Stories of the sun, p.6
Stories of the Sun, page 6
March or September makes the perfect time of year to try a time detox, as we have near enough equal day and night, giving you a strong anchor for where you are in the day.
Most of us will have lived within the construct of time for the entirety of our lives, so you might find that your routine does not differ particularly, especially as I am suggesting you try this exercise over a relatively short period and that you don’t confine yourself to a bunker with no natural light.
You will have the daylight to guide you and perhaps social cues from others, but you may still be surprised by how freeing it feels not to worry about what time it is and simply to eat when you are hungry and sleep when you are tired.
Try to find a day or weekend when you have no commitments, appointments or work. In preindent-paration for your day or weekend, the night before, cover all the clocks and timepieces in your house. Turn your morning alarm off, if you have one set, and place your watch in a cupboard. Don’t forget your mobile phone too, as that also has a time on it. So you don’t miss anything, you could spend some time the day before noting where you usually look for the time and making sure these places and timepieces are covered or turned off.
You don’t have to make any plans for your time detox day(s), but if the idea of having no routine at all fills you with dread then you could simply write yourself out a list of the things you want to do during the day.
During your time detox, try to avoid technology such as the television, computers, smartphones and tablets, as they all have clocks displayed on them somewhere.
Some Ideas for Your Time Detox
Go for a nature walk, find a sit-spot and observe the comings and goings of nature. Don’t forget to take a snack and a drink with you.
Read a book from cover to cover.
Keep a journal.
Draw or paint.
Complete your chores without worrying about how long they take you.
Soak in the bath.
Track the journey of the sun across the sky and how it relates to how you are feeling during the day.
Cook a meal from scratch. Cover the time on the cooker and instead watch and smell for when the food is done rather than timing it. One proviso: don’t guess if you are cooking meat. Ensure that meat is cooked properly before eating it. Most good cookery books will tell you how to know when meat is cooked, with or without a clock.
For more information and suggestions on time detoxes, take a look at the resources I have put together via the website page that accompanies this book. You will find the web address in the introduction.
APRIL
THE HIRUNDINES RETURN
AS SOON AS I OPEN the door, a tidal wave of sound greets me. This morning has a very different feel to it. With the passing of the equinox, the days now get progressively longer until the longest day in June. The air is full of music and in the canvas of the morning it is as if you can see the crotchets and quavers, dancing across the sky, filling the air.
I can usually pick out different birds amongst the voices, from their unique calls, but my ears and brain are not used to this volume and complexity of song, and it becomes a chaotic symphony of whistles, clicks and trills. Our avian neighbours are putting on a show, staking claim to territories, deciding who will breed this spring and letting the world know they are ready for another season of chick rearing. If you haven’t heard the dawn chorus in April, in my humble opinion, you haven’t lived.
The dawn chorus is at its peak towards the end of April and through to the beginning of June. It is the order of passerines, more commonly known as songbirds, that sing at this time in the morning and they sing for all the reasons above and for a couple of other reasons too. First, at this time in the morning, the sound carries twenty times as far in the still, calm air. Second, singing comes with a risk and I am not just referring to stage fright. A bird singing loudly advertises its presence to all, friend or foe, but the crepuscular darkness of pre-dawn makes it harder for predators to see them.
Birds such as blackbirds and robins are the first to start singing, as they have the most light-sensitive eyes. In urban environments where there is a lot of light pollution, particularly neon and blue light, this can cause problems for these birds. In some large cities they have been known to sing all night. Exhausting!
So why does the bird that sings the loudest get to secure its place in the gene pool? Well, technically it’s the bird that sings the loudest and the longest. Singing uses up energy, so the bird that sings the loudest and longest is clearly the strongest and most likely to father strong chicks. Of course, it’s not just the male birds that sing at this time in the morning; the females do too, but they are much quieter.
The crescendo in this joyous ensemble is around half an hour before sunrise, which is exactly the time I stepped out the door this morning, as if called forth by their song.
In 1962, Rachel Carson famously noted the decline in birdsong in the USA. Her book Silent Spring led to changes in the law for the use of insecticides, which were not only killing insects but birds as well. However, the decline in birdsong did not stop in the 1960s.
More recently, surveys from across North America and Europe were collected to compare the chorus of birdsong on these continents over the last twenty-five years. The survey shows that there has been a long-standing decline in the variety of bird species singing. This means that with the decline and loss of songbirds, such as the song thrush, nightingales and skylarks, much of the intricate, layered nature of our soundscapes has also been lost. Researchers have found that the soundscapes of the area where you live are crucial to our sense of belonging. If our soundscapes are being eroded, what does that mean for our sense of belonging?
When I first started this project, I had the idea in my head that I would go to different places to watch the sunrise, but so far I’ve always returned to the same place, and in this case, familiarity does not breed contempt. It has instead allowed me to connect with my local non-human nature and landscape on a much deeper level. There is a huge amount of value in understanding a place well, encoding your soul with its rhythms, listening to its soundscape, knowing who your fellow biophilic neighbours are, their toings and froings and where you fit in.
A lack of connection to the land and the nature it holds can ultimately be seen as the key to many of the problems we have today. There is a disconnection with where we came from to the point where we almost forget that we need it. But spend a little time at sunrise in a nearby field, on a bench in your local green space or on the patio of your garden and you’ll find it tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you that it’s still here; just. All we have to do is reach out, embrace it and keep it safe for the next generation.
My departure from the house to walk the hill to my sit-spot is a little later than usual this morning and as I pass through the village there are some lights on in houses, perhaps because I am a here later or perhaps because people are feeling the effects of spring.
I pass the thrum of the refrigerator fans attached to the local shop; timpani to the bird’s woodwind section. The brass section joins in the form of a crow shouting accusingly, ‘You’re late!’ But I still have time to get to my spot on the hill. The sun will not be up for at least another thirty minutes.
I am walking at a brisk pace and I’m warming up quickly. It’s a grey, cloud-lined morning that insulates the earth and my winter coat and fleece-lined trousers are not as necessary as they were in February. Behind the clouds on the horizon is a pale passive strip of yellow and an equally fierce strip of orange. The sun is on its way. My unnecessary layers of winter clothes exaggerate the warmth of the morning, which dries my mouth. I can’t wait to sit at the top of the hill, drink my coffee and watch the sun make her appearance.
As I reach my sit-spot by the edge of the little copse, looking out across the meadow and the horse jumps, the orange fades and with it comes a lull in the dawn chorus. The pigeons and collared doves calm the other birds with their cooing, and the staccato of great tits and trill of the wren are now easily heard.
I can’t feel much of a breeze, but as I sit watching the sky, the cottonwool cumulus clouds tumble across it – a giant crankie show in the sky; I expect shadow puppets to appear at any minute.
Crankies are moving panoramas, scrolls wound from one turning pole to another, often in a miniature theatre-type box or frame. According to the wonderful Bronia Evers, a storyteller specialising in the use of crankies for storytelling, they date from the Victorian era but the first person to call them crankies was Peter Schumann of the Bread and Puppet Theatre established in 1967 in the USA. This term relates to the handles that turn the scroll at either end of the box.
My crankie musings are interrupted by the laugh of the local green woodpecker and the clouds, sandwich-pink streaks of glowing light between them. A new sound joins the cooing and singing; a mewing somewhere between a cat and a baby crying.
I look up and see Mediterranean gulls crossing the meadow south to north. They fly in a follow-my-leader ticker tape across the now lilac sky. In the summer they stop here to collect the insects that fly in plenty above the long grass and it won’t be long before they can stop here once more. This morning they are steadfast in their journey and I wonder where they are heading. Perhaps to familiar fields, freshly ploughed and heavy with dew, seeds and earthworms.
Mediterranean gulls are a relatively new addition to our skies. They are local to the northern parts of Europe and the Black Sea. They overwinter in the Mediterranean, but many are now resident on the south coast of England, although the first of these gulls was only spotted in Hampshire in the late 1960s. England now has a current population of around 2,000 birds.
The damp from the grass seeps into my bones, with no promise of a sun bright enough to break through the clouds and warm them. I am glad of the ski trousers now. The sun through the clouds is soft box light and although I can’t actually see that the sun is finally up, I know it must be. The rooks have moved in great gaggles from their roosts and this is a sure-fire sign the sun is with us once more.
The stream of seagulls has lasted at least twenty minutes and their occasional mews have been replaced with the territorial squawking of a squirrel vexed by my presence. A little shorter in my sit-spot today, but I shall take the squirrel’s cue and head home.
Down the hill and through the village I see the house martins are now awake, feeding their twittering young, clinging to the edge of the mud-cup nests to stuff their hungry mouths with food and then fling themselves back out into the sky to catch more insects.
It’s then I see it, high in the clear-blue sky: a twisting, turning, black body with bow-shaped wings. Solitary and silent at first, then there is another, two, three, four and more, all shrieking and darting through the telephone wires and chimney pots. The swifts have returned and it brings joy to my whole being.
These hirundines – house martins, swallows and swifts – are of course following the sun and its analemmatic route across the sky. They seek the place where the earth is tilted most towards the sun, and although it doesn’t feel like it today, we are indeed tilting once more. For hirundines to survive, they need the air to be warm and full of the insects that they eat and feed to their burgeoning nests.
They are not the only winged animals to do this. Some migrant butterflies can travel as far as swifts seeking the warmth of the sun. The Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) flies here each summer and has wing sensors that can detect if there is enough sunlight for it to fly. They are tiny solar-panelled beings. The Painted Ladies won’t appear until May, though. Perhaps they are avoiding travelling with the hungry hirundines.
Swifts, swallows and house martins arrive in the UK from far-flung climes between March and June. The first to arrive are the house martins, with a white underside and blue sheen to the black feathers of their head and back. They are the smallest of our three most common hirundines and they are possibly the most familiar to us as their nests are easily spotted beneath the eaves of buildings, but they are actually quite illusive birds.
Currently there is very little information on the migration route of the house martin. They have rarely been seen in the winter in the countries you might expect to find them: South Africa, the west coast of Africa or the Nile Valley. Ornithologists have found ringed house martins on the same routes as the swallows and swifts, but other than that they have yet been able to work out where these birds over-winter.
Swallows are the next to appear in our skies. These birds are easily identified next to their cousins, by the red spot on their throat and their swallowtail. As well as the red spot under their chin they too have a white belly and a blue sheen to the black feathers on their head. Their forked tail has two tail streamers on either side and they can often be seen flying a little lower, above ponds and fields, collecting insects and mud for their nests.
Swifts don’t tend to arrive until late April. They have very dark-brown feathers, which can appear black at the beginning of the season but become more bleached in the sun as the season progresses. They are high flyers and their wings and body look like a bow and arrow. Their forked tail is shorter than a swallow’s and they are most easily identified by the shrieking sound they make as they are flying. If you’ve ever heard a swift, it’s clear to see how it came by the names ‘screecher’, ‘jack squealer’, ‘screech martin’ and ‘shriek owl’. Their Latin name Apus means ‘without feet’, as swifts rarely land and in fact spend the first four years of their life on the wing. Past observers thought this must be because they did not have feet.
More is known about swallow and swift migration, and when they arrive here, they have travelled from the Nile Valley, the west coast of Africa and the Sahara. They fly over Morocco, eastern Spain and the Pyrenees and finally through western France before arriving in the UK. During this 9,000km journey they travel over 300km a day and can fly at speeds of just over 20mph.
It is thought that this need to move on is triggered not just by a drop in temperature, but by the effect that drop has on the density of insects in the air: fewer insects flying around and the birds know it’s time to travel south.
There are many hazards facing the hirundines on these epic crossings, starvation being the most obvious, but once they get here, they also face a loss of habitat. Old buildings are being renovated and holes are being filled up in walls and soffits, and these are all places where they like to nest. Swifts pair for life and return to the same sites each year, so if the site has been demolished or ‘repaired’, they can no longer nest.
As the great naturalist Gilbert White observed in one of his letters, ‘Swifts, like sand martins, carry on the business of nidification quite in the dark, in crannies of castles, and towers and steeples and up in the tops of the walls of churches under the roof.’ (1877) Isn’t ‘nidification’ a wonderful word for nest building? When I read observations such as this one it often reminds me of stories of towers and castles. Swifts are nature’s Rapunzels.
Because of the loss of their homes, swifts are now one of the sixty-plus birds in the UK on the red list of endangered bird species. The best thing you can do for these little wonders is to invest in a swift brick or swift box, and some housing companies are thankfully building these bricks into new houses.
When observing swallows, Gilbert White regularly observed how they collected water from ponds to create mud for their nests. It was also speculated at the time that swallows might even hibernate in ponds beneath the water. Gilbert’s thoughts on this were as follows:
Repeated accounts of this sort, spring and fall, induces us greatly to suspect that house-swallows have some strong attachment to water, independent of the matter of food; and, though they may not retire into that element, yet they may conceal themselves in the banks of pools and rivers during the uncomfortable months of winter. (1877)
Of course, we know now that the swallow disappears because it travels to Africa.
Some of the folklore associated with these feathered beings, in particular the weather lore, was also noted by Gilbert White. He observed that swifts loved thundery weather, perhaps due to an increase in insects in the air. In weather lore, swallows flying low are an indication of rain, whereas if they are high up in the sky, fair weather abounds.
When nesting, swallows only nest in happy, peaceful places and to destroy their nest is very bad luck. This is particularly so in agriculture lore.
Before they return for the winter, swallows will often gather in large flocks and in Norfolk the chattering of these flocks is considered to be the birds gossiping about who will die this winter.
In Chinese culture, the swallow symbolises good fortune and long life. For this reason, some cultures have kept swallows in their homes as living decorations.
As for nicknames, the swallow is sometimes called an ‘easin’ due its habit of nesting in the eaves and squeezing its way under them in order to do this.
In the world of the sailor, there was a tradition that for every 5,000 nautical miles travelled you would tattoo a swallow on your chest. One on the right and one on the left, both facing in, indicated you were a well-seasoned sailor. These swallows were again considered lucky and they were even thought to carry your soul safely away should you drown at sea.
As you can see from the folklore, it is the swallow that we tell the most stories about. In Aesop’s Fables, the swallow represents an animal that has travelled far and therefore is wise and yet roundly ignored by the other animals. The phrase ‘one swallow does not a summer make’ is also thought to originate from an Aesop’s Fable. In this fable it has been a hard winter and a young man has run out of money and cannot feed himself. When he sees a swallow, he thinks the warmer weather has arrived and so he sells his cloak in order to buy food, but he soon discovers his folly when he is frozen to the bone by the last of the winter weather.
