No, I didn’t really mean to call one of my best friends a Fungus! But those of you who read the end of the August piece of ‘From the Inclosure’ might well have noticed that, in fact, it would appear that I did. What you should have read was the word ‘Fungi’ i.e. a fun guy – get it? Unfortunately in this day and age of spell and grammar checkers somewhere in the ether between my PC and your copy of the magazine a grammatical correction was made -- and a perfectly correct alteration it was too; for the plural of fungus is fungi and as I was referring to a third person singular i.e. ‘He’ it was only right and proper that somewhere in cyber space an electronic brain chose to change my ‘fungi’ to ‘fungus’. Whilst it made nonsense of my feeble attempt at word-play humour it did, at the same time, make a lot of us chuckle. I am sorry, my old friend, I’m sure that you weren’t offended and you’ve probably chuckled more than the rest of us.
The swallows eventually managed to rear two chicks who took their first tenuous flight around the interior of the stables before finally zipping through the doors to explore the vastness of the open sky which was to be their domain for the rest of their days; or so I thought as I watched them flitting and twittering excitedly in the air-space above the paddocks, but little did I know that fate was about to deal a cruel hand. The next day I was wandering down to the stables to give Isaac the mule his morning toast when I noticed three swallows swooping and diving around the stable door, they seemed to be very agitated and were shouting loudly to each other. I knew that something was wrong but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I looked over the door. There, hanging from the nest and quite dead, was one of the swallow chicks, I couldn’t believe my eyes and was saddened to see its unfortunate demise. Closer inspection from a step-ladder revealed that a length of horse hair that had been used in the construction of the nest had somehow entangled in the feathers of one of its wing tips and the hapless little bird must have tried, unsuccessfully, to take flight and then hung, for goodness knows how long, before it finally gave up the struggle and died. Needless to say I removed it immediately and without further ado the remaining swallows disappeared and were not seen again until a few days ago when they suddenly reappeared as if by magic. This morning a bird swooped past my head as I walked by the door and on a sudden impulse I picked up my mirror which revealed, much to my surprise, four more pink-blotched eggs. I don’t know how successful they will be in rearing a second brood this late in the season but I wish them better luck than they had with their first.
I took the dogs along the brook this morning and what a sorry sight it was for the river is virtually non-existent apart from isolated, semi-stagnant pools which must be providing a last-ditch sanctuary for those fish that haven’t already succumbed to the devastating effects of low oxygen levels or the predations of both heron and mink. We wandered to the point by the gravel track where two streams merge to form Blackensford brook; the one known as Bartley Water rises in the bogs opposite the deer sanctuary and this was completely dry, the other, which springs from the mire in Backly Bottom and flows via Stinking Edge wood and Blackensford Lawn to join Bratley Water was producing no more than a feeble trickle. We are certainly desperately in need of a good drop of rain and the consequences of this on-going drought are beginning to become evident. Recently, especially at night when all is quiet, the silence has been suddenly broken by the ear-splitting rifle-crack and crashing thud as a large limb breaks from a thirsty tree. Whilst down by the bridge the ground beneath the hazel trees is littered with part formed nuts which have knuckled-off in the heat and in the lower reaches of the Lymington and Beaulieu rivers the sea trout are gathering and already changing colour as the unusually low water levels hinder their instinctive urge to travel up into the Forest streams to spawn.
My apple trees are suffering too and Isaac is getting a good supply of immature apples as they drop onto the grass below; but, on the other hand, the blackberries seem to revel in the hot sun and have produced an early, bumper crop. Now blackberry and apple is, in my opinion, a combination that can only have been made in Heaven so I’ve decided to freeze the blackberries until the apples have matured.
I’d better go, all this talk of blackberry and apple is giving me the pip!
Ian Thew
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