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Looking Out April 2021 by Melinda Appleby

The Fattening of the Buds

Gradually as spring nears the trees change. I call it the ‘fattening of the buds’ when flowers
and leaves begin to swell and break from the winter skeletons and there is less sky between
the branches. With the sudden warm weather at the end of March it seemed as though the
pulse of the land was quickening. Shirt-buttons and goose-grass sent up their spirals of leaves
through the drying mud. Now cow parsley inches up visibly in the lane. Everywhere life is
returning and with it hope.
Chiffchaffs arrived on 19 th March, tentatively tuning up in the buffeted trees. Blackcaps
followed with a short song on 29 March but now all is busy and the song is building from
wood, garden and hedge. April is a month of firsts. Our summer migrants gradually arrive –
swallows, house martin, willow warbler, whitethroat and cuckoo. The first Brimstones have
brought a splash of yellow – like daffodils in flight. Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell are
warming up and even the bats are busy in the dusk, click-clicking along the hedge and over
the pond.

The long cold winter kept toads in hibernation so our toad patrol is still out as. Just before
March ended I sat by the village pond watching stars rise and mallard paddling in pink rippled water. It was the night of the Wolf Moon. By 8pm toads were emerging purposefully
from their day-time rest. I have read that toads co-ordinate their emergence during the waxing and full moon so they arrive at their courtship sites together. Now warm days echo with their squeaky song and the deeper call of frogs. But they are in decline. Our toad patrol regularly collected 600 in a night but this year we have only found around 140 since collecting began.

April brings with it such a bounty of song. The dunnock is the first up warbling its little trill
from the top of the hedge, then blackbirds join in and a faraway thrush. Even the chaffinch
cascades its song down from the cherry whose blossom is beginning to break.

The National Trust is hoping to catch people’s imagination with an emphasis on blossom this
spring. Taking inspiration from the Japanese celebrations (Hanami), the Trust has launched a
website for people to record their first sight of blossom. And blossom circles are being
planted to create green spaces in towns and provide uplifting sights and smells. The Trust
quotes Professor Richardson from Derby University who said that ‘spending a few moments
looking at and enjoying blossom can have a surprising impact on feelings of wellbeing.’

Blossom provides a lifeline for bees and butterflies as they emerge and we have had queen
bumblebees of several different species already out foraging – early bumblebee, buff-tailed
bumble bee and red tailed bumblebee like little drones humming into sight over early flowers:

Look, look, a bee, big as my thumb
see her work the lavender flowers,
a buzz so deep it’s your teddy bear’s
growl. She’s striped black and yellow
with her buff bottom. And here small
black bears, bees with red bottoms…
From Looking at Bees by Melinda Appleby

April is a month to look forward, to see detail as it changes daily, to take hope and creativity
from the arrival of colour and song in our environment. Perhaps one of the most loved and
joyful April poems sums it up: – Home Thoughts from Abroad by Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

Famous Five Birds – Eights years on

‘One of the most imaginative and innovative projects ever launched in East Anglia’

so said the East Anglian Daily Times describing  Waveney & Blyth Arts 2013 project – The Famous Five Birds.

Featuring five iconic birds from the region – barn owl, bittern, bearded tit, marsh harrier and nightingale – the project took birds into local schools and celebrated our association with them through poetry and song.

With our focus on a creative response to the environment, this project recognised the role of birds as an indicator of environmental health. To help young people become more aware we joined forces with the RSPB, Suffolk Wildlife Trust and Norfolk & Suffolk Biodiversity Partnerships, and took a team made up of bird experts Steve & Kathy Piotrowski, RSPB poet Matt Howard, and Nutmeg Puppet Company’s Meg Amsden into local schools. These sessions were the starting point for a fabulous children’s entertainment event.

Hosted by the eccentric Bernard the Birder (played by Greg Hanson) these feature:

• Nutmeg Puppet Company’s beautiful shadow puppet show, with music by Nathan Williamson
• fabulous film and theatrical bird impressions
• chances to do a quirky quiz, make musical bird calls, and sing a special song about the fab five.

We all know that barn owls screech and nightingales sing – but what sound does a bittern make? What is so special about marsh harriers? And do bearded tits really have beards?

In addition to work with schools the project offered a walk along the river Blyth with Natural England staff,  a chance to spot one or more of the featured five and listen to poems dedicated to each bird by poet Matt Howard.

And our regular Arts & Eats lunch introduced ceramicist and printmaker Georgina Warne talking on: Art, Life and Birds. The lunch was held at the Raveningham Centre which hosted an exhibition of two and three-dimensional work featuring British birds. The exhibition, curated by Sarah Cannell, celebrates the beauty, diversity and appeal of our feathered friends.

In support of the project I created a ‘fact file’ on each species and wrote some short descriptive passages about discovering the birds in the two river valleys.

Here is an extract of that work:

“I am in the Waveney valley, a thin thread of a river that winds from its source at Redgrave Fen down through marsh, meadow and woodland via Carlton Marshes and Breydon Water and out to the North Sea. In winter, the trees are thin, withdrawn, shaking out the moss-lined cups and twiggy platforms of last summer’s nests. Spent seed heads of valerian and meadowsweet hang over the river wall; only the reeds remain standing.

Now, looking out across this January fen, I see a marsh harrier, quartering the embankment, turning and skimming low. A female, her cream head marking her out, alert, hunting. I watch her lift higher and return along the river. I remember harriers from my childhood. They returned year after year to the coastal marsh, using some salt weary trees as lookouts. Their population has since increased and they breed in river valleys and on the coast in eastern England. She has found her prey and drops out of sight. The wind ruffles through the reeds again, plays with a scatter of leaves, like a ghost passing through. And like ghosts, my memories of those childhood marshes, recall other birds.

Where now is the bittern – the reedbed dweller, that barred and streaked secretive bird that is more often heard than seen.  Its call, described as booming, penetrates through the reed stalks like a novice learning to play a difficult bassoon. I thought it more like the noise we made blowing across the top of milk bottles. They are difficult to spot as they sneak in and out of marsh pools hunting fish and eels, their plumage a tapestry of broken, reed stems and dark shadows. Sadly bitterns have disappeared from so many places where they used to breed. They are ghosts from my childhood.”

This early project set the tone for Waveney & Blyth Arts’ innovative approach to arts and the environment and showed how we could draw in partners, experts and volunteers to create something magical, informative and appealing. Other projects were to follow in the years after.

Melinda Appleby

A summary of the project and highlights from the performances can be seen here:

and the Nutmeg Puppet Theatre film is here:

Famous Five Birds

Sample of Famous Five Facts

Marsh Harrier – Circus aeruginosus

Sometimes called bald buzzard, bog glebe, dunpickle, harpy.

Population and distribution

A reedbed specialist, the marsh harrier’s population has fluctuated particularly in response to persecution by game keepers. A few hung on in Norfolk but their recovery as a breeding bird was set back again by the 1970s use of organo-chlorine pesticides.  The creation of reedbeds in Suffolk, after wartime flooding, helped provide a suitable habitat to aid their recovery.

Habits/food

Harriers fly low across the ground, with steady flappy wing beats between glides; when they stop beating their wings they hold them in a characteristic V shape. They can be seen pursuit flying across marshes in April when they are selecting nest sites. They may perch on a prominent tall dead branch.

Occasionally their spectacular aerial food passes can be seen. The female rises from the nest before the male is above it; she turns over, upside down and catches food as he drops it.

Bittern Botaurus stellaris

Local names:  gladden, boomer, bull o’ the bog, butter bump, buttle, (Norfolk) night raven, bog drum.

News snippet

In the 1963 severe winter, bitterns were starving and weak birds were picked up and brought to Minsmere to recover.  One of the birds was found, bemused with hunger and fatigue, as it stood by a queue of people at a bus stop in a London suburb.

Population and distribution

Rare and declining except where protected in nature reserves, as many as 85% of those breeding may be on nature reserves. By about 1886 the bittern was extinct as a breeding bird but recolonisation took place in Norfolk in the early 1900s.

Bearded Reedling

After the severe winter of 1947, there were thought to be only a few pairs surviving. Their recovery began in the 1960s believed to be triggered by populations moving across from the Netherlands.

Some 5-600 pairs breed in the UK. They are particularly associated with the Norfolk Broads where they are known by the local name, reed-pheasant. They can also be seen along the lower reaches of the Waveney Valley where there are good stand of reeds such a Carlton Marshes, a Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve.

 

Three Hares Running

Morning walks cheer us

Hares run unhindered in fields

We are one with nature now

 

Pink sun on silver frost. I see the hares. Out of the oilseed rape, across the ditch, onto the plough. Three hares running, running not crouching in the tramlines or jinking erratically for cover. It lifts the spirits this early morning race. Tugged by sap rising, March hares put life into empty fields. Today they own the landscape. They remind me of the symbol of three hares, the mystical motifs found in Devon churches. Three hares each with two ears but only three ears between them.**

This year I saw them in February and some mornings I would catch them in a dance of eight or nine running and circling. They have woven their magic after a full moon night. Give them space to run and a place to shelter. Three hares running.

It is March at last and after a long winter of flood, snow, frost and lockdown we search for signs of spring. There is warmth in the sun when it appears and the longer days mean that birds are on the move. Winter has stripped the countryside bare. The trees are shrivelled by cold winds and frost, branches snapped, last leaves tossed to the fields. Gales felled hedgerow trees tumbled in a sprawl of ivy. Dried tufts of grasses are flattened by the wind, shrink wrapped against field edges.

This is the ‘Hungry Gap’ – the end of winter when last year’s food reserves are at their lowest but there is still little growth to provide new seeds and insects have yet to emerge.  The Hungry Gap was named by gardeners for this time of year, when all that was left on the allotment were a few cabbages, potatoes and carrots. The winter diet was uninspiring and yet the new crops were only just being set and a long way from providing food.

The yellowhammers have been here most mornings, their cheery song bursting from the hawthorn bushes, a splash of citron caught in first light. There are usually eight foraging on aniseed coated seed that spills from the bird feeders. No reed buntings or tree sparrows now – just two species that have been rubbed out of our landscape.

But we look for signs of hope and March brings one of the first of the spring migrations. On warm moist nights the toads are moving. I organise the toad rota in the village and each night someone goes out to rescue toads who are setting off across the road for their amorous tryst in the village pond.

Toads use the lunar cycle to co-ordinate their gatherings, ensuring that enough males and females come together at the same time. They arrive at the breeding sites, mate and spawn around the full Moon. This maximises their breeding success and reduces the odds of being eaten. But they also need night-time temperatures to be above 5 or 6 degrees.

There is a magic about toad collecting. We drag ourselves away from the fire, take buckets and torches and walk up to the green. A Little Owl calls its mournful whoooo. Pigeons clatter, disturbed from their roost. Dusk falls. The air is quiet. Then a squeaking call from the ditch. Toads emerge, tentative, a face peering from grass verge, venturing onto the road, heading for water.  For an hour we follow a route round the pond and down the side roads from where toads are emerging in ones and twos. Some are already paired up. ‘The bucket dating agency’ one of my patrollers says.

We count males and females, frogs, newts. Some nights we collect hundreds and remove those we didn’t manage to save from passing cars. Gently they are released into the rippled depths of the pond. The torch spotlights them. Some make off, strong kicking back legs, needing to make up for lost time. Some hang there, floating, back legs splayed, remembering the feel of water after a winter in earth and wood.

There is much to enjoy about the coming of spring, the feeling of release as the cold and the dark lose their grip on the countryside. Armed with camera, notebook and pen I try to capture the sights and sounds, smells and tastes of March.

**The story of the search for the three hares motif is told in a book published in 2016 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2082809-the-three-hares-motif-is-an-ancient-mystery-for-our-times/

Figure 1 European Hare: Piet Munsterman

Recollections of some of Waveney & Blyth Arts’ projects in the last ten years

Yes there will be a time when we can run events, open galleries and studios, join walks and workshops. Until then – let’s remind ourselves of some of the amazing activities that W&BA has created over the last ten years.

What better way to start than Finding Paradise. Devised by Simon Raven this trail of artworks, each portraying a letter from the word Paradise, was laid out along the two river valleys in 2015. It celebrated the landscape of the Waveney and Blyth valleys and the creative work of some of our members.

Let’s reprieve the Paradise Pilgrim who set out that summer to find the letters hosted by arts venues. Here are some extracts from the slightly tongue-in-cheek diary:

One August day I set off in pursuit of capital A. This required Paradise Pilgrim to leave the gentle headwaters of the Waveney and, like an otter in search of new territory, head cross country through villages such as Metfield and Linstead. In less than an hour I arrived in Halesworth to start my search. The Cut, Halesworth’s arts centre and theatre, is welcoming all sorts of boffins on the day I arrive. Part of its science café season, the foyer is full of displays about antibiotics, soil, compost and the value of eating broccoli. Having tried broccoli soup, explored renewable energy options and tasted tea and carrot cake, I finally tracked down capital A and was told that I was not the first person to come looking. You could say that by now ‘I was hooked’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1 Capital A at The Cut

After successfully tracking down the E, I could no longer be chasing the tail of paradise but set off in search of dragons. As dragons begin with D and so does Diss, it was a simple decision to find Designer Makers in the Heritage Triangle, as this part of Diss has become known. Stepping across the threshold, there were old friends from Diss Corn Hall and, as in all good quests, a guide came to our aid – print maker Annette Rolston. Annette showed us round the tardis like interior. There were necklaces, knitted goods, stained glass, mosaics, prints, finely crafted clothes and willow baskets. It was a true emporium of artistic talent. The whole concept of Designer Makers is that not only do people work together, making unique and beautiful objects, but the public can come and buy direct from the makers and see how the pieces are made.

But what about the dragon? It truly epitomises the spirit of Designer Makers; several of the artists contributed to its design and construction and there it was, coiled, sleeping, suspended on a wall.

Figure 2 D at Designer Makers

I am nearing the halfway mark on the Paradise Trail which takes me away from our market towns to a village easily bypassed on the A143 – Brockdish. I am killing two birds with one stone for not only is Brockdish playing host to Paradise ‘I’, it is the venue for August’s Arts and Eats. The Old Kings Head, a fourteenth century pub at the centre of the village, was bought last year by brother and sister, Jonathan Townley and Louise Lees. After complete refurbishment it now offers not only the traditional bar and restaurant but a café serving cakes and cappuccino – always a hit with Paradise Pilgrim, who has been known to navigate the county on the basis of the best coffee shops. Joined by Jonathan’s wife Vicky, an art teacher, the pub now offers an art gallery and a venue for some creative activities.

It was not difficult to locate I, startling, vivid, well-padded and set amongst paintings, not too far from the cakes!

Figure 3 I in The Kings Head, Brockdish

I found an opportunity to track down P in Bungay. It was the Doggerland workshop – Words on the Edge – that lured me this far along the Waveney. Venturing further down this valley into the little market town, home of the Fisher Theatre, I indeed felt like a fisherman. I was hoping to catch P hooked up in the Gallery upstairs or hanging above the coffee machine. Imagine Pilgrim’s own slough of despond on discovering that the theatre is closed on Sundays. The P went unstamped.

And now comes the sad conclusion – I can see no way down the Waveney and Blyth rivers before the trail ends on 30^th September (2015). Paradise Pilgrim has therefore drawn the search to a close and admits to only collecting an IDEA of PARADISE.

Figure 4 Only an Idea of Paradise

But for all pilgrims there remains one opportunity to see all the letters in a row. They are on display in the bar of the Swan Hotel, Harleston.

Figure 5  The Paradise letters assembled

CREDITS

Trail devised by Simon Raven

Artists:

P          Malcolm Cudmore on behalf of Black Dog Arts, Bungay

a          Paul Osbone of Papershaker, Great Yarmouth

R          Caroline Reeder and members of Lowestoft Arts Group

A          Members of Inspired by Becker Art Society, Wenhaston

D          Dragonmakers@21, members of Designer Makers @ 21, Diss

I           Lin Patterson on behalf of Harleston & Waveney Art Trail

S          Ron Fuller on behalf of Craftco, Southwold

e          Members of Eye Arts Guild

Paradise Pilgrim text and photographs – Melinda Appleby