Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  . . . seen on the wing as ghostly, whitish form in dusk . . . but also on winter afternoons . . . when pale appearance with orange-buff upper parts, pure white face and underparts, equally attracts the eye, as it quarters ground with buoyant, wavering flight and . . . pounces down to seize a mouse or vole.

  This was a promising start – good, accurate in a clipped, academic orthodoxy – but not really what I was looking for.

  Thence to the rather grander and much more conversational Bannerman and Lodge, The Birds of the British Isles, 1955, in twelve volumes, with its fine watercolour illustrations by George Lodge, but despite its long and detailed essay on barn owls, the authors seemed to be unmoved by the bird: ‘When seen, as is most probable, this owl appears almost white in the evening light.’

  Undeterred by this prosaic dismissal, I turned to W. Swaysland’s Familiar Wild Birds of 1888. But things got worse. Mr Swaysland plunges into a dismally critical view that can only suggest to me that he had never watched barn owls in person: ‘The flight of the Owl is dull and heavy, but particularly noiseless.’

  I was beginning to despair when the Rev. F. O. Morris’s Morris’s British Birds, 4th edition of 1895, came to my rescue. Perhaps, after all, I wasn’t alone in my exultation over this bird. Like Richard Jefferies, Morris refers to them as ‘white owls’, then helpfully lists their alternative local names: ‘yellow owl, screech owl, gilli-howlet, church owl and hissing owl’. A little later in his rather disjointed description, as much about taming owls as observing them, he ignites the flame:

  The flight of this bird, which is generally low, is pre-eminently soft, noiseless and volatile. It displays considerable agility on the wing, and may be seen in the tranquil summer evening when prowling about, turning backward and forward over a limited extent of beat, as if trained to hunt, as indeed it has been – by Nature.

  Quite so. And then he rounds off his piece with a verse from Thomas Gray’s famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’:

  Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower

  The moping owl doth to the moon complain

  Of such, as wandering near her sacred bower

  Molest her ancient solitary reign.

  So far so good. By now I was happy to have confirmed that some people shared my Romantic enthusiasm for this soft-plumed creature of the dusk. But I was still searching for something more intimate, more personal, something that touched my soul, as did the bird every time I saw it. I scoured even more ancient tomes, such as Robert Mudie’s The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands, 1834, but for all its delightfully quaint phraseology, it was to no real avail, except that in his revealing ‘. . . stands not accused . . .’ line he provides further affirmation that in the nineteenth century other owls were not just incorrectly accused but also heavily persecuted for taking game:

  This is the most common, the most familiar, the most useful, and in its plumage perhaps the most beautiful of all the British owls. Instead of spurning the society of man, it courts the neighbourhood of his dwelling; and while it is more destructive of mice, in all their species, barn, field and bank, than any of the other owls, it stands not accused of destroying any sort of game . . . It does not skin its mice, but breaks the bones, and returns these and other indigestible parts in pellets . . .

  If only Robert Mudie’s view had held true for the Victorian era, but, writing forty-five years later, Richard Jefferies not only finds the barn-owl carcasses gibbeted with all the others but endorses the point: ‘The barn owls are more liable to be shot because they are more conspicuous.’

  *  *  *

  Nowadays the Aigas rangers collect barn-owl pellets from underneath the quarry nest site. They bring them back to our little environmental education centre in polythene bags and offer them to classes of schoolchildren to dissect. This rather messy process involves soaking the pellet in water in a tray and gently teasing it apart with a probe and forceps, floating off the hair and unravelling the bones. Each pellet is a bundle of tightly packed fur, bones, teeth and skulls of prey, evicted from the crop with a series of rather undignified hiccups. Most predatory birds regurgitate indigestible detritus this way.

  In this glen our barn owls are principally feeding on wood mice and field voles with a few beetles and shrews snapped up for a change of flavour, but in the process of teasing pellets apart there is always the exciting possibility of something really unusual, such as a pipistrelle bat’s skull or a lizard’s toes and claws or the cartilaginous sections of a slow worm’s spine.

  The children work in twos. They pore over the trays, initially expressing disgust but quickly moving on to shrieks of ‘Yeah! Cool!’ as another tiny skull emerges from the murky water and, matched to the key, proves to be of the predicted species. Later they glue their washed prizes to a sheet of card, grouping together the voles and the mice, with the unusual extras highlighted in shocking pink or lime green – ‘We got a frog in ours!’ – building a chart of successful hunting that can be compared with the findings from other dissected pellets. It becomes highly competitive, much jostling and calling for the rangers’ approval of their handiwork.

  Cornish artist Alastair Mackie has chosen the unlikely medium of mouse skulls found in barn-owl pellets from a disused building on his family farm with which to pursue his theme of ‘Metamorphoses’. He collected hundreds of these skulls, cleaned them and reassembled them in a perfect sphere. When I first stumbled across this astonishing artwork in a Devon gallery, I couldn’t believe the skulls were real. I thought he had re-created them in moulded white plastic and I was about to dismiss it as a piece of imaginative gimmickry when, on a closer look, and having often pored over pellet dissection myself, I saw that they were indeed the real thing: many hundreds of mouse skulls, every one slightly different, all facing upwards, but perfectly cleaned and intricately assembled into this hollow, small football-sized perfect sphere representing, I imagine, Mother Earth. It reminded me of the art of minuscule Chinese ivory carving, but whereas I cannot look at any ivory without picturing the tragic destruction of elephants, this mouse-cranial orb, to me as a naturalist, was a dazzlingly imaginative reaffirmation of the interdependence of all living things. I treasured the image, hoarding it away as one of the most delicate and captivating works of creative art I had ever seen. The catalogue said that he ‘had traced the “states of being” of one creature absorbed by another and reconfigured into a work of art’. He certainly had.

  *  *  *

  Back in the winter of 2009–10 when more than a foot of snow lay for three months and temperatures crashed to –18º Celsius, with the grim inevitability of being a top predator, our barn owls starved. Voles and mice can survive happily under snow for weeks on end, their maze of tunnels, latrines and food caches eventually exposed by a thaw. But their security means that the owls’ pale nightly vigils around the fields are fruitless. The marshes and the loch were gripped white with frost, the Beauly Firth froze over so that the tide floated sheets of salt ice onto the foreshore, heaped like rime-covered slates from a fallen roof, preventing the owls from hunting even there.

  That spring, when finally it came, I took Alicia, one of our young rangers, down to the quarry to see if there was any sign of our only local breeding pair of barn owls. As we clambered through the winter-burned rushes towards the rock face I saw something white up ahead. My heart sank. I knew very well what it was.

  On its back with wings outstretched lay the emaciated corpse of a barn owl. I picked it up. It weighed nothing, a feathered wraith of the once vibrant bird. It was withered and dry; talons clenched in a final, defiant clutch against mortality. It had been dead for weeks, fallen from the sky as it struggled back to the sanctuary of its nest site – perhaps the place where it was born. Its eyes were sunken hollows in the soft, golden fringed heart of its face. I handed it to Alicia. ‘Damn,’ I whispered. ‘I was afraid we might find this.’ When I looked at her again, tears were running down her cheeks.

  A few weeks ago, browsi
ng one evening at my fireside, I found, perhaps where I should have looked first, in my old friend Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure (2005), an evocation of exactly what had inspired to me to love barn owls all those decades ago:

  The memory of the owls beating past the poplar trees – burnished golden wings against lime-green in the evening light – is one of the few visual images of childhood I can recall with absolute clarity . . . Few birds are so dramatically beautiful, or can bring the exquisite delicacy of flight so close to us, or can look at us so penetratingly, eye to eye.

  11

  The Long Wait

  When Springtime came, red Robin built a nest,

  And trilled a lover’s song in sheer delight.

  Grey hoarfrost vanished, and the Rose with might

  Clothed her in leaves and buds of crimson core.

  ‘A Wintry Sonnet’, Christina Rossetti

  It is the second week of February before our latitude hands us back a full working day. After months of getting up in the dark and having to abandon outdoor work early, it’s revitalising to find that once again there is a full eight hours of daylight. Our woodland edges are the first to test winter’s mettle. In radiant drifts of white, snowdrops are blooming defiantly among quilts of snow-flattened leaves. If it happens that the temperature is generous, as it has been of late, the small resident birds – tits, robins, wrens – seem to adopt the mood, and the woods suddenly resound with rasping, sawing, trilling song.

  Yet for all those tantalising enticements, this is the most frustrating moment of the year. Those with sense go away, take a break, skip south to the sun, as we have done many times. It helps to discard a chunk of February like that. To stay is to trudge through the long, depressing wait for the Highland spring, still fully two months away. But what is even more frustrating is knowing that in southern England daffodils are blooming and birds are nesting. Here the spring fools with us like a child with a puppy on a long lead, letting it go and then hauling it back in.

  Yes, the days go on getting reliably longer, and the sun continues to inch its way up the sky, but for every day that seems a little warmer and brighter, there are two or three that drag us back to winter. Sleet and icy rain on snarling winds, cheek-stinging hail squalls, swingeing frosts and sudden snowfalls are all entirely predictable throughout the whole of March and well into April. While smiling southerners are busy oiling their lawnmowers, we are still grimly longing for the daffodils to burst.

  I am a Taurean. My birthday falls in the second week of May and I use it to gauge the season every year. Downy birch, Betula pubescens (often wrongly but forgivably called silver birch), is our commonest native Highland tree. It loves acid soils and, with enviable stoicism, is wholly unfazed by our increasingly capricious climate. Ignoring the cold and wet, it grows vigorously wherever its delicate wind-borne seed flutters into a niche. Some years the first birch leaf appears in late April, others it is the first few days of May, but occasionally, if it has been held back by desiccating cold winds, green tips are only just showing on the eighth.

  Snow can arrive at any time. Often I have awakened on my birthday to find the world white with a dusting of fresh snow, and the local crofters always shake their heads sagely and warn me, ‘Aye, that’ll be the lambing storm. There could be more yet.’

  It seems perverse, but it’s so often the case that just as the first lambs on wobbly legs are beginning to appear in the fields up and down the glen, usually around Easter, the snow comes barrelling through with an overnight dump sometimes several inches deep. Every now and again I have to remind myself that I have chosen to live north of the 57th parallel, closer to the Faroe Islands than to London, closer to the Arctic Circle than to Paris – something the Arctic’s icy tendrils never let us forget.

  So spring comes late to the Highlands – always. It is what history tells us to expect. My neighbour Finlay Macrae, whose crofting family have eked an agricultural existence from these acid soils for more generations than he can remember, assures me with a grin beaming across wind-tanned cheeks, that the grass in his wet and rushy river meadows doesn’t really start growing until the second week of June – growing, that is, sufficient for his out-wintered cattle to get their tongues around it.

  Reading Dr Isabel F. Grant, the universally respected early-twentieth-century historian of Highland life, in her book Everyday Life on an Old Highland Farm 1769–82, a low point in history for the Highlands and a period of near-starvation for many Highland cottars, I learn that the menfolk had physically to carry their cows out of the byres onto the fresh grass at the end of winter because they were so weak after six months indoors on minimal feed.

  Nowadays, of course, in the age of silage and the big round bale, farmers, small-holders and crofters have sophisticated methods for harvesting and storing winter feed, so that animals can be kept and even fattened during the long winter months. Back then, when the only winter feed was hay and a few soggy turnips from a clamp, and when a wet summer turned a bad hay crop mouldy, the cattle scraped a similarly grim existence to that of their impoverished owners.

  Wildlife has always had to take pot luck. If times are good, most wild animals do well, but when the weather turns sour and food supplies fail, they suffer and fail too. That is the process by which natural selection has honed them for survival over millions of years. Populations build and then they crash. The survivors are the ones who go on to breed tougher, stronger, more adaptable offspring and populations begin to claw their way up again.

  The word Charles Darwin made famous is ‘fittest’ – the survival of the fittest – to which he added his visionary quotation: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.’ In the context of change, the word ‘fittest’ means those species most able to adapt their behaviour or their feeding and breeding habits at the same pace as the change – whatever that change may be – is affecting them. Some change will bring benefits. Other changes will severely disadvantage them.

  A bird laying eggs expects and needs to be able to feed its chicks. If it is pinned by evolution to a particular food supply, and suddenly that food is removed or delayed, or even reduced in quantity or quality, and the bird finds it cannot feed its chicks, they will die. Newly hatched chicks of every species have an extremely rapid metabolism, requiring a constant input of energy. If they don’t get it, they will die very quickly, within a matter of hours if they don’t receive the quantity and type of food they need. It doesn’t matter whether it is a blue tit, a golden eagle or a mallard duck, it’s tough out there: they have no reserves, so they perish. The adults have to have a mechanism by which they can cope with change and try again. Many bird species are programmed to accept failure by starvation or predation and simply lay more eggs next time round.

  A few years ago a pair of robins nested in a yew stump three feet off the ground. I watched the nest daily and counted the eggs when the hen flew off to feed. When she had six a predator – I suspected a weasel, a rat or a stoat – raided the nest. The adults escaped, but the entire clutch vanished. For three days they sat about, looking bewildered. Then, to my delight and surprise, they began building a new nest only ten feet away from the previous one. I worried that the same predator was also watching and would strike again, but I was wrong. The new nest, an elaborate mossy cup lined with sheep’s wool, took them less than a week to complete; then she started to lay again. Did the robins know what they were doing or was it just luck? Who knows? It doesn’t matter; the important point is that it worked. Robins have adapted. They have a mechanism for surviving raids like that one. This time she went on to raise seven chicks.

  *  *  *

  Darwin carefully used all-embracing terms, like ‘fittest’ and ‘change’, words that cover a multiplicity of complex vicissitudes. In these puzzling times it is climate change that is exercising me. We know it is happening – there seems to be plenty of evidence for that – but we cannot y
et determine its pace or its permanence. Neither do we know the fullest implications or consequences to ourselves or to wildlife, no matter how adaptable that wildlife has become.

  Only a few years ago ‘global warming’ was the catchphrase for environmental alarm. There is little doubt that greenhouse gases, especially methane and carbon dioxide, are contributing to the gradual rise in temperature across the globe. There seems to be little we can do about it in the short term, but because the places apparently suffering most from rising temperatures are the extremes – the Arctic and Antarctic polar ice, places too far away actually to impact on our collective imagination – the new emphasis of alarm has shifted to something undisputedly evident in our own backyards: climate change.

  And it is alarm with good cause. Rapid climate change is scary. Ecologists are very gloomy about the Arctic ice cap, and the prospects for the polar bear as a pack-ice, seal-hunting top predator; but far closer to home, for most of us in the extravagant West, over the past few decades global warming has manifested itself in sudden and unwelcome bursts of extreme weather: floods, hurricanes and storms, droughts and blizzards. We plunge from hosepipe bans to widespread flooding and consequential landslides, not just in one year but in one summer. Winters have their own grim signature: white-out blizzards bringing traffic to a standstill one minute, storm-force winds and lashing rain, power cuts, flooding and tidal surges the next.

  For many the words ‘climate change’ have come to mean discomfort, disruption, financial loss, despair, anxiety and stress – even life-threatening events. Right now, at the time of writing only a few days before Easter 2013, most of the west of Britain and Northern Ireland is at a standstill with blizzards, and the people on the island of Arran, off south-west Scotland, are struggling with snowdrifts up to fourteen feet deep and have been without power for a week, a situation unprecedented in living memory. No one knows where or when such extremes will strike next.