself up pretty well into the bluest of skies and there’s a warm thickness to the air that promises dry ground underfoot and a slow sluggish canal or river to walk by. I am elated stepping out of my front door, padding along the neat little same-and-yet-not-same Saltaire streets, with a fondness for everyone whom I pass because we are all complicit in this wonderful warm May day together – in the determination to be out of doors and to soak sun into skin. And yet I do not know exactly which path I will take – canal to Hirst Wood, the Nook Lane to Nowhere, or the river path? I let my booted feet decide as they trip along by the canal, wafting and wefting and warping the path’s dust about me like a chalky cover-all. I know each path a little more with each week – the goodies to look out for: the hawthorn in prickly blossom; the fluff-feathered goslings; the sweeps of bluebells. All lie before me, known stops along the way, and my feet go with the slow haste of anticipated joy and savouring delay.

I retrace a bit – why not? The stone squeeze by the canal where you go down to the river path almost makes it seem a secret. You slip off into it as if the very first to make this delicious discovery. The stones lip my boots as I go, jostle my steps as they pebble the path, and over all the thrushes, blackbirds and crows fly and dip their shrewd wings like greetings. Thin nasal siren of a bee alarms for just a moment as it brushes past and is quickly gone upstream. Over the bridge, over the river, a flicker of dapple tricks down through the branches from the sky and dances over the path to web the way with white. This – as I expand my lungs to take in the arid, laden air – this! is nature’s way to welcome in a spring.

Round the corner and out of nowhere the downy globes of dandelion heads emerge to bob and nod – a clutch of waiting wishes to bless you on your way. The ground dips down and rushes me on till, level with the river, feet plant into grassy banks to muse at the overgrown round tower of the derelicted bridge. Through the field brighter than the brightest green quilt, I come to its edge and seam where bees are at work shuttling in and out of one another’s way in a strange furious dance and play. A gurgle of stream is crossed, its rocky bed water-slaked and mossed. Down by the boat club where swallows dip and follow, another stream. Temptation to bathe hot swollen feet, but I retreat with the coward thought, someone might appear!

Whoever knows what makes us look up to see the secret thing so many others miss? Today’s was this: a heron across the way, stealthy silent stalker in the river’s languid pull; strange snaking neck and big gawky wings. All the herons I have never seen were because I was not watching, but now my attentiveness connives to bring you to life, careful flutterer, weaving in between the weeds. I wonder about your steady step as you reveal your grey again. This is a slow dance to draw a minnow out. I would not disturb your subtlety for all the world. Sudden as an arrow or the end of a song, you’re gone. The mallards with their young are busy on their glides and do not mind the dark tickle of baby minnows under-web whose embryonic selves, flickering almost by accident with the current, gather in dense translucencies: something the river keeps but cannot hold for long. A robin a flash of red song on a lichen-laced branch, no sooner spied than it flies.

I clamber up the ridge under a parasol of sun-blasted green and the tree branches dip low in spite of me. Whitened and jewel-like in the sun, clouds of flies startle as I push on – you see them hanging over the river; great shifting billows preside there and trap the light. Sharp shaft of wild garlic up the nose calls the gaze downward to a maze of white constellated stars. Beside me I pass trees sleeved with ivy until they are covered with it: trefoil leaves close as clothes. The bluebells up the bank – straight purple blazons – sing out their short lives as they renew and rejuvenate the woods. And I burst with it too – my whole being alive with this becoming, this husk-splitting on-rush of life.

At last I am but a willing receptacle for precious impressions: a pigeon as heavy and cumbersome in flight as its image to get down. The lace of the cow-parsley heads – finer than a bride’s veil – looking sugar-spun and gorgeous to taste. A duck landing mid-river with a skirmish of feathers. Smooth and silky in the sun, iridescency of mallard’s crown. And as my steps turn homeward, its rasp-throated call.