Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Yet this thesis sat uncomfortably with the drip-drip of evidence coming in from ships returning to British ports from the Mediterranean and Africa with tales of exhausted swallows landing on rigging or on decks.

  John Rae, the great English naturalist of the seventeenth century, editing Willughby’s Ornithologica in 1678, certainly expressed doubt: ‘To us it seems more probable that they fly away into hot countries, viz., Egypt or Aethiopia.’ But others would have none of it. Even the great Swedish taxonomist Carl Linné (Linnaeus) was insisting as late as 1768 that Bishop Olaus’s confident assertions, with all the authority of the Church, were correct – that they hibernated under water.

  By the end of the eighteenth century the ever more divided world of science had split clearly into migrationists and hibernationists. Gilbert White, curate of Selborne, was well aware of the debate. His lengthy correspondence with the Hon. Daines Barrington (hibernationist) and Judge Thomas Pennant (migrationist), both eminent naturalists of their day and Fellows of the Royal Society (and from which correspondence much of the text of his 1789 Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne was gleaned), reveals strong influences in both directions, but White was canny and stuck to a much more cautious scientific approach: ‘As to swallows being found in a torpid state in the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to.’ But with the scientific objectivity that would make his natural history so famous (never out of print in 225 years), he also hedged his bets.

  I myself on the 29th October last (1767) . . . saw four or five swallows hovering around and settling on the roof of the (Oxford) county-hospital. Now is it likely that these poor little birds . . . should, at that late season of the year . . . attempt a journey to Goree or Senegal, almost as far as the Equator? I entirely acquiesce with your opinion – that though most of the swallow kind may migrate, yet that some do stay behind and hide with us during the winter.

  Gilbert White’s brother was chaplain to the British garrison on Gibraltar. Also a keen naturalist and a reliable observer, John sent his brother reports of swallows crossing the strait to Africa. This first-hand evidence enabled Gilbert to write back to the devout hibernationist Daines Barrington:

  You are, I know, no friend to migration; and the well-attended accounts from the various parts of the country seem to justify you in your opinions, that at least many of the swallow kind do not leave us in winter, but lay themselves up like insects and bats in a torpid state . . . But then we must not, I think, deny migration in general; because migration does subsist in some places, as my brother in Andalusia has informed me. Of the motions of these birds he has ocular demonstration, for many weeks together, both spring and fall: during which periods myriads of the swallow kind traverse the Straits from north to south and from south to north according to the season.

  This may well have irritated Barrington, because shortly afterwards he published a damning paper utterly refuting the whole idea of bird migration. Although White was totally convinced that bird migrations were real, he was evidently puzzled by the late movements of some species, often well into November, but his admirable scientific objectivity would never permit him to reject altogether, without positive proof, the hibernation possibility. Right at the end of his life he was still instructing labourers to search for hibernating birds in winter. In April 1793, only three months before his death, he asked a neighbour to assist him in examining the thatch on an empty cottage in Selborne.

  *  *  *

  Things are very different, these days. We possess an astonishing log of scientific knowledge about migrations of all sorts. Thanks to ringing (banding) and radio tagging, birds are perhaps the most studied, but so are elephants and polar bears, herds of antelope, the great wildebeest migration from the Serengeti across the Mara River, and the carnivores and scavengers that follow them; deer, like the caribou migration of the Alaskan tundra and their attendant wolf packs; whales and seals of many different species migrating to breed or feed; eels and basking sharks and many other migratory fish; reptiles, such as turtles and crocodiles; and, of course, insects in uncountable numbers. Billions of monarch butterflies migrate up to 2800 miles down the North American continent from Alaska to Mexico because they can’t withstand the cold winters.

  Some of the research aided by modern technology has revealed previously undreamed-of feats of endurance and ability. Imagine their surprise when the pilots of an Air India passenger jet found themselves flying alongside a large skein of bar-headed geese at thirty-two thousand feet, an altitude required every year as the geese cross the highest Himalayan peaks.

  Radio transmitters have revolutionised bird research. Very recently, an electronic tracking device weighing less than a paperclip uncovered what is now thought to be one of the world’s greatest bird migrations. It revealed that a red-necked phalarope, a tiny wader the size of a wagtail, migrated thousands of miles west across the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, a journey never recorded for any other European breeding bird.

  Dave Okill, of the Shetland Ringing Group, fitted individual geo-locators to ten phalaropes nesting on the Shetland island of Fetlar. When a bird returned to Fetlar in the spring, Dave was astonished to discover that it had made an epic 16,000-mile round trip during its annual migration – across the Atlantic, south down the eastern seaboard of the US, across the Caribbean and Mexico, ending up off the coast of Peru, taking the same route back. Prior to this, many experts had assumed that Scottish breeding phalaropes joined the Scandinavian population at their wintering grounds, thought to be in the Arabian Sea.

  My conservation colleague Roy Dennis has hugely increased our knowledge of osprey, marsh harrier and golden eagle movements by attaching transmitters to young birds leaving the nest. The British Trust for Ornithology has done the same by attaching solar-powered radio tags to English cuckoos in an attempt to discover the route and precisely where our diminishing British cuckoo population spends the winter. The results have been illuminating and, for us, deeply disappointing. Aigas Field Centre sponsored one bird named Kasper; he made it to the Congo Basin for the winter, but perished on the way back in the spring – just our luck. Of the first five birds tagged in 2011, only two made it back to Britain.

  Sophisticated modern radar can also accurately track the movement of small passerine migrants. We now know that most small birds migrate at below five thousand feet, the most popular altitude being two to three thousand feet, whereas flocks of waders choose to travel much higher, at twenty thousand feet. We can also measure speed of flight very accurately. Warblers, finches and other small birds commonly cover thirty to fifty miles a night with daytime stopovers to rest and feed, whereas swifts, swallows and house and sand martins regularly cover up to two hundred miles a day, preferring to roost at night and fly by day so that they can feed on flying insects as they go.

  Raptors, such as ospreys and harriers, tend to move much more slowly, travelling by day and using thermals to spiral upwards so that they can glide for long distances before rising and repeating the process all over again. The exception to this rule may be falcons. Only twenty-four hours after it was ringed in Paris, a young peregrine falcon was gunned down on Malta, some thirteen hundred miles south, an average of fifty-four m.p.h. without stopping.

  *  *  *

  For me, here and now, migration means geese and swans, waders thronging the mudflats of the Firth and woodcock slinking into the woods. Our small summer migrants all vanished south long ago, but the onset of winter brings the Arctic species down to our more favourable climes. I lie awake at night, listening out for the haunting music of whooper swans bugling through the moonlight. Then, with the first frosts and an east wind, woodcock suddenly arrive in droves from Scandinavia and Russia, escaping the snow and ice.

  It is a gamble. If, as seems likely, birds are triggered into migrating by the length of daylight, they must also assess the weather, choosing suitable conditions and the right wind to travel. Two years ago
the Scandinavian woodcock got their timing horribly wrong. They arrived in the Highlands, which were gripped by an unseasonably severe November frost. There had been a light snowfall immediately followed by –18ºC, even on the coast.

  The land fell silent. The Beauly River froze over. The loch became gleaming glass in the low-angled sun, and huddles of disconsolate mallard sat about preening on the edge of the rigid marsh. There was nothing else to do. The ground and its snow crust, even in the sheltered woods, was as rigid as concrete. Woodcock are woodland waders with long probing bills for winkling invertebrates out of the litter layers of damp forest soils. Unable to break through, they starved. My good friend and colleague Peter Tilbrook, former Nature Conservancy Council and Scottish Natural Heritage director, who lives on the east coast at Cromarty, doesn’t miss much. He phoned to tell me that migrant woodcock, which had just arrived, were starving in his wooded garden. They were so weak that he could pick them up.

  In the Aigas garden there is a small patch of wet woodland where a spring rises. I have never known it dry and I have never seen it freeze solid, although in very hard winters the open pool has grown a skin of thin ice. The spring water seeps away into the soil beneath the spreading branches of 120-year-old, close-planted western red cedars, whose closed evergreen canopy provides a resin-scented arbour like a secret den – a place where my children loved to hide when they were small. Following a hunch after Peter’s phone call, I went to have a look.

  There they were. Three woodcock stood together on the damp soil, their large black eyes in sculpted soot- and cinnamon-barred heads stared blankly at me. I backed off, reluctant to stress them any more than the weather already had. The ground was dotted with the pockmarks of their hungry probings. I prayed they were finding something to sustain them. They stayed there a week, until the anticyclone drifted back towards Norway and a mild west wind flooded in to free us up.

  How did they find that lonely wet patch, I wondered, the only one in a world of ice? What tricky avian sensibility had led them to that secret place? Could they scent the damp soil over the heady essence of cedar resin? Had they been there before in hard times? Did one wise old bird tell the others? So many questions, so many riddles. Such a cloud of witnesses.

  4

  And Then There Were Rooks

  Above the dark and drooping world

  Let the empty skies disclose

  Your dear, delightful crows.

  ‘Crows’, Arthur Rimbaud

  Crow realized God loved him –

  Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.

  So that was proved.

  Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

  ‘Crow’s Theology’, Ted Hughes

  I can’t claim any prescience; neither am I given much to old wives’ tales or pithy country aphorisms. An abundant fungal flora or a heavy crop of rowan berries doesn’t seem to me to mean anything more than a bumper year for fruiting fungi and rowan trees. When the greylags and pink-footed geese arrive earlier than expected, harrowing the September skies with their treble-pitched clamour, all that it tells me is that the season in their Arctic breeding grounds – Greenland, Iceland, Lapland – is turning, and that their migratory instincts have fired a little earlier than in some other years.

  Not so Old Malkie, famous round here for his doom-laden predictions, when I bumped into him at the Beauly petrol station. ‘That’ll be the snow on the way any day now,’ he gloomed, waving his walking stick to the puckering late-October clouds and shaking his platinum curls. (To my intense chagrin, three days later there was a sugaring of snow on the three-thousand-foot pyramidal crest of Beinn a’ Bha’ach Ard [hill of the high byre], which impales our cloud-laden horizon to the west.)

  Yet despite all the head-shaking and dark muttering by the nay-sayers and would-be country sages in our glen, it did not seem to me to follow that blizzards are imminent, that we are in for a harsher winter than usual or that the end of the world is nigh. But I am moved by the wholly unexpected.

  In early November our rooks arrived back at their long-established nests in the tall limes, oaks and sycamores that line the Aigas drive. You couldn’t miss them. They were their usual boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly and generally carrying on like – well, like rooks always will. They were nesting – at least, they were going through the unmistakable motions of nesting. They were paired off, gathering and stealing each other’s sticks, repairing old nests and even building from scratch. But it was only just November. Now that was unusual. We don’t expect the rooks to attend their nests until February, sometimes late February, if the weather is hard. But November?

  It didn’t last. In ten days they were gone again, flocking away in rowdy gangs tangled with jackdaws, down to the potato and stubble fields recently harvested, the arable soils of the Beauly Firth as dark and rich as molasses, where they joined up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others from far and wide. I never did discover why they had arrived back at their rookery so unexpectedly, so absurdly early. It was as though they were feeling some collective corvid memory lapse and a need to check it all out, just to make sure they were still welcome there, like old boys and girls heading back to school for nostalgia’s sake. I logged it away as odd and, as the New Testament has it, ‘pondered these things in my heart’.

  With hindsight I now know that something other was indeed up, although it took a long time to become clear to me. At a human level we tend to view and assess climate change by large events, not small ones. Hurricanes, cyclones, storms and cloudbursts, rampaging floods and withering droughts are the dramatic yardsticks by which we measure swerves away from expected ‘normal’ patterns of weather. It’s hardly surprising: they come rampaging in and imperil us with their power and potential for disaster – or far worse. But in reality they are probably just the crescendos in the overture, the pushy high points of much more subtle shifts and pulses that are happening, pianissimo, all the time, most of which go unnoticed or at best recorded only by meteorological boffins with their noses pressed to electro- barographs and computer models.

  In just a few weeks we would know that whatever undetected signal had triggered the rooks’ unseasonal return to their nests was indeed part of some much grander orchestration, something much more all-encompassing, much more . . . yes, perhaps ‘sinister’ is the right word, after all.

  *  *  *

  Not just God, but I also love rooks: Corvus frugilegus, the very fittingly named ‘foraging crow’. The onomatopoeic crow – hrōc in Old English, rork in Old Dutch, craa in Old Scots, all, including the word ‘crow’ itself, inflections of the distinctive kraa calls everyone immediately recognises. I love them for their dissonant, rough-edged, pub-brawl rowdiness, all of which, as one of my earliest childhood memories, is permanently etched into my cerebral cortex.

  I need to come out and declare this now because so many people seem not to like rooks, lumping them together with every other crow and often refusing to acknowledge the many differences – although getting it off my chest feels a bit like owning up to some contemptible vice. Farmers grind their teeth and spit venom when packs of rooks swoop down, like brigands, to raid their winter barley fields, ripping the germinating seeds and the stash of protein-rich sprouts from the rain-sodden tilth, just like the old Scottish Border reivers, ‘. . . where all men take their prey’.

  In a fit of rage a farmer near here felled a handsome spinney of mature Scots pines just to prevent the rooks nesting there, and another, also given to uncontrollable outbursts of anger against many aspects of the natural world, attempted to sue his peace-and-wildlife-loving neighbours for having the temerity to harbour a rookery in their trees. Even those who don’t suffer loss of any kind further darken the rooks’ iridescent blackness by ignorantly dismissing them as just ‘crows’, uttered with a sneer and all the disdain one might award to football hooligans or drug dealers; an ornithological unfairness equiv
alent to lumping swans together with geese or writing off fieldfares and redwings as just thrushes. In fact, of course, the crow family is famously diverse, even the black or nearly black ones on the British list: rooks, jackdaws, choughs, carrion crows and ravens differ widely in character, habits, appearance, diet and their manifold interactions with people. It is hard to argue that crows bring many obvious or tangible benefits to mankind, but then neither do most other bird species unless we gain pleasure from their songs, their colourful displays or from killing and eating them, little or none of which relate to crows. Rightly or wrongly, the crow family have long been cast in the villain role and little I can say will alter that.

  But, for me, rooks are different. I love everything about rooks and I have clung to the emotive authority of their cries since infancy, when I knew no birds by name and saw them only as flickering glimpses in the great whispering beech trees through the bedroom window of my childhood home. So I am proud to have a rookery at Aigas. I get personal and possessive about them when they return from their winter forays to nest in my trees and surround our lives with their remarkably human and often comical racketing.

  The Aigas rookery is very old. We know from the first-hand testament of an old lady (Helen Foucar, now long deceased), who spent her childhood holidays here more than a hundred years ago with guardian godparents, who in their turn had been here since the 1860s, that every May back then the young birds were shot at the point of fledging, as they perched on the edge of their nests, by local Highlanders, the estate workers whose perquisite it was to harvest and consume this seasonal bounty. But our rookery is probably much older than she or her guardians knew. (Although the rhyme is thought to allude to Henry VIII’s sacking of England’s monasteries during the Reformation, the ‘Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ might well have been rooks: they were commonly eaten by country folk right into the second half of the twentieth century.)