Take a bough

Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi, and fierce owls. John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home

OUR friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter. However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours—say when spring hatches out of winter—what would we see?

6.17 am First light. The male mistle thrush flies to the top of the oak dome and sings Pavarotti in feathers, the valley his auditorium. On a branch just below, the thrush is joined by the great tit, who similarly likes a high post to ‘ring his bell’. The mistle thrush breeds early and, halfway down the 60ft tree, snug in a dim fork is its bowl-nest with four speckled blue eggs.

7.01 am The slanting rays of morning sun first catch the 1,000 leaf buds in the canopy, then the high untidy drey of the grey squirrel, before illuminating the ground beneath our 300-year-old oak. There, as Robert Bridges versed it: ‘Thick on the woodland floor Gay company shall be,/Primrose and Hyacinth And frail Anemone.’ Hyacinth here is the bluebell, lying in a mauve pool.

The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still, lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.