An hour goes by, then a squirrel calls. Something grey is coming along the trail. I try to point it out to Thomas Joe, my angle is slightly better than his, but it has stopped behind the willows. It moves again and I start to film. It’s a lynx and now he has seen it too. Through the out of focus willow stems, a slender, self-confident cat comes striding towards us: a female. There are dark tufts on the tips of her ears, her face is patterned and, as busy as I am with the camera, the bold white markings around her pale eyes strike me as breathtakingly beautiful. Thomas Joe whistles to her, a kitten’s call perhaps, and she trots forward, then stops at the sight of two people crouching where she’d expected another lynx. She stares at us quizzically, quite unafraid, and calmly detours, stepping tall through the deeper snow as carefully as a house cat. On the other trail she walks away without a backward glance, her trim behind and short tail swaying, her huge feet silent on the softer snow of the afternoon: a little after four o’clock, as Thomas Joe predicted. He shakes my hand and smiles, then we walk away, quietly, in single file.
After a month of looking for the lynx we have had to leave with our film only half finished. In such an ideal year, with so many hares for them to hunt, Adam had hoped we would eventually find the mother lynx and her kittens, but we missed them by a whisker. When the family completed their circuit of the forest and its frozen rivers, they came back to the house in the woods and spent two days there, hunting and playing together. We had left the day before.
For twenty years I have dipped into many places, filmed for a month or two then moved on. It has been endlessly fascinating but there have also been times like this, when people rightly say, ‘It happened as soon as you had gone,’ or, ‘You should have been here yesterday.’ Thomas Joe has lived a very different life. He proves that immersing yourself in the area around your home is the best way to know its animals intimately well. There is no substitute for spending time.
AN UPDATE ON LYNX
The natural fluctuations in the numbers of lynx, which mirror the cyclical change of the snowshoe hare population, have been happening since at least the early nineteenth century, when this pattern was discovered in the numbers of their skins traded by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Despite lynx still being trapped for their fur in western Canada and in Alaska, where there are still large areas of forest, these cats are doing much better than Asia’s tigers. Where forests have been fragmented, in eastern Canada and the lower forty-eight states of the USA, lynx have become rare. They are classed as ‘threatened’ in the contiguous US and in 2008 more than 40,000 square miles of public land were designated as critical to their survival.
Europe has lynx too, perhaps 30,000 of them in the conifer forests of southern Siberia and in Scandinavia (with a smaller and very rare species clinging on in Spain). They have been reintroduced to several European countries, including Switzerland, Germany and France, with some conservationists lobbying for the same thing to happen in Britain, where they might help control the rising number of roe deer.
– NINE –
EIDERDOWNS AND POLAR BEARS
The lagoon in front of me is fringed with islands and beyond them rise the snow-covered mountains of Svalbard: it’s a place alive with birds. After our failure last summer, Miles has decided to try again to film polar bears searching for nests, but this time we will wait on one of the islands and hope that a bear comes to us.
This is a productive, sheltered place, which is one reason that so many birds have come here to breed. Above us dark skuas chase Arctic terns, as if the birds were being robbed by their own shadows. On the water there are black guillemots and all the way along the shore spin twittering groups of phalaropes, so delicate you would never imagine they had spent the winter at sea. Miles has chosen this particular island because eider ducks nest here too, and when their eggs are about to hatch the bears sometimes come looking for them.
Instead of last year’s flimsy shack we are staying in a robust cabin, which was built here because of the eiders by a man called Louis. This is the only house on the island and inside it is very quiet. The terns’ screams are muted by triple-glazed windows. There is no ticking clock and no running water. No tap drips. There is no radio and no aeroplanes pass over. On its walls are two pairs of walrus tusks as long as my forearm. There are Arctic fox furs, a flare pistol and a hunting rifle, hanging by its strap from a peg. Louis is ingenious and mischievous: the peg is the penis bone of a walrus. I’ve sat in a chair he made from a whale vertebra and laughed at the signs on the toilet’s double doors: one has a male arrow, the other a female cross. Both open into the same small room but on the gents’ side there is a note saying: Out of order, use the beach.
All this is in the upper half of the cabin, where Louis lives, but in the basement there’s a small fortune. A metal door protects a storeroom stuffed to the ceiling with large cotton sacks. When I press them they feel soft but elastic. Each one weighs 10kg (22lb) and their contents are worth £650/kg (about $550/lb).
Today the air is cold, with just a light breeze ruffling the leaves of the willow trees. Not one of them reaches higher than my boots, none of the plants here do, but tucked into this dwarf forest is an eider. I have been watching her from a distance for several days. The duck has made her nest in a hollow, surrounded by purple saxifrage flowers. Her feathers are subtly beautiful, with pale edges and dark centres, dappled in cinnamon, black and ash brown. When she moves they slide over each other like tiles. On her face they shrink to dark and light stipples and above them a pale brow gives her a gentle look. She is an exact match for the rocks and soil between the flowers, and she needs to be hard to spot because sitting ducks like her are a powerful draw for bears. Five or six of them visit Louis’s island and he knows the character and foibles of each one. I would rather not meet them while I’m sitting in a hide, especially the bear Louis says he really doesn’t trust – he calls it the Telephone Bear.
Miles is outside making a phone call: we can hear the murmur of his conversation with the production office in Bristol, as Louis tells me how the bear came by its name. The phone mast that makes the call possible was installed a few years ago to serve a coal mine, far away at the head of the fjord. The signal is weak by the time it reaches the cabin, so cell phones only work on the top step outside the front door. From there the cabin blocks the view to the rear. Last summer a friend of Louis’s was standing where Miles is now, making a call from the top step. The first sign that he had met the Telephone Bear was a very loud bang. When Louis ran to the window his friend had vanished. Instead the bear was standing there, upright and taller than the door it was battering with its paws. It had heard the conversation, crept to the corner of the building, then rushed the last few feet. Louis scrambled for his rifle, ran to the porch and found his friend lying on his back with his feet braced against the juddering door, still on the phone and saying, ‘No, dear, no, it’s nothing, it’s just a bear,’ all the while gesturing furiously at Louis and hissing, ‘It’s my wife! Don’t shoot or she’ll never let me come back.’
‘Louis,’ I said, ‘don’t you think we should tell Miles?’
Although bears are frequent visitors to the cabin they rarely come as close as that to breaking in, but one August Louis came home to find that a family of bears had succeeded. The mother had chewed one of his windowsills until it splintered, then slid her claws behind it and torn out the glass before climbing inside with her cubs. They had spent several days trying to reach the food, which Louis keeps in a reinforced cupboard. He showed me photographs of the knee-deep debris in his home: smashed furniture, glasses and crockery. He says it was a shame the bears hadn’t managed to open the food cupboard because they might have left sooner and done less damage.
He rebuilt the cabin and this time he armoured the walls using timber cladding three inches thick and recessed bolts, with locking metal shutters across the downstairs windows. He has fixed strips of wood, with nails protruding like claws, to the edges of the roof and every climbable surface, b
ut Louis, who is so fastidious in everything he does, has left the bears’ claw marks on his living room walls. Perhaps they remind him never to be complacent.
With this in mind, when I go outside to wash, I carry a flare gun and take no chances. It is a bit like crossing the road: looking right, left, then right again. There is no sign of the Telephone Bear but I am immediately attacked none the less. The Arctic terns’ colony on the island is large and close to the cabin and the terns are defensive of their eggs and chicks. It is not the most peaceful way to clean myself, with screaming terns hitting my head, so I set my bowl on a driftwood log and wash as quickly as I can, scanning for bears and wondering how long the water will take to freeze.
The terns’ deterrent is effective but it does advertise where they are nesting. Eiders have the opposite strategy: they stay still, trusting their camouflage and, just as importantly, their lack of smell. By nesting close to the terns they may even gain some aerial protection but there is no escaping the fact that to succeed they must lay their eggs on the ground and somehow, for a month, ensure that they are not found by bears. For the next couple of weeks I will be there with them, sitting in my canvas hide, which has a very limited view and offers no protection at all, trying to film what happens when the eider ducks think that no one is watching them. The thought will never be far from my mind that the Telephone Bear might be watching me too.
There are eiders nesting all over the island, there’s even one directly below the cabin window, but it has been hard to choose which of them to film because we have no way of knowing when their eggs will hatch. Last night this changed when Miles visited the saxifrage eider and noticed a tiny crack in one of her eggs, so now the three of us – Miles, Steinar and I – are walking slowly towards her. She crouches with her head among the flowers, stretching her neck and flattening her body. We take our time and I talk to her as we approach: ‘Hello, hello there, don’t worry about us, we won’t harm you, you just stay put, good girl, good girl …’ on and on, as if she were a fretful child.
Filming nesting birds is a matter of life and death. Her babies are about to be born into this cold, dangerous place and she wants nothing more than to be left alone, but to film what happens I will need to spend many hours just a few metres away. If I scare her from her nest the eggs will quickly chill and her ducklings will die. That’s why I am trying so hard to make no difference to the outcome. It’s only television after all.
I have two reasons to think this will work: eiders are famously confiding because they put such faith in their camouflage, and I can use my hide, which most animals ignore. We set up the metal poles first then cover them with the canvas, faded now by years of sunshine and wind, but still able to make me disappear. I squeeze inside and Steinar passes me the tripod, the camera and a walkie-talkie. He zips me up, then he and Miles walk away. Through the opening, obscured by layers of net, I can see the duck lying flat on her nest. It must take a great effort of will not to seek safety at the expense of her eggs and I thank her quietly for staying, hoping she is convinced that I have left with the others.
The sun burnishes her back and streams in through the mesh of the hide, casting patterns like a reptile’s scales onto the walls. I sit completely still, watching her. She casts no tell-tale shadows because her wings and tail droop smoothly to join the ground. Everything about her is cryptic and matte, except where the sun sparkles in her liquid eye. Fifteen minutes pass before she relaxes enough to raise her head.
Eiders spend most of their lives at sea or on wild northern shores like this, where calm days in summer are a treat to be savoured. I first filmed them with my fiancée, Mary-Lou, twenty years ago in Scotland. We watched groups of the gorgeous males throwing back their heads and cooing, and became so fond of them that, as an engagement present, I gave her a ring with a male eider engraved on it, rising from the water to flap his wings.
The ducks finished their courtship here a month ago and this female has been sitting on her eggs among the flowers ever since. In that time she will have seen more polar bears than people. One of them was here yesterday, leaving its footprints on the shore; and where the last of the winter ice joins the island it found a handy place to scratch its backside. The strands of hair it left behind are long and curiously colourless, transparent rather than white.
An unfamiliar sound startles me – the clicking of stones – and I listen hard. Perhaps the waves on the shore are echoing from the rocks, but was that a huff of breath or just the wind? Steinar is lying out of sight somewhere above me on the hill, keeping watch for bears. I tell myself it’s nothing and concentrate on the eider, through the lens. She is confident that there are no bears and stands to turn her eggs, a clutch of khaki domes.
Eggs are a brilliant solution to the problem faced by nearly every female bird: if their young grew inside their bodies, the mothers would become too heavy to fly, but by encasing their babies in shells they can put them in a nest. The snag is that the chicks will only develop if they are kept warm, and that’s especially difficult for birds nesting in the Arctic. Even in July this duck could find that she and her nest are buried under eight inches of snow. The eiders’ solution to this problem is the reason that Louis built his cabin here, it’s why he has those valuable sacks in his basement and why the cosiest of all bedclothes, the eiderdown, takes its name from a duck.
As a boy I could hardly believe my ears when I first heard that quilts were filled with feathers, which had been plucked by wild ducks from their own breasts, then collected by eider farmers: it sounded fascinating but unlikely. Years later, when I was filming those courting eiders in Scotland, I saw the first stage for myself. A duck had scraped a bare nest among the heather, laid her eggs in it, and now she needed to protect them from the cold. She stretched her neck very tall, tipped her bill until it rested on her front and rubbed it upwards against the grain, as if she was stropping an old-fashioned razor. Easily, miraculously, clouds of down bubbled up from between the feathers. It seemed to weigh almost nothing. She worked each plume to a head as fluffy as meringue, took it in her bill and carefully tucked it under her. After an hour she had filled her nest and had enough down left over to cover the eggs.
Eider down is the best insulator in nature. A teaspoonful, fluffed up, would fill a cup and the warm air trapped inside it is just as effective at protecting eggs in a nest or a person snuggled under a duvet. Warmth like that is worth paying for and in Japan the best eiderdown quilts sell for $30,000. Louis is an eider farmer but the birds on his island are wild and free to nest wherever they like. He only takes their surplus down, which the ducks replace, and he protects them from predators. Since he came here the colony has doubled, to more than 3,000 nests.
People first protected eiders more than 1,000 years ago, when the Northumbrian Saint Cuthbert made what may have been the first conservation law anywhere in the world. Perhaps he too was kept warm by their down at night.
The duck shuffles round to face the other way. Perhaps she’s feeling the small movements of her chicks through their shells. If so she is keeping her secrets close to her chest, but just as she settles I glimpse a hole in one egg, smaller than my little fingernail. It’s one chick’s first window onto the endless light and brisk air of Svalbard’s summer. She calls to them, ‘kuk-kuk-kuk’, and from inside their shells the ducklings answer with the faintest peeps, almost too quiet to hear. They just carry to my hide.
I remember the anxious hours in delivery rooms, the uncertainty and pain and the many years of dependency after our children were born. These young eiders must grow up far more quickly. Rather than lingering on the shore, they must run as soon as they can, and swim and dive and feed themselves too. At least it’s a good day to hatch: the wind has dropped and the island is quiet now, apart from the calls of the terns around Louis’s cabin. There are still no signs of bears. I rest my back against the hide wall. I will be here for many more hours but this is nothing compared to the duck’s wait, of course. She has not eaten for four w
eeks and will have left her nest for only a few minutes every couple of days, after carefully covering her eggs, staying away just long enough to swallow some snow.
In my pocket there’s a clump of down. I took it from an abandoned nest this morning. I feel the warmth almost as soon as I wrap it around my hand: it’s my own warmth, held close. I rub the down and my fingers glide as if I were smoothing cream. Louis is the only man I know who has used an electron microscope to study what makes eider down so special. He says it has virtually no quills but that each fibre has bumps along its length, which are too small to see. To demonstrate its extraordinary elasticity he interlocked his fingers and moved his hands, while preventing his knuckles from sliding past each other. I can feel this happening when I tease the down apart. It resists at first, stretching, then rips with a minute tearing sound, like Velcro letting go.
Within the feathers I can feel tiny imperfections. I roll one to the surface with my fingertips and a saxifrage seed head appears, as if through mist. Teasing out seeds and twigs is a strangely calming way to pass the time and twenty minutes later I’m still finding ever-smaller bits, like the princess who felt a single pea under her many mattresses. No doubt she slept under an eiderdown too.
I am losing track of time, but when the sun has moved across a quarter of the sky the duck grows restless, flicking her wings with the rustle of expensive paper. She stands and settles again quickly, with a crunch. Perhaps she is helping her chicks escape. Her sides twitch as my wife’s did when the babies kicked. Two tiny dark heads appear, bristly and wobbly necked, then tumble back into the nest. She hunches over them, making a tent with her wings, and dozes uncomfortably while her youngsters explore their freedom to move. She knows they are not yet ready to go.
The Shark and the Albatross Page 15
