Gods of the Morning (5 page)

Raptors, such as ospreys and harriers, tend to move much more slowly, travelling by day and using thermals to spiral upwards so that they can glide for long distances before rising and repeating the process all over again. The exception to this rule may be falcons. Only twenty-four hours after it was ringed in Paris, a young peregrine falcon was gunned down on Malta, some thirteen hundred miles south, an average of fifty-four m.p.h. without stopping.

*  *  *

For me, here and now, migration means geese and swans, waders thronging the mudflats of the Firth and woodcock slinking into the woods. Our small summer migrants all vanished south long ago, but the onset of winter brings the Arctic species down to our more favourable climes. I lie awake at night, listening out for the haunting music of whooper swans bugling through the moonlight. Then, with the first frosts and an east wind, woodcock suddenly arrive in droves from Scandinavia and Russia, escaping the snow and ice.

It is a gamble. If, as seems likely, birds are triggered into migrating by the length of daylight, they must also assess the weather, choosing suitable conditions and the right wind to travel. Two years ago the Scandinavian woodcock got
their timing horribly wrong. They arrived in the Highlands, which were gripped by an unseasonably severe November frost. There had been a light snowfall immediately followed by –18ºC, even on the coast.

The land fell silent. The Beauly River froze over. The loch became gleaming glass in the low-angled sun, and huddles of disconsolate mallard sat about preening on the edge of the rigid marsh. There was nothing else to do. The ground and its snow crust, even in the sheltered woods, was as rigid as concrete. Woodcock are woodland waders with long probing bills for winkling invertebrates out of the litter layers of damp forest soils. Unable to break through, they starved. My good friend and colleague Peter Tilbrook, former Nature Conservancy Council and Scottish Natural Heritage director, who lives on the east coast at Cromarty, doesn't miss much. He phoned to tell me that migrant woodcock, which had just arrived, were starving in his wooded garden. They were so weak that he could pick them up.

In the Aigas garden there is a small patch of wet woodland where a spring rises. I have never known it dry and I have never seen it freeze solid, although in very hard winters the open pool has grown a skin of thin ice. The spring water seeps away into the soil beneath the spreading branches of 120-year-old, close-planted western red cedars, whose closed evergreen canopy provides a resin-scented arbour like a secret den – a place where my children loved to hide when they were small. Following a hunch after Peter's phone call, I went to have a look.

There they were. Three woodcock stood together on the
damp soil, their large black eyes in sculpted soot- and cinnamon-barred heads stared blankly at me. I backed off, reluctant to stress them any more than the weather already had. The ground was dotted with the pockmarks of their hungry probings. I prayed they were finding something to sustain them. They stayed there a week, until the anticyclone drifted back towards Norway and a mild west wind flooded in to free us up.

How did they find that lonely wet patch, I wondered, the only one in a world of ice? What tricky avian sensibility had led them to that secret place? Could they scent the damp soil over the heady essence of cedar resin? Had they been there before in hard times? Did one wise old bird tell the others? So many questions, so many riddles. Such a cloud of witnesses.

4

And Then There Were Rooks

Above the dark and drooping world
Let the empty skies disclose
Your dear, delightful crows.

‘Crows', Arthur Rimbaud

Crow realized God loved him –
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

‘Crow's Theology', Ted Hughes

I can't claim any prescience; neither am I given much to old wives' tales or pithy country aphorisms. An abundant fungal flora or a heavy crop of rowan berries doesn't seem to me to mean anything more than a bumper year for fruiting fungi and rowan trees. When the greylags and pink-footed geese arrive earlier than expected, harrowing the September skies with their treble-pitched clamour, all that it tells me is that the season in their Arctic breeding grounds – Greenland, Iceland, Lapland – is turning, and that their migratory instincts have fired a little earlier than in some other years.

Not so Old Malkie, famous round here for his doom-laden predictions, when I bumped into him at the Beauly petrol station. ‘That'll be the snow on the way any day now,' he gloomed, waving his walking stick to the puckering late-October clouds and shaking his platinum curls. (To my intense chagrin, three days later there was a sugaring of snow on the three-thousand-foot pyramidal crest of Beinn a' Bha'ach Ard [hill of the high byre], which impales our cloud-laden horizon to the west.)

Yet despite all the head-shaking and dark muttering by the nay-sayers and would-be country sages in our glen, it did not seem to me to follow that blizzards are imminent, that we are in for a harsher winter than usual or that the end of the world is nigh. But I
am
moved by the wholly unexpected.

In early November our rooks arrived back at their long-established nests in the tall limes, oaks and sycamores that line the Aigas drive. You couldn't miss them. They were their usual boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly and generally carrying on like – well, like rooks always will. They were nesting – at least, they were going through the unmistakable motions of nesting. They were paired off, gathering and stealing each other's sticks, repairing old nests and even building from scratch. But it was only just November. Now that
was
unusual. We don't expect the rooks to attend their nests until February, sometimes late February, if the weather is hard. But November?

It didn't last. In ten days they were gone again, flocking
away in rowdy gangs tangled with jackdaws, down to the potato and stubble fields recently harvested, the arable soils of the Beauly Firth as dark and rich as molasses, where they joined up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others from far and wide. I never did discover why they had arrived back at their rookery so unexpectedly, so absurdly early. It was as though they were feeling some collective corvid memory lapse and a need to check it all out, just to make sure they were still welcome there, like old boys and girls heading back to school for nostalgia's sake. I logged it away as odd and, as the New Testament has it, ‘pondered these things in my heart'.

With hindsight I now know that something other was indeed up, although it took a long time to become clear to me. At a human level we tend to view and assess climate change by large events, not small ones. Hurricanes, cyclones, storms and cloudbursts, rampaging floods and withering droughts are the dramatic yardsticks by which we measure swerves away from expected ‘normal' patterns of weather. It's hardly surprising: they come rampaging in and imperil us with their power and potential for disaster – or far worse. But in reality they are probably just the crescendos in the overture, the pushy high points of much more subtle shifts and pulses that are happening,
pianissimo
, all the time, most of which go unnoticed or at best recorded only by meteorological boffins with their noses pressed to electro- barographs and computer models.

In just a few weeks we would know that whatever undetected signal had triggered the rooks' unseasonal return to
their nests was indeed part of some much grander orchestration, something much more all-encompassing, much more . . . yes, perhaps ‘sinister' is the right word, after all.

*  *  *

Not just God, but I also love rooks:
Corvus frugilegus
, the very fittingly named ‘foraging crow'. The onomatopoeic crow –
hrōc in
Old English,
rork
in Old Dutch,
craa
in Old Scots, all, including the word ‘crow' itself, inflections of the distinctive
kraa
calls everyone immediately recognises. I love them for their dissonant, rough-edged, pub-brawl rowdiness, all of which, as one of my earliest childhood memories, is permanently etched into my cerebral cortex.

I need to come out and declare this now because so many people seem not to like rooks, lumping them together with every other crow and often refusing to acknowledge the many differences – although getting it off my chest feels a bit like owning up to some contemptible vice. Farmers grind their teeth and spit venom when packs of rooks swoop down, like brigands, to raid their winter barley fields, ripping the germinating seeds and the stash of protein-rich sprouts from the rain-sodden tilth, just like the old Scottish Border reivers, ‘. . . where all men take their prey'.

In a fit of rage a farmer near here felled a handsome spinney of mature Scots pines just to prevent the rooks nesting there, and another, also given to uncontrollable outbursts of anger against many aspects of the natural world, attempted to sue his peace-and-wildlife-loving neighbours
for having the temerity to harbour a rookery in their trees. Even those who don't suffer loss of any kind further darken the rooks' iridescent blackness by ignorantly dismissing them as just ‘crows', uttered with a sneer and all the disdain one might award to football hooligans or drug dealers; an ornithological unfairness equivalent to lumping swans together with geese or writing off fieldfares and redwings as just thrushes. In fact, of course, the crow family is famously diverse, even the black or nearly black ones on the British list: rooks, jackdaws, choughs, carrion crows and ravens differ widely in character, habits, appearance, diet and their manifold interactions with people. It is hard to argue that crows bring many obvious or tangible benefits to mankind, but then neither do most other bird species unless we gain pleasure from their songs, their colourful displays or from killing and eating them, little or none of which relate to crows. Rightly or wrongly, the crow family have long been cast in the villain role and little I can say will alter that.

But, for me, rooks are different. I love everything about rooks and I have clung to the emotive authority of their cries since infancy, when I knew no birds by name and saw them only as flickering glimpses in the great whispering beech trees through the bedroom window of my childhood home. So I am proud to have a rookery at Aigas. I get personal and possessive about them when they return from their winter forays to nest in my trees and surround our lives with their remarkably human and often comical racketing.

The Aigas rookery is very old. We know from the first-hand testament of an old lady (Helen Foucar, now long
deceased), who spent her childhood holidays here more than a hundred years ago with guardian godparents, who in their turn had been here since the 1860s, that every May back then the young birds were shot at the point of fledging, as they perched on the edge of their nests, by local Highlanders, the estate workers whose perquisite it was to harvest and consume this seasonal bounty. But our rookery is probably much older than she or her guardians knew. (Although the rhyme is thought to allude to Henry VIII's sacking of England's monasteries during the Reformation, the ‘Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie' might well have been rooks: they were commonly eaten by country folk right into the second half of the twentieth century.)

This centuries-inhabited house sits in a wider landscape largely denuded of its trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a population of Highland people perpetually teetering on the precipice of a failed harvest and famine. All trees had a price not so much on their lofty crowns as on their hearty bowls and stalwart limbs, for structural timber, furniture or firewood, for charcoal or just ready cash, anything to stave off the crushing poverty of what we would now consider to be a third-world existence barely compatible with civilisation. Only when the majority of Highlanders upped and left for southern cities and the New World in the nineteenth century (more than eight thousand left from this narrow glen, Strathglass, a diaspora extending well into the twentieth century) did the trees return either by planting or by nature's unsleeping opportunism. Ours are the legacy of that era: mature oaks, limes, sycamores and one or two big
ashes, along with the naturally regenerated native birches, Scots pines, goat willows, hazels, rowans and geans (wild cherries).

Every spring I look forward to the rooks' return to the rookery, to the soap opera of their constant bickering, sabotaging and thieving from their neighbours' nests. One large and now well-established nest high in the swaying tops of a mature lime tree is in full view from our bathroom window. I can lie in the bath and watch the daily machinations of their competitive, gangland twig war, drink in the rough old music of their calling, ponder the urgent electricity of instinct blending with guile drawn from the hard-edged experience of survival, the ultimate judgement of all living things. But it is from their flight that I draw the greatest delight.

When a wild wind comes calling, hustling in from the south-west like an uninvited guest, its warm, wet embrace rises and falls, wuthering down the mountains and whirling through the crowns of our tallest trees, building zest and power, so often the precursor to short, stinging rain squalls. My eyes immediately avert to the clouds, to the roiling snowy-grey constants that are such dependable tokens of our time and our place in nature. Their ever-changing back-cloth seems to complement the drama of the rooks' flight, bringing vibrant focus to their ragged black shapes and awarding purpose to their swirling patterns. More vividly than any television forecast or smart-phone app, the clouds and the rooks speak to me about the day ahead.

They seem to sense the west wind's arrival. Effortlessly
they lift off into the quickening breeze, crying out for the others to follow, circling, rising clear of the trees in a ragged pack, out over the river and the broad valley for the sheer glory, for the wild giving of it, as though it has been sent specially for them.

From my study window I watch black rags, like small yachts, tossing on a tumultuous sea. They lift vertically, towering in a whirling tangle of wings, only to fall again in a joyous tumble of free-fall, gyrating, rolling and sweeping up to do it all over again. No one can convince me it isn't fun – more than fun: it's a delight longed for after days of dreary doldrums. They are school-kids let out into the playground after a tedious lesson; racehorses led prancing to the field gate and released into spring pasture after days in a stable, heels to the sky. They fly with all the carefree abandon of a sheet of newspaper picked up and hurled willy-nilly along an empty beach on a stormy day.

The consequence of loving rooks is that I have come to care for their well-being. (Jackdaws and ravens too but, I have to confess, not so heartily the malevolent villains of the black pack, carrion or hoodie crows – ‘Crow, feeling his brain slip,/Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder', Ted Hughes). When the crofters' arable crops in the little river fields of this strath began to decline in the 1970s – no more oats, turnips and potatoes lovingly planted, tended and harvested by bent backs and weathered hands, stoically buttressed by universal little grey Ferguson tractors – I worried that the rooks would suffer and leave. But they clung on. The sheep and cattle fields still delivered up a
harvest of grubs and worms, bugs and beetles sufficient to stave off the rooks' departure.

I did notice that they spent more time away in winter, away on the wide arable fields of the Black Isle, stocking up on corn and barley shoots, gleaning energy enough to be back in February for nesting and raising a brood. The world around them constantly changes at the hand of man, sometimes beneficent, sometimes profoundly taxing, but rooks are resilient and supremely intelligent birds: quickly they learn to adapt to man's latest agricultural whim and, as a happy consequence, the Aigas rooks are with us yet.

Then there is the wonderful cacophony of rooks. Their vocabulary is so expressive and varied. It certainly isn't restricted to the rasping ‘caw' so often dumped on them, although, of course, in a flock they can be world champions of the cawing cause when they need to be.

From my bath on a spring day, with the window flung wide, I can phoneticise at least fifteen calls. (I often wonder how many naturalists habitually keep binoculars in the bathroom and can indulge their interest from the comfort of the bath – not, as Lucy was quick to point out, the most arresting image.)

The commonest is the benchmark ‘caw', but which I prefer to present as ‘kaarr' or ‘aarrr' with a flourish of canine growl at the end that is absent from ‘caw'. A bird with an urgent message to impart repeats this over and over again, with a forward thrust of the head and open bill, wings akimbo, the whole body jetting the sound forward with a counter-balancing upward flick of the fanned tail to send it on its way.

Then comes a collection of similar but quite distinctive calls of similar tonal quality, but with differing consonantal emphasis: a short, sharp ‘kork' or ‘dark' and a stretched ‘daaark', a muted ‘graap', an even quieter ‘grup' and still softer ‘brup', uttered as an afterthought or an aside to some louder exclamation. But these would all appear to be communication calls tossed into the broader clamour of the rook din – the rook cocktail party – as opposed to more intimate exchanges taking place between nesting partners, to chicks or near neighbours.