Less welcome as house guests were the mice that invaded the house in the spring. Only once did I find I had house mice, which are something of a rarity in these parts. No, these were country mice rather than town mice, long-tailed field mice and their larger and less common cousins the yellow-necked mice that overflowed into the cottage from the fields. They were cute little critters with big black eyes, but they made a terrible mess and ate everything. There were five sturdy ham hooks embedded in the living-room ceiling, and I would hang vulnerable packages of food from these in carrier bags, but the mice had a remarkable propensity to find something, anything, that I had overlooked. They would gnaw their way happily through plastic containers and bottles, eat their way through corks, and were partial to a little nibble of soap. I didn’t want to kill them so I got myself some live traps and released them back into the wild. They would make their way straight back from a surprising distance, so to be on the safe side I usually took them all the way to the far side of the river.
The daytimes I spent getting to know my patch. Though I took occasional forays further afield, to all intents and purposes my home turf was anywhere I could walk to and from in a day, and so it expanded in summer and contracted in winter. Loosely, it formed a rough circle with a perimeter five miles from the cottage. It was skewed though; I spent much less time on the east side of the river. This was not because of accessibility; although it was miles north or south to the nearest road bridges, at my nearest point on the river was a footbridge, a beautiful old suspension bridge that swayed and rolled as you walked across it, which was a fine place to pause and watch the dippers and grey wagtails for a while, and was a handy short cut to the main road beyond. But I was in the remotest northern reaches of Breconshire, while east of the river the Radnorshire Hills grew steadily smaller and more populated as you headed towards the Marches and England beyond. I was drawn inexorably to the wild, and to the west.
The sheep-grazing fields immediately around the cottage, in spite of the vast views they afforded, felt secluded, flanked to the west by Penlan Wood, a fully grown plantation of Norway spruce, and to the east by a small oak wood long preserved as pheasant cover, misty with bluebells in the spring and above which loomed the rocky crags of the mountainside across the valley. The top field behind the house was capped by a long thicket of Scots pines, and a hundred yards downhill, as the hillside fell steeply away, was a scattering of massive oaks, many hundreds of years old and hollowed out with age. The top of Penlan Wood ran almost level with the cottage, and apart from that uninterrupted view directly west on to the moors the cottage was encircled by trees, as if in a large forest clearing. The only other person who came here was the farmer, to tend to his sheep, otherwise this was my own personal domain. Sometimes it felt as though I didn’t need to go anywhere else, that if I just waited here patiently, every wild creature there was to be seen in mid-Wales would eventually come and visit me.
Penlan Wood was my shelter; it gave the cottage a modest amount of protection from the prevailing south-west wind. These conifer plantations have been vilified for despoiling natural habitats and being generally lifeless, and Penlan Wood seemed this way too. It was hard to get into, fringed with a tangle of rhododendrons that overhung its fence, and once you got inside it was dark and gloomy and still. No birds sang, and the ground was bare, just a thick mulch of pine needles. Nothing grew there, save in autumn when bright white eggs would emerge from the ground, from which would burst the other-worldly flyblown phalluses of stinkhorn toadstools. The wood had never been thinned, presumably because it was small, obscure, in an awkward location, and was easily forgotten. The trees were fully grown now, perhaps forty years old, and stood shoulder to shoulder so little light could penetrate the dense canopy. It was only a small plantation, just a few acres, and seemed totally unpromising, but it was there right beside me and it felt like mine. The place took time to give up its secrets, but this apparent lifelessness turned out to be an illusion.
Owls called each night from the edge of the wood. At its nearest corner was a single ancient oak. They say that oak trees take two hundred years to grow, two hundred years to live, and two hundred years to die. This tree was dying; its topmost branches were leafless antlers. I wondered if this tree might be the owls’ home, but when I inspected it there were no holes I could see that could possibly be used for nesting. And then one sunny day I was walking across the field past the tree, and the sun cast a perfect shadow replica of the oak on to the grass at my feet. I saw the shadow of an owl on the ground below me, and before I could even look up the ghost owl disappeared into the very heart of darkness. I watched the tree constantly after that, and in the evenings I would sit on a nearby tree stump and watch the owls’ comings and goings. They didn’t seem to mind; the female even paid me a return visit one afternoon. I was in the garden weeding when she flew over for a closer look, calling softly. The male and female were quite distinct, the male a pale grey bird, the female a dark rufous brown. When I knew for sure that both birds were out hunting, I shinned up the tree trunk to where the boughs spread, navigating my way around a clump of bramble that was growing from the fork. It was important to be sure they were both away; one early bird photographer lost an eye to a tawny owl, right here on this estate. They will attack anything they see as a predator after their chicks. The tree was completely hollow, the hole was a vertical chimney almost all the way down to ground level, over six feet deep. I didn’t have a torch so I lowered down a storm lamp on the end of a length of string. And there at the bottom was a single comical-looking chick, with oversized feathered feet and the long tail of a half-eaten mouse emerging from its beak, which peered up at me and hissed at the light. Tawny owls’ main prey is the field vole, but vole numbers fluctuate wildly from one year to the next. The size of the owls’ clutch will depend on the availability of prey, and this was evidently not a good year for voles, as this solitary chick was far smaller than it should have been this late in the season.
In the heart of the wood nested woodpigeons, and a pair of magpies, while the carrion crows always chose an old oak in the fields near by. Along its bottom edge nested the buzzards, looking down over the oak and alder woods around the stream at the bottom of the hill. It was always the same pair; buzzards’ markings vary hugely and it would have been possible to get to know every one of the local buzzards individually were there not so many of them. Often there would be twelve or fifteen of them circling over the hillside, squabbling over their territorial rights. For two or three years I would regularly see a buzzard that was all white apart from some brown on its wing feathers, it would often be out in my front field in the early morning, hunting for the night’s worms. The Penlan Wood pair had been here for years, and there was a whole row of old nests along the flank of the wood. When the young lost their infant down and fledged they would loiter around the trees in the bottom field for a couple of weeks, mewling piteously for food. And then one year my home pair of buzzards elected to move nest, to the thick horizontal bough, strewn with polypody ferns, of a streamside oak, with the nest directly above the rushing mountain stream. It was a pretty spot, and much more conducive to watching the young as they grew.