by Jim Crumley
Sitting in the car, watching through an open window, I felt like the still centre of the wild world, as if I should be doing more. But my job was this. As one more shower thudded into the car, the hedge five yards away filled up with tree sparrows and linnets, and they burrowed deep inside it and gossiped loudly for every moment of the deluge. Then the sky lightened, the wind calmed, the sun stole out, and they were gone. Then suddenly everything was restored at once. The sun and the wind started to bore into the mountain clouds, making holes just above the foothills but never quite revealing the summits. Geese piled in, adding to the mayhem in the stubble fields, and perhaps they had been waiting out the storms on the river, keeping their heads down below the level of the highest banks. A big flight of rooks drifted over, sounding like heavy agricultural traffic, and launched dozens of dummy-run assaults on a solitary kestrel on a fence post. It finally tired of them and headed west, and so did I.
Out near Flanders Moss I found it again – on a fence post, being harassed by jackdaws. I had stopped to watch, but then I found my attention distracted by some odd shapes in the field across the road. They were dark and inert, they looked like sods of earth where the snow had melted (except that the snow had not melted), or lumps of spread dung (but there was no spread dung). The field had been partly ploughed before the snow came, and the shapes lay in the hollows made by the plough and partly filled in by the snow. None of them moved, and yet there was something about them that did not quite make sense. Nothing else in the field was free of snow. I reached for the binoculars and what snapped into focus was a flock of lapwings. But they were so hunkered down that only the broad dark curves of their backs and the slim curves of their crests showed.
A single sentry bird got to its feet. Otherwise, not one bird moved, this despite my very obvious presence standing by my car and my very obvious interest in them. The field at my back, which the kestrel had just crossed, seethed with jackdaws, sparrows and starlings. The field where I had stopped earlier was feverish with birds. All across the Carse, that winter bird highway thrummed with traffic. Yet there, thirty yards away, these lapwings were still enough to make me think at first glance that they had been sods of earth. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was out, there were two hours of usable daylight, followed by a long, cold night. Why were these birds and these alone not making hay while the sun shone?
They had the look of birds that had just reached journey’s end after migration, probably from somewhere down the east coast, Northumberland perhaps. Behind them was a journey up the coast, into the Firth of Forth, then the long haul upstream. If you make such a journey, this is as far inland as you can get in this part of Scotland. Keep going west and you run into the mountains, and you start to close in on the long sea lochs of the west coast. Go north from here and its mountains all the way to Orkney. This was journey’s end all right. If I’m right, these lapwings migrated about six weeks early. So, were they lured by an absurdly warm December and an all-but snowless January? Nothing more than dropped hints of winter, a day or half a day at a time while the temperature swithered between ten and fourteen degrees. Is this, in other words, another symptom of climate change convincing enough to tamper with one of their most fundamental biological functions; convincing enough to delude them into migrating six weeks early, only to find that winter had turned up on the day they arrived? Can that happen? Yes, it certainly can. Was it happening right there in front of my eyes? I don’t know. But I think so.
When I left them, I drove on to Flanders Moss (finches, linnets, geese and jackdaws again, wrens a-twitch everywhere in the woods). When I passed the lapwings again more than an hour later, it looked very much as if not a single bird had moved. In all that time, the sun had shone. That night, there was an almost full moon at the end of my street, the temperature had dropped below zero, and then it had started snowing again.
Three days later it had thawed again, the temperature rose in a day from minus five to plus ten, the snow was gone from the fields and the low hills and the mountains wore stripes. I went out in the early afternoon and found the kestrel again in the same place but on a pole rather than a fence post. I pulled in to watch from a distance, saw it follow a line of poles down the side of a farmhouse track. It perched halfway to the farmhouse, despite the hover-friendly breeze out of the west. Twice within five minutes it dived straight down into the grass verge by the track and twice returned empty-taloned to the same perch. Then it tried a third perch much nearer the farmyard. I saw now there was a ruined outbuilding behind the house, and I suspect that might be where it nests when the time comes.
Out of idle curiosity I scanned all the fields that I could see, and counted all the poles that were available to a hunting kestrel. Over about half a square mile there were more than fifty. Now how might that change the characteristic hovering behaviour of the same hunting kestrel? It flew suddenly in a shallow, flat-out dive that covered hundreds of yards before I lost it. I turned back to the farm track in search of an explanation. I found it: there was a buzzard low over the field and coming from the direction of the kestrel’s last pole. It flew slowly, carrying hefty prey. It perched on a fence post and began eating at once, but it looked up often in the direction the kestrel had taken. Once again, I was wondering about the impact the proliferation of buzzards has had on kestrels. Thirty years ago, there were more kestrels and no buzzards here. A final thought on the subject: in a previous life, I commuted from Stirling to an Edinburgh newspaper office early in the morning, and I used to count kestrels at the side of the M9. My record for one journey of about thirty miles was fourteen. Now, if I have cause to drive to Edinburgh, I see no kestrels, but I do see buzzards.
And while I am rounding up final thoughts, I left the buzzard and drove west to the field where I had seen the lapwings. More of the field had been ploughed in the interim, but the lapwings were still there, feeding in the stubble, but no more than twenty yards from where I had first seen them. So I had cemented one more small theory about climate change securely into place.
* * *
Airthrey Loch on the campus of the University of Stirling is a swan water. All kinds of wildfowl use it, but it is owned by mute swans, or more specifically one mute swan, the resident cob. I have spent more hours watching swans than any other creature, and more hours writing about them. I have watched them all across Scotland, from Shetland to Solway and from the Western Isles to the east coast. And from Lindisfarne to Norfolk to a swan hospital in Surrey. And trumpeter swans in Alaska, and whooper swans nesting on an Icelandic beach of black volcanic sand with the volcano in question – Hekla – for a backdrop. Over the years, I have learned among many other things to avoid generalising and to recognise individuality. I have met clever swans, stupid swans, brave swans, timid swans, reasonable swans, unreasonable swans, enlightening swans and downright baffling swans. I have yet to find a swan that turns into a beautiful swan maiden, but I haven’t finished looking yet.
And sometimes you come across the mute swan cob from hell. Airthrey Loch has such a cob. To begin with, he is huge. They always are. He is also fearless. They always are. And when he does that thing that all swans do, “standing” on the water with head and neck held high and wings flourished and wide open so that they crack like sails in a big wind, it becomes a gesture intended to intimidate, and it succeeds. When he strikes that pose on still water so that it reflects itself and becomes an exquisite, two-headed, four-winged monster, it becomes difficult to overstate the impact. I have tried to imagine how that must look to a lesser swan or a mere duck or a swimming otter down at water level, and I think it must look as if the Celtic gods have moved in to terrorise all lesser beings.
Winter is a difficult time for swans, especially young swans in their first year. The mortality rate is exceptionally high. Some adults pairs look after their brood right through the winter and only evict them from the territory when they start entertaining nesting notions again. Other parents throw them out before winter sets in
. Airthrey’s cob is one such parent. Luckily for his offspring, the loch is effectively two lochs connected by a long narrow middle section. The larger of the two watersheets is owned by the cob and his mate, the smaller is where the banished offspring go, and there they can winter well enough, for their water is sheltered, there is good feeding both in the water and on large areas of mown grass. The reliable presence of humans with handouts also helps.
On a day towards the end of winter, with a fair bit of ice on the surface of the smaller loch and the narrow connecting stretch, I had wandered that way with a camera and my insatiable swan curiosity. The cob was already well fired up, and was clearing everything from coots to goosanders to geese from his path in a series of fast swimming charges with neck furled, head held low and wings hoisted like mainsails. Some of these sallies evolved into wing-thrashing lunges, his colossal black webbed feet and his wingtips thrashing the surface with fear-inducing rhythmic precision. So far, so predictable. Then I heard the wingsong of more swans in flight. If you ever had a humming top as a child and you remember the noise it made, and if you can imagine that sound broken up into rhythmic four-in-the-bar fragments, that is the song of a mute swan’s wings in flight, a pulse of extraordinary beauty. When its echo bounces back off the frozen surface of a winter loch, then you know for sure you are eavesdropping on the language of one of nature’s chosen tribes.
Three swans came low over the loch, undercarriages lowered, wings angled and gliding, but at the last moment they pulled out and went round again, and if the change of mind was instigated by the sight of the cob in full flow, they failed in that one moment of doubt to appreciate the full implications of what awaited them. For they circled again, and this time they landed on the water and by the time the water around them had subsided, the cob was twenty yards away and closing. Fast.
In this mood of more or less constant belligerence, nothing heightens it to a pitch of terrifyingly concentrated rage like the arrival of a new adult swan. And now there were three of them. As often as not, a cob’s territorial sallies are designed to deter, to deliver a sermon about discretion and valour and all that. Physical contact is comparatively rare. What followed was all physical contact. After the first lunging assaults, two of the incomers fled. The third was either a little slow on the uptake or it was made of stronger stuff and was in the mood for a challenge. But this was David facing up to Goliath in a version of the story in which Goliath hadn’t read the script. He first grabbed a beakful of the smaller swan’s back and held on. The victim let out a yelp that could only be pain. Then he was simply unable to free himself as the sheer weight of the assailant bore down on him. Then the attack moved to the neck, and at every bite the victim yelped again and again. Finally, the cob drove his victim against the bank and then the attack really got going. How this might have resolved itself is not a pleasant speculation, but there was a fisherman on the bank, and he, brave soul, waded into the water, separated the swans and stood between them. He was a big man, over six feet and well built, and the cob didn’t give a damn. He eluded the fisherman’s defences and time after time he charged again at the swan on the bank, always going for the neck, always inflicting pain. But the fisherman hung in there and finally succeeded in ushering the injured bird far up the grass bank, at which point, honour more than satisfied, the cob withdrew a few yards on to the water, where he was joined by his mate, and they rose on the water together, flourishing their wings and calling loudly, as blatant a demonstration of triumphalism as you will ever see in nature.
Some swans are better at the “nuclear option” school of territorial rule than others. Here, it works. There are six very healthy-looking young swans on the smaller part of the loch, the cygnets from last summer, and now, at the end of their first winter, with the brown plumage of their nursery months giving way to their first coat of brilliant white, they look primed, ready to go out into the world, where it is just possible they will join forces with the seven cygnets that flew from here last year. Demonstrably, they have wintered well. Demonstrably, their parents know what they’re doing, and any day now they will finally clear their offspring from their nursery waters, forcibly if necessary.
Chapter Thirteen
Insh Marshes: A Waterworld with No Half Measures
The longer the nights, the more precious the daylight. At the latitude of the Insh Marshes in the upper reaches of Strathspey and the lee of the northern Cairngorms, December rarely doles out more than six usable hours of the stuff. Between dawn and dusk, the daylight fliers cram the hours with hunting. These are the dark days, which the weak and the ill-starred rarely survive. At this time of year the Insh Marshes are a waterworld with no half measures, as uncompromising as Iceland, which may be why Icelandic whooper swans feel at home here. Their beauty and their arctic-toned music dignifies every Strathspey winter. Wetlands this expansive, this wide-open, this wild, are the stuff of nature’s own dreams, and it is not possible to overestimate their value.
There should be beavers here. In nature’s scheme of things, such a wetland should be aided and abetted and managed and manipulated by beavers, because their presence is capable of increasing the biodiversity of such a landscape fourfold, so it becomes four times as priceless.
The marshes lie between two of the Highlands’ set-piece mountain massifs, the Cairngorms to the east, the Monadhliath to the west, and every December the snow unfurls down their flanks by degrees, according to the depth of winter, the one in shadow when the other is in sunlight. It is a sorcerer’s landscape. Birch woods, garbed in that mysterious winter purple that stows away their tight-packed finery of the seasons to follow, climb up and over low ridges between here and the Cairngorms’ pinewoods. They also offer cover for a nature writer on a mission. Mostly when I have come here at this time of year my priority has been the swans, but I have also come in hope of renewing another old acquaintance.
An hour drifted by, drifted from one woodland-edge viewpoint to another, to another, to another . . . each one opening out a different portion of the marshes, a different set of possibilities. A little elevation goes a long way on the Insh Marshes. A birchy knoll of fifty feet opens up the miles-wide world which is simply out of reach when you are down at water level. There are inevitable diversions: wolf-whistling wigeon flocks; a red squirrel on a birch trunk a dozen yards away, cramponing vertically upwards, three points of contact, one hind foot lifted to scratch some woodland irritant, hanging on; the whooper swans, of course, a handful swimming far out on dark pools, and one heart-stopper of a flypast – nine of them came low over the trees from behind me, then dropped almost to water level as they banked to fly south down the marshland miles. But such an hour, fascinating and sometimes enchanting as it was, reduced to five the workable, watchable daylight hours, and the particular old acquaintance I wished to meet had not shown up yet.
Realistically of course, you do not just drive a hundred pre-dawn miles, park your car at first light, walk down through the woods, focus your binoculars, and have the object of your day’s endeavours manifest itself in the glasses, majestically lit by the rising sun, but you do try to harvest the fruits of the sum of your experience. You know what you are looking for and where you have seen it before. You know the kind of places it likes – low, solitary trees, fence posts. You fall back on proven techniques of stillness and moving through the landscape. If you don’t like hides (I don’t, although once in a while, needs must), you must become a part of the landscape. It all takes time. It all takes patience. That particular day, it would take two-and-a-half hours. Oh, and that was my third day of looking. It is, to say the least, an imperfect science. But after two-and-a-half hours, I focused my binoculars on a line of fence posts just beyond the edge of a long, narrow pool, and there on the third post from the left, in the sunlight, and perfectly reflected in the water, and exactly (down to the very fence post) where I had seen one two years ago, was a male hen harrier.
Apart from everything else that pushes the hen harrier so far up t
he list of bird conservation’s priorities, it is a singularly stylish bird. Aesthetics alone would account for its superstar status in what you might call ornithology’s pecking order. The male is the showstopper, and in light as uncompromising as a December noontide, and at a good distance, he looked white, and only a slightly darker white on his head and the tops of his folded wings, those wings which are ennobled by vivid black primaries. The legs looked bright yellow, and the face had a snowy-owlish aspect. No part of him moved. The male hen harrier is a master of stillness when he needs to be and he needs to be often because he is so conspicuous.
All stillness is a deception. It feigns disinterest. That particular manifestation of stillness in my binoculars was saying: don’t bother about me, I’m a fence post. Such stillness also conceals the bird’s true colours, metaphorically and literally, for the male hen harrier shares with the swans a quality in his plumage that absorbs colour from its surroundings. I stumbled on the phenomenon years ago when I was writing a book called Waters of the Wild Swan (Cape, 1992), in which I quoted the wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe. In his book Bird Portraiture (The Studio, 1946) he first dismissed the idea of a “white” bird, then there was this:
Notice the yellow tinge in the feathers of neck and upper breast, and the cold bluish purity of the back, wings and tail. Note also the colour of the shadowed under-surfaces and how it is influenced by the colour of the ground on which the bird is standing: if he is standing on green grass, then the underparts reflect a greenish colour, whereas if he were on dry, golden sand, the reflected colour would be of a distinctly warm tint; or again if he were flying over water, his breast, belly and underwings would take on a colder tint, especially if the water were reflecting a blue or a grey sky.