Rain and storms were due today but this autumn is set to be one of the most beautiful seasons in many years. This is ever a spectacular time, with nature’s special effects at their vibrant best, but signs that the autumn of 2024, officially beginning today, would be special have been gathering all year.
A record-breaking wet winter and spring, combined with high rainfall throughout the summer, and steady, high temperatures, have swelled the foliage and thickened the growth.
Stroll in the country now and you can see and feel everything, from small gilded grasses to the mightiest oaks, burgeoning.
This is a world in ripeness and a flood-tide of a harvest.
The hedges and woods are ablaze with blackberries, rowan berries, apples and scarlet hawthorn.
A spectacular at the start of September was predicted by ecologists at Forestry England and so it has come to pass –nature’s own end-of-year firework display.
The trees’ gunpowders are plant sugars their leaves have been manufacturing throughout the year. That sunlight, which blushed our faces last week, was completing its work of breaking down the green chlorophyll in all the year’s foliage.
As it decays, the colours of the sugars are revealed in pigments – carotenoid oranges and yellows, betalain scarlets, anthocyanin reds and purples.
Walking over the Usk from Crickhowell, in the Brecon Beacons, to Llangattock, across our locally famous bridge (with 12 arches on one side and 13 on the other), was like strolling into Provence.
The village orchards are sweet with the smell of apples, the boughs baubled with them, a scrumper’s dream, and the sky was singing with huge flocks of house martins.
You can tell house martins from swallows by their white rumps and short, forked tails and they are having a good year.
Above us, they gorged on midges and flies. The birds will be around for a while yet – everything is late this year – before the call of the south takes them to France, the Mediterranean and North Africa.
House martins are the most mysterious of all our migrants. While barn swallows, for which they are often mistaken, will head for South Africa, and the swifts, which have already gone, make for Mozambique via Liberia and Congo (and never land; our swifts only put their feet down in Britain, where they nest), house martins go where they please. The map of their distribution across Africa is a shotgun spatter of apparently whimsical individual choice.
These gossipy birds in their silk-blue plumage travel in double springs and Indian Summers, following the seasons across the globe. All that twittering is a humming exchange of information, a cross between a news desk and a stock market. At least 26 barn swallow calls with distinct meanings have been identified, and martins come from the same family.
Some will be netted by ornithologists in Africa this winter, and readings taken from the chemical make-up in their feathers will reveal that in September they ate insects that had eaten plants that had grown on soils and rocks matching the geological and biochemical profile of the Usk valley.
Meanwhile, there has been alarm about low butterfly numbers this year – all that rain – but they seem to be having a late surge.
I watched skippers, Meadow Browns and Speckled woods fluttering across the field, the latter landing on a blackberry briar to taste the fruit through its feet. This is a species trait, which is of a piece with a creature whose life cycle – from larva to winged insect – surpasses our most imaginative aliens, monsters and myths.
The next treat will be the songs of the ‘heaven hounds’, wild geese, bringing their young down from their arctic breeding grounds in skeins like crying banners, beating southwards through the sky.
We saw a young hobby hunting the house martins in the village of Cwmdu, last week – this most agile falcon tracks them to Africa and back again, a flying leopard chasing panicked zebras. The hobby is so skilful it can take swifts on the wing.
Autumn brings out the predator in all things. My wife has rigged a mosquito net over our bed in defence against the huge, and seasonally active, house spiders which live in the attic, especially the one behind the picture near the bed.
Named Ariadne, she prepared to rush at anything, from my wife to a passing bluebottle, which tripped her trap. ‘They are hydraulic,’ I said, helpfully. ‘They have to rest between dashes – then you can run at her, or run away.’
Spiders do not have muscles like us. To move, they flood limbs with hemolymph, a hydraulic fluid. That little pause is the fluid rebalancing, offering the moment for your pop-the-glass-over-the-spider move.
House spiders will be busy at night throughout this long, late autumn, hunting and mating and generally stomping around looking for baths to get stuck in. It is the time of year for men and women who are terrified of Ariadne and her relations to stand back calmly and call on the rest of us to be heroic.
They are scary and some do bite, but it is against the mellow spirit of autumn, against the poetry of the season captured by Keats as the ‘close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’, and against the Darwinian wonders of evolution, to just hoover the blighters up.
A healthy home is a happy home for all God’s creatures. Some should just stick to the garden.
Everything which was an egg and chick, baby and fledgling in the spring and summer is now feeding, feasting, mating, stashing food; autumn is a riot of sex, death and sugars, played out in earth’s brightest colours.
The nights, when the sky is clear, are as vivid as Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over The Rhone, with its blazing bridge of stars.
Nature plays her most beautiful trick of all now, and you will see it if you are somewhere high up on a bright morning, when cold air in the valley floors condenses into lakes of mist, and warmer air leaves the world above sparkle-clear. On a morning like that, in this ‘cloud inversion’, as the spectacle is known, you feel that Van Gogh, Keats and Darwin are only right beside you, speechless, in the light of autumn.
Horatio Clare’s book, Your Journey Your Way, published by Penguin Life, is out now.