Mice are hiding nuts under seats in my car

At dawn the jays swoop down with their Bleriot aeroplane wings and help to disperse the cobnuts. Do they hide them into safe niches? Indeed they do. And they know where they have hidden them four months hence like forest birds all over the world.

The first nuts are said to be ripe on St Philibert’s Day which is August 20, so he gave the name Filbert, still sometimes used but strictly speaking just the name for a lovely fat white nut from one of 15 species of Corylus: C. maxima from the Ukraine.

With the warm autumn weather of early October even the dormouse was about once, eating the hazels. Wood mice and yellow-necked mice, the few that survived the population crash last winter, have been gathering nuts too and hiding them as usual under the seats of my Alvis.

I have got wise to this little hidey-hole however and frequently rob their larder. I don’t fancy them making cosy nests out of the old leather and horse-hair seats as they have Beatrix Potter parties in the dark winter days. Hazel nuts were magic symbols to our Celtic ancestors, giving rise to the spots on salmon’s backs when the fish ate them. They were as pearls of wisdom when peeled of their shells, having such sweet taste and concentrated energy.

WH Hudson records how a hundred years ago itinerant farm workers travelling between farms on the Wiltshire Downs would know where to find food and refreshment in the coppice woods during the late harvest days, stripping the bushes of their supplies of nuts that could last them for several days.

The 15 species mentioned have of course been inbred to form a complexity of varieties. Since the hazel recolonised Britain almost immediately after the last Ice Age farmers have been cultivating the choicest.

The Romans, the Tudors, and the Georgians all had their specials.

I wonder every year what could be the origins of these around my home. The photograph I took was of a horde buried in the moss beside a stump.

One eaten by a woodmouse has been placed there from the collection in my car, but all the others were gathered by jays and hidden like a Saxon horde of gold, an extraordinary number.

I cracked some shells open and none of those was empty. Squirrels and jays seem able to judge the contents and do not waste their time with the empties, which is more than I can say for myself.