Leaf-fall

There was time to look at the leaves before the rain arrived.  It was one of those days when we should have listened to the weatherman – showers, he said, “with a lot of rain”. It came with an insistent air, which I mean literally. The space between the drops, of which there wasn’t much, seemed thick with wet.

We’re lucky to have a permit for Wytham Woods, north west of Oxford. My daughter always says she doesn’t want to go, but secretly she loves to look for animal tracks. My intention in going there was more elevated – spatially. Autumn’s turn ought to be well advanced by late October, and I cherish a memory of looking out from Ilam in North Staffordshire onto a hillside of changing trees.

But as recent work on phenology (the study of cyclical changes in the natural world) shows, the mean date of many seasonal indicators has shifted in recent decades (see for example, 18:153-9, British Wildlife). So my desire to see this ancient, semi-natural woodland in its colours was slightly out of key with the reality. Still, in the sheep field between two arms of the wood we could see where the trees had begun to turn. The colours stood out against the deadweight of the clouds. Lime, beech, oak – not all had started to change, but enough had. In between, pigeons reinforced the grey and rooks hauled it down to black. Toadstools in the long grass worked on their own autumnal range. But blackberries were also ripening. It’s a mingled season.

The idea of “turning” contains that mingled nature – as Fortune’s wheel might turn. The way I was taught the story of Demeter (Ceres) and Persephone (who for six months of the year must live with the King of the Underworld while her mother, goddess of fertility, pines in the world above) laid emphasis on the descent into autumn and winter as a time of grief and loss. But really the story is about endless reunion as well as parting, that autumn is a harbinger of spring.

The yellowing of the leaves might look like death, but in fact it’s a sign of a tree’s readiness for winter – they withdraw chlorophyll into their woody stems to preserve it through the shorter days. It returns with the new leaves. The death of worker bees and wasps among the social insets could be seen in a similar way: the organism, that is, the collective entity, withdraws into the one part that will start afresh in the spring – the egg-laying queen – the better to ensure its longevity through the cold times.

But it is a mistake to think of autumn simply as a standard change within a fixed cycle. I’ve already mentioned the phenological changes, and of course the wider effects of climate change are likely to result on greater extremes. What will autumn mean after a few more tens of seasonal cycles?

Some changes that look autumnal also speak of non-cyclical change – they indicate actual death. Dutch elm disease, ash dieback and sudden oak death all involved a withering and dropping of leaves but mean permanent loss. Some such changes are inevitable and natural, but others are at least partly the result of human actions. The recent invasion of ash dieback results ironically from the public love of trees – demand led to infected saplings being imported from the Netherlands because not enough trees were being grown within the UK. The importers even included some conservation charities. It seems a strange world when native tree species are being imported. Other permanent changes are affecting the social insects. It’s well known that honeybees, for example, face the verroa mite, the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides, loss of food sources from the countryside (though ironically not from towns) and again changes in climate.

In Wytham Woods, where much research into these changes is carried out, stacks of timber lie beside the main path, and also at the intersection of cyclical and permanent change. These trees are pine, felled as part of the regeneration of those parts of the woods that were commercially planted. I’ve written about the ecological void created by commercial plantings before (see my earlier piece, Bank and Lowe). The pines are being replaced by broad-leaved trees, and the timber will be used. The new trees should fit into the ancient woodland around them, given enough time, enough cyclical change, and will form an integral part of it.

My daughter is fascinated by the rings visible on each log. These too show the cycles of the years, but also the vagaries of chance and the linear passage of time. I am instructed to crouch at the end of the fattest logs and reel off the numbers of rings. I identify the broad years of good growth, the thin years of bad, and make a guess at which family member might have been born while a particular ring was being formed. There’s a strange interplay between the precise annual boundary of each ring and my speculative comments on it. I’m sure a dendrochronologist would be horrified.

There was less of this during our most recent visit because the long rows of felled wood shone with the moving cloaks of water as the rain lashed down. I do like being in the rain (see my earlier piece, Rain Pleasures), but this was the sort of rain that writes off an afternoon, as our daughter made very clear – in between the fascinations of finding sweet chestnuts in their prickly cases, fat acorns and the trails of interloping muntjac.

Although the vastly increased population of deer represents a serious challenge to conservation management efforts, I can’t give up my affection for them. Muntjac wander almost in the very centre of Oxford, and in our previous house, which looked out on “waste” land beside the railway line, we often saw roe deer resting among the willows and nettles. For me they still carry that breath of “somewhere else”.

My daughter’s delight in tracking animal prints in mud stems from another rainy afternoon – not as wet as this one – in a nature reserve on the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire border. That day we spotted the hoofmarks of a doe and fawn side by side in deep mud at the centre of the path. They went along in parallel, close together, beside a narrow stream. We looked closely at their sharp marks while the trees dropped big blobs of water on our backs. The tracks were so crisp they could only have been a few minutes ahead of us. Sometimes we lost them, as they drifted onto the patches that separated the path from the little the dip the stream had cut, but they came back to the path a few metres on, fawn beside doe, close all the time.

Eventually, having mixed with other prints for a while, their tracks left our path. They turned right, down into the stream, where the bank had disintegrated into thick mud. Here they jumped, into equally thick mud on the other side. Then the tracks disappeared into the leaf litter. We looked out among the trees and speculated about where the deer had gone.

On the afternoon in Wytham the rain had demolished most prints before we found them. We were hoping to find a badger’s trail, but just got more muntjac, and the marks of boots left by all the walkers ahead of us. Our own footwear was crusted with the thick earth, which took much scraping off. We also had to peel off the soggy remnants of fallen leaves that were well on their way to returning to the soil.