by Jim Crumley
So there were two birds out over the lapwing-and-goose field, and for a moment it had seemed like a good idea to change position so that I had a view of the field and its airspace unencumbered by branches. Memo to self – don’t. At least not yet. I have found that when you are in buzzard country par excellence, there are often more pairs of buzzard eyes watching you than you know about, which is why I have developed this slightly odd-looking technique (I’m guessing here, I’ve never watched myself) of standing with my back against a birch trunk, and slowly inching all the way round the tree looking up and keeping my back in contact with the trunk. Although I knew there were two buzzards out there to the north, which was the direction I was facing, and although I also knew that two buzzards over a field full of lapwings and geese can sometimes put on quite a show if they’re in the mood, I began my slow circumnavigation of the birch by turning away from the buzzards and towards the east.
I was a degree or two beyond east-north-east when the third and then the fourth buzzards cruised over the trees, one looking down at me looking up, the other looking side-headed at the sky. The third called from no more than thirty feet up and directly overhead, a cry so sharp-edged and (as I fancied it) so specifically aimed that I felt it nail me to the tree. Tingling scalp and startled shoulder blades jerked back against the bark in a tiny but perfectly co-ordinated spasm of response. It was an ice-cold voice the bird directed straight at me.
It is absurd, of course. The buzzard and I both know I don’t speak buzzard. It was calling the attention of the fourth buzzard to my presence. And I had been so convinced I would be indistinguishable from the birch trunk where I leaned to any third and fourth buzzard eyes, thanks to my inch-perfect, slow-motion manoeuvre around the trunk. The fourth buzzard called back and immediately appeared in that portion of the sky where the third still lingered. The two birds shared that space for a moment and called there just once, but the call of the fourth bird began just before the call of the third bird, so that their voices overlapped, and as one was more or less a tone above the other and curved in a steeper glissando arc to a deeper denouement, the effect was of a kind of menacing harmony unique in all my days and nights in wild places. I imagined a duet of wolfsong dwindling to its last deepening and discordant bars.
The two buzzards veered towards the north as the first two had done, flying sideways, the starboard wingtip of one almost touching the port wingtip of the other, so that it was a single creature with a double wingspan that crossed the clear sky directly overhead, and I thought that if the thirsty traveller in the bar had seen this, he would have held the almost-eagle in formidable respect forever more, for I have done just that myself.
It was time to give up trying to be a birch tree, time to walk slowly to that space on the headland where the trees relented and offered up a wide view over the lapwings’ field. The original buzzards were still there, circling at more or less my eye level and about a hundred yards away, and so were buzzards five and six; and buzzards three and four cruised over the birches that surrounded me on three sides, and now the buzzards had become a throng. Six buzzards at eye-level and in the sunlight, and loitering without any apparent intent at all, but – also apparently – enjoying the company of the others less than a month before the nesting season begins with all guns blazing, all hackles raised . . . it was a moment to weigh up every ounce of that compact, power-packed profile, to garner tiny flight details for future use (one bird paused on stiffly held wings to lift a foot towards its beak and nibble it for several seconds; one half-folded its wings and surged forward in level flight as if a turbocharger had just kicked in; one hovered on slowly beating wings, tail held vertically below its head). And then, from behind and above, the seventh buzzard called, and then from the low ground beyond the geese, I heard another, so I turned and re-focussed the glasses, and through a blur of mobilising greylag geese there were three more buzzards, and these abandoned what had been a leisurely northwards procession and made a pointed beeline for the throng.
Ten buzzards.
So let’s see. I had come here to watch the swans, but I had come here too knowing the place from old seasons and its capacity to surprise me with its wildlife riches. I had come to this side of the headland in the first place because I had heard geese, then their lapwing companions, and decided I would drop in on their field to see what was unfolding there. Then, buzzard by buzzard, the whole mood of the hour transformed, and when the last three panicked the goose hordes, the sky was as full of big beating wings as any single pair of human eyes could possibly take in. And then I felt as if – finally – I had achieved something of the birch’s stillness, for I was still and the sky seethed and the air resounded with the clatter of several hundred geese and the eerie tumult of ten buzzard voices that wheeled and dived and soared and spiralled as they cried and . . . hey, what happened to the lapwings?
There is a school of thought, to be found exclusively in the minds of a section of the country’s gamekeepers, that there are too many buzzards, and that it should be made easier to get a licence to shoot them. This is why, because sometimes buzzards turn up ten at a time, because their range is spreading, because they constitute that rarest phenomenon in the 21st-century landscape of Scotland, a prospering species of raptor. It is almost unheard of in our recent past, thanks in no small measure to the activities of that certain section of gamekeepers. Two things have happened to assist the buzzards’ cause. One is that pro-wildlife legislation has got tougher and is better policed, and the other is wildlife crimes are much more widely publicised in the media. So those keepers who cannot tolerate the improving fortunes of a wild creature if it causes them the slightest inconvenience have raised the cry again with Scottish Government ministers:
“Too many buzzards!”
But there is no such thing. There can be no such thing. It is one of the most basic principles of nature that an abundance of predators is only possible when there is a superabundance of prey, and if that prey includes literally millions of gamekeepers’ pheasants that are released into our countryside every year, it also includes rabbits, rats, voles, stoats and weasels, and various other forms of what they are pleased to call vermin.
Not all keepers feel this way. I have had invigorating conversations with those who like to work with nature rather than against it; who know that when the population of a raptor like a buzzard soars from a troubling low point to a spectacular high, that high is false and soon enough the population will relax back to a stable level. Besides, you don’t remove protection from a protected species just because it has recently achieved a position of strength. But all that presupposes that no one takes the law into their own hands; the landscape is still pockmarked with poisoned carcases. Strange how public opinion never comes down on the side of the poisoners.
Hopefully this time the buzzard is here to stay.
Rejoice.
And no one should worry that it’s not an eagle.
ALMOST EAGLE
Buzzard is almost eagle,
more than hawk,
opens tins of cold air
with cutting edges
of sunwise spirals.
Blue’s the background sky
best suited to such languid copper,
not golden enough for eagle
which prefers thundercloud grey.
Chapter Fourteen
I Went Out to the Hazel Wood
They cling to the outermost edges of the western fringes of Gaeldom like the frayed hem of an ancient kilt. They are rags and tatters of woodland, remnants of remnants. They are among the last souvenirs of the original wildwood, the most primitive and least tampered-with of its direct ancestors. The Atlantic hazel woods of our western seaboard – and a handful more on Ireland’s west coast – constitute a habitat unique in the world. Perhaps they are the oldest of all the native habitats of post-Ice-Age Scotland. They hold the great ice in their memory, and in their DNA. Perhaps they have something to say to me about the nature of what winter ha
s become. It is a nature writer’s mission rather than a climatologist’s, but then this book, this tetralogy of the seasons, is a nature writer’s mission. I advocate listening to the land, and I practise what I advocate. Winter has become so unstable, so unsure of itself, so erratic; winter has lost its sense of purpose; winter has lost its way; winter is just plain lost. I have emerged from this pilgrimage through winter looking for something stable and eternal to cling to myself. And nothing clings to eternity more tenaciously than an Atlantic hazel wood.
From the west coasts of Sutherland and Ross to Skye to Ardnamurchan to Mull to Knapdale and the island of Seil in Argyll, these dense and low-slung woods curve uphill from the ocean’s high-tide line to a distinctive pattern dictated by the wind. They will never grow taller, and for as long as they have held the final frontier of the land against the onslaught of ocean winds, they never have. The ocean has never overwhelmed them but ocean winds limit them. Tree and ocean have reached an amicable pact, a peace treaty that has lasted 10,000 years.
Step inside such a wood, on the west coast of Mull. Feel the millennia tumble away. Immerse yourself in its embrace and the press of trees abruptly reduces your awareness of the world to the next few yards, sometimes the next few feet. Again and again the architecture of such a wood commands you to turn aside, bend double, unpin yourself from brambles, wade bogs . . . any combination of these and more or less all the time.
And the trees are eerie.
They writhe their trunks and limbs, the ones that have trunks and limbs, that is. Many of them are effectively self-coppicing, that is, they produce dozens of stems instead of a single trunk. Our own distant ancestors learned from nature how to coppice trees, and especially hazels, so that they might create endless supplies of firewood and of straight poles for building. Often in the Atlantic hazel woods, the trees just do it themselves. If you walk there in a certain mindset and if the day is soft grey and calm, the effect can seem curiously aggressive, nervy, edgy; and if the sun shines, they throw such a web of shadows on the woodland floor that it adds to the untranquil aura of such places. When Yeats went out to the hazel wood in The Song of Wandering Aengus “because a fire was in my head”, it was not to cool the fire that he went there, but rather to cut a hazel wand so that he might catch a trout. The uneasiness of hazel woods is not the environment you would choose to cool a fiery head. If, on the other hand, what you want is an instant fishing rod, it’s perfect.
Hazel woods are also vocal. The trees rasp and rustle in a good-going wind (and on Scotland’s Atlantic seaboard the wind is good-going more often than not), and groan and creak when the wind gets excited, and these are notes of protest that ocean winds have heard for almost as long as there have been hazel woods on an Atlantic shore.
Everything here is apparently ageless, or at least it evokes those imponderable times ensnared within the implicit vagueness of the word “Mesolithic”. It means, since you asked, relating to a transitional period of the Stone Age between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, so somewhere between 12000 and 3000 BC. Further back than that, we’re guessing beyond the level of our competence, but there is ample evidence to suggest that at least some of our Mesolithic ancestors knew how to burn and cut, both to improve grass for the animals they hunted and to create more prolific hazel woods that produced more wood for building, more firewood and more nuts. The profusion of hazelnut shells unearthed by archaeologists at some of our oldest known human settlements is emphatic confirmation of their importance as a food source and, crucially, a food source that could be harvested and stored for winter. For such people, hazelnuts were the nature of winter.
It occurred to me too, walking this Mull wood, that probably then as now, hazel woods were also a preferred habitat of brambles, and that too would enhance their value to early wanderers and settlers. And the more inclined to settle our ancestors became, the more valuable were their hazel woods. The mysterious crannog builders, for example, used hazel and alder posts, and both are trees that thrive in wetlands. The earliest farmers in the West Highlands laid claim to hazel thickets or planted their own, and found endless uses for the flexible slim branches: Yeats’s Wandering Aengus was not the first man who ever caught a little silver trout by hooking a berry to a thread on the end of a hazel wand. They also make good fences, creels, any shape or size of basket you care to imagine, hoops for barrels. There were creel houses and outbuildings like barns made from hazel. In a daft moment, I wondered how I would begin to make a creel house if I had been a wandering Mesolithic chiel 5,000 years ago and made landfall hereabouts. I decided I would make two circles first, a small one which would let the smoke out from a central fire, and a large one that would define the floor area, and which could be pinned into the ground like a tent. Then all you have to do is join the two together with curving hazel wands to make a dome, then cross-hatch them with horizontal hazel wands. Nature has always approved of its tribes – and we are one of these, remember – living in something so organic, something so characteristic of the landscape where it stands. And sometimes, when we do still take the time and the trouble to listen to nature, we surprise ourselves. In some parts of England, for example, where hazels can reach fifty feet high (they achieve nowhere near half that on this blasted shore), they are conservationists. They are being planted and coppiced beneath oak trees right now to assist the cause of English bluebells and nightingales, and who would not want to assist the cause of both?
Meanwhile, on Mull at the end of a weary winter, it seems they assist the cause of brown hares. I walked in on two of them resting in dappled sunlight, ears flat along their backs, both reluctant to move despite my blundering intrusion. When eventually they lost their nerve and decided to make a run for it, they effected a half-hearted retreat across the woodland floor and stopped again not twenty yards away, and still well inside the trees, sitting up and looking back, ears tall. It seemed to my eyes that a hazel wood was a confining kind of habitat for a hare, but then I wondered if perhaps it was an extra defensive measure these hares had adopted in recognition of Mull’s steadily growing population of sea eagles. This coast in particular is increasingly accustomed to that huge eagle shadow rippling across shoreline and cliff face; across its hazel woods. I pulled back, chose a different route, stopped out of sight and downwind and waited. In ten minutes, the hares had ambled back to the very glade where I had found them.
The moment put in mind an old September in this very wood, the shoreline air thick with young swallows and martins cashing in on the insect hordes above and around the hazel wood. I had one eye on a bruise-coloured storm that was powering its way across the sea towards this Mull shore from Tiree and Coll, both of which had vanished in the last few minutes. I heard it coming, for it packed its own wind and arrived with a salvo of hailstones that sizzled off the sea, off the shoreline rocks, then off the trees. By that time, the swallows, the martins and I had come to the same snap decision – head for the hazel wood. I had stepped into the lee of one of the bulkier non-hazels of the wood, a silver birch, and almost at once the skinniest twigs of the surrounding hazels were invaded by birds. They perched upright, chattering, dozens of them in a few square yards. I had seen this happen before in reed beds, but not in a wood. There again, a hazel wood a yard above the high-tide line probably doesn’t look so different from a reed bed, when all you want to do is get your head down in a storm, when your solitary need is met by something thin and upright to cling to.
The storm crashed by, the sun rushed out, and the birds, as if on a signal, exploded in a whispered cacophony of rasping wings back up into the insect-rich air and resumed the slaughter. One moment there were swallows and martins all around as thick on the hazel trees as catkins in February. The next, there were only leaves for company, and in the stillness that followed the storm’s gusto, the trees’ voices were the whispers of skeletons couched in an antique tongue.
It is curious how some landscapes draw you in and reach you with at least a sense of their formative years.
Some achieve the trick by baring the rock bones of the landscape corpus. Some – glaciers or the aftermath of glaciers, for example – demonstrate at a glance the convulsive nature of the hand that devised the architecture of their landscape. Others – like volcanoes, like sea, like polar ice – use perpetual restlessness to challenge our own transience. A Scots pine wood uses the deep, dark green primitiveness of jungles, a realm so all-consuming that you cannot imagine that the landscape ever wore any other garb. They have in common with the hazel woods that they trace their ancestors directly back to the great ice, and they contemplated no other guise from that day to this. Such a pedigree communicates itself effortlessly.
But an Atlantic hazel wood has a different technique from any of these. It lies along the westmost edge of the land as if it has just waded ashore, or as if a mighty breaking wave had petrified as it unfurled, then fossilised over millennia into a chaotic tsunami of trees. I know, I know, I’m taking liberties with the evolution of the raw stuff of the planet, but these are trees unlike any other. If your idea of the kind of tree that makes you happy is a trunk from which branches and a canopy spring forth, you are in the wrong wood here. Rather, this is a half-caste wood, biologically rooted between a tree and a shrub. From inland and above, or from the sea homing in on the land, the thing looks neat, ordered, corralled and curved by the ocean and its winds into something compliant and obedient. But inside, it seethes. There is a crackling, spindly, electric energy about a tree with thirty trunks, each of which rocks and swithers independently of all the rest and at the wind’s bidding; each of which throws a shadow on the woodland floor. And every dancing shadow is interlaced with the dancing shadows of the next tree and the next, for it is in the nature of hazels in an Atlantic wood not to leave more space between trees than what is strictly necessary to get the job done. The whole thing has the effect of a dance to the music of time.