Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Lucy once had a Labrador dog that was accidentally left behind at a friend’s house some ten miles in a straight line from home. But those ten miles included crossing the Beauly Firth, a tidal estuary more than two miles wide, or a circumnavigation round the end of the Firth, increasing the journey to more than twenty miles. Frantic searches in the vicinity of the friend’s house revealed nothing, but twelve hours later the old dog turned up at its own back door, wagging its tail. It was remarkable enough that he knew his way home, but that his homing instinct had caused him to swim across open sea or had taken him many miles in the wrong direction if he had gone round also seems to indicate some powerful impetus at work. I marvel at animal behaviour but it never surprises me. Nature has had a long time to hone its secret skills.

  Throughout the spring and summer, these engaging little mice are more than happy to live in the woods and fields where they belong, and are one of several small mammal prey species upon which so much of our wildlife depends. Tawny and barn owls, foxes, badgers, wildcats, pine martens, stoats and weasels, buzzards and kestrels, even herons, crows and brown rats all eat wood mice when they can. With bank and field voles, they are the staple diet of our owls. Without them the owls would perish and disappear altogether. But the wood mice are hard-wired to find a warm, dry place to nest for the long cold months. We have generously provided them with an endless selection of choices: garden sheds, byres, stables, garages but, best of all, centrally heated houses, often with a fast food supply readily tipped in for good measure.

  In this old house (some bits are eighteenth-century and earlier) the thick outer walls are of large round whinstones of hard metamorphic schist gathered from the fields and burn beds, heaved and levered into position by men with aching shoulders and rough hands, whose craftsmanship was passed down from generation to generation. However skilfully the Gaelic-speaking Highland masons placed these stones to create a handsome vertical wall on the outside, there were always hollows and gaps in the interstices that had to be packed with lime mortar to hold everything together. Inside the walls, which were always two or more large stones thick (up to twenty inches), there were spacious cavities loosely filled with end-of-working-day lime tossed in, along with any handy rubble. (While plumbing in new heating I once found a George I halfpenny dated 1718 in one of the walls – I’d treble your money for your story, Mr Highland Stone Mason, if only I could.) Lime mortar doesn’t clench in a rigid chisel-resistant grip, like cement: it sets yet remains friable and crumbly, like damp Demerara sugar. Any diligent mouse can scrubble away at the weaknesses and burrow through.

  Once inside the thick old walls, the mice enjoy a labyrinth all their own. They can go where they please. They travel through the hollows, up, down or sideways, as safe and secure as any city metro system. Modern insulation makes perfect bedding for a wood mouse – warmth and comfort laid on. At night I lie awake and hear them scuttling back and forth in the roof, up and down the ancient plaster and lath walls and occasionally popping up inside rooms. From time to time I see them nipping out from under the kitchen units to sample left-over meal in the Jack Russell terriers’ bowls – a source of constant frustration to the dogs, which charge, skidding across the vinyl, to crash land among the bowls, always far too late.

  We are lucky: our neck of the Highland woods does not have the very destructive and invasive house mouse, Mus domesticus, originally an alien species from Asia, trans-located all round the world by man, and the progenitor of all pet and laboratory mice, which can carry unpleasant diseases such as leptospirosis, typhus and meningitis – even bubonic plague. They are present in the Highlands, but mainly restricted to the grain-growing areas of the east coast and to towns and cities such as Inverness. Happily, they don’t venture up the glens. House mice will gnaw through just about anything: lead and copper pipes, electrical cables, plastic, woodwork, plaster, skirting-boards and structural joists, even limestone.

  Our wood mice, alas, are not entirely blameless: they delight in shredding polystyrene pipe insulation, and if they elect to nest in a wardrobe of stored clothes their actions can be very distressing. By comparison with house mice, though, the damage they do is slight. They are very clean living and are not known to transmit disease. When I find their nests in the woods, exquisitely crafted balls of grass, moss and leaves, often lined with sheep’s wool, there is virtually no smell.

  Years ago I brought some reindeer skins back from an expedition to Lapland. I thought they would make cosy bedside rugs for our growing family, but I was wrong. Reindeer fur has a fine woolly undercoat but the outer fur consists of longer, hollow, air-filled hairs for efficient insulation in an Arctic climate. These hairs are brittle. The regular passage of children’s little feet broke the outer fur into a constant fall-out of shards, which stuck to everything, itched in their socks, clogged the vacuum-cleaner and drove their mother to drink. The pelts were banished to a cupboard in the cellar, securely contained (we thought) in sealed polythene bags.

  The wood mice said, ‘Thank you very much.’ It took them no time at all to find the bags, nibble in and rearrange the rolled-up skins to their liking. Several months later, one of the field centre’s education officers needed a piece of reindeer fur to demonstrate the efficiency of natural fur insulation to some visiting school-children. I opened one of the bags and was astonished to find that large patches of the pelt had been shaved clean down to the leather and the removed fur, both woolly and brittle, had been skilfully woven into an orb-shaped nest the size of a cantaloupe melon. On pulling it gently apart I found that the hairs had been systematically sorted and separated: the long hairs for the structure of the ball and the softer wool for the inner lining. The inside of the nest issued the essence of fertility, like leaf mould, making me think of wood anemones and unfurling ferns in spring – none of that uric rodent reek I remember from keeping pet mice as a boy. I was sorry I had disturbed it and put it back carefully, glad that they had found a use for the reindeer skins and happier to have them living in the cellar than in my wardrobe. It would be hard to imagine a warmer, cosier or more secure winter refuge from which to produce a family.

  *  *  *

  As I walked back to the house from the rookery, the unmistakable yelping chorus of geese floated to me on the damp air. I stood still and squinted into a sky of dulled metal. They were high, just below the ruffled cloud base at around three thousand feet; it took me a moment to locate them. There they were, in an uneven V-formation, shifting and flickering in a large wavering skein of tiny silhouettes, like flies on a high ceiling. I shivered. Not a shiver of cold – I was well wrapped – but a shiver of deep, transcendental unity. No sound in the world, not even the rough old music of the rooks, etches more deeply into my soul than the near-hysterical ‘wink-winking’ of pink-footed geese all crying together high overhead. It is a sound like none other. Sad, evocative, stirring and, for me, quintessentially wild, it arouses in me a yearning that seems to tug at the leash of our long separation from the natural world.

  Their arrival in the early autumn sets a special seal on the turning year, repeated again with their departure, back to their Arctic breeding grounds in the spring when the last few rise, with rattling pinions, and wheel away into the north. Autumn or spring, I never tire of their unrestrained dissonance, which surrounds us during the winter months when tens of thousands of grey geese gather on the Beauly Firth. Scarcely a day goes by without a skein or two passing over, or when we go east to the Black Isle, the moist coastal fields are always cluttered with their corn-gleaning and grass-plucking flocks.

  It seems that naturalists (and perhaps not just naturalists) need these sounds to help us locate our passions, to ground us in the beliefs we hold about the natural world and to link us with our origins. My old friend Brian Jackman, the celebrated wildlife journalist, who has enjoyed a forty-year love affair with East Africa, tells me it is the night roaring of lions as he lies awake in his tent on the Masai Mara that does it for him. For Lennart Arvidsson, th
e half-Lapp-half-Finnish doyen of the Arctic forests, who first showed me wild lynx tracks in the Sarek snows, it is the long-drawn howls of timber wolves, rising and falling on a moonlit night. Dame Jane Goodall insists it is still, after nearly half a century since they catapulted her to world fame, the hoots and pants of a troop of chimpanzees deep in the forest that sets her blood tingling. Television wildlife cameraman John Aitchison recounts that, for all his globetrotting, it is the calls of waders – greenshank, curlew and redshank especially – on the Scottish salt marshes of his Argyllshire home in the crisp air of a morning in early spring that raises the hairs on his neck. And Roy Dennis, my ornithologist (and a brilliant all-round naturalist) colleague and friend of more than forty years, once told me that the combined fluting calls of tens of thousands of common cranes assembling on the wetland steppe of Hortobágy-Halastó in Hungary was a moment of pure transfiguration for him.

  My geese and the shiver pass together. It is autumn, late autumn, and winter is no longer imperceptibly snapping at our heels. Its clawing fingers have finally gripped. I know there will be a piercing frost tonight. I pray that the rooks still gleaning manna from the barley fields are well prepared; bad luck for the hungry barn and tawny owls – I know that at least some of the wood mice have moved indoors. Like the robins and the blackbirds, the shrews have no choice: they have to keep going whatever the season, bound to the treadmill of twitching out from the dark confines of the leaf litter their own body weight of invertebrates every day.

  The squirrels are well stocked up and these last, straggling goose arrivals will have joined the vast flocks that are gorging on the late spillings from combine harvesters on the stubbles of the Black Isle. A final few ash leaves gyrate silently to the yellow carpet of their own design. The crinkly oak leaves hang stubbornly on, only reluctantly releasing when winds scour through. And the silky-haired beech leaves will rattle like crisps until the spring when the new growth will finally force them off.

  As I return to the house I see wood smoke pluming from a chimney. Lucy has lit the sitting-room fire, a sight that brings an inner glow and a smile to my tingling face. As the darkness closes in I shall repair to my old armchair with a book. The Jack Russells will yawn and sigh as they stretch themselves across the hearth rug at my feet. Winter brings blessings of its own.

  3

  So Great a Cloud of Witnesses

  Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

  Hebrews 12:1

  Those few last geese to arrive from the Arctic, straggling down from the great heights at which they travel, often many thousands of feet, are special to me not just because I love to catch their excited voices on the wind and see their silhouetted chevrons against the clouds, but because they are living, crying witnesses to nature’s biorhythms present within us all.

  We all migrate. We venture out and we return home. We send forth our young. The winged seed spiralling to Earth from a sycamore or an ash; the rowan berries ingested by Scandinavian fieldfares and redwings are cast to the hills; the lonely ‘outcast’ badger that dug himself a temporary home among the roots of one of our western red cedars last year; the spiders I witnessed ballooning down the wind on their silk threads; the rooks and jackdaws I was watching this afternoon, surfing the wind over the river fields; the swallows and house martins swooping low into the stables each spring; the salmon surging up the Beauly River to spawn every summer – all of these and myriad more organisms around my home, around all of us all the time – are responding to the secret codes emitted by the sun and the spinning Earth, received and processed to serve each species’ individual ends. ‘So great a cloud of witnesses.’

  They’re heading out, patiently running the race their needs have set before them. They all need to feed, to breed and to survive, like surfers riding the waves of Fate. I, sitting tapping these words into my laptop, and you, reading them – whoever we are, wherever we may be and whatever our private pretensions – are also part of that same grand opera: the pull of life’s imperatives. We migrate, whether a few yards before finding a suitable place to put down roots or circumnavigating the globe, like the Arctic tern, which travels ten thousand miles to the Antarctic and back again every year, patiently making the most of our lot, our personal shout at the survival of ourselves and our species. That’s what migration is.

  These days we understand it – at least, quite a lot of it. Seasonal bird migration in particular has been well and widely studied. We now know, for instance, that migration can be triggered by temperature, by length of daylight hours, by weather conditions and by diminishing food supplies, but we also know that it is genetically controlled. Glands churn and swell, hormones swirl. The imperative to get up and go when we need to is written into the electrochemical circuitry of human brains as well as bird brains.

  In the case of geese, intricate studies have demonstrated that their innate circuitry and navigational skills are added to year on year by experience. Old birds get canny: they learn to read the wind. They know exactly the right moment to head off, and the youngsters follow. I’ve always loved the expression ‘wise old bird’. It’s never truer than of mature geese, sometimes individual birds that have made their twice-annual trek more than fifty times. A ringed (banded) snow goose hatched in Alaska and wintering in Mexico has been recorded still migrating at twenty-six years old – that’s more than 130,000 miles of reading the wind. I ask myself just what huge range of conditions and changes, trials and close-calls lurk behind the twinkle in that wise old bird’s eyes.

  We also know that different families of birds respond to and navigate by different signals, reflecting each species’ needs and capabilities and determining their route and destination. Experiments in planetaria have proved that some Silviid warblers, such as the blackcap, are genetically wired to navigate by the stars, requiring them to migrate at night. Artificially exposed to different seasonal constellations, caged birds become restless and flutter to the north or south, according to their migratory instincts. Other species can detect the Earth’s magnetic field or memorise significant landmarks, such as coastlines, river valleys and mountain ranges. Yet others follow the sun, demonstrated by German ornithologist Gustav Kramer’s 1950s experiments with caged starlings. Most significantly, he proved, with mirrors and artificial cloud effects, that it wasn’t direct sun they required, but that sufficient light intensity was all they needed for the correct orientation – an important ability for birds since the sun is so often obscured by clouds.

  One of the most remarkable experiments in bird navigation was conducted by my late great friend Ronald Lockley, a real pioneer of ornithological research and author of the ground-breaking monograph Shearwater (1946) – a study of Manx shearwaters nesting on the island of Skokholm off the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales. He took mature birds from their nesting burrows, then shipped them off to Venice and to landlocked Basel in Switzerland, many miles from any normal shearwater habitat or migratory route. They were back in their burrows fourteen days later.

  Another bird was flown across the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, some three thousand miles from home; a starting point completely unknown to that shearwater species. It took just twelve days to arrive back on Skokholm. What Lockley’s experiments proved conclusively was that shearwaters must use navigational aids other than landmarks. What we now know is that birds often employ a combination of abilities: stellar, solar, geo-magnetic and geographical recognition, to locate themselves and return to precisely the same wood, moor, field, tree or bush, swamp, stream, burrow or cranny they departed from many months before. Our swallows swoop home from Africa to the rafters of their birth through the same door in the same stable at approximately the same moment, year after year. Nowadays we know so much that we take bird migration for granted, but it was not always so.

  In the early sixteenth century the Bishop of Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, was convinced that swallows and other
similar birds spent the winter months under water or in deep mud. In his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus he goes so far as to cite the evidence of fishermen landing a catch of swallows in their nets. He was sufficiently persuaded by this bizarre explanation for the sudden disappearance of swifts and swallows in the winter that he commissioned a woodcut illustration of the fishermen with their catch, thereby endorsing an entirely bogus scientific claim that would remain substantially unchallenged for the best part of a hundred and fifty years.

  There were doubters and fence-sitters, of course, casting around for objectivity, such as Robert Burton, who wrote in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy:

  Do they sleep in winter . . . or lye hid in the bottom of lakes and rivers, spiritum continentes? so often found by fishermen in Poland and Scandia, two together, mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and when the spring comes they revive again . . . Or do they follow the Sun . . . or lye they in caves, rocks and hollow trees, as most think . . .?