The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  Chapter Eleven

  Jay is for Crow

  One of those half-dark-at-noon days that January does so well moved sluggishly through the afternoon, fuelled by that lethargic species of rain that makes almost no sound but has the capacity to saturate in minutes everything and everyone in its path. It was falling when I was having breakfast, mid-morning coffee, lunch, mid-afternoon coffee (long sessions at the writing desk are punctuated with excuses for getting up and crossing the room to the kettle). It was an old January, and at the time my base was a kind of upstairs studio flat, an outpost of a hotel at the entrance to Balquhidder Glen. Just when I was thinking I needed the full-blown exercise of going downstairs to the bar, where I might have the day’s first conversation with another human being, I glanced out of the window and saw pale light. The rain had stopped and the last hour before dusk promised to be the brightest – or rather the least dark – of the day, so I postponed the pleasures of the bar, stepped into wellies, grabbed a jacket and binoculars, and went out into the sodden world.

  The nearest walking option from my desk was the forest that climbed the hillside behind my writing eyrie. It was a Commission forest, so not the most promising in wildlife possibilities, but the track would at least be firm underfoot whereas every other option would be sodden and soft, and in any case the object of the exercise on such a day is just to be out, to breathe clean air, and you just never know what might turn up.

  The sky had just begun to lift from its base halfway down the hillside, a process that had the effect of draping the trees in thin scarves of cloud, as if the forest was smoking, although common sense would tell you that there are few circumstances less conducive to any kind of spontaneous combustion than such saturated windlessness.

  Apart from my own footfall, a trickle of water in the ditch at the side of the track, and an occasional distant rumble from the main road far below, there was a conspicuous lack of sound. It was good to be out, but there was an unease about the forest in such a mood, and it communicated itself effortlessly into the mind of a solitary walker. Then the forest screamed.

  As screams go, it was not so much a damsel-in-distress affair, more the conspiratorial screech of one of Macbeth’s witches. There again, it appeared to emanate from high in the spruces, which would seem to rule out both damsel and witch. I spun round to face the source of the sound, at which point an answering scream sounded from the direction I had been facing, so I spun again, in time to catch a glimpse of the screamer as it threaded a buoyant and gently bouncing flightpath between trees. There was a flash of white, a hint of blue, a blur of tawny, another scream, then nothing at all.

  The Gaelic name for it is sgreuchag-choille – screamer of the woods, which just goes to show how much the old Highlanders knew about the creatures whose company they kept. The English “jay” is prosaic to the point of boredom, especially for such an un-boring bird. I had the idea of a silly children’s book (a silly book for children, not a book for silly children) called Jay is for Crow, but before I got round to it, Helen Macdonald took the nature-writing world by storm with H is for Hawk, and that was that.

  So I knew for sure that I was somewhere between two jays, whose last known locations were about 100 yards apart. Jays rarely stray far from their nest territory unless they run out of acorns, which is their favourite food, and paired-up birds rarely stray far from each other. But whatever these two were doing on this spruce-drenched hillside, they weren’t looking for acorns. The chances are, I reasoned, they were a pair, and they would reappear sooner or later. I also reasoned that there was half an hour of usable light before darkness fell, that my chances of seeing anything more interesting were slim, so I may as well sit where I stood, lean back against this spruce trunk, and see if my reasoning bore fruit. Ten minutes (and four screams) later, there were ten jays on the forest track between twenty and fifty yards away from where I sat. Sometimes it just turns out that way, and you reap a modest reward because you made the effort to be out there and trusted the rest to instinct and stillness.

  The birds appeared to be feeding, probably on beetles or spiders or some other forest floor bug lured into the open by the mild weather. The thing about the screaming, which is how you identify an invisible jay from quite a distance away, is that it’s only the most obvious element in the jay’s copious vocabulary. Sitting as close to them as I was, and with no other sights or sounds to distract either me or them, I was now treated to the collected works, as all ten birds kept up a sotto voce stream of chatter. The most frequent voice was a short, monosyllabic, flutey coo, which is not at all what you might expect. There were several variations on the theme of a crow-like caw, but shortened like soft explosions. There were also equally soft throaty chortles, both deep-voiced and falsetto, that reminded me a bit of my grandfather’s pet budgie Joey, last seen lying dead in the seed tray about 1960, which is one of the more ludicrous images that my writer’s mind has contrived on a Scottish hillside.

  I then decided that there was also something of the budgie about the jay’s exotic plumage: the pale, patterned head with the habitual raising of the small crown feathers into a “crest”; the black embellishments beneath the beak; the contrast of breast and back plumage; the black and white of wings and tail and the audacious flash of blue. It could easily be a fellow Australian.

  Ten jays felt like a bit of a windfall. I decided they constituted a winter foraging party, and that they had run out of acorns on their home patch, in which case they had done well to have found this corner of the Highlands. Jays like oakwoods because they like acorns, but they also like deep cover to nest and roost in, and the spaciousness of oakwoods does not supply deep cover. So if they can find an oakwood with, say, a spruce forest nearby, that suits them particularly well. And here was a spruce forest with oakwoods to the south and to the north (and I have seen jays in both), so perhaps it was not so surprising that I might stumble across such a midwinter gathering here. The fact that these were the first I had ever seen in that particular forest only reflects the secretive nature of many aspects of the bird’s life. For despite its vivid plumage, its increasing willingness to take advantage of garden bird-feeders (if they’re near oakwoods), and its so-conspicuous voice, it remains something of an enigma, and is extraordinarily accomplished in the art of not being seen when it chooses.

  The restless gathering on the forest track suddenly took flight in a clamour of screams and a sparrowhawk looped down and sped after them. What happened next was infuriatingly concealed by towering banks of spruce, and all I can say with any certainty is that it was loud. But I now believe with complete conviction that the sparrowhawk was never born that could get the better of ten jays, for when it reappeared, it was in flat-out retreat down the forestry road and it was trailing a wake of ten screaming jays.

  In the dead quiet that followed I eased myself up and out of what had been a very damp seat, and headed down into gathered dusk with the welcome destination of a room with a blazing fire and a glass of something distilled on a far Hebridean island for just such an occasion as this. It’s a great country I live in.

  * * *

  The rooks were singing with their mouths full.

  If you have trouble with the concept of rooks singing at all, you probably have not spent time in a rookery on a mild day early in the year. Like most members of the crow family, rooks have a considerable repertoire. It is true that their most recognisable noise is the one that sounds like a donkey gargling, but they also make frequent forays into the falsetto territories of, say, Roy Orbison, although admittedly without the controlled vibrato or for that matter the perfect pitch. And when they do it with their mouths full of chunky twigs and broken branches during the nest-building season, it tends to sound more like Donald Duck than Roy Orbison. But they are singing.

  An old countryman I used to know insisted that his neighbourhood rookery started nest-building on the first day of March. It was, he further insisted, as reliable as Christmas. He had watched it every year
for forty years, he said. An old keeper had told him the date when he moved into the area, and year after year, so it had proved. Or so he used to insist. But I am far from convinced that the set-piece events of nature’s year are ever as precise as that, and the old keepers whose paths I have crossed have tended to be strong on dogma and as inflexible as shotgun barrels. Or to put it another way, I don’t believe a word of it. The rookery I know best is on the edge of Stirling, and is apt to dip a toe in the water of the nesting “season” as early as late December if the weather is mild enough, and take a break if and when the New Year turns seriously cold for any length of time. It’s a common enough phenomenon in the bird world. Golden eagles are not the only ones to begin displaying, re-establishing territory, and renewing the pair bond around the turn of the year; they are quickly followed by ravens and herons, and I’ve seen Edinburgh’s famous fulmars back at the nest ledge on Arthur’s Seat in January.

  The Stirling rookery is old and sustains several hundred birds, and these thicken the winter profiles of big beech, ash, oak and sycamore trees over several hundred yards. The trees throng the slope of a steep, east-facing bank that drops about a hundred feet. A small burn bisects the slope and provides the necessary doorstep water for the wood’s badger sett. (I never yet found a sett that isn’t near running water.) It’s gloomy or downright dark in the heart of the wood on any winter day after mid-morning, although if there is late afternoon brightness in the overworld beyond the wood it filters through the topmost trees and brightens the high field beyond.

  A mild day of midwinter is the best time to watch the rookery at work, and to eavesdrop on its raucous symphony. The sound of the more or less constantly opened throats of a hundred pairs of rooks requires a certain amount of scrutiny on the part of the listener before you get the sense of what’s going on, of what underpins the harmonic structure of the symphony. I have no idea how long I have been listening, but it’s quite a few years now, and I still haven’t quite got the hang of it, but sometimes I think I’m making progress. I like to watch from a distance at first and from the sunny topside of the bank. The nests are all high in the trees and in clusters. Rookeries are sociable places, except that like most sociable places (pubs, for example), the sociabilities are punctuated by skirmishes. The territory of any one pair may only be a yard or so all round the nest, but they all seem to be vigorously defended. I am choosing my words carefully here: “seem to be” because of how often you see evidence of individuals clearing a space around the nest and keeping it clear. But it is a dangerous generality, for all that. With so many birds in such a relatively small area, it is pushing credibility to insist that all of them are equally adept and equally brave and equally bolshie when put to the test by their neighbours. As with almost any other species, you get smart rooks and stupid rooks, tough guys and timid guys, brazen birds and sneaky birds. It is not possible for all of them to behave identically, any more than it is possible that they all start nesting on the same day every year.

  Rooks fly into the wood from every compass point carrying sticks, from skinny twigs to surprisingly hefty bits of branch. Watch the dexterity of the builder-bird as it grafts the stick into the growing structure and marvel, then watch the neighbours steal that very stick as soon as the builder has turned its back. As further evidence of character diversity, careful scrutiny reveals the accomplished thieves that never get caught and the hopeless ones that get a neighbourly rook beak in the side of the head for their trouble. I am tempted towards the idea that some rooks also have a sense of humour. Rook-watchers will get the most out of their day’s work if they have one too.

  The big winds of autumn always take their toll on such exposed nests, but whereas a much bigger treetop nest like, say, an osprey’s, can be swept from the tree by a good gale, there is almost always something still in place when the rook begins rebuilding. New nests appear every year because first-time builders move in, but the older birds seem to return determinedly to the same nest year after year. Although that too is in danger of becoming an unreliable generality, there is anecdotal evidence at least (and some of it is my own) which suggests they are at the nest site so early in the year in order to reclaim their old nest. And like some carrion crows, there seems no doubt that some rooks repair and maintain their nests throughout the winter.

  Between bouts of building, established pairs stand close together by the nest and croon to each other, a strangely affecting ritual to watch. It also comes as something of a shock that a rook, of all brash creatures, should reveal an intimate side to its character. The male also does a great deal of loud-voiced bowing to his mate as the nesting season progresses, a lusty, expansive gesture with overtones of aggression, but then he brings her food and offers it with manners of such delicacy that you find yourself smiling.

  Now consider the individual bird itself as it stands on the topmost branch of a huge beech and contrives to catch the last of the sunlight, for it glitters glossy black and deep purple, an effect ever so slightly diminished by a pasty-white face and beak and a flashing black eye. The baggy-pants effect of the half-feathered legs also conspires to undermine further the glossy bravado. I was watching a rookery in Edinburgh once, wondering what the bird’s full dress uniform reminded me of when it suddenly hit me – the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland wears breeches just like them. So I wrote the Edinburgh rooks a poem:

  A very Edinburgh bird, the rook,

  Moderatorially cliquey;

  Black breeches and a grey look

  - Auld Breekie.

  I like to head down into the wood late in the afternoon of a rook-watching day and find a good tree to lean my back on, to sit for an hour in the gloom and watch with my ears. Once, I had been sitting for no more than about ten minutes, and had more or less readjusted my ears to the enhanced volume of the rookery from within, when it suddenly produced a roar that sped from one end of the wood to the other, and hundreds of birds took to the air at once. Three things produce that kind of reaction – a sparrowhawk, a buzzard or a peregrine falcon. A rook is ambitious prey for the hawk, and a buzzard is invariably more interested in rabbits when it crosses the rookery field, but when a peregrine spooks a whole rookery into the air, it has achieved the first object of the exercise and then tries to home in on one of the flying mob. Then it either chooses discretion rather than valour in the face of hundreds-to-one-against odds, or it pulls off something remarkable and there is a puff of black feathers. I was in the wrong place to see the cause of the unrest but the right place to feel the explosive nature of the mass launch. The unrest lasted well after the threat had passed. Birds circled noisily for several minutes, and even after most had resumed their stances at the nest, the havering was louder and angrier than before. So I guessed peregrine.

  It becomes apparent when you sit beneath a rookery that the birds don’t like the lower depths of the inside of the wood. It is, for example, littered with suitable nesting material. In fact, much of it is nest material dislodged by wind and weather from the previous year, but they leave it where it lies. Instead they forage far and wide in the brightness of day. I have never seen a rook on the ground inside the rookery wood. The nearest one I’ve seen from the inside of the rookery was perched on a gatepost just outside the upper edge of the wood. There, a long defunct gate reclined, attached to the post by a scrap of that phenomenon of human invention that binds the working Scottish landscape together the length and breadth of the land: blue baler twine. Rooks, like most crows, have a taste for bright or eye-catching stuff to decorate the nest, and this one had seen the blue baler twine flapping thinly in the wind. That twine must have been there for years, for the gate was worse than useless and the fence it used to serve is long gone, but that day that rook wanted that piece of twine.

  I heard it before I saw it, a rhythmic drumming sound at odds with the unscored chaos of the rookery’s symphony. I turned to pinpoint the sound and saw the rook on the post stabbing at the twine. This went on for quite
a long time without any visible effect, then it perched on the gate and started to attack the knot. It put a foot on the twine to stop it moving and attacked it again with renewed zeal. It dropped onto a lower bar of the gate and attacked the knot from below. It yanked on one end, it yanked on the loop round the post. Then it looked as if it was trying to bite through the twine, then to saw through it.

  Then a second rook appeared on the post and tried variations on the same theme. They worked as a team, hammering the twine against the post; they worked in opposition, tugging in opposite directions. A third rook arrived, remained for half a minute on the topmost bar of the gate watching the others at work then left. Perhaps it had offered advice.

  The twine was still there when I left the wood. But when I returned a few days later, it had gone and the gate lay prone in the grass. I walked past the gate into the wood and there was the twine a couple of yards away. So what was all that about: a game? Or did it eventually weaken and fray beyond the point of no return after the rooks had given up and the burden of the gate suddenly became too much for the rook-weakened twine to bear? Alas, I will never know, and I feel bad about that. Perhaps if I had stayed for another hour . . . ?