Grass Tales

For one group at least the summer holidays are already over.  Our friend Katie arrived early this morning to collect the chickens, six Silkies who have had their holiday and have now been taken home.  We enjoyed having them. They lived on the top field in a large 'pen' or area chicken-wired off from the rest of the garden, and had complete freedom within it.  They ate garden scraps and some corn.  Silkies are winter layers apparently so we didn't get many eggs.  

But now they are gone the archaeology of their landscape is revealed.  The pen was built across a pattern of cut  grass, i.e. a perimeter path of short grass around a large island of uncut grass, what I optimistically called 'the wildflower meadow'.  The chicken wire fence cut across this and the path on that side and the 'meadow' were left to the chickens.  Like a miniature Berlin Wall, the fence changed the landscape; on this side the old path was lost as the whole lawn was cut short (ish) and on the chickens' side it all began to disappear beneath new growth and chicken trampling.  Now it has gone, the line is marked by a narrow band of taller grass, unable to be pecked by the birds or reached by my mowing.  The coop too has left a yellow square of deadish grass around a tuft that did get some light.  The chickens' field is like one of those ancient villages seen from the air during a drought.

I am thinking along these silly lines because of a recent article in the paper about the old landscape of the Berlin Wall and the border between East and West Germany, now dismantled.  600 miles long and (I think) up to a mile wide, it is the largest wildlife reserve in Germany and over forty years it attracted an astonishing array of wildlife rare elsewhere, simply because it was inaccessible to people.