Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  We have no choice but to speculate and hope for the best, as must so many of the species, plant and animal, with which we share our planet. Powerless, we watch and, hopefully, we learn. It’s like a game of roulette we’ve been sucked into against our will, forced to gamble. For us, we bet on our jobs, our livelihoods, our homes, our standards of living. And, when made to, we adapt: we move, we build flood defences, we duck and weave, we adjust, we change our habits. For wildlife it’s much tougher; only an adaptable few can change quickly. They toss their genes into the wheel and see how they fare. Red is good and they can adapt; black is death, if not immediately then a gradual decline into oblivion. If their number fails to come up there are no consolation prizes.

  Change can mean shifts in predation too. Our eight-acre loch at Aigas used to have moorhens and coot, little grebes, teal, mallard and wigeon all ground-nesting in the woods or on the marsh and sedges around its shores. They did well, despite regular nest predation on land by a formidable array of predators: foxes, pine martens, wildcats, buzzards, herons and hoodie crows. Once they got their chicks onto the water they did well. Then mink arrived – alien American mink that had escaped or been released from mink-fur farms. Mink are voracious and relentless predators, as much at home in water as on land. Suddenly we lost our ground-nesting birds at the loch – and not just some: we lost the lot, except one tough old species, the mallard duck. One by one the other species disappeared. They couldn’t change their habits and behaviour quickly enough to cope with this new, extra layer of predation on land and in the water. Mallard are a famously resilient and successful species right across the northern hemisphere. They nest on the ground. If the nest is discovered by one of those many egg predators (the list is startling: gulls, crows, herons, rats, stoats, weasels, foxes, hedgehogs, badgers, otters, pine martens, mink . . .) the mallard loses the lot. But the success of the mallard as a species is precisely because it is so adaptable.

  As a general rule, the more successful the species the more adaptable it proves to be. In Britain, think house sparrows, herring gulls, the crow family, wood pigeons, chaffinches, blackbirds, herons and many more common species. In every case they can move easily from habitat to habitat, from food supply to food supply, from nest site to nest site. They cope with whatever man throws at them and they keep coming back for more. Adaptability is their byword.

  The mallard is an excellent exemplar: defence adaptation number one is the camouflaged plumage of the duck and her ability to freeze. I have stepped on a nesting mallard before she flew up. Number two is the wide diversity of habitats in which she can nest: woods, marshes, fields, scrub and thickets, in gardens, up against walls, in old hollow logs, in drifts of leaves . . . The list goes on and on. Many species are tied to one particular habitat. Not so the mallard, and she will learn by harsh experience which nesting sites are successful and which to avoid. Adaptation number three is her cunning laying technique. She can lay only one egg per day, so she lays it in her carefully prepared nest and covers it with down. Then she heads back to the water and safety. She doesn’t return to the nest until she’s ready to drop another egg, thereby keeping her presence at the nest to an absolute minimum. She keeps this up for as long as three weeks, sometimes laying as many as fifteen eggs. During that time her giveaway presence at the nest has been absolutely minimal, a few hours only, every time carefully covering the clutch with down from her own breast, then with grass and leaves. But that’s not the end of it. Adaptation number four is another cunning ploy. For the safety of her chicks it is vital that they all hatch together, within a matter of an hour or two, so that she can lead them to water together (we have all witnessed the endearing sight of a mother leading them across a main road). So, once the clutch is complete, she covers it up, then abandons it to allow all the eggs to cool to exactly the same temperature. This ensures that none of them starts to develop until she brings them back up to 37.5º Celsius. She can leave them for as long as three weeks before returning to begin incubation. This secret hoard of concealed eggs, if undiscovered, must mean there is no trace of duck scent emanating from the eggs, or anywhere near the nest. She sneaks back in, settles, bares her brood patches and begins the long twenty-eight-day incubation. If she has to leave the nest she covers it over again and is away for the shortest time she can to keep herself fed and watered. Adaptation number five is her ability, apparently unfazed by losing an entire clutch of eggs first time round, to find another site and, within a few weeks, build a new nest and lay another clutch. The same thing could happen several times, but mallard ducks don’t give up. Despite being hit over and over again by predators, eventually she will raise a duckling or two to replace herself. But the trump card she has, adaptation number six, is not just her laudable and obstinate refusal to give up (it breaks my heart to see a clutch of twelve ducklings successfully hatched and, within a few hours, down to eight, then to five, and finally one if it’s lucky), it is her longevity.

  In captivity mallard have survived in breeding condition for twenty years. In the hazardous wild it is likely to be much less, but assuming an average lifespan of only eight years, during that time a duck can produce hundreds of ducklings. Even though only one or two may survive each year, if she herself survives, by the time she succumbs she may well have replaced herself and her mate many times over.

  Other species can’t do that. Wrens and other small birds, such as tits, live for only two or three years, so they have to have another trick – that of extra-large, multiple broods. If wrens have been hit by a hard winter, which they often are, suffering as much as 60 per cent losses – tiny bodies can’t maintain their heat in long periods of sub-zero – the survivors are well known to take up the challenge of rescuing the species by producing up to twice the size of egg clutch, from a norm of five or six eggs to ten or eleven, then repeating it a few weeks later. Wrens in particular seem to know that they will die in extreme cold so they gang together in tight spaces for mutual body warmth. There have been some remarkable instances of dozens of wrens all jammed together in nest boxes. The British Trust for Ornithology cites the record number of wrens roosting together in one box to be sixty-three, but the RSPB lists a record of ninety-eight wrens emerging from one hole in an attic. The largest I have found was twenty-one, in the extreme winter of 1998, all jammed together in a tit nest box. The nail had rusted through and the box fell to earth. A dead wren lay beside it. When I lifted the lid and looked inside I was astonished to find what I took to be another twenty dead wrens. I was horrified. I tipped them out onto a tray, then noticed a slight movement. A single leg stirred. They weren’t dead, but comatose with cold. I put them in the Aga warming oven and brought them back to life. When they had completely recovered I released them again and nailed the box back onto its tree. Two nights later all twenty were back in the box. It had worked for them once, why not again?

  Yet all these commonplace survival tricks that have evolved over many hundreds of millennia, perhaps even millions of years, to enable species to fit the climate and habitat available to them, all have to submit to the caveat ‘if everything else is equal’, by which I mean on the assumption that the species in question has sufficient food to feed itself and its offspring. Jenny Wren can produce as many extra-large clutches as she likes, but if there is no food for her chicks, they are all doomed within hours of hatching. Similarly, if there are no insects on the water or in the marsh for the ducklings to eat in the first week of life, the mallard has no hope of raising even one duckling. That is what makes rapid climate change so scary – as we would discover, there’s nothing ‘equal’ about it.

  *  *  *

  What was happening around us in the early spring was the beginning of a catastrophic inequality. An unforeseen factor was about to shoulder its way in to complicate the lives of just about everything around us. February had been dry and cold – nothing so unusual about that. The rooks came and went, checking things out, ready to pitch into nesting as soon as the conditions were righ
t. By March everything looked good. Every day the sun rose with renewed determination and with it, as though to urge it on, came an unusually warm southerly breeze. It was gentle at first, delicious and, oh, so welcome. The rooks revelled in it, cawing incessantly as they busied back and forth around their bulging nests. Secateurs in hand, Lucy rushed out into the garden and vanished into a herbaceous border for hours at a stretch, stripping out the winter-killed stems of last autumn’s blooms. I started the rounds of the many nest boxes on our trails, scribbling notes as I went. Great, blue and coal tits were all busy carrying filaments of moss and sheep’s wool. It seemed we were ‘set fair’, as the barometer says.

  Normally – and I can only really speak for the ‘normality’ of the last forty years – March in the Highlands is treacherous. It can be warm or icy, wet or dry, calm or stormy, through all of which the daffodils struggle valiantly into full bloom at last, and that splendid normality is leavened by the lifting sun supplying us with a broadly upward temperature trend zigzagging gently towards April. Years ago old Dunc Macrae, my crofting neighbour Finlay’s father, now long dead, told me he never fussed about snow in March: ‘Ach, it will na stay. It’ll be away in a day or two.’ Dunc’s reassurance was unnecessary, the snow never came. It was the last thing on my mind. The long wait had taken its toll: I was sick of waiting, sick of winter. As far as I was concerned, spring had arrived. Now, along with just about everything else, I was enjoying the warmth.

  12

  The Sun’s Rough Kiss

  These violent delights have violent ends

  And in their triumph die, like fire and powder

  Which, as they kiss, consume.

  Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene vi,

  William Shakespeare

  Looking back, we had no idea. It all seemed normal. February had surrendered to March without a fuss. Only the moon noticed the difference, off on its rounds again. Despite the first daffodils’ most ecstatic fling, nobody round here expected March to be anything but another month of winter dragging its feet. Even April can hang in the balance, so in March we expected to wait on, patiently, trying hard to avoid the word ‘spring’, although the great tits were nagging and the wrens were taunting us all day long.

  Frosts had crisped the lawn for the last two weeks of February and mists hung over the river until noon when, like a bolshie teenager, the sun seemed to wake up properly and managed a smile. It was good. Most days were dry. We were out and about, doing tasks we hadn’t been able to do for months. Then, without warning, everything changed.

  A gentle wind moseyed in, like a cruise ship docking from the Mediterranean, dragging with it a Continental high more appropriate to Monaco than the Moray Firth. It shimmied its glowing warmth up the whole of Britain. Overnight the clouds of our little wintry world vanished. There was no excuse for the sun now. March glowed and then it blazed. Average seasonal temperatures doubled from 10º to 20º Celsius and more. Records began to tumble. People rushed to the seaside and leaped into rivers and lakes. Camping shops sold out of tents. Three weeks later, as the month drew to a close, television news was reporting crazy temperatures: 23.6º Celsius at Aboyne, only an hour’s eagle flight to the east of us in Aberdeenshire. The whole of March had been dry, most of it what us Brits like to call hot.

  We loved it, of course. We strode about in shirtsleeves or none at all. We swam in the loch. The young field centre staff lay about sun-basking through their down time. A pensioner died from heat-stroke in Scarborough and no one seemed to care. We laughed and joked endlessly about summer, like most northern-hemisphere humans do when the sun shines for more than a day and a half. It was all jolly good fun. Every morning we awoke to a constantly expanding chorus of triumphant birdsong: chaffinches bellowing, woodpeckers drumming, robins carousing and wood pigeons, over and over again, calling out their soothing, summery instructions, ‘Take two cows, Susan, take two cows.’

  The rooks came home in force. Their nesting trees were a constant hubbub of domesticity. They carried in fresh sticks and set about rebuilding their twiggy piles with a perpetual racket of corvid commentary. They strode about the lawns as if they owned the place, drilling their gimlet bills into the turf, plucking unsuspecting leatherjackets into their hungry gullets. When we approached the paddock with a bucket of kitchen scraps for the hens, the rooks parachuted in like a pack of black vultures, lining the paddock fence in haggling gangs, loudly cawing their approval.

  The first small tortoiseshell butterflies shook themselves free from hibernation, dancing prettily among daisy and dandelion blooms that suddenly studded the lawns, and queen wasps emerged from under the roof slates two months earlier than usual, droning slowly and purposefully in through bedroom windows thrown wide, diligently searching for secret hideaways to fashion their delicate little paper lanterns. It all seemed so good.

  Brown hares deserted the woods and lolloped aimlessly about the fields, as if they couldn’t quite believe the grass was growing. They cast nervously around, long, black-tipped ears ceaselessly swivelling and twitching with neurotic anxiety as though they oughtn’t to be there at all. When they settled to graze, laying their ears back on their shoulder blades, through binoculars I could see their vibrating whiskers and curling, trembling lips taking each protein-laden growing point, hauling in each blade in turn.

  Ears and eyes. That’s what I love about hares. Those acutely honed senses, unsleeping ears, like satellite dishes, and big brown bulbous orbs set into the skull flanks for 170º vision on either side. That leaves twenty degrees of relative blindness, five to the front and fifteen at the back, for the ears to cover. An alerted rabbit just looks cheeky and mischievous, but the hare’s glaucomatous eyes, bulging madly from a narrow, chiselled head full of sculpted hollows and angles, give it a look of crazed melancholy, whetted by perpetual terror. They remind me of a sensitive girl I once knew whose confidence had been terribly crushed by overweening parents.

  The March hare brings the spring

  For you personally.

  He is too drunk to deliver it.

  He loses it on some hare-brained folly –

  . . . All year he will be fleeing and flattening

  His ears and fleeing –

  Eluding your fury.

  ‘Deceptions’, Season Songs, Ted Hughes

  I grew up with a print of Albrecht Dürer’s meticulous hare drawing (1502) on my bedroom wall. It was mesmerising. As a small boy I stood and studied it intently. I wondered how he had got so close, how he had achieved so much vibrant detail from a living hare without the help of binoculars, detail that vanishes the moment the animal is dead. Did he just sit quietly with his sketch pad? Would they come close enough? It seemed unlikely. Did he have a tame hare or did he stalk his hares or use a hide? I decided to try for myself and I quickly found that stalking was not easy.

  Hare-stalking is a game of great skill and no little vexation. The best approach is from directly behind, but head-on can work too; from the side is hopeless. First, you have to slough off any thoughts of being human, hunker down into your careless senses and engage with the hare’s own animal magnetism, with its force field of twitchy hyper-sentience, blocking everything else out. Wait until the head is down and grazing; be ready to freeze when the ears swivel to your direction or the head suddenly jerks up, which it will at intervals, regardless of whether it has detected you or not. Scent is important too: you must approach down-wind; gauge it on the tip of your tongue. Stick to cover until the last possible moment, and when you have to move out into the open imagine you are a tree. When you freeze don’t look at the hare; fix on a point to one side of it and don’t move your eyes.

  It’s Grandfather’s Footsteps taken to the limits of human stealth, and a game the hare inevitably wins, flattening with the first hint of danger and freezing until its fear gets the better of it, then careening off at up to 70 m.p.h. On rare occasions I have got as close as ten yards, but at that range it’s almost impossible for a human to move without making a hare
-detectable sound.

  Lepus europaeus, the brown hare, is a woodland animal and normally nocturnal, but gardens and fields of crops are often irresistible to them. I had seen none all winter but now the sunshine and the smell of new grass winkled them out of the woods. They gambolled and frolicked across the lawns in the dawn dew, adopting our mood, as excited about the radiant spring weather as the rest of us.

  Buds began to explode. The birches, usually not leafed until the end of April, shimmered in a pastel haze. The horse chestnuts are always the first to leaf in spring and to colour up in autumn. They burst through their cinnamon sticky buds thrusting their five-to-seven-lobed leaflets into the sunlight as though they had something to prove. The avenue of balsam poplars hovered in a mist of heady scent, known as the Balm of Gilead, oozing from gummy oleoresins in the leaves’ brown and papery protective sheaths, not from the leaves themselves. As they split open, for a few days we drifted through an aromatic tunnel as old as the Bible. Like birthday candles, hazel catkins trembled in fired sunlight, firing puffs of yellow pollen into bright air.

  It wasn’t just hot, although it certainly was, it was also refreshing. As smooth as silk, an alluring breeze fluttered through every day, teasing its way unnoticed into every cranny. Its invisible caressing fingers probed deep into places not normally warmed until July. Bumble bees hummed through glowing sheaves of daffodils. Oh! How we were all duped. Looking back, recalling the laughter and the happy surge of endorphins that wafted us through our work for the whole month, how completely we were taken in. How drugged we were by the sun’s brassy overtures. I overheard someone say, ‘If this is global warming, I like it. Bring it on!’