Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  I once had the chance to come along on a weekend sailing trip to the outer archipelago. I brought two of my nephews; the female sailor brought her pet crow. She had previously asked whether we were afraid of crows, so I suppose she was used to people being suspicious of them.

  During our voyage the crow mostly stood on deck, legs planted wide, steady like a seaman. While the sailor handled the craft, the crow seemed to believe its assignment was to watch over the passengers, as if in the discreet manner of a spy. My nephews were smokers at the time, and since they were constantly fiddling with their cigarettes they attracted the crow’s attention.

  We were allowed to choose our own sleeping arrangements once we reached the island where we would spend the night. One option was to share a cottage with the sailor and the crow, the other was to be on our own in the berths on the boat. We elected to stay on the boat in order to enjoy the rocking of the waves, and also because we weren’t really used to sleeping near a crow. Apparently, it liked to spend the night sitting in an open doorway to keep an eye on everything.

  After a night free of avian surveillance, one of the boys went up on deck for his first cigarette of the morning. But he’d hardly taken it out before the crow came swooping in from the cottage like a bat out of hell. She landed on his shoulder with a thud and began to thoroughly study his smoking, which now had a more serious bent. His cigarettes were running out.

  At lunchtime, the smokers had a brotherly drawing of straws to see who would get the last cigarette, which was lit with great reverence. Suddenly the crow showed up again out of nowhere. She was coming straight for us, and in an acrobatic manoeuvre managed to snap up the cigarette and fly with it to the roof of the cabin. There she sat, taunting us, desirable object in her beak. It all became clear. She was no bad omen. She was simply having a lark.

  Since then I had seen plenty of reports about the whims of crows. They play hide-and-seek with each other and tag with dogs. They tease cats. They catch sticks in the air. They ride jar-lid sleds down snowy roofs, and when they get to the bottom they take the lid in their beak to do it all over again.

  Playfulness can be the sister of creativity, and crows do their best to prove it. In one of his fables, Aesop tells of a thirsty crow who manages to reach the water at the bottom of a pitcher. She simply drops pebbles into it to raise the level of the water. In real-life experiments, crows have demonstrated the same behaviour, as well as that they can solve a number of problems that demand the use of tools.

  In fact, crows seem to possess many of the traits we link with intelligence. They clearly have a sense of humour; they can plan; they are curious and adaptable and, at the same time, individualistic. Even back in ancient times they were drawn to the many opportunities of a city, although they did not allow themselves to be domesticated. Intelligence is also thought to be promoted by a prolonged childhood with instructive parents and a social life. Crows tick these boxes as well. Aristotle noticed that they cared for their young longer than other birds, and then maintained contact with family members. Now we know that they communicate by way of a multitude of sounds that differentiate not only species but individuals. What’s more, they all seem to have their own identification sounds that others in their group recognise. They can even understand human body language, so they look in the right direction when someone points. Chimpanzees can’t do that.

  Like magpies, crows often gather around dead relatives, although it’s not clear whether this is to serve as witnesses to the death or to show loyalty. In any case, they do have a good memory. It’s a piece of cake for them to match two identical images in the game of Memory. Their eye for human faces is so good that the United States Army tried to involve them in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. They’re especially skilled at recognising people who have mistreated them, and can even teach other crows to make out such villains from a distance. In general, they keep an eye on everything around them, so they, if anyone, would know what was going on around the property.

  It seemed a little awkward that the sharp-sighted creatures of the trees could perceive so much more about me than I could about them. But I suppose that was the point. Up in the trees, they could blend in with nature.

  The squirrel was an exception. She may have preferred to be left alone in her chosen nest, but she was hardly shy. The next time I saw her come scampering by, I happened to be eating an apple and tossed a piece her way. Although she was in her usual hurry, she stopped to take me in. Not that she stooped to being fed, but she did go so far as to stand on her hind legs to get a better look at me. Her eyes were large, like a child’s, and her white belly gleamed unguardedly. This time there were no annoyed flicks of her tail. There and then, I decided to put up a squirrel feeder full of nuts as compensation for confiscating her attic flat.

  Having non-human company can be remarkably restful. From a psychological standpoint, it’s not hard to see why. Such a relationship can be free of concepts like ‘why’, ‘guilt’ and ‘forgiveness’. I could have given her lengthy explanations about roofing felt and insulation, and how the roof was the most important side of a house. I also could have laid out what might have happened if she’d stayed there under the roof. But there wouldn’t have been any point. The grammar of the squirrel world was simpler than in my own world, without such complicated factors as a conditional ‘could have been’. She wasn’t well versed in cause and effect. The past was a memory of tangible seeds, tied to real places, and she sometimes forgot even that. When it came to possessive pronouns, all she needed was ‘mine’.

  Once the squirrel had apparently accepted her eviction, it felt as if one of the roof issues had been dealt with. And that was nice, since the carpenter and his helpers showed up after lunch. They wanted to tear up part of the roofing felt right away, to see how it looked underneath. A ladder was fetched and steadied, and two of the men entered the roof.

  That’s when it became clear that the squirrel and I were not on the same page at all. Quite the opposite – she took this as a brazen attack on her territory, and breaching of territories can unleash strong emotions. She came bolting through the trees like Tarzan on the warpath and, after a few intermediate stops, leapt onto the roof. There she stood on her hind legs and, from her full height, unleashed a tirade of chattering curses. She emphasised the gravity of the situation with several stomps of her foot. The tradesmen looked with an uneasy fascination, ducked back down, and began to remove the felt.

  I have to admit, I found her impressive. What integrity, what courage! Still, she had lost this battle for territory, for the demolition was inevitable. Her attic apartment would be cleared out, and the house would belong to the tradesmen for a while. Once I had packed up my belongings and made one last circuit, I handed them the key.

  By the time the new roofing felt and insulation were in place, spring had advanced a bit more and the roof work had reached a new stage. Gutters and downspouts would be installed, and a metalworker wanted to know if they should be fitted to water butts.

  Naturally the house should have them, for water butts have both a practical function and cosy connotations. Thanks to the internet I managed to find a pair of used metal butts in the proper shade of green, and a seller who could transport them to the cottage. I just needed to be there to receive them. By that point I hoped I would also meet the migratory birds who made their summer home on the property. As a token housewarming present I had already purchased a birdhouse, and at the same time I bought a rain gauge to measure small amounts of precipitation.

  The tradesmen were on holiday during the week I visited, but I still heard an eager hammering coming from the property. The woodpecker must have been inspired by the carpenters and the spring sunshine. It seems as if woodpeckers want to make new nesting holes each spring, where they can take turns brooding and feeding their young. Although they divide parenting up equitably, they aren’t very social animals; yet their wild drumming helps them stick together and can probab
ly transmit important information. In experiments, woodpeckers have even learned to ask for different objects by varying the number of beak-strikes. They are magnificent percussionists and change their tone by drumming against an assortment of materials.

  Besides being a drumstick, their beak serves as hammer, lever, chisel and insect-detector, all in the span of one minute. This woodpecker was happy to demonstrate. When its gentle, exploratory taps located the larvae in a tree, it lifted the bark to remove the morsels, and its beak could then serve as a drill for a new nesting hole. I wondered how many holes it had already made on the property. A nuthatch lived in one of them. She had carefully narrowed the entrance with mud so the woodpecker wouldn’t collect rent by eating up her young.

  Like other homes, birds’ nests can tell us something about their inhabitants, so while the woodpecker decorated with sawdust the nuthatch used pieces of bark. A blackbird nest that had fallen down near the storage shed was a piece of art. On the outside, braided conifer twigs had been plugged with moss and strands of birch bark, and then the inside had been smoothed over with mud and lined with soft grass. And why shouldn’t birds be able to appreciate beauty and a well-made piece of craftwork? Some exotic breeds constantly redecorate their nests with fresh flowers, and others gather objects of a certain colour for installations where they dance for their ladies.

  I felt like I had taken part in the birds’ nesting work thanks to the birdhouse I had brought for them. Since I don’t like climbing, I had chosen a model that could be hung from a branch. It was a little red house that looked rather like the cottage, but it wasn’t actually a very good nesting site – it would probably be rough sailing in there when the wind blew. Perhaps this swaying little home could at least make a good birdfeeder when winter came.

  Once I’d hung up the birdhouse, I devoted some time to the interior of my own house. There wasn’t really much space to fill, but a lamp and Mum’s meadow-flower curtains went up. Then I went back outside, and to my surprise I saw a blue tit fly straight into the failure of a birdhouse, without missing its swaying entrance hole. I heard only a plop as the little bird’s body zoomed through the opening.

  I was aware that blue tits aren’t very particular about their nests, for in Stockholm one of them lived in my kitchen vent. If I leaned out of the window I could sometimes see a pair of dark eyes peering back through the metal grate. We were a bit curious about each other. The first time she came flying by and saw me in the kitchen window, she quickly turned back to the elm in the neighbouring yard, where she had been collecting caterpillars. As soon as I retreated into the room, she returned with her see-sawing flight path, but if I approached the window again, the same procedure repeated. We went back and forth a few times like that. The blue tit flew in and recoiled from my silhouette in the window; I backed up and she returned. It was like the steps of a dance. And as it went on, she became bolder. From within the room I soon saw how she sat on the window ledge to look for me. I’m sure the way she, like all birds, experienced the world differently to me contributed to her curiosity. For her, shapes and distances could partially be determined by way of shadows, and her gaze augmented objects slightly, all the better to spot insects. I must have been difficult to assess.

  Our encounter was quite possibly made both safer and stranger since it took place through a windowpane. Author Björn von Rosen once described a nuthatch moving from window to window to follow his movements inside the house. Their contact was initiated when he fed her from the window ledge, and in time she also approached him outdoors. I never had such a relationship with the blue tit, but I had encountered a gaze that reflected a shy and yet curious individual.

  She was one of the creatures who’d exchanged the shrinking deciduous forest for a city with very different demands. For birds, this didn’t just mean the ability to make their nests in buildings rather than trees. Great tits must sing louder to be heard over the bustle of the city, and blackbirds’ songs rise in tempo. In the loud urban environment, they wake up earlier and their biological clocks tick faster so they reach sexual maturity more quickly. It’s almost as if they have been infected by the stress of the city. As urbanisation expanded, many animals were drawn into it, so from my balcony I could see a dozen species of birds. One day, too, feathers rained down over me on the pavement. A goshawk had found a pigeon nest, for one species had drawn the other along with it.

  Still, it was not city walls I wanted to associate with birds, but the freedom of wings. On those occasions when I have felt a similar lightness at my desk, I have thought of all the feather quills that have been dipped in ink. For millennia they carried with them the ancient dream of moving freely, like Icarus and the angels, for even if a body was heavy, words and thoughts could take wing.

  Leonardo da Vinci filled entire books with observations of birds in flight. He realised that air behaves more or less like water and noticed that it flowed both above and below a wing. Much later, with the help of his studies, the Wright Brothers were able to construct a flying machine. They understood, for instance, that a bird’s tail feathers are a crucial factor in its ability to steer.

  But no pilot has ever been able to measure up against birds. Everything about their flight astounded me. Some can stop abruptly and land on a swaying branch from a speed of 60 kilometres per hour, and some can sleep in the winds or mate in flight. Their feathers have almost become an extra sense – at their base, they transmit information about wind speed to the nerves of the skin. With the upward motion of the wings, the feathers spread – but as the wings push away the air, small barbs hold them together. No two feathers are identical, and none of them can manage without all the rest when it comes to flying.

  It’s not dissimilar to the way migratory birds stick together during their long journeys. They follow the same laws as so many things under the sun, for as the Earth moves around it, all life on the planet is affected. Happily, we don’t notice that we’re moving at a speed of 108,000 kilometres per hour, but the net of our meridians guides 50 billion migratory birds across the Earth. Some will fly many thousands of miles without a break in order to be close to the sun, and some even fly across the Himalayas. They may bring along seeds that have become stuck in their feathers and be accompanied by insects who are on a journey of their own. Their wings make the air vibrate as if in ecstasy. Up in the sky, millions of bird hearts are beating ten times faster than my own in order to pump vitality and warmth into bird bodies.

  What drives all of these migrants? It’s clear that they can feel differences in temperature, because millions of migratory birds have shortened their journeys as the climate has changed, and many of them have begun to stay put in the increasingly warm Nordic countries. Squirrels, too, have been able to adapt to changing temperatures. In Finland, it’s been said since the Middle Ages that very hard winters drive them eastward. When this happens, they move as a group, in a front that is miles wide, although they mark their independence by maintaining a certain distance from one another. In Sweden, a similar squirrel migration was observed during the cold, snowy winter of 1955. Still, the most dramatic stories are those that came from Siberia, where throngs of squirrels set out on mass migrations, allowing neither mountains nor rivers to hinder them. Many were found exhausted, weeping sores on their paws, sometimes paralysed, but each one that could go on did. In the bitterly cold year of 1847, thousands of squirrels swam across the Yenisey River, only to crowd into the city of Krasnoyarsk, where they were killed en masse.

  This phenomenon prompted me to spend a little more time wondering about squirrels. They’re territorial loners, so what could force them so communally eastwards? Did they influence one another after all, or did they have some inner barometer that sensed such a strong temperature shift approaching?

  For their part, migratory birds do appear to have internal barometers and light meters. As soon as the light begins to dim in an autumn locale, billions of birds suddenly head south like a giant flock
of charter tourists. Like all airline passengers they must avoid overweight luggage, so they need to know, down to the gram, how much food they can store in their bodies. In many cases, the calorific content of a nut is enough for a journey to Africa. After all, other things with mass are needed in the body. The chest muscles that are required for wingbeats grow quickly, and so do brain cells that help them find their way. Bladders, however, are ballast that evolution has done away with, since any waste can be jettisoned during the trip.

  The timetable is long since imprinted, and no one wants to be left behind. In 1933, a German bird station was taking care of a stork with a wounded wing, and he was struck by such a great urgency to migrate that he escaped. He couldn’t fly, but he spent six autumn weeks walking 150 kilometres on foot in the same direction as his relatives had flown. This course had most likely been fixed inside him since his chickhood, because even first-time migrators must find their way. A similar anxiety beset some captive starlings. Facing south, they stubbornly flapped their wings against the bars of their cage all through migration season.

  Migratory birds also have internal maps. These provide not only an image of the Earth but also the braille of the stars. Tern chicks stare at the sky while in the nest, and after just a few weeks they have memorised the position of the sun and various stars. The Pole Star is their north. Before leaving the nest, they take an extra lap around it to imprint the local geography. During their journey, it will expand infinitely.

  It’s this very thing, the journey of migrating birds, that brings a geography lesson to life in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. This children’s novel was meant to be a textbook for schools, and the publisher had helpfully supplied author Selma Lagerlöf with the dry bundles of facts used by headmasters. She read them all with fading enthusiasm. How could she make a textbook vivid? How could she breathe life into topographical fields of green-gold, and paragraphs about climate and flora? Her solution was to send animals into the landscape, and suddenly there was movement in the impenetrable thicket while songs were heard in the trees.