Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  And when dawn broke, I wasn’t the only one to awaken. I could hear the noise on the roof again; it was like tiny steps. Could it be a bird? When I sneaked out to check, it turned out there was nothing there. I did make a discovery behind the house, though. In the screening that covered the gap between roof and wall was a large hole. It looked like an entrance.

  Throughout the day, this entrance would occupy my imagination as I tried to organise the moving boxes in the kitchen. Around lunchtime I made a circuit of the house and finally laid eyes on the mysterious roof creature. It was stretched out on the screening against the wall, dozing and enjoying what appeared to be a siesta. Its teeth indicated that it was a rodent, and at first glance it could have been mistaken for a rat. But its fuzzy tail said otherwise.

  All at once, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This was a squirrel that had excavated the roof insulation to gain more living space, and clearly its ploy had worked. Judging from the infrared camera pictures, there must be a very grand squirrel apartment up there.

  My emotions were thrown for a loop. Here was an intruder whose behaviour in relation to the house was highly unauthorised. On the other hand, I’ve always liked squirrels and was fairly knowledgeable about them, and now I could see both the sensitive whiskers on its forelegs and the rudimentary thumbs that made its front paws so much like hands. I looked at the fuzzy tail, which acts as a rudder in a leap between trees and as a blanket at night. Its softness was touching even without touching it.

  Judging by the genitalia under its tail it was a female, and asocial female squirrels can have tough lives. After the hunt for a mate in the spring, they drive the male out of their territory and must care for all the young on their own. Just how hectic this life can be was driven home for me once when my biologist friend found a baby squirrel that had fallen out of the nest. I quickly read up on what squirrel mothers must do, which turned out to be an awful lot. The babies must be fed every three hours, and after that their tiny bellies should be licked or massaged to encourage digestion. Then, each one in turn must be dangled out of the nest for a while to keep it from becoming a latrine. It sounded like a full-time job, so I was doubly relieved when the squirrel mother found her baby. Maybe it had fallen out of the nest while she was trying to find a bit of food for herself between shifts. Her task would hardly become easier once the young began to dash around and become easy targets for hawks and cats, but female squirrels are so responsible that they even take on orphaned babies, if they’re relatives.

  My tender-heartedness was starting to take over. Squirrels have been hunted throughout almost all of history. They were sacrificed at Germanic festivals in winter and spring, and their tiny bodies provided the poor with food, as well as income from selling their pelts. In the 16th century, thirty thousand squirrel pelts might be exported from Stockholm in a single year, and that was just one of many stockpiles in Sweden. In more recent years, our native European red squirrels have been in competition with their grey relatives, who were brought here from the United States in the 20th century. The grey squirrels carry a virus that only they are immune to, and they sometimes create very tough little gangs that at times bite dogs and children.

  This little red friend on the screening deserved protection. I gingerly sneaked away, and sat down quietly to read once I was inside again.

  I had a little trouble concentrating on my book, because my thoughts kept being drawn back to my neighbour in the roof. What was it like to live with squirrels? Well, people have done it before. Ladies in both Antiquity and the Renaissance kept them as decorative pets. While it seems unlikely that they participated much in aristocratic society, an 18th-century English gentleman boasted about the musical abilities of his tame squirrels. They didn’t care about choral music, but they could energetically stomp in time to chamber music from their cages. One squirrel had kept up an allegro rhythm for ten minutes before pausing and turning to another rhythm. In general, they probably found life indoors much less stimulating given the hamster wheels that were put in their cages.

  At last the day became night again. By that point I really couldn’t avoid thinking of the squirrel, because she was constantly moving around in the space below the roof. At first, I was amazed that we were only separated by a few planks. Hearing her movements gave me a sense of closeness, and I understood how bats can experience things without seeing them.

  But soon enough, the fact that I could hear her went hand-in-hand with my being annoyed. Just as I dozed off, she started up again. Clearly, she was having a hard time falling asleep, and now so was I. It was like having a fussy child in the room. Each movement was a whine: something was in the wrong place, or maybe it was too hot. ‘Go to sleep!’ I hissed as she rummaged around up there. Squirrels aren’t known for deploying any sort of interior decorating skills in their nests, but perhaps she was arranging what little insulation was left. If she’d used it for a bed, it must be too warm. Squirrel nests are typically lined with grass and moss, so I supposed mineral fibre might irritate her airways. In fact, wouldn’t it be downright hazardous to her health?

  The squirrel scratched herself loudly. She probably also had fleas. There’s usually an awful lot of vermin in squirrel nests. I had previously had bad experiences with that sort of thing – one time, bird lice had spread to the vent above my bed. They came from pigeons in the attic, and I expected something similar could happen with squirrel fleas.

  Now she was up and about again. Squirrels mark their territory by tramping around in their own urine and using their wet paws to stamp the boundaries. Was that what was going on up there? And didn’t it sound like she was gnawing on something? Like other rodents, squirrels need to wear down their continuously growing front teeth every day.

  After a restless night’s sleep, I heard rustling from the roof around seven o’clock. Aha, the squirrel was awake. When I went to the kitchen I saw her peering in the window, probably on her way to breakfast.

  As I drank my coffee I unearthed a pair of binoculars from the moving boxes so that I could spend time with her from a distance. To do so at closer range was impossible, because now a circus act had begun. As her kangaroo-like legs put a spring in her jumps, she wove every direction together like a dancing sunspot, here and there and up and down. I followed her movements with a jolt of nausea. It’s possible for squirrels to leap five metres, and it’s also possible for them to fall. But there was neither fear nor boldness in her jumps. They were made with breezy effort in a single, fluid now.

  At last, she stopped in a spruce tree and I could focus the binoculars on her. She had found a breakfast cone. As her paws turned it in a spiral, she peeled it so systematically that the shell of a seed fell to the ground every four seconds. The whole cone was finished in seven minutes.

  Then she vanished for a while as I got dressed and straightened up. When our paths crossed again at the corner of the cottage she greeted me with an annoyed flick of her tail. I felt a little hurt, given how thoughtful I had been towards her, but I suppose she had grown used to living undisturbed. Her quiet life wouldn’t last much longer, though. During the night, I had made up my mind to be a troublesome neighbour. She must, like all squirrels, have several nests, and now it was time for her to choose a different one. The next time I heard her above me in the cottage, I banged loudly on the ceiling. Everything went quiet up there, so presumably she had got the message.

  After all, indoors was not where I wished to encounter nature. During a circuit of the property I had heard a woodpecker drumming, and that seemed promising. They’re said to thrive in forests with lots of biodiversity.

  Not that I was out to spot anything rare. There are remarkable traits to be found even in the warbling great tit. I could no longer view great tits as just cute little birdies, because ever since it was discovered that they use tools and make plans, their intelligence has been considered on a par with that of chimpanzees. They hold pine needles in their beaks to pr
y caterpillars from cracks in trees, and they carefully note where other birds are hiding food in order to steal it. They can also send up a false alarm, a warning of nearby birds of prey, to scare competitors from the birdfeeder, and if they’re truly hungry they can kill other small birds or sleeping bats. Peaceful individuals exist too, of course, so it’s not as if the great tit has become one of Sweden’s most common birds solely thanks to its cunning nature.

  Suddenly I heard a more unexpected sound. Could it be, way out here? Yes indeed, I had just heard the most common bird in the world, a bird that exists in three times the number of all the humans on Earth. I had just heard a crowing rooster, so someone in the neighbourhood must have free-range chickens. It almost felt like the cosy idyll of a children’s book.

  Most chickens these days, of course, live far from nature. Hatched in incubators, the factory-farm laying hens are kept separately, while those raised for meat crowd among fifty thousand other chickens in windowless sheds – pre-emptively also fed antibiotics as a precaution against the crowded unsanitary conditions. Deep in the jungles of South East Asia, their wild forefathers still steal about in shy little flocks, so sensitive that they may die of shock if captured, just as hundreds of thousands of industrial hens do on their way to slaughter.

  Jungle fowl were domesticated long ago in India, and Alexander the Great brought some back from his military expeditions there. For him, a chicken was a practical field supply that not only gave eggs and meat but also multiplied. In Greece and Rome, however, chickens would mostly be used for prophecies, since their manner of eating and taking flight were said to be signs one could interpret. Roosters were for their part viewed in a completely different fashion. If two aggressive individuals were placed in a so-called cockpit, from which neither could retreat, they would fight to the death. This popular spectacle would continue long into the 19th century in England, and names of breeds still live on in boxing terms like ‘bantamweight’.

  Hens, too, could demand respect outside the factories. This had become evident to me during the summer I rented a writing retreat cabin next to a henhouse, for the inhabitants strutted about freely during the day. Their patches of manure were about the size of a Danish pastry, and as I tried to keep from stepping in them I began to comprehend their internal hierarchy, from the top bird down to the bottom of the pecking order. That pattern certainly seemed familiar. Later I found out that their clucking involves more than thirty different sounds, including separate warning calls for airborne threats and those on the ground.

  These were enormous hens who even managed to survive a fox attack, although their rooster didn’t make it. After that, they were provided with a young cock who started out seemingly terrified of the massive ladies in his harem. Even the owners’ youngest son was afraid of the hens, for he had heard that birds are descended from dinosaurs. You could tell just by looking at these giants.

  The first person to suspect it was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. He was working on a dinosaur skeleton in 1868 when he was offered a turkey leg for dinner one evening, and he was struck by the similarities between the thigh bone on his plate and the one in his laboratory. Later, genetic analyses have proved him right. Chickens and turkeys truly are the closest relatives of dinosaurs. Perhaps the transformation began with small dinosaurs making their way into trees to avoid larger predators. After all, chickens do still prefer to roost on a perch at night.

  Soon the rooster stopped crowing, and after that all I could hear was a dove down in the public lands and a crow at the top of a conifer. I have to admit, I’ve never thought highly of either of these birds. Doves have become a symbol of peace and love and the holy spirit, but in real life they give rather a different impression. They were the ones who had given me bird lice once upon a time. And how had they come to be associated with the holy spirit? They’re said to be related to the extinct dodo, whose Portuguese name, doudo, means ‘stupid’, because a small head doesn’t exactly give the impression of genius. Nor do doves, who hardly seem to be aware of the eggs in their slapdash nests. But my image of them has changed thanks to more recent observations. Writer Jennifer Ackerman, for one, has collected a hefty documentation of intelligence on the wing.

  Like chickens, doves have lived close to people longer than other birds, and we humans are the reason for their spread. Rock doves, or pigeons, were domesticated ten thousand years ago, about the same time as jungle fowl, because their tender young are a delicacy. Since rapid multiplication was the goal, males who were always eager to mate and females who produced many young were encouraged to breed. They had no problem living in close proximity to humans, and cities made perfect homes for them since cornices and balconies were much like the rock ledges of their original habitats.

  In the 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great kept over twenty thousand doves and bred them to promote desirable traits. This method of breeding later came to be practised here and there in Europe, and it also inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution. If genes were so mutable that humans could select for various features among doves, then surely nature could do the same thing on a broader scale.

  What dove breeders of the 19th century valued most was no longer the birds’ meat but their phenomenal ability to find their way. This had made them letter carriers even in ancient Egypt and Rome, and they continued this messaging career until the advent of the telegraph. Networks of dovecotes were found not only at giants like Reuters News Agency and Rothschild & Co. bank, but were also used to pass on news in smaller contexts – the results of 19th-century Swedish sailing regattas were reported by a carrier pigeon who flew them to the printing press of the newspaper Stockholms Dagblad, where they were posted in a news window.

  More serious tasks, too, were entrusted to pigeons. Explorers, spies and the military gave them assignments that could have been adapted into thrilling novels with winged heroes. In 1850, for instance, a pigeon flew four thousand kilometres in order to deliver a message from a polar expedition, although unfortunately the message itself disappeared along the way. During both world wars, all fighting parties used carrier pigeons, and some of them were even awarded medals of courage after being drawn into battle. One British pigeon stoically persevered in its task even after having part of a wing shot off. German pigeons had it no easier, for they faced both rifles and peregrine falcons.

  Not only are pigeons courageous – they are quick and observant too. They can find their way thousands of miles over unfamiliar territory at a speed of 80 kilometres per hour, and as skilled observers they are unmatched. When pigeons were shown a series of landscape photographs taken in close succession, they were able to pinpoint differences that had escaped humans. The United States Coast Guard, as a result, trained them to find dots the colour of a typical life jacket, and then brought them by helicopter to areas where boats had capsized. They were able to pick out humans even among large waves.

  Their visual talents became just as apparent in experiments of a more artistic nature. After a bit of training they could tell a work by Picasso from one by Monet and were able to differentiate Cubists such as Braque from Impressionists such as Renoir. Using signals for colours, patterns and textures, researchers were even able to get them to judge paintings as beautiful or ugly.

  The list of their abilities doesn’t stop there. It turns out pigeons are good at numbers and can place nine images of objects in the proper order. Their memory is also so exceptional that they can memorise a thousand images in one year and recognise them later when presented in negative or upside down.

  Faced with such a tableau of winged intelligence, I felt ashamed of looking down on pigeons. After all, it’s our fault they increased in number so rapidly and so strongly prefer to live near us, for those were the traits that we selected in breeding them. And it’s certainly evident that they have lived alongside us for a long time. Not only can pigeons recognise individuals in their own flocks, they can also tell humans apart and identi
fy expressions of emotion such as anger and sadness in photographs of different people.

  Pigeon empathy is probably not the sole reason behind this. The ability to read emotions seems to be of some survival value. Birds can use it to detect threatening attacks and to join forces with each other by way of hardly perceptible signals. A look, a certain posture, a way of fluffing up feathers is all it takes. Even we humans unconsciously read others; in fact, tones of voice and facial expressions can be more honest than words. And, incidentally, words are said to transmit only about 7 per cent of what we communicate. Could it be that the art of reading between the lines is the basis of all communication?

  Of course, here too I spotted a problem. It’s easy to project emotions onto other creatures or slot them into neat patterns. Doves, for example, have solely been allowed to symbolise gentleness, while sharp-sightedness has been reserved for hawks. The cawing crow, for its part, has come to be seen as the opposite of the cooing dove, and when Ted Hughes deployed the crow in a collection of poems it became an anti-hero. Where the swift soared through the scent of violets, the crow chowed down on a dropped ice cream among the rubbish on the beach.

  For how could the bawling of a crow inspire poetry? To me, the fact that they belong to the same order as songbirds seemed as incomprehensible as the fact that such categorisation has to do with the shape of their feet. The crow’s biological relationship to birds of paradise was no less mysterious. That black and grey jacket of the hooded crow would be fitting for an undertaker, and its croak isn’t particularly uplifting either.

  But as we know, appearances can be deceiving. The Romans must have heard faith in the crow’s song, for they interpreted ‘kra kra’ as cras, which means ‘tomorrow’ in Latin. So, to their ears, a caw sounded like eternal hope. And even I knew that crows really aren’t all that dismal.