The country people have a notion that the fern owl is very injurious to weanling calves … but the least observation and attention would convince men that these birds neither injure the goatherd nor the grazier, but are perfectly harmless and subsist alone on night insects … It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother’s milk … and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them.
Why has the nightjar been so unfairly disliked for so long? Perhaps due to its squashed, slightly uncomfortable shape at rest, which makes it look like a doorstop. Perhaps due to those dark eyes, large gaping mouth for catching moths, or even the spiky whiskers that line the edge of its beak. Or perhaps it’s because the nightjar is rarely seen but always heard. On warm summer nights, an evening walk through an isolated heathland will be peaceful … until suddenly, from the depths of the ferns, will emerge the unmistakable call of the nightjar, a strange, unearthly churr like the vengeful ghost of a Japanese horror film.
In April we found ourselves sailing across the English Channel towards northern France, where our nightjars were making their final stop before heading home for the summer. Nightjars are migratory birds, spending the short summer months on the heathlands, moorlands and open woodland of Britain before leaving at the end of August to overwinter in Africa. In spring they make their way back up through Nigeria, Mali, Morocco, Italy and France, before crossing the Channel and returning to Britain to breed, completing the migratory cycle. There are two species of nightjar in Europe but only one in the UK and, despite (or because of) our historic persecution, I felt protective of our birds. Where did they go when they left our shores? What kind of habitats did they live in when they weren’t focused on breeding? We were sailing to one of their holiday chateaux to explore temporary landscapes, ones through which they were only passing on their way back home. Our sailing was an overnighter, and as we sipped apple martinis the sun dipped below the waves, a vast expanse of salt water spread around us on every compass point. Tomorrow we would wake on French waters and discover where our nightjars had been sleeping.
Just after I started secondary school we visited northern France for a few days on a school trip. We stayed in one of those brilliant hostel-type complexes created for students, full of ping-pong tables and Orangina vending machines. The itinerary, designed to supplement our history, geography, French language and cultural skills, took us far and wide across Normandy.
During the trip we visited the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidered linen cloth that had been hanging in France for almost 1,000 years. It depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England and is perhaps most famous for its image of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, being killed with an arrow to the eye. Whether or not this is how Harold died has been debated by historians almost since the tapestry’s creation, but some believe the idea was deliberately invented by the Normans in an attempt to legitimise William the Conqueror’s victory and seizure of the English crown, claiming Harold was ‘struck down’ by God as punishment for betraying William in the lead-up to the Battle of Hastings.
The tapestry is a magnificent object, a symbol of the complexities of human civilisation, reminding us not only that borders and nations are a man-made concept, but that entire countries thrive on the diversity of their people. Today it seems strange to hear people crying out for an older, more nostalgic version of Britain, and I can’t help wondering to which point they would like to return. To the Palaeolithic, when we all migrated over from Africa? The Neolithic, when farming was introduced from the Middle East? To the Iron Age, when the so-called Celts arrived from Poland, Austria and France? How about the Renaissance, when ideas born in Italy fuelled our arts, science, politics and architecture, and the work of pioneering Arab astronomer Al-Battani helped develop the study of trigonometry? John Donne once wrote: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ We have so much to gain from connecting with others, and so much to lose by cutting ourselves away. In the end it is only living things that matter. As an 11-year-old girl, of course, nothing of that kind entered my head. I liked the colours and the amusing expressions on their faces, and I liked using my newly gained Latin skills to try and translate some of the words embroidered through the scenes. Above Harold’s sad little head it reads: ‘Hic Harold rex interfectus est’, translated as ‘Here King Harold has been killed’.
There is another panel in the tapestry, without battle or blood or glorious coronations, which seems to glow with natural wonder, a warm simplicity; a piece of history so vivid you can almost taste the reverence in the Latin inscription above it: ‘Isti mirant stella.’ Roughly translated it reads: ‘The people look in wonder at the star.’
The star in question is not a star at all, but you can forgive the people of early Britain for thinking so. It is a short-period comet made of dust and volatile ices like water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. More specifically, it is Halley’s Comet, the only comet visible to the naked human eye, and the only one we might have the chance to see twice in our lifetimes. Sadly I won’t get this chance, as the last appearance came six years before my birth, although the next is due around 2061 when I will be 69 and still heartily outpacing death. One of its earlier recorded appearances came in 12bc, only a few years before the assigned date of the birth of Jesus, and some theologians have suggested this might even explain the idea of the Star of Bethlehem. The original creators of the tapestry played fast and loose with the chronology of this section: although Halley’s Comet is shown just after the scene depicting the coronation of King Harold, in reality it appeared about four and a half months later. Historians believe this was to add extra gravitas to Harold’s coronation, with the comet representing a sign of divine judgement from God, foreshadowing the evil that would arise after he betrayed William.
Something about this small embroidered comet seems to reach out to us, a fragment of an older life surviving into the modern age, long after we had worked out what comets were and how they are actually relatively unimportant to our daily lives. To these people, however, they might have believed a comet to be a message from God, a spirit sent by the devil, or even a harbinger of the apocalypse. How wonderful that it was stitched into this tapestry by a quiet embroiderer in the corner of a room all those years ago, so that when that comet finally returns to our skies, despite all the technological advances achieved by then, we will witness the same natural brilliance and still share the awe captured by that simple utterance: ‘The people look in wonder at the star.’
The next morning we awoke in our cabin, gathered our things and drove the camper van down the ferry ramp and into Saint-Malo, a pretty port city with old granite walls and cobbled roads. From here we travelled to our first destination, Lake Guerlédan, a place I had read about online that was known to be a hiker’s paradise. It is in fact a man-made lake, the largest of its kind in Brittany with a surface area of 4km², originally constructed to power the nearby Guerlédan dam. Unsure what to expect when visiting northern France in the middle of April, we arrived in the car park and walked over to the cliff edge overlooking the water. That this was a man-made habitat was almost unbelievable. A shimmering palette of blues and greens stretched out before us, the air vibrating with out-of-season quietude, the sky gleaming with swallows just back from Africa. But beyond that, away into the dark forest rising up from the shoreline and encircling the water like a hazelnut husk, a voice floated out and up towards the sky, an echo across the water that seemed to awaken something buried in my earliest memories.
Cu-ckoo.
Two notes, and I was thrown back to my six-year-old self, standing in the patch of ancient woodland that was then my grandparents’ garden. Here was where my sisters and I played for years under the dappled canopies of oak and beech leaves, where we made a rope swing and d
iscovered moss-smothered statues in a derelict corner of the garden. It was a vast space, full of wonder and joy and horror, all the emotions a child feels when faced with the magnitude of nature. I remembered a monkey puzzle tree planted as a gift one year; an outbuilding with an old ping-pong table blanched in cobwebs; a sundial standing in a topiary circle that never told the correct time; a dead rabbit covered in flies beneath a rhododendron bush. At one end of the garden we visited the Fairy Hole with Grandad, where we would collect coins left as presents – as long as we always left one behind to prove we weren’t greedy. At night we could hear owls and bats in the sky, and Nana would leave a plate of lamb bones out for the fox.
Cu-ckoo.
And there, hiding somewhere in the trees, was the cuckoo. We used to listen to it calling through the forest as we sat in the sunshine, eating hot sausages from the BBQ – the sausages were always ready first so we had something to nibble while everything else was cooking. The cuckoo came in spring, and called all day from some hidden corner, always unseen. Male cuckoos are thought to have absolute pitch, singing always in the key of C; their song starts as a descending minor third when they first arrive, but the interval gets wider as the season goes on, moving from a major third to a fourth, so that by June there is almost no harmony to it at all. But still he sings on, that clockwork voice reverberating through the trees long past the evening and into nightfall.
The common cuckoo has gained an unsavoury reputation in the natural world due to its unique breeding habits. They are known as brood parasites, which means they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds such as dunnocks, reed warblers, pied wagtails and meadow pipits, leaving the unwitting foster parents to raise the cuckoo chick as their own. Adult cuckoos will sometimes mimic sparrowhawks to raise the alarm among smaller birds, distracting them long enough for the female to lay eggs in their nests. It’s an amazing adaptation and, like all natural creations that seem slightly unfair, we can’t help associating the cuckoo with a little naughtiness. On the darker side, young cuckoo chicks will push host eggs and even live chicks out of the nest to ensure their own survival. It might go against our laws of morality, but it’s a highly successful way of reproducing, and a quick Google search will reveal quite amusing photographs of tiny dunnocks feeding adolescent cuckoos almost three or four times their size, bound to care for their monstrous children under the iron grip of maternal instinct.
Sadly, the call of the cuckoo is a much rarer sound in Britain today, and according to research published by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), cuckoo numbers in Britain have dropped by 65 per cent since the early 1980s. There doesn’t seem to be one exact reason, but like so much of our wildlife, field studies suggest their decline is linked to the health of the whole ecosystem. One theory is that climate-induced shifts in the breeding times of host species have reduced the number of nests available to parasitise; some of these species have brought their breeding forwards by five or six days, which can have both positive and negative effects on the ability for cuckoos to find suitable nests at the right time.
Despite downward trends in Britain, however, the common cuckoo is still classed as ‘Least Concern’ on the IUCN Red List of potentially threatened species, with a native range of 130 countries and over 100 different host species recorded. In northern France, where the name first originated from the Old French word cucu, the cuckoos of Lake Guerlédan seemed to be plentiful, their unmistakable calls following us for our entire 10km hike through the woods and farmlands nearby. It isn’t just their nest-stealing habits that class them as vagabonds of the natural world; they are also impossible to find. Everywhere we went, there came the maddening call of the cuckoo, but to discover its hiding place was impossible. Dave said it was like watching a rainbow; so easy to detect from afar, but try to get close enough to touch it and it disappears, always slightly out of reach.
By the end of the day I had gone a little cuckoo-manic, trying and failing to find our cuckoos. Everywhere we went I could hear the bird calling, but no matter how hard I strained to see through the trees and up into the topmost branches, I could never find him. In my delirium I was reminded of the Wise Men of Gotham, an old folk story from medieval England in which a group of villagers feigned imbecility to prevent a visit from the unwelcome King John (who also appears as the stroppy lion from the greatest Disney film ever made, Robin Hood). The story goes that King John had intended to travel through the village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire to build a hunting lodge there, but at the time any road the King had travelled on was then made a public highway by law. The people of Gotham did not want a highway through their village, but they were unable to directly disobey the King’s wishes, so when the royal messengers arrived they pretended the whole village was mad. A number of absurd tasks were publicly carried out, successfully persuading the messengers to report back to the King that the whole area should be avoided. They tried to drown an eel in a barrel of water, threw cheese rounds down the hill in the hope they might roll their way to market in Nottingham, and built a hedge around an old bush on which a cuckoo was sitting, to prevent it flying away so the summer would never end. On finding itself hedged in, the cuckoo immediately flew off – much to the dismay of the Wise Men – but the Cuckoo Bush Mound still stands in Gotham on top of what is believed to be a Neolithic or Bronze Age tumulus.
By evening we had resigned ourselves to the fact that the cuckoo was a bird to be heard and not seen, and retreated to the camper van for a cup of tea and beans on toast. The heat of the day lingered on as the sky grew darker, so afterwards we hopped down to the shore of the lake and took a dip in the water. It was freezing. If freshwater bodies are shallow enough, they can quickly absorb the warmth of the sun even this early in the year. But the lake was deep and cold. I plunged my head beneath the surface and felt the spring sweat leave my body, the icy water brushing through my hair and into the very pores of my skin. I pushed my head up but kept my shoulders below the water; the surging numbness meant that it felt warmer to stay submerged. I floated in the water, eyes to the cloudless sky that had now turned indigo. At one end of the sky, far from where the sun had set a while before, the stars had started to gleam, specks of white against the fading light. I gazed around at the lake, the forest, the wildflowers and wooden boats. The night air was silent but for the sound that had followed me all day: the taunting, joyful, clockwork call of a most clever bird, echoing through the trees like a sylvan siren.
Cu-ckoo.
Cu-ckoo.
Cu-ckoo.
The next day we explored the hills and towns of Brittany, consuming vast quantities of crêpes and coffee before driving up to the Monts d’Arrée in Finistère, a small but ancient mountain range reaching its peak at Roc’h Ruz just 385 metres up. This was tonight’s sleeping spot, in keeping with our general philosophy of finding secret, beautiful places to park up, moving if asked and leaving no negative trace on the landscape. It was already growing dark by the time we reached our destination, a long, solitary track leading away from the mountain road and down towards a small village. The landscape here could be called bleak, but in truth it was just unforested. The horizon had darkened into a pink shadow fragmented by clusters of grey cloud, and the land was almost barren but for the black, twisted silhouettes of gorse and bracken pressed against the sky. It was a heathland habitat, beloved at dusk by nightjars, bats and birds of prey, but behind us was also a forest, and inside a wren was singing its fiery, rattling warble to the gloaming.
Dave made a start on the food while I went to explore the forest. It was not entirely wild, but more a strange mixture of cultivated land overgrown with wild plants. The floor was carpeted with ferns and bracken, but in front of me stood a line of fruit trees, a seemingly abandoned orchard that was now a feasting den for the birds and mice that lived here. I tackled my way through a bramble thicket and moved around the corner to find a lone deer who was startled and scampered away into the night. Further out beyond the trees, the land returned to sparsity,
bracken and gorse, and I felt this was good nightjar territory: the perfect spot for a bird to wriggle down into the ground and make a nest. There were no nightjars calling then, but it was only April; by July these mountains would be ringing with the churring call that mesmerises us all on summer nights. Perhaps they were lying here anyway, alarmed by my presence but staying motionless to avoid detection. Perhaps they were sleeping further down the mountain, under a spiked gorse bush or beneath a frond of green bracken.
Having chased cuckoos through the forests of Lake Guerlédan all day, it was liberating not to have my camera around my neck. I like photography; it’s useful to capture beautiful birds or landscapes, but I chiefly use it to illustrate my writing or to brighten up a blog. I’d rather look with my eyes, but I’m too easily seduced by the temptation to see the world through a lens rather than enjoying the moment as it is, there in front of me in 3D. Aside from the flash and my trail camera, I don’t have the right equipment to take photos in the dark, so at that moment I felt free to wander through the trees in search of crepuscular life: a strange shuffle in the leaves, the clap of a pigeon disturbed in the canopy, the damp scent of dark earth.
Dark Skies Page 18