Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  Mandarins nest in tree holes; their preference is to nest high, thirty or forty feet up, and the newborn ducklings are known to be fearless, leaping to the ground from their nesting hole high in the trees when they are still tiny. I may not have been able to see the young birds, but I knew the mandarins were nesting now and perhaps I could still find their nest, so I returned the next day to look. The riverbank itself seemed unlikely; the trees along this stretch didn’t look big enough or old enough to have any suitable holes in them. But set back a hundred yards or so from the river was a large field of very rough grazing, boggy and overgrown with alders and studded with ancient hollow oaks, so I decided that this was worth a quick look, and I would work my way through the fifteen or twenty old oaks one by one. The first tree I came to was one of the most massive, perhaps ten feet in diameter, and had a large hole in it at head height. Directly beneath the hole was a large boulder, so I climbed up on to that and leaned in. The hollow didn’t go down to the base of the trunk, it was level with the entrance, so I reached around in the dark. And felt a nest. I grabbed a pinch of the soft grey down that lined the nest and pocketed it. It seemed incredible: a new breeding species for this part of the world, and I had found its nest in the first place I had looked. Of course, I had to be a little cautious: goosander down could be grey too. So I sent it off for analysis to get the official confirmation that I needed. This nest was no one-off: the following season I watched a female proudly leading a parade of young downriver.

  My other find was surprising for a quite different reason. Early each year, when the main influx of goosanders arrived on the river, there would sometimes be a pair or two of red-breasted mergansers accompanying them. These are sawbill ducks too, close relatives that breed near to the coast. They are finer, smaller birds, and the male, at least, is quite distinctive, with grey flanks in comparison to the pure white of the male goosander, and of course the red breast for which it is named. But when the males left the river soon after, the redheads were much harder to distinguish. Smaller and skinnier, with a slightly more obvious shaggy crest, perhaps. One year I thought I had seen a female with her brood, but it was hard to be sure when the redheads were forever in the process of disappearing around the next bend in the river, and then the next. Then the following year, when I was on the heavily wooded section of bank nearest my home, something crashed out of the thick undergrowth at my feet and splashed down into the river. She began to circle close to the bank, flapping her wings and panicking but unable to flee, torn by conflicting impulses. From this close up there was no doubt that this bird was different from those I regularly saw. I checked the place where she had emerged; beneath the thick ground layer of riverside plants was a hidden trail, almost a green tunnel. I followed it back ten or fifteen feet to a secret hollow in the bank where eleven nearly spherical white eggs were hidden. They may be close relatives, but in this respect at least their habits differ markedly from their larger cousins. Unlike the goosanders with their tree-hole nests, the mergansers are ground nesters. Old records show that, long before goosanders moved south and took over the rivers of Wales, there were occasional sightings of mergansers on the river here. My suspicion is that they have always nested here in small numbers, but have been overlooked, and when their bigger, brassier relatives arrived, they simply merged into the crowd, and disappeared from view altogether.

  As far as the woodland creatures were concerned the fringe of riverside trees along the river’s length constituted a very long, thin wood. Badgers left their trails all along the bank and dug latrines to mark their territorial boundaries. Flycatchers dashed back and forth across the water. Sparrowhawks worked the beat, soaring above the treetops, then pausing to circle, then soaring, then circling again, as if they could not fly as slowly as necessary, as though they were worried they might have missed something important.

  Working my way downriver through a thickly wooded section, I surprised a buzzard right at the water’s edge just beginning to pluck a dead carrion crow. I must have missed the kill by seconds. The buzzard lifted off with the crow in its talons and set off across the river, but the weight must have been too much for it, for it dropped the crow midstream, and it fell with a splash right in the middle of the river. As I walked on along the riverbank the floating body stayed alongside me, matching my pace exactly and making me ponder the possibility that I had perhaps been accompanying the very same shower of raindrops for the whole day, as the landscape and the birds changed around us. After a minute or so, a second crow arrived, and began to circle and swoop over the floating body of what I had to assume was its mate, making calls of the utmost distress. It was very sad — crows pair for life. But what happened next took me aback. Over the course of the next minute or two, more crows began to race to the scene, flying in from every direction, until there were twenty or thirty of them wheeling and diving and calling above the dead bird. These are not in any way social birds, but crisis had brought them together and I felt as though I was witnessing a crow wake. And then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they all began to disperse, and it was once again only me and the black corpse drifting downriver side by side. Far above us hung a single red kite, waiting for the body to drift ashore.

  With the end of the year’s river-bird survey I could revert to a less structured relationship with the river. I would often head down the hill to the footbridge and position myself halfway across. From high above the water and midway between its banks I had a quite different perspective on the river and could see much further both upstream and downstream than I could from almost anywhere at the water’s edge. If I had been busy that day chopping wood or digging, it was a particular pleasure to stroll to the bridge at dusk. There was a pair of semi-detached estate cottages near by, with a shared roof space that was home for a colony of long-eared bats — a colony at least ten times the size of mine. As darkness fell, the bats would come streaming out from under the eaves and hurry to the riverside and its trees, swooping and diving all around me. The river had its own bats too: Daubenton’s bats, which skim the river, feeding on the midges and flies that live in the inch above the water’s surface, and even snatching insects floating in the water, so that they look as if they are bouncing across the water like a skimming stone. These are not house-dwelling animals; they roost in crevices in trees, always close to water, and the university had put bat boxes in the woods all along this stretch of the river. They were much higher in the trees than the bird boxes, as is the bats’ preference, high enough that they could be inspected only by ladder, and they had a narrow slot for the bats to enter rather than the round entrance hole that would have let in the birds.

  The bats would swirl all around, passing within inches of me as darkness fell, their most active time. To my ears there was nothing beyond the quiet churning of the waters below me, a screaming silence, but to them there must have been a cacophony of sound. It is almost impossible to comprehend how they must perceive the world: they map everything around them, creating a mental image from sound as we create an image from light. When it was too dark to watch them any more I would set off back up the hill, and on a moonless night, with clouds to hide the stars, it could be almost pitch black. But if I kept to my regular route I would have no problem: I had my own mental map of the journey home that I had built out of memory. Time and distance, the texture of the ground beneath my feet, and its incline, aided by the slight fluctuations in the density of the darkness that would tell me whether or not I was beneath the trees.

  There was something extraordinary about the bats, something apart from the obvious extraordinary things. As they circulated around me and hunted for their breakfast, they treated me no differently from how they would treat the branch of a tree: as an obstacle, not a threat. And in this respect they were different from almost every other mammal or bird. So many of my most memorable encounters with wildlife were those occasions when there was a breakdown in the natural order of things — the natural order of things being that wild creatures sens
e us coming a mile off, and run like hell. Those moments that felt to me like intimacy, like closeness to nature, must undoubtedly have seemed quite different to the animals involved. The injured raven in the hand. The plover with her eggs, or the mandarin with her young, each torn between conflicting impulses: the maternal instinct and the urge for self-preservation. Even the garden birds that we watch with pleasure at our bird-feeders are in a state of conflict: safety or hunger. When the weather is at its worst, more and more birds throng to the table, because the alternative to facing their fear is starvation. It is easy to sentimentalize nature, to forget that the prevailing forces at work — besides the urge to hold a territory and find a mate — are hunger and fear. Our position in nature is anomalous: we are the pole predator and almost everything fears us, while most other predators in the animal kingdom are themselves running scared. The sparrowhawk fears the goshawk just as the chaffinch fears the sparrowhawk, and with good reason; when the goshawks move in, the number of sparrowhawks inevitably falls.

  In the Western world our relationship with nature is unnatural. Hunger is historical, and any animals that could have been a threat to us, the wolves and bears, have been either eliminated or pushed into ever more remote outposts. I could walk in the forest at night and fear nothing, because there is nothing worse to fear than the possibility of bumping into a tree in the darkness. Close encounters with wildlife are very different when the wildlife you are watching would sooner eat you than run away from you.

  It was the end of the season and I was going down into the valley, to a hidden vantage point overhung by trees on a secluded, wooded reach of the river. I approached perpendicular to the river so that I could go directly to my chosen place without having to walk the bank and risk disturbing anything. I got comfortable and prepared myself for a long wait. After all those months of crashing along the riverbank with my clipboard in hand it was time to enjoy the simple benefits of sitting quietly and seeing what happens. There was nothing there to see as I arrived, and that was surely good, for it meant there was nothing to disturb. It was a pleasant, sunny day on a narrow stretch of river where the trees on each side reached out and shaded at least half of the water’s surface. The waters here ran fast and shallow, their gentle babbling the ideal accompaniment for a long vigil. It is difficult to remain still for long periods, but I’d had practice: all those evenings out watching the badgers and the woodcocks, the rainy days sat on my doorstep beneath the shelter of my porch just watching the world go by, and most of all a multitude of nights sat doing nothing by the flickering fire.

  I didn’t have long to wait. The kingfisher announced that it was coming; they always seem to call as they patrol the river. It perched on the overhanging branch of the tree right beside me, and I could tell that in spite of its glorious plumage this bird was a juvenile — it had the same black legs as the flightless bird I had found not far from here. From that second on the river seemed to be alive with kingfishers, flying past repeatedly in ones and twos. There was no way of guessing how many there were as they flew up and down, back and forth. The youngster in the tree next to me took off after a passing bird, but was soon replaced by another that settled directly opposite me on a branch that hung low over the water. This new arrival had the bright red legs of an adult. In fact, I could tell that this was the female, for though their plumage is indistinguishable, the male’s bill is all black, while the female has a distinctive red lower mandible.

  As I watched, a nuthatch that had been hopping around the hazels near by found itself a nut. It had done well to find one as I never managed to get my hands on any myself; the grey squirrels took all the hazelnuts while they were still small and green. The nuthatch carried its find over to the tree beside me, wedged the nut into a crevice in its bark, and began to hammer away at it. It was remarkably noisy at such close range. I could see it out of the corner of my eye but didn’t want to make a move — it was so close. It surprised me that the kingfisher wasn’t distracted by the noise, but it was obviously a familiar sound and she ignored it entirely, her attention focused instead on the water drifting by beneath her perch. And then she dived. A second or two later she was back on her perch with a fish in her beak. A perfect view of a kingfisher fishing, like something out of a documentary, soundtracked by the nuthatch on rhythm, and the river on melody. Over the course of the next ten minutes the kingfisher caught three more fish. The first two she ate herself, the third she carried off for her young. There was a lull for a while — the kingfisher had gone and the nuthatch too — and then a loud piercing call and a kingfisher shot upriver, flying low and fast. Right on its tail, a rather optimistic buzzard was in hot pursuit, trying its hardest to keep up without its wingtips getting wet. A minute later, the kingfisher returned alone, quite unruffled.

  A family of goosanders was making its way upriver to where I was waiting. It made a change to see them swimming towards me for once instead of sailing away. By this late stage in the season, the young birds were able to fly, and were virtually impossible to tell apart from the mother bird. Perhaps she was still a fraction larger, her crest still a little shaggier; and she was still the boss. There were thirteen in this family, and they were fishing in an extraordinary fashion that I had never witnessed before. They were spread in a dead-straight line across the entire width of the river, which was perhaps forty feet at this point, the mother in the very middle of the river and six of her young to either side of her, perfectly evenly spaced. They reminded me of a line of pheasant-beaters. All had their necks stretched flat out across the surface of the water before them, with their eyes just underwater, for some of the time at least. Every few seconds they would scuttle forward with a flick of their big red feet and snatch at a fish. Splash and grab. Only the few birds in midstream actually needed to dive, so shallow was the water here at this moment. As they all filed past me, the nearest bird was barely ten feet away, but it saw nothing; only noise or movement would have alerted them and caused their usual panic.

  Soon after they had passed me, the birds turned and began to drift downriver, falling out of line as the faster water midstream sent a few of them surging ahead. I thought that was the end of the show, but not at all; after fifty yards they all turned back towards me again, assumed their positions and began to work their beat. Just as they reached me, they must have encountered a whole shoal of tiny fish, for the half-dozen or so birds furthest across the river from me suddenly formed themselves into a tight semicircle, almost wing to wing, and pushed towards the far shore. I had no idea that birds could perform such coordinated teamwork when they hunted; each bird seemed to know the exact position to take, while those on my side of the river held their posts, undistracted by the feeding frenzy taking place in the shallows opposite. Once again, as soon as they had passed the shallow rapids where I had positioned myself, they turned and drifted back down the river just as they had before, to regroup and begin one more pass. This was to be the final time; perhaps they had used up everything the river had to offer here, or perhaps their hunger had just been sated. They broke rank and gathered in a cluster around the mother bird in the middle of the river, directly in front of me, as if for a debrief. They held their position perfectly, swimming so that their pace matched the current exactly, and began to preen themselves with their brilliant red serrated bills. Time had stood still and I felt invisible; I could scarcely believe what I had seen, and that I had the shyest birds on the river still no more than twenty feet away, oblivious to my presence. And then one by one they finished their preening, folded up their long necks like coiling snakes, tucked their slender bills under their wings, and slept.

  9. What Remains

  Summer came to a reluctant end. The buzzards and the kites circled lazily on the thermals, rising high, and the ravens were out with their three young, rolling and calling continually. But the hillside was still mostly silent in the sunshine, and the songbirds were still hidden away in the moult. The first to emerge was a party of mistle thrushes, sleek and g
lossy in their new plumage, which seemed to have adopted my patch of hillside as their hunting ground. There were at least thirty of them, along with a handful of camp followers, a few chaffinches and a couple of warblers. For four days I watched them closely whenever they were in sight. I knew that thirty fat thrushes would not have attracted my attention alone, and the thrushes seemed to know this too; they fed on the ground but were twitchy and nervous, and would stay close to the trees, ready to dive for cover at the slightest provocation.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day the moment came. I was out at my woodpile chopping logs when I saw the flock suddenly lift from the bottom of the front field. The flock flashed light and dark, light and dark, as the birds twisted and turned in sudden jerky movements, like winter dunlin on the estuary, but their hunter hung fast, its long tail swinging from side to side with each check, each sudden corner. The goshawks were back from their summer holidays. This hawk was out of luck though, for the raven family was near at hand over Penlan Wood and decided to intervene. The two adults dived right in and began to harry the hawk, while the young held back, for dealing with a hungry hawk was clearly an adult matter. After the first few passes, the hawk dived back, and the thrushes were able to slip away and make their escape during the brief distraction. And that was the last time I saw this particular flock of thrushes on my hillside that autumn; now the hawks were on the hill it was no longer safe for them there.