A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  Ravens were also seen as distinctly un-Christian, even actively pagan birds. Odin, the Norse god of battle, had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, or ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory’, whom he sent out into the world each day, and who reported back to him each night on all they had seen and heard. When the Vikings started their raids, and then invasions of Britain from the late eighth century onwards, they generally did so beneath a distinctive banner bearing the device of a raven; and that alone would explain why the early medieval church, and the general populace, might have developed a negative view of the largest corvid.

  Even before the Vikings, of course, the Christian church might have frowned upon the raven’s use in iconography and decoration. Before their conversion, the Anglo-Saxons had had their own version of Odin – Woden – and it’s reasonable to suppose that he too might have been accompanied by raven familiars. Ravens, then, were given a bad press for a whole host of reasons, and the rest of the corvid family might well have been damned by association. Add to that the fact they can – especially rooks and jackdaws – be seen as agricultural pests, and you have a recipe for disdain, and worse.

  That disdain shows itself in the collective nouns used for corvids. Although some of these were coined relatively recently, in the nineteenth century, and are deliberately either whimsical or attention-grabbing, others go back much further, and corvids don’t come out of it well. A group of crows is described as a rather menacing-sounding ‘horde’, an even more threatening ‘mob’, or a downright malevolent ‘murder’, while a gathering of ravens is an ‘unkindness’.

  Shakespeare reflects these attitudes in Macbeth, in which he touches upon one of the more curious facts about the British corvid family – and one that still ensures that some of these birds are blamed for crimes they didn’t commit. As Macbeth reassures his wife about the planned murder of Banquo, he uses the crow’s malevolent associations in a speech full of foreboding and doom:

  … Light thickens, and the crow

  Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

  While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

  Macbeth seems to be in some doubt as to whether it’s crows or rooks he’s talking about (although it’s perfectly possible that the former might nest very near the latter), and it’s easy to see how rooks, and the jackdaws that are often found with them, might be tarred with the same carrion-eating, lamb-attacking brush as ravens and crows, merely because they look similar. However, the worst that rooks and jackdaws can fairly be accused of is damaging the occasional crop, and even this is hugely outweighed by the favour they do farmers by acting as natural pest-controllers: rooks, in particular, have a liking for leatherjackets and other larvae and grubs.

  But matters were no doubt as unclear in Shakespeare’s time, and in the fictionalised version of the eleventh century he was writing about in the Scottish play, as they are now. For instance, Scotland has two versions of the crow. South and east of the Great Glen, there are all-black carrion crows just like anywhere else in Britain. North and west of it, however, there are hooded crows – handsome grey and black birds that were once thought to be merely a subspecies of the former. And all along the ‘borderline’ between the two there are fertile hybrids.

  As if that’s not enough, in Scotland the rook can seem a quite different bird from the version we see in England and Wales. True, there are some enormous rookeries on rural estates in Aberdeenshire, bigger than anywhere else in the UK, but Scottish rooks also seem a lot more adventurous than their Sassenach counterparts; and that’s when telling them apart from their cousins gets really difficult.

  A few years ago, I travelled up to St Andrews in spring to read at StAnza, the large poetry festival there. I had three great days catching up with friends, meeting and listening to new writers, and enjoying the sort of warm welcome that Scotland does better than just about anywhere else on earth. I was also determined to make the most of the bright, blustery March weather by going birdwatching. And so I did. The fulmars were already back on the cliffs, mini-albatrosses returned after a winter’s wandering. There were curlews on the beaches and the flooded fields and the golf courses, gracefully picking up choice morsels. There were gulls, of course. And there were rooks.

  They were not in the trees, nor on the ploughed fields, but strutting up and down the main street, rooting around in litter bins, perched on guttering and ridge tiles, and generally behaving in every way like carrion crows (of which there were none). I gave in to my fondness for this particular avian family, and spent hours watching as they confidently exploited every feeding and roosting opportunity that the grand old town could offer them. Their adaptability and ingenuity shouldn’t have come as any surprise, corvids being renowned for such things, but their willingness to live right next to man, and man’s willingness to tolerate them in return, was unusual.

  Elsewhere, the old attitudes linger on. All the corvids, even the jay, appear on the list of pest species that farmers can shoot or otherwise control, and despite the considerable consciousness-raising effect of Mark Cocker’s book, there’s still a distinct shortage of people willing to speak up for this much-misunderstood tribe. I’d like to try to reverse that, even if only a little.

  Ahead of me, the peaks of Snowdonia are glinting in the last of the sun. Early snows, perhaps, lying in some of the higher corries and cwms, or maybe just surface water or the first hard frost.

  For the last two days, I’ve been exploring some of the gentler trails. While they can provide pretty lean pickings for birders in autumn and winter, the ‘gronk, gronk’ of ravens has been a regular – in fact, a constant – accompaniment to my ramblings. Now I’m sitting, huddled, on the edge of Newborough Warren, wondering whether any of the birds I’m about to see are actually old acquaintances.

  The Warren – it was colonised by rabbits in the Tudor period – sits on the southern point of Anglesey, the largely flat, fertile island that was once the granary of the Welsh princes through the centuries. It’s a large expanse of dunes, some fixed, others constantly on the move as if reaching out towards the mainland, tantalisingly close across the Menai Strait. Areas have become forested, and there’s a lake, a saltmarsh and mudflats.

  This is the home of Britain’s most renowned raven roost. I’m keen to see whether or not its glittering reputation is entirely deserved, in the light of some of the tales I’ve been told. Some claims put the number of birds gathering here at around 2,000, or at least they say that was the figure when the roost was at its peak five or six years ago, adding that birds come from as far afield as Ireland, the Isle of Man, north-west England, and even southern Scotland. That would be a very significant chunk of the British population: there’s reckoned to be around 8,000 breeding pairs in total across these isles.

  Other watchers feel those figures are too high, and that the same birds may have been counted more than once; whatever the case, the numbers are now somewhat down. What isn’t up for dispute is that even now, in its diminished state, it’s one of the largest such roosts in the world, still attracting 800 to 1,000 birds, and there are satellite roosts elsewhere on Anglesey, at Mynydd Bodafon and Pentraeth.

  As I watch, they start to arrive from the east. A pair, although most of the roost’s members will probably be unpaired younger birds. Field guides often include useful tips on how to identify ravens, such as noting the diamond shape of the tail as they fly, the huge, heavy, chisel-like bill, the shaggy throat feathers, and the long wings – and pointers like these can all be useful, given that the bird’s size isn’t always obvious without any context.

  Nothing, however, is quite so distinctive as the tendency for ravens to indulge in all sorts of stunning aerobatics, tumbling, rolling and even flying upside-down, often seemingly just because they can. I’ve seen this characteristic in the ravens nesting just outside my home village. I’ve seen it in ravens high in the Scottish mountains. And I’ve seen it, memorably, in Extremadura, in Spain, wh
en a group of four winging their way high over the open plains took turns to show off, as though to alleviate the monotony of the miles of flatland they faced before they reached the distant mountains.

  This pair do exactly that, now, suddenly folding like clenched, black-gloved hands, then plummeting groundwards, before righting themselves and carrying on as though nothing had happened. When more arrive, in loose groups of twos and threes and more, most do the same, or add their own variations, including barrel rolls. It’s as if they can’t bear not to use the skills they have at their disposal.

  And so it continues. I try to keep count as best I can, but the birds are arriving not only from the mainland, but also from behind me and away to the left. Ravens, after all, when left to themselves are extremely catholic in their tastes where habitat is concerned, so much so that Max Nicholson, in Birds of the Western Palearctic, commented: ‘so wide-ranging that concept of habitat is hardly applicable’. Today’s birds, I guess, have been everywhere from the tops of the mountains to the seashore itself, taking in everything in-between, including man-made landscapes such as landfill sites. It’s only because the bird was persecuted and hounded away from the haunts of man for so much of the last two centuries that we’ve come to think of it as a creature of the mountains, cliffs and other upland places.

  Their foraging will have turned up an eclectic menu to match: worms, hikers’ dropped sandwiches, dead fish and seals, human rubbish, roadkill and just about anything else you can think of, including a range of other carrion. In Wales, hill sheep will be among that latter category, including, in spring, their dead lambs, although ravens have long been blamed for killing live lambs, too. When I was a child, I remember more than one elderly relative telling me that ravens habitually pecked the eyes out of lambs, and so they were the bogeyman of my early birding world – beings more fierce and terrifying, even, than the largest eagle. And I’ve heard the same story since, but never yet come across anyone who could actually claim to have seen it happen. Genuine confusion may be to blame: ravens would certainly hang around flocks during lambing, hoping to make a meal of the sickly ones who don’t survive, and they may also be attracted to sheep by the prospect of feeding on the invertebrates to be found on their fleeces, and around the animals’ dung.

  What is clear is that these are formidably intelligent creatures. Not for nothing did Odin choose ravens as his spies and messengers. More than one birder has told me that they’re quite capable of counting well past twenty. As we’ve seen, most birds can be fooled by two people going into a hide, then one leaving – the bird assumes both have gone, and starts to approach the hide much more closely than it would if it thought the hide were occupied. With ravens, you need a lot more people: only at around thirty do they really start to lose count.

  This intelligence makes relationships in the raven community very complicated. For the most part, pairs hold territory the whole year round, so winter gatherings tend to be of young, unpaired birds. To some extent they’re looking out for each other – there’s greater safety in numbers, and the more eyes available, the better the chances of spotting food. In fact, young ravens often call in other ravens once they spot a carcass, hoping to use weight of numbers to deter the resident pair, if there is one, as well as rival scavengers. On the other hand, all those untapped sexual urges, combined with a fierce intellect, means that the young birds are constantly looking to outdo each other in a bid to impress the opposite sex and join the breeding population. It’s like a vast, airborne version of The Only Way is Essex. Almost.

  Studies, including one from the University of Vienna, have suggested that ravens are sensitive to the emotions of the other birds in their flock; for instance, bystanders appeared to attempt to relieve and console the distress of ravens that had just lost fights with fellow flock-members. The benefits are obvious: resolving conflict, and avoiding future dust-ups, maintains relationships that are mutually beneficial. It all sounds intriguingly close to the sort of thing you see in primate societies.

  And that, I realise, is what I’m seeing unfold before me. The hundreds of birds congregating are hoping that by banding together, they’ll stand a much better chance of making it through the winter. Ravens don’t have too many predators to fear – their size puts off most attackers, and their aerial agility enables them to evade others, even including peregrines – but raptors will certainly be deterred by the prospect of plunging into the midst of dozens of stabbing bills. More importantly, put all those highly intelligent minds together, and there’s an improved chance that they’ll find and exploit more and better food sources.

  Quite how they communicate this information to each other isn’t clear (and it happens in some other bird species, such as gulls). It could be that some birds simply follow others – the ones that look well fed and generally successful – away from the roost in the morning, and certainly there’s evidence of a hierarchy within the flock, just as with other species, with older, more experienced birds taking up residence on the flock’s inside, and the newcomers and less successful hanging around the edges. But so important is this gathering to the birds, given the distance they’re flying to reach it, that it has to be probable they have other ways of communicating the vital information to each other. It could be by actions – a raven’s equivalent of a bee’s waggle-dance – or it could be by, effectively, talking to each other.

  As I watch, this feels more and more likely. Because, as more and more birds accumulate, their croaking rises to a crescendo of sound, in which, if you listen hard, you can just about pick out the individual ‘hrafns’, as the birds name themselves again and again.

  In the morning, this will all happen in reverse. A growing clamour from long before the first rays of the sun seep over the mountains, then a few coal-black offcuts of night thrown to the wind, and finally the moment when the centrifugal force that binds the whole gathering together is too weak to hold and every remaining bird is scattered and dissolved into the cold, bright day.

  It’s easy to understand why ravens have inspired such awe, respect and fear down the centuries; and it’s not just that these are powerful birds, capable of killing or at the very least of unmaking a body – human or animal – within minutes. It’s that they have been our constant companions since the earliest times – as harbingers, as gods, or their confidants, as waste-disposal units, as pests – and yet they’re still stubbornly themselves, unfathomable even with the technology and countless hours of research at our disposal.

  The light is almost gone now. The wind and the effort of staring into the dying light is making my eyes water, and when they clear a little I can’t tell if the dance of pale shapes in the distance is a late convoy of gulls heading up the strait or just the passage of blood cells across my retina. The sky is dark enough that it’s impossible to see the approach of individual ravens. I know they’re there only because they can’t help announcing themselves, but only when one or two of the birds wheel across a thin sliver of paler blue between two cloud banks do they become recognisable. Then they’re lost again, little slicks of the purest black clotting the tallest branches of the pines.

  12 A Blizzard of Wings

  The two pristine white birds flying powerfully in from the north are utterly familiar. Long-necked, long-winged for that matter – most toddlers would be able to put a name to them, as well as reel off that old warning about the birds being able to break your arm if angered.

  Swans. Until the recent colonisation of these islands by the little egret, and the even more recent return of the spoonbill, any large white bird in the wild could be confidently identified as a swan, even at extreme distance, by birder and ‘civilian’ alike.

  But taking a longer, closer look, I know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. There’s something more compact about this pair, and as they pass almost directly overhead, I can see their bills are yellow and black, and lack the prominent knobbly protrusion of the orange beak of the mute swan – the species familiar to all of us ev
erywhere, from city park to remote Scottish loch. There isn’t the wing noise – a creaking, far-carrying throb – that so often gives away the presence of the latter either, although there’s the brief susurration of feathers swishing through cold winter air.

  And there is, suddenly and wonderfully, a bright, trumpeting ‘kloo-kloo-kloo’ from each of them, a clarion call to their fellow travellers, somewhere behind them on a wind straight out of the Arctic. These are whooper swans, and they arrive like the first snows of winter, a few brief flurries followed by a steady and thickening blizzard, their whiteness all the more startling in its complete contrast to the washed-out earth tones of the bleak fenlands around them.

  And sure enough, the snowstorm isn’t far behind those first few flakes. The sky is blank and featureless. It’s too grey for actual snow, although it feels more than cold enough, and there’s a thin, mizzly gauze that dulls and blurs the muted colours of the countryside even more; but from somewhere away to the north comes a distant honking noise, not unlike a toy trumpet, which increases in volume until a long, strung-out straggle of birds emerges from the mist.

  There’ll be time enough to count them later, so for the moment I simply enjoy watching them arrive. They take a sweeping curve around behind the visitor centre, and then they drop abruptly down towards earth – a manoeuvre known as ‘wiffling’ – and there’s the faraway sound of tired bodies splashing into the welcoming water of the Ouse Washes. The trumpeting, meanwhile, continues at the same volume and pitch, but now it takes on an affably triumphal air. It’s a fanfare for a difficult, dangerous journey accomplished against all sorts of odds, and it’s hard not to want to join in by shouting in celebration yourself.