Gods of the Morning (16 page)

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After beginning with a snowstorm, April descended into a washout. It rained and rained. Winds racked the trees and the land was sodden. One morning I awoke to an uncanny silence. The recent and entirely normal racket of the rooks was gone. I went to the window and stared out at the rain-filled skies. I couldn't see a single black silhouette in the
rookery trees. Hurriedly I dressed and took the dogs out, walking briskly the hundred and fifty yards to the first nests. Silence.

I knew they had laid eggs early in March because husks of hatched shells appeared on the twig-strewn and guano-spattered grass beneath the trees. The incubating parent birds had hunkered down inside the nest cups, invisible from the ground, but as the temperature hovered around freezing and snow squalls came barrelling through, I had a sinking feeling that they were fighting a losing battle.

I had also watched them at work in the fields, searching for food, where they strode about in rowdy gangs and seemed to be finding something to eat, probing here and there, plunging their sharp, four-inch bills into the soggy turf. Then came the frost: –8º Celsius for a week. Bright sun by day, swingeing cold by night. The full moon fell on 6 April. With it came an anticyclone that sucked any remaining heat from the land. Overnight the temperature plunged to –12º Celsius. Everything froze.

The rooks were in turmoil. Feeding in the frozen fields became hopeless and, anyway, any emerging bugs would have been killed off. For several days hungry rooks flew round their rookery trees cawing loudly. They had pitched on the nests and taken off again straight away, seeming to signal that they had no food for the delicate young chicks.

The chicks should now have been well on and constantly crying for food. There should have been a cacophony of rook gossip, to-ing and fro-ing of parent birds, and the gargling burble of strong chicks calling as their gaping
mouths were stuffed with regurgitated food. Instead, the leaden silence of emptiness. Nothing moved. Not a single rook was in attendance at this crucial moment in their breeding calendar. Quite simply, they had given up and gone. Twenty-nine nests, and possibly as many as a hundred chicks, abandoned. They had all starved.

I don't know where they went, but it seems likely that they had joined up with other rooks on the east coast where there was less frost and where the arable soils delivered up a more reliable supply of food. I was gutted. In forty years of living at Aigas I had never known the rookery fail. We missed their baggy-legged bustling, their bossing and bullying and their constant corvid backchat. My morning baths had lost their appeal. The dawns were strangely silent and the skies disturbingly empty. They had given up and gone from our lives.

A few days later, still lamenting the loss of our rooks as I walked the Jack Russells early one morning, a movement among the nests caught my eye. I looked up to see two black birds. My heart leaped. Perhaps, after all, at least one rook nest had survived. I moved to a better place and homed in with binoculars. My spirits tumbled into a downward somersault of macabre confirmation. They weren't rooks: they were carrion crows feeding off the dead chicks in the rooks' nests. Corvid eating corvid. Rook chicks die: crow chicks thrive. Nature isn't choosy; it just gets on with it. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

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I began to realise what had happened. March had been glorious. All that warmth had brought with it an exceptionally early Highland spring. Buds had unfurled, chloroplasts had streamed, and deep in the secret crannies of the soil invertebrate larvae, especially leatherjackets, had awoken from long sleep and wiggled to within three inches of the surface, later to emerge as crane flies. The rooks had loved it. Every day I had seen them out there, gorging on these fat, protein-filled delicacies. Right across the landscape life had awoken exceptionally early. The benison of solar energy and heat had created a false dawn of fecundity. Everyone was fooled. Then came the snow and the swingeing frosts. A week of –8º Celsius will always be a killer of young and tender life. A whole age class of invertebrates was wiped out before it had got going. There were no leatherjackets left, no bugs to feed the rook chicks.

When, later in April, the swallows and house martins arrived back from Africa, there were no flying insects to feed them. They went away again. The great tits, an irrepressible species if ever there was one, abandoned their nests of young. One pair that had previously nested successfully in a box fitted with a camera under the eaves of our environmental education centre did manage to lay a single egg and raise one chick – that from a species capable of laying a clutch of six to ten eggs and raising them all. There were no caterpillars to feed the adults or the young. Just about everything had been deceived, lulled into false security by the errant sun, then massacred like innocents by the sudden return of winter.

14

Comings and Goings

What I cannot see, no matter how closely I look, is what drives this small creature, barely heavier than air, to make the journeys that it must make. What thousands of miles have passed beneath its stubby wings, which seem so ill-suited to the task but which have carried it back here again. It knows and I do not.

Living on the Wind
, Scott Weidensaul

The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.

Circle of the Seasons
, Edwin Way Teale

Somehow we arrived at May, but you would have been forgiven for not knowing it. April had plunged us back into winter; the buds and leaves that had so exuberantly burst in March were now frost-scorched and shrivelled. Day after day an icy rain spat upon Scotland, now sleet, now flurrying snow that shrouded our dawns, making us think that March and April had been a turbulent dream and that we were really still stuck in February.

A north-east wind kept us well wrapped throughout April; to venture out was to reach instinctively for a hat, gloves and a scarf. No thought of shedding a garment of any kind
for the first eleven days of May. May! Where were your darling buds and surging hormones? We were bewildered; the birds were befuddled; the bugs were nowhere to be seen. Yet despite everything, a tentative greening did creep back into our world. Surreptitiously, uncertainly, almost suspiciously, ought-not-to-be-here-like – the trees leafed up again.

Then, with ill-concealed relief, the tune of the television weather reporters changed. They turned prophet with a smile. Off the map to the east, approaching Scandinavia from eastern Europe they had spotted a large high-pressure zone expanding, sliding sideways and outwards towards us, like ripples on a pond that grew and grew. Windless in its tranquil core, and very stealthily, it spread its heartening gospel to the west until it embraced most of northern Europe.

The bookies nervously halved their odds for a record-breaking May temperature from 16:1 to 8:1. Overnight on 21 May it arrived. The clouds vanished. By morning our temperature had rocketed from the unseasonal chill of 9º Celsius to 24º. By midday at Altnaharra in Sutherland, an hour and a half 's drive to the north of us, the temperature zoomed to 27.3º Celsius – just 1.7º short of an all-time record for May. No wonder the bookies were twitchy. What they had boasted as a safe bet had become a real possibility in just thirty-six hours. As the temperatures levelled off, their sigh of relief was audible.

We'd had the wettest April for a century and the coldest for twenty-three years. Now May was heading for the record books too. A headline in the
Daily Mail
trumpeted that Inverness, only sixteen miles to our east, was hotter than
Ibiza. With withering
sangfroid
, Mike Silverstone, head of the BBC's weather centre, observed, ‘May can be a very fickle month. Weather in spring can be very varied.'

The thing about heat and sun is that it pumps up the endorphins; everyone smiles. When you're smiling you tend not to notice the downside. Of course, we loved it. Just as we had back in March, we swanned about in T-shirts and no shirts, in sandals and shorts, sun hats and shades. We fell into the loch, even though the dark, peaty water was barely 9º Celsius. And, just as it had in March, it took our breath away. We didn't care: we had waited weeks for this.

In the first few days of that surge of endorphins, as I sat in a deck-chair beside the loch one balmy afternoon, faint strains of the unmistakable, squeaky-scratchy chatter of wild geese came to my ears. Looking up, shading my squinting eyes, I could just make out a broad skein high above me in a long, wavering V. They were greylags, flying at four or five thousand feet, fifty or sixty of them, strung out in constantly shifting formation, like performing jets. These were not local, non-migratory greylags just drifting about Scotland, they were migrating – of that I am sure. They were heading north, back to their breeding grounds in Iceland nearly a month later than normal, going home. They must have been the straggling last few; for whatever reason, they had lingered. Perhaps the winds had been wrong; perhaps the roller-coaster weather had confused them too. Perhaps they had wintered in the Low Countries and had taken a detour, dawdled across to us to try to find a favourable wind to
carry them back to nest in the tundra wastes of Iceland, now just emerging from eight months of winter.

Were they adapting, responding to climate change before my very eyes? Was I witnessing a shift in behaviour by these robust, archetypal geese, which for decades have been successfully expanding their numbers and their range right across northern Europe?

Some farmers don't like geese stealing their grass and winter corn, but it is our own fault. On the back of modern agriculture we have supplied them with just what they need: potato and stubble fields when they arrive for winter, keeping them fat with winter-sown cereals, the stronger and fitter for the migration home in spring, the more likely to breed successfully. Can geese choose their migration dates at will? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know that geese and swans (and probably many other birds) have to learn their migration routes.

The work of Canadian ornithologist H. Albert Hochbaum, published in 1955 from many years' study at the Delta Waterfowl Research Station in Manitoba, demonstrated that goose migration – in his case Canada goose migration – is a learned behaviour passed down from parent to offspring. Subsequent studies on other geese have demonstrated that his findings stand for most migratory species of
Anatidae –
the goose family – in the northern hemisphere. He suggests that the approximate timing of migration is innate, triggered by length of daylight hours, as are the orientation and celestial navigation skills present in most birds, but that in geese these can be and are superseded by direct learning and
experience. Female geese are hard-wired to return to their birthplace every spring, but not the males. The pairs bond and the males just tag along, back to their self-evidently successful nesting grounds. Come the autumn, when it's time to head south again as the frosts descend and the Arctic winter closes in, the young birds are led south by their parents in tightly knit family groups, learning the route, the stop-overs, the feeding grounds and the best places to over-winter. Hochbaum called this learned behaviour ‘traditions'. If they can learn all that, I feel sure they can learn to adjust those traditions to allow for freaky weather too.

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Back in the blowsy but short-lived treachery of March's heat wave, the first swallows and house martins had arrived in Scotland. They had been sighted over Loch Ness, only a few minutes' skimming flight away. But they hadn't come to us. I was glad. It was too early, and I knew from bitter experience that those early birds find nothing to eat and are forced to go away again, back to lower, more sheltered landscapes or to the coast, where they can flick along the beaches for sand flies. In the slicing chill of April one or two birds had arrived in the glen, but they were gone again straight away. But hardy wheatears had arrived on the moors, and the first brave willow warblers had been heard cascading defiantly from the birch woods.

Now, in mid-May, with all this bursting warmth, the full rush of summer migrants piled in, almost as though they
had been queuing just down the road, like impatient shoppers waiting for opening time. Cuckoos prattled and cuck'd from the hill behind the loch, and tree pipits were suddenly spilling their shrill whistles and trills from the bright lime-budded tips of larches. Chiffchaffs announced themselves from the willows at the marsh and whitethroats chittered from those banks of golden broom and gorse left after the fire. Warwick opened his front door to find an exhausted redstart on the mat. He brought it to work to show me – we don't get many here: we haven't got enough of their favoured habitat of mature oaks. After a rest it seemed to perk up and fluttered up into a sycamore. Now at least there were a few insects about to boost its strength.

For me the real joy of that warmth was the return of our blackcaps. They, too, were almost a month late, but they came. The dawns, now at three forty-five a.m., pulsing towards the summer solstice at eight minutes of increased daylight every day, rang with their fluting, melodic exuberance. There is a large clump of snowberry in the garden much loved by both wrens and blackcaps. Brambles entwine its woody stems, making it impenetrable even to my probing inquisitions. I peer into nothing but twiggy darkness. But I suspect it is a haven for spiders and consequently for anything that enjoys a spider repast. I can rely upon that shrubbery for the first blackcaps of the year and it hasn't let me down yet. Later on, when they start to nest they move much more freely through the gardens and trees so that all day our little world floats aloft, enriched by the sheer joy of their constantly repeating canticle.

I read that in southern England blackcaps are now present all the year round. It seems that the warming climate and food, particularly fat balls, on suburban bird tables has meant that they can survive. But these are thought not to be our migratory birds, but another ‘new' strain of central European and Scandinavian blackcaps that have started to migrate away from Continental cold to the much milder winters of England's south and south-west – a shorter migration, a better climate and a more reliable source of food. That's how adaptation works: life keeps moving on.

I can't be sure where our blackcaps go in winter, but I read that it's southern Europe, the Mediterranean countries and further even to sub-Saharan Africa. I find it hard to comprehend that the little scrap of ashen feathers I held in my hand last autumn had made it all that way and back again, possibly several times. Like Scott Weidensaul, I am dazzled. That tiny pulsing heart, those fluttering wings, the beady eyes scanning the land beneath, and that fizzing brain no bigger than my little fingernail, all perfectly in sync, like a tiny electric toy. All driving, pushing, steering, navigating, eyeing up the stars, sharp little bill thrust into the wind, skimming across seas, weaving through woods, fields, gardens and parks, orchards, vineyards and olive groves, flickering over mountains and dales, skirting great lakes and snatching a roost and a rest wherever strength and energy supplies demand. Is it two thousand miles, or three? Does it take a week or two, or three, even a month? I don't know, and until some boffin manages to radio tag or track a blackcap's migration, I don't suppose anyone else can be sure
either. But it doesn't matter. What matters to me is that it makes it there and back again safely. I would rejoice if I could find a way to tell it how very pleased I am.

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It was only then, still basking in the warmth of what would turn out to be a disappointingly brief spring, the memory of which is made the more piquant by the sorrowful summer that would follow, that I realised the full extent of the damage that treacherous burst of heat in March had done. All those life forms that had been tricked, lured into exposing themselves far too early, had been ruthlessly obliterated by the subsequent frosts and snows, many never to emerge again. The buds and blossoms that had flung themselves apart; the tender leaves that had sloughed off their protective sheaths; the bugs, the beetles, the butterflies and moths that had crawled out of hibernation or pupae that had split; larvae that had prematurely rushed their next instar phase; frogs and toads that had pumped their spawn into pools that would soon be smothered by an inch of ice; birds, such as the rooks, that had laid their eggs and hatched their chicks into a world of frost and starvation. Everything had suffered. If it was a roller-coaster for us, it was a death slide for them.

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Climate change. I am wary of that catch-all excuse for anything we can't explain or don't like. Its brackets are too
large, too all-embracing – a tad too convenient. The rub that leaves me uncomfortably pensive is that we simply don't know. What little I do know tells me that, however real climate change is, it is unlikely to be the sole reason for those changes to the natural world we can see and document. It is when several factors come together, bringing an insupportable pressure to bear upon species and ecosystems, that things go most seriously wrong.

Perhaps this is what we have to expect now: massive swings and surges; unreliable seasons; soaring and plunging temperatures; exceptional storms and their consequent floods. Have we done this? Have we brought it on ourselves? Are the excesses of the Industrial Revolution to blame? How much worse will it get? Is this to be Gaia's nemesis? The scientists continue to argue and no one really knows what is happening and how it will alter our lives. But the rooks know, and the great tits and the crane flies and the looping caterpillars. They all know that they have to adapt quickly if they are to survive.

Have we got it all wrong? Has the march of what we have labelled ‘civilisation' now taken us so far away from nature, from biorhythms, from contact with the soil that we have lost the ability to assess what damage our actions inflict upon the planet? Have we abandoned the precautionary principle, or did it never really exist? Does it remain simply a notion, two catchy words that never stood a chance against the march of our irrepressible greed? Or then again, was all this destined to happen anyway? Has one major event on the surface of the sun spun us into disarray, just as has almost
certainly happened many times before during the four thousand million years of life on Earth?

That certainly was the well-aired view of the former Astronomer Royal, the late Sir Bernard Lovell FRS, who told me shortly before he died that the fuss we were making about climate change was ‘laughable' in the context of the planet's history. He was a man who knew a thing or two about the sun and the Milankovitch cycle and solar flares, about axial tilt and the precession index, all those tricks on our eccentric path around the sun which dictate the levels of solar radiation on Earth and are supposed to ordain the measure of our seasons. It's hard to shrug off the opinion of such a venerable old scientist, especially one who, at the very end of his long life, was busy planting an oak wood for future generations. ‘It's the best thing I can do for the planet,' he said, with a wry smile. ‘Don't stand about. Come and help me.'