I was gripped by this macro-ingenuity. There is no end to nature’s awesome creativity. I sat transfixed, occasionally ducking the swallows’ best efforts to bomb me. Two hours slid past and still she was beavering away, back and forth, in and out, weaving, plucking, pulling and winding, drawing threads like a skilled seamstress, tucking in ends, twisting them off and busying round and round the nest. She was a perfectionist, a precision purist, sometimes pleased with her work so that she could start afresh somewhere else, and sometimes clearly not, unpicking it and starting all over again, nipping back for more silk thread until the result matched the demanding standards of her innate conditioning.
The following day I hurried back to see what more she had achieved. The sun flashed and glinted on the silvery web so that I could see the full extent of her labours. I was dazzled, swept up in this minuscule feat of avian aptitude, this astonishingly deft warbler dexterity. It would have taken a mighty wind to unravel or wrench free that remarkable little orb of a nest. Now both birds were at it, the male arriving with an endearing flurry of wing fluttering and a chatter of thin, high-pitched calls. The female had moved on to the all-important insulation lining of the nest. She still seemed to be doing most of the work, but the male, unmistakable beneath his bright orange flash, was at least bringing in strands of sheep’s wool. These she took from him as though she didn’t trust him to do the weaving properly. Off he went again. This time he returned with what I could clearly see were two long russet hairs from my Highland cattle, with red shaggy coats and buffalo tough hides. So tough that they delight in scratching on barbed wire, clogging the barbs with the fine russet filaments, long and silky, perfect for goldcrests to weave into the lining of their nests. His female seemed very pleased with these; she sent him off again while she bent to the task of weaving the hair, just as she had done with the spiders’ web.
When I returned the next day I could see the almost completed nest. The interior lining was now a mix of tiny feathers bound into the moss and lichen with hair, smoothly and delicately woven. The birds were nowhere to be seen and they never did nest there, although I failed to discover why not. Perhaps, after all, she wasn’t satisfied. Had the next class of rowdy school-kids spooked her? Had the swallows dive-bombed her because she was so close to their territory? I will never know. But I came away richer for the instinct-driven little pageant I had witnessed. The industry, the dedication, the skill, the thousands of journeys for materials, the embroidery, the genius of design and construction, the intricacy, the detail and perfection all came together in a triumph of creative brilliance.
Goldcrests live lives of feverish top-spin urgency. They die in droves in the winters because their tiny bodies cannot contain the heat they need to survive. As many as a quarter of the entire population may not survive a harsh winter. To compensate they must lay seven to eleven eggs and always have more than one brood. They hurry. The female often lays a second clutch in another nest while the male continues to rear to fledging the first brood. If the food supply is good and the weather fair, goldcrests are capable of fledging twenty young in the space of two months, but the mortality of young in their first winter is as high as 80 per cent, so they may rear only four of those chicks to adulthood. Because it was well on into June when I found it, I was sure the nest I watched being built was not their first. I prayed that it wouldn’t be their last.
16
Summer Night
To see the Summer Sky,
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee –
‘Poem 1472’, Emily Dickinson
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased,
the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best . . .
‘A Clear Midnight’, Walt Whitman
The longest day, the shortest night, the northern hemisphere’s pinnacle moment, its apogee, its uttermost fling of solar indulgence. Yes, it’s a solstice again, the summer solstice. It’s that briefest of exultations when, on our elliptical journey round the sun, the Earth’s axial tilt of 23.45º tips us, here in the north, into maximum solar radiation. It’s what finally announces the arrival of our capricious Highland summer, a summer that may, or very possibly may not, prove to be everything we want.
Yet midsummer’s most endearing feature, and the one that imprints itself on most visitors’ memories, is the Highland night. At this latitude, 57º46′43″North, the Aigas night recedes to under an hour of true darkness on 21 June or, perhaps more meaningfully put, our day – defined by me as the ability to read a newspaper outside – stretches to something approaching twenty-two hours and a few minutes.
The precise statistics for our latitude reveal that on 21 June the sun officially sets at 10.03 p.m. and rises again at 04.28 a.m., a total sunless (but not lightless) gap of six hours and twenty-five minutes. But this is misleading and it’s quite wrong to call that a night. The angle of the sun’s decline to the horizon is so obtuse and its six-and-a-half-hour passage below the horizon so low that its fiery afterglow continues to beam semi-daylight – the diffuse light of a mildly overcast day – well on into what at any other season would be proper night. Added to this, if it’s not cloudy, the sunset bleeds on and on as the sun glides through, inches beneath the horizon, stretching and sliding its reds and purples far into the reluctantly descending darkness. It becomes a Tug o’ Light, seeming at first almost to haul the night away altogether. But the Night Team does eventually rally and win through: the daylight finally collapses as if they’ve suddenly let go of the rope and darkness plummets in, so that you have to abandon reading your newspaper at about eleven thirty. Even so we are still left with a line of gleaming steel along the northern horizon just to prove that the sun hasn’t abandoned us altogether. That never goes away, and although you may have given up straining your eyes on your newspaper, be patient, it’s not for long.
Night is an illusory pause in the battle, a temporary setback, like an evil thought summarily shamed away by honest conscience, because just a hundred and eight minutes later, by 01.18 a.m., only three and a quarter hours after the sun set, the Light Team is back on the rope with fresh vigour. The sun is lifting, imperceptibly at first, but gradually, as stealthily as a wildcat stalks its prey, it’s heading up again, heaving back to the surface. The steely gleam expands and spreads and, before you know it, dawn is arriving.
We’ve lived with it for forty years, so we’re inclined to be blasé about it, almost forgetting it’s happening, but our guests from further south are always astonished. ‘I can’t believe how light it is up here,’ I hear, over and over again. ‘It’s amazing. I didn’t want to go to bed’, which is precisely what everything else is thinking.
Blackbirds flute their sad notes into still air and robins tick and tinkle thin wisdom as the late-evening light seems to stand still. If the weather is fine and, better still, if it’s a full moon, the night is receding before you’ve had time to fold your newspaper and head back to the house. For the robins and the blackbirds it is a very short sleep. By three in the morning they’re at it again, soon to be joined by the whole choral throng: bellowing chaffinches, trilling wrens, grating greenfinches, warbling blackcaps, all mixed in with hooting tawny owls and, if only they hadn’t abandoned us this year, the raucous racketing of the rooks out and feeding their fully fledged young.
Yet the real winners are the plants. To be able to photosynthesise for up to twenty hours a day creates a massive surge in energy available for growth. Combined with the seasonal rise in soil temperature, plants rocket skywards or spread their green solar collectors as far and wide as they can, all of them, from the lowliest photosynthetic algae on a gatepost to the hundred and thirty-year-old sequoias planted by the Victorians, now towering hundred and twenty feet over the house, they’re all at it, all surging upward, all expanding, all exposing their
leaves for maximum absorption. It’s a green revolution after the long months of winter, an explosion of growth and verdure so fast and so unstoppable that, before we can mutter, ‘Summer solstice’, the gardens are swamped with weeds, broom and gorse banks are bursting with bright yellow blooms, the lawns need cutting twice a week and the roadside verges are spilling hooligan umbellifers into the carriageway.
Studying the statistics again, one more snippet of technical precision grips me and it’s one that, in a curious way, defines the whole solstice phenomenon and makes me wonder who on Earth first spotted it and possessed the sensitive instrumentation to measure it. It is this: on 21 June the sun appears almost to stand still. In fact the official difference between the length of day on 20 June and 21 June is a blink of just one second – from 17 hours, 35 minutes and 18 seconds, down to 17 seconds, whereas on the 19th/20th the daylight is still lengthening by 8 seconds a day, and by the 22nd/23rd it has started reducing by 7 seconds a day. All of this is a reflection on our tilt and our elliptical course. Thank God fasting for the gift of that tilt, that wondrous parent of diversification, that miraculous accident of creation that has made us what we are. It hands us our seasons, shapes our climate, fashions our poles and our tropics, causes our multitudinous migrations, and forges our manifold differences.
* * *
At nine o’clock I climb the hill slowly. I’m heading back to the Iron Age fort, the humped vantage-point seven hundred feet above the glen where I met the glorious sun-bronzed roe buck just after the winter solstice. The fort has been a shapeless heap of boulders for centuries, but long ago its sturdy walls provided a place of last resort, a sanctuary the Aigas people ran to when raiders came rampaging through. Now I go there for escape from the jangling, clamouring world we all live in these days, for a private sanctuary of my own, a place where I can commune with the rugged landscape that has been my home for so long. It’s a splendid look-out high above the valley.
From here I can watch the sun’s long decline to the mountains of Glen Strathfarrar in the west, trace its gory trail north-westwards and follow its fiery afterglow right round to the north. There is almost always cloud in the west, the mountains forcing the warm, wet Atlantic air upwards, but as long as it is thin and distant, this wraith of cloud enhances the sunset. The sun’s fire is reflected back with renewed vigour, adding depth and authority to the afterglow.
I have come to try to witness the famous ‘green or emerald flash’, the sudden surge of green light, which, on rare but apparently unforgettable occasions, immediately follows the sun’s disappearance below the horizon or precedes its rise. I have read about it, tried to see it from African deserts and Arctic wastes, but it has always eluded me. I’ve never witnessed it, although once I narrowly missed it. We were on a Costa Rican beach looking out at the Pacific Ocean, sitting in camp chairs revelling in a fiery sunset. I was distracted by the capuchin monkeys in the trees around our camp, monkeys that watched our every move so that, as soon as we weren’t looking, they could nip in and steal anything edible we had been careless enough to leave out. Green flashes were not on my mind. I looked away at the wrong moment but my companion beside me suddenly cried out. I glanced up, but it had vanished.
It is best viewed at sea with a clear, clean horizon, but it can be seen anywhere and it is real, although it’s caused by a mirage phenomenon. As the sun disappears, so its rays are fragmented and broken up into the spectral colours of a rainbow. The Earth’s atmosphere acts as a weak prism as the rays beam obliquely through, principally refracting blue and green light. The blues are a shorter frequency than the greens and bend themselves out, lost in the atmosphere, leaving, for a fleeting second, the luminous greens dramatically powering into the sky.
Tonight I’m lucky. The auguries are good: no wind, and the sky is clear overhead. I have checked my watch with the internet and I wait calmly for the appointed 10.03 p.m. Although I’ve climbed to seven hundred feet, the mountains in the west rise to four thousand feet above sea level and the precise timings for this latitude are calculated at sea level, so it’s as well I’m here early. The sun’s last glimpse, passing from my view, actually fell at 9.51 p.m. It slid behind the slumped pyramid hulk of Beinn a’ Bha’ach Ard (two thousand two hundred and twenty-eight feet – which makes it a Corbett – ‘hill of the high byre’ in Gaelic), setting the whole rim of the mountain ablaze as it went. The afterglow that followed was just what I had hoped for but, alas, no sign of the emerald flash. It was hard to be disappointed because the night was so fine and the sunset promised to be long and poetic. By ten o’clock, I wrote, ‘the overall light of day hasn’t changed at all’. I had no newspaper, but I could sit and scribble in my journal as easily as if it were midday.
So I sat on a rock with the coconut perfume of gorse and broom flowers lifting from the valley far below, assaulting me from all angles with pulses of heady scent. I sat and wrote for nearly an hour. It was balmy, a June night of calm and tranquillity. Slowly drowsiness claimed me. I lay back with the canvas pad of my notebook’s waterproof case under my head – pillow just enough to soften the rock on the back of my skull. The sky above me was a deep, purpling blue, threaded with the same blushing pink of the bell heather just coming into bloom beside me. Before I knew it I was asleep.
When I awoke I was chilled and stiff. I wasn’t immediately sure where I was and it took a couple of seconds to remember why I was there at all. I couldn’t read my watch; it was too dark. The rock was cold and a touch of dew had beaded the grass at my feet. Cursing my sleepiness I dug for my mobile phone. It said 01.49 a.m. At that moment I wished I was at home and in bed, but not for long.
I have always been partially nocturnal. Lucy has grown accustomed to me rising in the small hours, standing at the open window, breathing in the night air, or tiptoeing off downstairs and, if the mood is right and the weather is fine, outside for a night stroll. She ignores me now, although years ago it troubled her. ‘Where have you been?’ she used to ask, as I crawled back to bed at 3.30. A question I could never satisfactorily answer. ‘Just out and about’, was usually the best I could come up with. It’s an infection well known to poets, as Longfellow brilliantly expressed in his powerful ‘Hymn to the Night’. Nowadays I think Lucy’s just glad she hasn’t caught it.
I heard the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!
I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
Stoop o’er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
As of the one I love.
I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
The manifold, soft chimes,
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night,
Like some old poet’s rhymes.
From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,—
From those deep cisterns flows.
Slowly the sleep dulling cleared from my eyes and I was drinking from those ‘cool cisterns of the midnight air’. The Highland summer night is soft. It’s as smooth as the silk scarves of Rajasthan in the bazaars of old Delhi, and as soft as eiderdown plucked straight from the nests of Icelandic eider farms. It’s fresher by far than the sultry air of day. It possesses a new sensual density of its own, charged with nocturnal electricity, each molecule loaded with a static presence that electrifies the senses. It hones awareness, sharpens my hearing, enables me to comprehend its freshness on my face, discern the contractile curtain of my irises widening to Longfellow’s ‘haunted chambers of the Night’. Time stands still. History and the present merge, the spirit lifts to the moon, a perfect crescent, crisp and close enough to touch. My skin tingles with a new sensory alertness, all cynicism banished, just an anonymous, outpouring openness to the marbled sky. It seems to cling to other presences, things that
by day might have completely passed me by – the soft flutter of bats’ wings, a moth landing on my sleeve, the secret rustlings of a shrew. With the clarity of gin, an intuition came wading in to take charge, bringing a compulsive intoxication all its own, ‘the calm, majestic presence of the Night’.
I hadn’t, as I feared, entirely missed the show. The biblical blackness of the mountains stood out clear and hard and the funereal flags of cloud still hung there, but in between the fire had ‘smoored’, as the old Highlanders would say when they tamped theirs down for the night with moist peat. Still the rim of light clung on, had refused to be overcome. As bright as polished silver, a long, silken ribbon simmered there, rising and falling with a strange, luminous glow. I needed to get higher for a better view.
It’s only a twenty-five minute hike from the Iron Age fort up to the trig point height of Bad à Chlamhain at one thousand and four feet (‘hill of the red kite’), the immediate high point above us at Aigas; a walk I have done hundreds of times and whose boulders and bogs I know well. Walking in the monochrome semi-darkness of moon-light was easy. The going was firm and lichenous over the rocky shoulder of the hill, and wet flushes gleamed like dulled steel as I skirted them. I was approaching from the west, with my back to where the sun had gone down, so for a while I saw nothing of the horizon behind me. Once onto the slope up to the trig point I was in deep heather. Its woody stems brushed my trousers with a swishing sound too loud for comfort. I wanted anonymity and was pleased to emerge into the final boulder field through much shorter vegetation.
Gods of the Morning Page 19