Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  Not long after the curlews returned to the hills, the first of the international migrants started to arrive too. Earliest of all was the chiffchaff, arriving back before the last of the redwings and fieldfares had even set off for their nesting grounds in the countries of the north; and then the wheatear, returning to the drystone walls that flank the moor, and to the cairns on the mountaintops. There are one or two types of bird that wait until May — the swift, for example, and, last of all, the spotted flycatcher — but almost all arrive in quick succession throughout April. Their consistency over the years was astonishing; not only could they be relied on to arrive in the same order, they would also consistently arrive within a day or two of the previous year’s arrival date. If the first wonder of migration is how birds manage to navigate thousands of miles back to the same tiny copse they were born in, the second is how they manage to time their journey so that they arrive back on the same day their parents did the previous year. Most of them, the woodland birds at least, I would see first in the trees along the stream on my way to my postbox, often in large groups. It would be like welcoming back old friends: the confiding pied flycatchers; the almost tropically exotic redstarts; and a whole raft of warblers. Some of them, the garden warblers and blackcaps, I would rarely see at any other time, for they are retiring birds of thick cover, the location of their territories best found by people better than me at picking out the song of individual birds from the cacophony of the dawn chorus. And once the migrants were back, there was no rest for them, it was now that the race for life truly began; to establish terri-tories, protect them, find a mate, raise a brood. These were hectic times.

  Before even the first migrant arrived a handful of our resident birds would have started breeding. The raven would be sitting on her eggs high in her lofty cedar, but at the opposite end of the spectrum of birds, the long-tailed tits would not be far behind her, the feeding parties of winter long since having broken up. On the day the curlews arrived, I found two of the tits’ distinctive nests, one on the riverbank and one on the old railway track, already fully built though not yet lined. Both were in dense gorse bushes, their preferred nesting place for the protection it gives them from predators. All tits are hole-nesters, but long-tailed tits are misnamed — they are not really tits at all — and build the most elaborate and beautiful nests of any of our birds. A perfect egg-shaped ball of moss and lichen, knitted together with cobwebs and lined with up to two thousand feathers. It is a time-consuming business building a nest like this, the birds fly back and forth constantly in a fever of activity, and it’s no wonder they have to start so early. The nest seems tiny, it’s hard to imagine that a single bird with such a long tail could fit in there, let alone a whole brood, but they do.

  The day after the curlews came, the showers began, building to a steady, relentless downpour that seemed as if it would never let up. The following day I walked to the river to find the water level had risen by seven or eight feet overnight and the long-tailed tits’ gorse bush was now a green island draped with flotsam. The water never quite reached the nest but it was too late, it was abandoned anyway, before it had even been lined. The nest on the railway track was a success though, the entire brood fledged, and when the season was over curiosity got the better of me and I took the nest home to dissect. The birds had done a good job of keeping it clean; they were fastidious parents. This nest was lined with around twelve hundred feathers. There was not as much variety as I might have hoped for; the nest was located near to some pheasant-rearing pens and over eighty per cent of the lining was pheasant fea-thers. But there were at least sixty tawny owl feathers too, presumably from a nearby old nesting hole, and significant numbers from blackbirds, woodpigeons and curlews. It took me all afternoon to pick through and sort them, and then I laughed at myself and wondered if I had too much time on my hands.

  When the breeding season began in earnest, I got to work on a weekly check of the hundred and twenty nest boxes I looked after, scattered through a sprawling trail of woods down in the foothills. It would take the whole day to visit them all. There were a couple of small alder woods on the way, and one mature mixed oak wood dotted with beeches and pines, but mostly they were hanging oak woods. These are the classic woodlands of Wales, positioned on steep rocky hillsides with the trees’ trunks twisted and contorted from the elements and fighting their way through the boulders. Given the chance this woodland would cover the whole land, as it once did long ago, and the hanging, twisted woods that remain are simply the fragments that have been left untouched because they are in spots unsuitable for cultivation, too steep or too rocky or both. They have their own unique atmosphere, these hillside woods with their thick ground layer but little understorey, and there are a handful of birds that are most at home in these woods, who live here in population densities unmatched anywhere else: the wood warblers, the pied flycatchers, the redstarts. You step into the green light that filters through the canopy and are assailed by bird calls: the chinking of chaffinches and great tits; the gentle cascade of the willow warblers; and the trilling song of the wood warblers that is the defining sound of these woods, along with their call, a kind of gentle whoop that wouldn’t sound out of place in a jungle. I don’t like phonetic renderings of birdsongs, they never seem to me to do the bird justice; birds simply don’t use our alphabet, they need one all of their own.

  These woods felt totally wild; they were trackless and I never met anyone else while I was walking through them searching for the boxes one by one. I came every week for over two months, and recorded on nest-record cards the different stages of nest-building, laying dates and when the mother bird began to sit, hatching dates, the development of the young and when they fledged. I didn’t keep these records only for the birds in the boxes but for any other nests I found too on my way through the woods: the robins and warblers that hid their nests in the ground layer among the bluebells; the thrushes in the hedgerows along the way; the goldcrests’ tiny mossy nests suspended from the branches of a conifer; the stock doves and the buzzards deep in the woods. I have a knack for finding nests, but I’m not sure it is something I could teach; it’s as if you have to think like a bird, you have to try to imagine the place that you would choose were you that bird. You have to get to know the individual preferences of different species. As you watch them from a distance, where is their attention focused? And, as you approach closer, where does their anxiety emanate from? My observations of individual birds meant the most to me personally, but these were not scientific. An incident of dramatic behaviour I had seen could well have been anomalous. Scientific validity comes from the slow accretion of small facts. It is the analysis of tens of thousands of nesting records that will reveal a population slump or a change in the distribution of a species. So this was me paying my dues.

  My nesting boxes would all be in use, every last one, unless perhaps one had lost its lid during the winter. Over half of them would be occupied by pied flycatchers, stocky, handsome little birds, the male black and white, the female brown and white. They are uncommon elsewhere but in these oak woods they are the most numerous species. Their population seems to be limited not so much by the supply of food as by the availability of suitable nesting holes, so if you fill a wood with nest boxes you can double the local population. Although it is not a common bird, not even a familiar bird to those who live elsewhere, it is one of the most intensively studied of all British birds. There are two main reasons for this: the first is simply because they take so readily to nest boxes; the second is that they sit so tight. It is possible to lift the sitting bird off her eggs, check the nest, and replace her as she was. The birds seem completely unfazed by this level of intrusion, though the male may come and hop around you, calling in annoyance while you are there. A significant number of the sitting females would have been ringed in these same woods as infants, so I took down the numbers and sent them off for the record. It was all grist to the mill.

  Of the remaining fifty or sixty boxes, most would ha
ve been taken by blue and great tits, in roughly equal numbers. Unlike the placid pied flycatcher, the blue tits are notorious for the struggle they put up when you lift them off their eggs, and given the chance they will jab their tiny beaks into the quick of your fingernails where it will hurt the most. A few boxes would go to the nuthatches, one or two of the boxes in the alder woods would be taken by marsh tits, and those few boxes situated on conifers might be occupied by coal tits. There would always be a couple of pairs of redstarts, although they found the standard hole size of a tit box a tight squeeze.

  The nuthatches would without fail be the first to lay their eggs. These birds would naturally choose holes with larger entrances than they need, such as old woodpecker holes, and rebuild them, gathering damp soil and plastering it on so that it will dry to give them an entrance hole that is just so. With these nest boxes this was surplus to requirements, as the holes were already quite small enough for them, but the habit dies hard, and they would do their best instead to plaster the box to its tree, or plaster down its lid.

  It was a pleasure to wander this trail up and down the hills and through these untouched woods each year as spring developed, the bluebells blooming and the woods burgeoning with life, while knowing that I was in some tiny way adding to the sum of human knowledge. But it was not all sunshine and bluebells and new life taking flight. In my third year of doing this survey, it rained almost every day in the second half of May and the first half of June. I guess that the supply of oakleaf caterpillars that all these birds rely on must have failed, because as I followed my route through the woods in the pouring rain I found box after box of dead baby birds, starved to death. That year only one pair in ten managed to successfully raise any young at all. And yet the following season, every single box was occupied as usual.

  I put up a single box in my garden, on the fruit tree. It didn’t seem worth putting one in the ash where the jackdaws almost always nested. The first year, it was occupied by a pair of great tits, bringing me back a splash of yellow just as the daffodils that filled the garden in March were starting to die back. But after that I decided to adapt the box, sawing a V-shaped notch beneath the entrance hole, and my plan to bring redstarts to the garden worked perfectly. They moved in the next spring and have remained ever since. Redstarts nest in crevices, in rocks as well as in tree holes, and my slight modification to the box was enough to make it more to their taste. While the garden wagtails bob and wag, the redstarts vibrate their long tails with a tremor so fast they are rendered almost invisible. I spent a good deal of time in the garden in the spring, digging the land, planting out the year’s vegetables and weeding, and the redstarts became confident around me. While the female sat, the male came and perched on the wire, his beak filled with flying insects, showing off his black bib and bold white eyestripe, his slate-grey back, and his glorious robin-red breast and trembling tail.

  The fields were full of lambs. The sheep invaded my dreams with their bleating and coughing. The lambs forever seemed to find themselves separated from their mother by a fence and bleated piteously while the ewe paced up and down the barrier that divided them, until finally I could take no more of it and went and shepherded the ewe the few yards to the open gate that would reunite them. And while I was out walking the fields it became second nature to liberate the occasional sheep that had trapped its head in a fence, again. They are not the brightest of creatures.

  The months of April and May were busy times for the hill farmers. My farmer’s nephew offered me a lift down to the village one spring day; there was a lamb on the passenger seat of his Land Rover that he was taking to the vet, so I picked it up and sat with it on my lap while it cried desperately. It had been born without a back passage, the farmer’s nephew explained. Born without a back passage, and filling up fast. Every year my farmer had to hand-rear a handful of lambs, bottle-feeding them, perhaps one of a pair of twins born to a lame mother. When they saw him coming they bounded over, leaped into his arms and licked his face with excitement. The bond of affection between man and beast was beyond question. Yet the animals still all ended up in the same place, of course.

  The butterflies that had slept the winter away in the corners of my ceilings upstairs had all woken now; one by one I let them out as I found them fluttering against my windows. The field mice were back to trying to raid my larder, but I was still awaiting the return of the bats to my loft. I had seen my first bats of the year though, not the long-eared bats but noctules, the largest species found in Britain. These bats are not house-dwellers, they live in tree holes, and I could recognize them by their different hunting style. They flew high and straight, purposefully searching out large flying insects such as moths, suddenly darting to one side to scoop up their prey, then returning to their original line as if they were following a predetermined route, as if they were running on rails.

  One day I was drawn out into the garden, into the morning sunshine, by a peal of laughter. A green woodpecker, a male, was hopping about on the ground across the track, among the litter of stones that was once Penlan Farm. Green woodpeckers are less common here than the great spotted woodpecker, but in spring you wouldn’t know it; the woods ring continually with their distinctive yelping laugh, far more a part of the soundtrack of spring than the drumming of their spotted cousins. The spotted woodpeckers rarely leave the trees, while the greens spend a lot of time on the ground searching for ants, something of a speciality of theirs. Once as a child I found the corpse of a long-dead green woodpecker. Only feathers and bone remained, the flesh had all gone save for its tough, wiry tongue. From its root in the bird’s throat it divided into two and went backwards instead of forwards. The two strands travelled behind the dome of the bird’s skull, then over the top of its head, rejoining between the bird’s eyes and entering the beak. This incredible design meant that the bird would be able to protrude the barbed tip of its tongue to a distance longer than even its beak, perfect for exploring the tunnels of ants’ nests, like the long tongue of an anteater. It is hard to conceive how such an extraordinary arrangement could have evolved, but there it was.

  The woodpeckers seemed to be partial to this patch of hillside in front of my cottage. My assumption was that the rocks strewn around here, the rubble of the farmhouse, kept the soil drier than elsewhere and particularly suitable for ant nests. As I watched the male rootling around on the ground, I heard a call, and a female flew up the hill. Up and down, rising and falling, the characteristic undulating flight of a woodpecker. She perched on a bough of the ash tree nearest to the male, and he immediately flew up to join her. They were directly facing each other on opposite sides of an almost vertical branch, and kept craning their necks to peer at one another. Then the male slowly, slowly, unfolded his chequered wings until they formed a perfect fan. He held them open for a while, before just as slowly folding them. As soon as he was done, the female copied this move perfectly, then the male again, back and forth, back and forth. It was one of the most touching displays I have ever seen. And then, to an invisible cue, the two birds launched themselves simultaneously from their perch and flew off down the hill together, their lemony-yellow rumps bobbing side by side into the distance.

  In the gnarly old ash just over the fence from my fruit tree there was a hole about fifteen or twenty feet up, a hole at least six inches across, too big to be suitable for small birds to nest in. This hole was perfectly situated for me to keep an eye on; it was visible from my front window, the window in the east wall that I watched my bird table from, my bedroom window, my porch, or when I was working in the garden. There was nothing special about this hole to make it stand out from a thousand others in the neighbourhood, but because of where it was located not much went on there that I missed. I don’t mean only the birds that nested in it — it was actually not an ideal hole for most birds to nest in because it was not sunken at all, and its base was level with its entrance — but also any bird that even considered the possibilities it might have to offer.

 
The jackdaws visited this hole every year without exception, though they most often ended up choosing the tree on the rocks behind the house that I thought of as theirs. They always gave the chimneys a good inspection too. One February, I returned from a few days away to find the pair occupying my bedroom, roosting on top of the wardrobe. They must have come down the chimney exploring its potential and then found themselves unable to fly back up such a narrow chute. Judging from all the feathers left on my windowsill they had been desperately attempting to make their escape through my closed window, so it was lucky for them that I came back when I did.

  A pair of stock doves came too without fail, shyly and diffidently inspecting the potential nesting site in the ash-tree hole. They seemed to spend a long time considering the matter, weighing up the pros and cons. It was strange how a bird that looked so similar to the town pigeon could have such a different disposition; these birds seemed quint-essentially wild and wary. They provided another example of the precision of the rhythms that birds live by; they came for their visit each year just over a week after the curlews returned. I could predict their arrival in the ash to the day, or at most to within two days.

  There was another annual visitor to the hole in the ash that was much more surprising; I could scarcely credit it when I first saw it. A snake-necked female goosander had come all the way up from the river. Goosanders are primitive-looking sawbill ducks that feed exclusively on fish, and seldom leave the water except to visit their tree-hole nests. They have very short legs and are obviously not designed for dry land. She would circle around and around my front fields, as if summoning up the courage, and then finally crash-land on to the tree, her wings flapping furiously, her feet scrabbling to gain a hold. She would spend many hours in my little clearing, carefully and methodically examining every tree in turn. She would even peer down my chimneys, and would sometimes decide this was a good spot for a break, perching a while immobile on the apex of my roof, like a straw bird on a thatch. When the goosanders’ eggs hatch, the young must leave the nest almost immediately and follow their mother to the safety of the river. It is hard to contemplate the journey this would entail were the bird to nest all the way up on my hillside. What an incredible obstacle course this would be for the newborn ducklings.