Life of a Chalkstream. Simon Cooper
on the hook. Sometimes by the time I find them they have died, but this Daubenton bat, the species that most commonly populate the river valley, was definitely alive and very angry.
I have heard it said that the Daubenton is the only British species to carry the rabies virus. I have no idea whether this is true, but I don’t intend to be the one to find out, so taking my handkerchief I swaddled the bat before snipping the line. Angry does not adequately describe how the brown, furry bat looked at me. The tiny black raisin-like eyes glared at me in pure fury. The pointed leathery ears that indicate the mood of the bat from gently lying back on the head (content) to being at rigid right angles to the head (agitated) were most definitely the latter. As I walked back to the Land Rover to get a pair of forceps to extract the hook from his belly I could feel his bony body twitch and turn in my hand, his head swivelling in an effort to locate the best direction of escape.
Bats have a bad press, but it is hard to feel anything but sympathy for the Daubenton for a moment or two. Though he seems exceedingly ungrateful for my help, at bay the furry head is more reminiscent of a mouse and the pink face, with wisps of downy hair, baby-like. That said, when he opens his mouth to snarl he exposes a vicious jaw full of sharp, ridged incisors designed to crush prey with one bite in flight. At the Land Rover, using an additional cloth I cover his head, trap his wings and expose the underbelly. On his back his hind legs, with claws like a bird but razor-sharp and bristly, struck wildly at the air, trying to get some purchase. The hook was caught in the belly, plumb between the legs, which made some sort of sense, for bats grab for their prey in the air with their feet. Grasping the eye of the hook with the nose of the forceps, I deftly twist my hand to remove it with one smooth movement. I am sure the Daubenton had absolutely no idea what was going on as I shook out the cloth to allow him to fly away. But he seemed to be none the worse for the experience and headed for his roost in one of the trees close by the river.
The Daubenton bats get to become regular companions if I hang around the river late into the evening anytime from May to September. The first few times I see them in May I get to do something of a double-take as the small, unfamiliar black shapes zip around the air. By now in September they are part of the furniture, and I can set my watch by them, as they appear almost exactly ninety minutes after dusk each evening. They are voracious feeders of chalkstream insects; midges are a particular favourite as they can swoop through the clouds of chironomids that gather above the river surface on calm evenings. Sometimes the bats will even take the hatching midge pupa from the surface, trawling their hind legs through the film. I am guessing it is those bristles on their feet that ‘sweep’ up the insects from the water that allow them to do this.
The bats patrol the air close to the river, high above the trees and everywhere in between for hours on end each evening for food, not just singly but in groups appearing from the trees closest to the river where they roost during the day. They sometimes, but not often, make a little squeak in flight. It is often described as a click but it never seems that way to me, but rather like the modulated squeak from a dog toy. But soon I will hardly see or hear them at all as they mate, become solitary and spend the winter in a safe roost.
September, the month of autumn fruitfulness, is a time of departures and preparations – everyone and everything in the river has its way of taking nature’s cue of the impending winter. The adult swans thrash up and down the river to chase away their cygnets, creating chaos for anglers and other birds alike. After a few days the cygnets get the hint and take flight. Woe betide any youngster who tries to return. The male cob swan will have no qualms about a full-on attack, mounting the much smaller cygnet, biting his neck, smashing down with his wings and pushing the young bird beneath the surface until the point is made. The departure of the swallows is altogether a more orderly affair, daily gathering in greater and greater numbers until quite suddenly one day they have gone on the long migration to South Africa, to return in April. Along the banks the water voles revel in the autumn harvest of hazelnuts, blackberries, seeds, acorns and whatever else falls to the ground. In the meadows the farmers put out the cattle to get the last and best of the grazing. In the river the trout, sensing the onset of autumn by the shortening days, start to feed in earnest on a spectacular array of insects that hatch in great numbers to capture the last truly warm days of the year.
For fishermen September is often termed the month ‘the locals go fishing’, on the grounds that it is the best month and best-kept secret in the piscatorial calendar. But maybe, like the creatures, we anglers also sense another season drawing to a close and get just a little frantic to enjoy the last of it before the bar comes down. For me it is always the first flurry of autumn leaves blowing onto the surface of the river that tells me the end of the season is around the corner. If I am fishing it can be a little annoying, difficult to pick out my fly amongst the blow-ins, but whether I’m fishing or just walking the banks, the sight of dead brown leaves makes me sad for the end. But this year I am buoyed by the plans we have to restore Gavelwood, which will start immediately the fishing season has closed and continue through the winter.
Gavelwood, the land, the river, side streams, brook and water meadows, takes its name from a wood that makes up part of this tiny, forgotten part of England. The woodland, a mixture of native trees like oak and ash, is as unkempt as the meadows it borders. Nobody knows where the name came from, but it is clearly marked on the deeds of ownership. The medieval word ‘gavel’ meant to give up something in lieu of rent, so maybe in some distant century the lumber was exchanged for tenure. But here today I am not here for any timber, it is the river that is the draw. A beautiful chalkstream called the Evitt that runs gin-clear, the perfect home for fish and water creatures that thrive in a habitat that is as endangered and as worthy of protection as any tropical rainforest or virgin Arctic tundra.
The water that flows through the chalkstreams is a geological freak of nature, almost unique to England. There are a few chalkstreams in Normandy, northern France, and one is rumoured to exist in New Zealand, but taken as a whole 95 per cent of the planet’s supply of pure chalkstream water exists only in southern England. The water I watch flow by in the river today fell as rain a hundred miles to the north six months ago, was deep underground yesterday and will be in the English Channel in a few hours’ time, a cycle that has been repeating for tens of thousands of years since the last ice age ended.
A chalkstream river valley today is a tamed version of how it started out. After the ice age it would have been little more than a vast, boggy marshland, with no river to speak of but rather thousands of streams, rivulets and watercourses that randomly flowed this way and that. At some point in time, it is hard to say exactly when, the early Britons must have started to use the valleys for a purpose, initially farming, which involved draining the land. Inevitably drainage involved reducing the myriad streams to a few channels, which in turn became the rivers that have evolved into the chalkstreams we have today.
It has been a mighty long process: five or six millennia for sure. The barges that carried the stones for Stonehenge were brought up what is now the Hampshire Avon, probably widened and straightened for the purpose, from where it enters the sea at Christchurch Harbour 33 miles from Amesbury, the Avon’s closest point to Stonehenge. But these incremental activities changed the river valleys very slowly, and it was the advent of the watermills that was to prove the penultimate step on the way to the chalkstream valleys we see now.
Again it is hard to pinpoint precisely when watermills became a regular part of the landscape. One thing is for sure, there are plenty listed in the Domesday Book, so it is fair to assume that the valleys were taking shape to meet the requirements of water power by this time. Essentially the mill wheel requires a good head of water to drive it, so a special channel would be dug to supply the water to drive the wheel. This ‘millpond’ would be controlled by a series of hatches, which when opened would turn the wheel for a few hours. Once depleted, the hatches would be closed and the millpond given time to refill from the river and streams.
The unintended outcome of all this would be to drain the land in the immediate vicinity, which in turn created the most wonderfully rich grazing pasture on the alluvial soil left behind after many millennia of flooding. This bounty of nature did not go unnoticed, so over the centuries that followed the river valley was gradually drained not just for the mills but for farming. The water was concentrated into a single channel which is the River Evitt today, supplemented by the side streams and ditches