The return of the Ravens

Tuesday's project is beautiful. It sits high on a hill on one side a valley in the Cotswolds. It was a pub garden covered in brambles and buddleia, untouched for decades. With the volunteers and my direction it is being transformed into a terraced garden to communally grow fruit and vegetables. We are very proud of what we have achieved here but it is an ongoing project and will be more beautiful still as time goes by and the planting takes off. This is one of three projects I coordinate but by far the most joyful to spend time in.

The view is breathtaking, the major road at the bottom of the hill being obscured both visually and audibly by the trees that line either side. A vineyard is visible which wasn't there when I first lived near here as a boy. It seems oddly exotic to think of all the new vineyards on south-facing slopes around here. I know the monks of medieval times grew grapes for wine. Monks do seem to have a penchant for alcohol. Some of the world's most highly regarded alcoholic drinks were originally produced by monasteries. Their abandoned terraces are visible in some quite unexpected places nearby. Names such as "Vineyard lane" which I often walked along to school hint at a viticultural past. Of course names are just names and whilst saying the words "Vineyard lane", people only ever thought about the place. Nobody ever stopped to think of the meaning of the syllables and their implication that once there had actually been a vineyard there. Names are funny like that: Divorced from the meaning of their component words. I mean, who ever thinks about the origin of the word "cupboard" from an etymological perspective?

So, the vineyards are returning as the average yearly temperature increases. And increasing it is. An old gardener long past retirement age but still cutting grass told me that forty years ago when he started he would cease mowing in mid September and resume at the beginning of March. Now he mows almost to December and starts mid February. That's a personal observation on a changing climate which as a relative newcomer was not a perspective I would have gained personally. But there is it is from one who has experienced the change in seasons.

Today, as I looked over the rolling hills at Postman Pat's tiny red van, very far away, climbing the steep hill to the top of the common on the opposite hill, a commotion caught my attention in the sky overhead. Two crows were mobbing a raven in an attempt to drive it away. Though the shape is superficially similar, a raven is a much bigger bird and its call much lower in pitch. Also, its tail is a different shape, forming more of a rounded fan then the straighter edged tail of its corvid relatives.

The raven didn't seem unduly perturbed but was still forced to perform occasional avian shrugs as a crow flew at a wing or plummeted down at it from above. They obviously were not too happy to see their cousin. Eventually the three of them disappeared from view with the shrieking still echoing off the roofs of nearby cottages.

When I was a boy, I never saw ravens. I once glimpsed one on a mountain in wales and this was a cause to remove my binoculars from their case and watch awhile. It was picking at a carcass of some dead animal and seemed not the slightest bit concerned at my presence. But it was a moment deserving of that kind of hushed reverence one feels is deserved in the presence of a natural phenomenon. But I never saw one of them near home, though it was and remains rural.

And then one day, i was cycling down by the Severn and I heard a distinctive caw, perhaps an octave lower than a crow's call. And there, on a dungheap were two ravens, possibly Huginn and Muninn. Who knows? I was pretty thrilled to see them and suddenly my immediate vicinity seemed more exotic.

And now I see ravens quite often. Red Kites too, where once you had to venture to obscure valleys in Mid wales to view them at special feeding site. This must surely be some kind of progress? With all the changes to the natural world and the erosion of diversity, at least this seems a positive development. Dare I hope...? I'm not sure.