A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson Read Free Book Online Page B

attempted to marshal enough French to explain my indignation, while she shrugged repeatedly and seemed bemused by my anger. The dog, meanwhile, had retrieved what remained of the partridge and in a gesture of goodwill she offered me the ragged, dripping, shot-laden corpse. I declined, and we may or may not have agreed to differ as to whether it was acceptable to pepper someone with lead when sitting on the roof of their own home. She departed to resume the slaughter, and no doubt later to recount the tale of the mad Englishman who had moved into Chez Nauche. The next day I nailed up ‘ Chasse Interdit ’ signs along the farm boundaries.
    There were many other moments of excitement on that trip. At intervals my power tools burst into flames, which was none too helpful. We were still using some of the rudimentary ancient wiring, including cloth-covered (rather than plastic) wires – something I’d never seen before – and we eventually realised that the problems only occurred with two particular sockets. I later discovered that, due to a quirk in the wiring, these sockets were delivering twice the normal voltage: highly dangerous to both power tools and humans.
    By the end of a fortnight I had a house with a waterproof roof, a few windows (and rather a lot of gaping holes where windows were needed), a working toilet and electric lights. It all looked dreadful, but it was slowly approaching being habitable, in the loosest sense of the word. We had got through an awful lot of cheese and red wine, but it seemed worth it.
    It wasn’t until the following spring when, accompanied by my dad, I made my next DIY trip to Chez Nauche that I realised the mistake I had made in filling in the hollow. I noticed that the rubble we had thrown in was now inundated with water, which fed in from a ditch running down the side of the drive. What had been a dry hollow in summer was clearly a pond in winter and spring. Newts have to have a pond to breed in – they go to them to mate and spawn in early spring, and then leave them again in the summer. The truth dawned uncomfortably upon me. The hollow that we had more or less completely filled with rubble was in fact a temporary pond – in winter it filled with water, but by summer it was dry. There were no other ponds in the thirteen hectares at Chez Nauche, so I had successfully destroyed the only breeding habitat for these lovely creatures. Given that my aim in taking over the farm was to create a wildlife sanctuary, this wasn’t an auspicious start.
    The obvious thing to do would have been to dredge out the rubble. I cannot recall why I initially decided against this. Instead, I hatched a plan for a much larger replacement pond, which I would create by damming the stream flowing from the small spring in the meadow. I reasoned that I could dig out a substantial lake in the valley below the spring. I envisioned an expanse of wind-ruffled water sparkling in the sunshine and reflecting the clear-blue Charente sky, with fish turning, perhaps the odd heron, and many happy newts frolicking in the shallows.
    My initial thought was that I would perhaps get someone with a digger to scoop out the lake, so I asked around among my limited local contacts. I eventually found a chap by the name of Marcel who came to look at the spring and, if I understood him correctly, declared that he could create a fine lake. However, his quote for the work, when it arrived by post a few days later, was for 7,000 euros, which would have made it the world’s most expensive newt home. Plan B was to dig it out by hand. After all, the Suez Canal was dug by hand – how hard could it be to make a small lake? I figured that the spoil heap could be used to create a mighty dam across the valley. And why stop at one lake? I could have a whole series, with the water spilling attractively over a series of weirs from one to the next. In my head, it was a marvellous scheme.
    So it was that, on