The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

dark-green holly – probably too much holly. Still, I welcome it where its prickly evergreen foliage makes an almost impenetrable screen twice as high as a man around my favourite part of the wood: the Dingley Dell. Not quite in the middle of our patch, the Dell surrounds two of our most impressive old beech trees, which have been christened the King and the Queen. Unlike many of our beeches they don’t soar away upwards immediately; there is a little spread of branches. Beneath these giants the ground is clear except for a covering of old leaves. Sitting on a log there in the April sunshine I feel as content as a dog before a fire. It is a place to write up my notes, and eat bacon sandwiches. Around the Dingley Dell a few old coppices of hazel – a traditional Chiltern undercrop – produce clusters of long, unbranched trunks almost straight from near the ground; these are of several ages and hence variable thickness. Some of the branches are dead – they need attention. A couple of young birch trees are growing on the edge of the large clearing. All these tree species have become old friends, and like all my friends they have quirks and history and several failings. We shall get to know them all.

      Cherry blossom

      During April the wild cherry blooms at the same time as the bluebells, but the cherry flowers are displaying high in the canopy. In hand I examine a flower head that has fallen down from above: coppery young leaves, half a dozen at the tip of the shoot all pointy and enthusiastic as if they should cry, ‘Forward, forward!’ But then behind this tip is a natural flower arrangement – ten little bundles of white cherry blossom coming off a grey-brown stick. They are arranged in clusters of four or five blooms, each one held on a green ‘matchstick’ an inch long. Every flower carries five notched, almost perfectly white petals surrounding yellow stamens, which are tiny threads with spherical heads like miniature pins (and in the centre of the flower, hardly grander, the style and stigma). Five red-brown sepals bend backwards from the flower as if to feign deference to the performance going on in front, which might be described as a cluster of tutus; and each bunch of flowers emerges from another five-fold arrangement of bracts next to the stem. So the twig is a series of bouquets topped by a flourish of leaves, a brief, exuberant festival of white blossom fifty feet above the common view. An early feast for insects, I suppose. Why do we need those double garden varieties of flowering cherry – ‘flore pleno’ and the rest? Admittedly they do augment the resemblance of the flowers to tutus, but there is already enough in the solitary blossoms. A Japanese artist might lose himself in a flower or ten: so short-lived, so fragile, like rice paper crimped into snowflakes. Even now a gentle snowfall of petals tumbling from high above is settling on last year’s old beech leaves; in an hour or two the sun will have frizzled them into obscurity.

      Butterflies appear suddenly in some numbers, and not just the umber-brown speckled wood butterflies, flitting erratically like camouflaged and subtle ghosts in and out of the shade, but also brimstone butterflies as bright and freshly coloured as primrose flowers. These last arrivals almost make up for the absence of real primroses in the wood, for the iconic springtime flower does not deign to live in the sparse, poor soil of Lambridge (this saddens me, as Darwin worked on primroses). A solitary peacock butterfly, a battered survivor of the winter frosts, with eyed wings shredded at their margins, is sunning itself on a bramble in the clearing, the better to gather the energy for a final burst of egg-laying. A green-veined white lingers for a second, then flits past and away.

      I have evidently become attuned to the Class Insecta. In the midst of the bluebell sea, open flowers are pollinated by large bumblebees that delicately hang off pendent blossoms that look too frail to carry them. I fancy they are like oversize clappers hanging off the bells. I believe I can recognise the white-tailed (Bombus lucorum) and red-tailed (Bombus lapidarius) species, not least because they have a convenient dab of the appropriate colour at the end of their fuzzy abdomens. A huge red-tailed bumblebee must be a queen on the search for an old mousehole in which to establish a new colony. She buzzes about the cherry roots, and she won’t have long to wait to find a suitable site. While I am crouching among the bulbs, a ‘pretend’ bumblebee whizzes past me that I know to be the bee fly (Bombilius major), one of nature’s cruel deceivers. Although fuzzy and generally bee-like, it is no bee at all (it is closer to a bluebottle). It carries a long proboscis at its head end, and I watch it dart forward into and back out of a flower to feed on nectar, so it really is an entomological humming bird as much as anything. But it reproduces by laying its eggs near a true bees’ colony, and its larvae crawl into the ‘nest’ where they consume the bees’ grubs. In fact, it is an entomological Iago. I recall that Darwin described how deception was commonplace in nature; the man himself apparently so free of duplicity.

      This is the day when all the male birds sing out passionately for a mate. Their plumage is buffed and preened, spring-ready. I am an amateur at birdsong, but I cannot mistake the sweet and penetrating phrase of the song thrush, repeated thrice or so, as if to emphasise its originality, for the next phrase is always different, and always repeated in its turn. I can pick out the implausibly loud song of the tiny jenny wren with a little rattle at the end of its performance. The songs of the robin redbreast and the blackbird I know well from my own garden. But I would not have recognised the nuthatch’s broadcast had I not seen the handsome blue-backed bird sing from a bare twig: a kind of ‘pwee-pwee-pwee’ – simple and penetrating. Can it be that there is an inverse relationship between the showiness of the plumage and the beauty of the song? The nightingale and the most musical of the warblers are pretty ordinary of feather, while the extravagant peacock’s raucous cry appeals only to other peacocks and the English aristocracy. Somewhere in the middle of this aesthetic spectrum, black-yellow-green great tits are everywhere in the wood uttering their repeated high regular notes – ‘tee-too’, possibly – which is hardly spectacular. The more sibilant, guttural, chatty conversation of the blue tit is more appropriate for such a small and bouncy cheeky chappie. Just now many blue tits hop rapidly about the denser branches whistling to one another, ‘Here we are!’ What I cannot do (pace the nuthatch) is reliably locate the source of all the birdsong; it seems to emanate in a general and celebratory way from almost everywhere. I begin to understand those descriptions of whole woods ‘bursting into song’. The distant drumming of a woodpecker, a sporadic, hollow-sounding percussion, provides all that is needed for a backbeat to the avian orchestra. But then I briefly catch a glimpse of a timid tree creeper dodging behind a beech trunk, almost furtively working its way rapidly up the tree in search of insects tucked into tiny crannies in the bark that it can pick out with its curved bill. It moves in silence.

      One cry is at odds with the general vernal celebration – a kind of wheezy, cross-sounding phrase repeated irregularly. Our pair of woodland buzzards are wheeling and gliding slowly round and round high overhead, as if barred from the general celebration below. Theirs is a simple call, almost like that of a baby working up to something more exciting. I had seen them yesterday flying through the wood itself: weighty, serious birds that appeared too substantial to negotiate their flightpath between the trees, something they nevertheless did with aplomb. Lambridge Wood is their patch. Beware, small rodents and unwary birds! If it turns out to be a good year for them, it will be a good year for the buzzards too.

      Among the bluebells my eye is taken by something much more turquoise: a thrush’s egg lying on the ground. It looks so perfect at first glance; a Mediterranean-summer blue overlaid with just a few black dots. I then remark a ragged hole in one side – somebody has taken it from its clay-lined nest and consumed the contents. The buzzards are exonerated (too much of the egg survives); I suspect a grey squirrel. I cradle the empty shell in the middle of my palm. It is almost impossibly light. Surely this must be the first item for my wood collection; I must cherish it.

      And then my eye is caught by a perfectly white bluebell, just one among so many thousands of the common kind. I suppose it should be called a whitebell. It is as rare as a sober Irishman on St Patrick’s Day, but much more conspicuous. It stands out from the crowd, visible yards away. It is the result of a natural mutation. If it were a successful mutation I suppose there would be many more of them, but there it is, living proof of that molecular part of the science of evolution that Charles Darwin did not know about. Just one tiny change on the DNA code and blue becomes white. Since most bluebell reproduction is from the proliferation of the bulbs, if I had a mind I could lift this example, nurture it in my garden, and artificially ensure its success. I could call it variety ‘Grim’s Dyke’.