Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  *  *  *

  That was yesterday. Today it dawned on me that the blackcaps had been one of the few normalities of our year so far. They had arrived, played out their particular summer pageant and now, as the first mists wafted over the river and the loch, and the first frosts crisped my footprints on the lawn, they were about to depart again, to slip away in the dawn, to chase the dwindling bug swarm south to England, over the Channel to Belgium, on to Germany, whispering unseen through the high passes of the Alps and down into Spain and Italy, all far more productive climes for the bugs, seeds and nectar they need.

  This autumn departure is one of the very few normalities of our seasonal Highland story, a standard by which to measure what has otherwise made 2013 an extraordinary year. That little warbler had fired something in my brain and caused me to write this down, and that departure, as the season wafted silently away from summer, was where I needed to start. Perhaps, after all, its death was not entirely in vain.

  2

  That Time of Year

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

  ‘Sonnet 73’, William Shakespeare

  You would think, wouldn’t you, that the logical and proper place to start was January: the freshly washed face of a new year? But in all due deference to the double-faced Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, I must point out that his month is of rigidly human designation and precious little to do with nature. It misses the plot. Whoever plumped for naming it was not thinking seasons or wildlife or weather, or even, with months of winter yet to endure, the human spirit. January may be the beginning of the Gregorian calendar year, but it is hardly a month of transitions.

  It straddles the plunging nadir of the Highland winter; it records our most gripping frosts down to –25º Celsius when diesel fuel turns to jelly, your skin instantly sticks to metal and, of course, January snows, from a powder dusting to drifts of three feet, are always just around the mountain. Even in mild winters when a warm Atlantic airstream clashes with a front of Continental cold we are raked by sudden storms of swirling sleet, despite the most valiant efforts of the Gulf Stream, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf on the western side of the mountains. Not much transition there.

  January is when the chimney moans as south-westerly gales howl through the trees and hammer at our door. It is the month of brief, crimped days when the dogs won’t stir from their baskets; the month of thick gloves, neck-hugging scarves and fur hats, of tightly drawn curtains and glowing firesides; it is the month of hunkering down and staying put. Many mornings I have arisen in the dark, peered out of the window into whiplash sleet or icy rain squalls so fired with spleen that I have chosen to crawl back to bed rather than face the world.

  Neither, of course, is it the beginning of anything but the eponymous month. So, to do justice to nature, the nature of this mystical land of hills and glens, forests, lochs and rushing rivers, and to the confused seasons of what has proved to be a discomfiting and bizarre year, I need to start at a real transition, in late September when fidgets of swallows were gathering on telephone wires like chittering clothes-pegs; when the first tug of departure was fizzing in blackcaps’ tiny brains; before moonlit frosts cantered rust through the bracken; before the chlorophyll finally bled from blushing leaves; even before the last osprey lifted and wheeled into its long migration to Senegal or the Gambia. I need to start when the word was fresh on our lips, in the incipient, not-quite-sure-if-it’s-happened-yet autumn of 2012.

  Autumn may arrive slowly, but it gives itself away. Something ethereal arrives in the night, some curious edge to the breeze, some abstract quality of the breathed air, so that when you step outside you just know in your bones that the whole world around you has shifted its focus from summer and is now interested only in preparing for winter.

  It is a climacteric, a moment of physiological and psychological shift in nature’s thinking, especially for the birds. Summer birds depart, winter migrants begin to arrive. In the Highland glens, bird numbers plummet as their food supplies – natural fruits and every kind of creeping, crawling, slithering or flying bug – begin to disappear. Not just the swallows and house martins have vanished from round the houses. Gone are the insect-snatching wheatears, whinchats and stonechats from the hills; redstarts and flycatchers have fled the woods. Pied wagtails no longer flicker across the lawns, while sand-pipers and grey wagtails have deserted the riverbanks. Farmland and hedgerow species have vanished in the night: the linnets, yellowhammers, and all the warblers have decamped from the thickets. By the first frosts the hills will have emptied to a few hardy stalwarts, such as the golden eagles, the raven and the irrepressible hooded crows. Silence settles across the land. The few species that are left frequent a changed world. Soon only the buzzards and wood pigeons will hang on in the woods, and the coniferous forests will host flocks of chaffinches, tits, siskins and crossbills passing through.

  Waders from Russia, Scandinavia and the Arctic will flood to our shores and flotillas of ducks and geese will gather on the tidal mud – but I am getting ahead of myself.

  On a full moon the temperature plunges overnight, a careening splashdown to zero as the Earth’s heat soars to the Milky Way. By dawn Lucy’s dahlias have collapsed at the thought, the last nasturtiums have flopped like burst balloons and the stinging nettles are hanging their heads, like convicts awaiting execution – they know their number is up. Even if we are blessed with an Indian summer for a week or two in October, the natural world isn’t fooled for long. There is urgent business afoot. To ignore the signals and loiter is to court disaster. Suddenly everything has changed.

  *  *  *

  A dank drizzle settled over the Highlands. By dawn the river had risen from a whisper to an urgent murmur. Mists shrouded the dark flow and clung between the bankside alders well into the morning. We awoke to a damp, rusting-away world of yellow and umber. The shortening days seemed to be draining the paling chlorophyll with them. Trails of fieldfares and redwings chattered across the sky and descended like archangels onto rowan trees now bright and laden with scarlet fruit, hurrying, stripping them bare, moving on in undulating squadrons as though they had some pressing appointment elsewhere.

  Later the sun came sidling in. It is low now, its power vanquished, enfeebled by the year’s reeling. It will track a lower path every day until midwinter, 21/22 December, the winter solstice and the longest night, when, imperceptibly at first, it will begin to lift again. At our latitude, north of the 57th parallel, a laggard sun rises late in midwinter and barely lifts above our hilly horizon, sloping off as soon as it can, by about three in the afternoon. Cool and remote, it’s a token appearance, a mere gesture to remind us that spring and summer will, with luck, one day return.

  At eleven this morning it cut swathes of gilded light into the trees and across the green lawn, absorbing all the colours into one glorious October gleam charged with a cool and ruthless beauty. I stepped from shade into its glamour, then back again to see if I could detect any warmth. I could, but only just. That alone should be enough to tell the natural world to hurry along, to wrap up and get ready for what is to come.

  Yet it is the intensity of the light that dictates the radiance of the autumn leaf colour. Leaves absorb red and blue wavelengths from sunlight, reflecting the green light to us. Green is good. Green tells us the tree is alive and well. If something goes wrong, such as a drought, the leaves begin to yellow because the green chlorophyll is no longer being fed, causing it to break down. It can’t absorb the red light any longer, so it gets reflected outward to our eyes. It is this mixture of red and green light that creates the yellow. The loss of green is a biochemical phenomenon with high, show-stopping drama and profoundly poetic consequences.

  Autumn colour is the universal manifestation of the same pr
ocess. Dictated by plant hormones, as the length of daylight recedes, the water and minerals, especially phosphate, that have fuelled photosynthesis all summer long, are cut off in deciduous plants at the stem of the leaf. The powerful green pigment in chloroplasts, chlorophyll – which, as every biology pupil knows, is the essential component for converting sunlight into sugars and is responsible for what John Cowper Powys described as ‘an enormous green tidal wave, composed of a substance more translucent than water, has flowed over the whole earth’ and what I call the ‘great green stain of summer’ – begins to fade because it can no longer replace itself.

  Without the supply of water and phosphate, chlorophyll burns itself up and disappears, allowing other pigments that are always there but drowned by the green wave, to begin to show through. These are principally carotenoids, bright yellows and oranges, and anthocyanins, the reds and purples, hence the drama and the rush for the poet’s pen. But their celebrity is brief: they, too, are doomed to the same fate as the chlorophyll, which is why this whole process is uncharitably dubbed ‘autumnal senescence’.

  As the nights grow steadily cooler, the anthocyanins are responsible for removing sugars from the leaves the tree is about to shed. Only when the leaf is of no further use to the tree do the leafstalks grow cork cells to close off the conductive veins with plugs of special water-absorbent tissue. These freeze with the first frosts and the cells burst open, causing the leaves or needles to fall.

  Bucking the trend, our oaks and beeches lose their chlorophyll like the rest, but stubbornly refuse to drop their leaves, an esoteric adaptation known to botanical boffins as ‘marcescence’. No one knows quite why this is, but there are several plausible theories. Some say the dead leaves hide the new buds and deter damage by herbivores, such as deer, evidenced by the measurable observation that the lower, younger branches, those within browsing reach, hold their leaves longest.

  Others proffer subtler and rather more imaginative hypotheses that retained dead leaves collect snow, which acts as an insulating blanket to protect developing shoots in the depths of winter and also hold it longer in the spring thaw, thereby providing a water supply to their roots at a time when the ground may dry out too rapidly for the tree’s comfort. I find that idea challenging. Yet others have proposed that the dead leaves contain sugars that will better benefit the mother plant if released in the spring when the nutrients are most needed. The theory I consider the least likely is that oaks and beeches (hornbeams too) are slightly backward from an evolutionary perspective – less biologically intelligent (the very suggestion!) – and haven’t yet fully worked out how to shed their leaves quickly. Whichever is the case, or maybe none, I draw comfort from the notion that nature reveals its motivations only slowly; mysteries within mysteries that keep us arrogant, would-be know-alls firmly in our place.

  *  *  *

  There is so much going on in October that there should be a better, more uplifting name for the passage of autumn into winter. The Mellowing, or the Misting perhaps, or the more intimate double-entendre, the Rustling. That’s what I hear when I close my eyes and stand underneath the rookery at the end of the month. For the moment the rooks had upped and gone, leaving only a vapid sky and an unavailing silence behind them. I wouldn’t expect them back permanently until February, but if they happened to be passing in their unruly troops, they’d occasionally drop in for a few hours and clog the trees with their quarrelsome bustling, like school-kids claiming their spaces well before the bell goes. But in today’s soft rain they were absent, and the oaks and sycamores solemnly dripped in an uncluttered, graveyard silence. When I stood completely still, a transcendental moment with only the pluming of my breath to reveal my presence, the silence bent to a lower urgency than a rowdy rook could comprehend. Beneath my feet, all around me, busy, industrious life was at work.

  I have often noticed that life beneath the rookery is fuller, richer and more diverse than similar habitats nearby. Logically, when you consider the rainfall of nitrogen-rich droppings from on high during at least five months of each year for well over a hundred years, coupled with the annually layered carbohydrate of mouldering leaves from the sycamores and oaks, it is hardly surprising that the soil is rich. Here, beneath the trees, despite the shade, the naturalising daffodils I have planted are always finer, taller, grander and a richer gold than elsewhere.

  Off to my left, with quick, jerking thrusts, a blackbird was cashing in, flicking rusty leaves, as if turning the pages of an ancient tome in a rushed search for wisdom. A restless robin fluttered from the wooden fence to the ground and back again, always pert, chinking its little metallic assertions, always checking out where my footsteps might have delivered up a worm, a bug or a centipede. And somewhere invisible, somewhere under the wind-blown waves of leaf litter, a shrew was blindly burrowing in its own private, nose-quivering, bristle-trembling quest.

  Everything alive knows that winter is coming. Everything needs to hurry, to feed, to lay down fat, to burrow down, to bore deep into the sanctuary of timber or soil, to crawl under stones, into hollow logs or mud, to build nests, to take in bedding, to batten down. Need and haste: those are the two bywords for this moment in the year. They are the apothegm by which so much survival hangs. The bell for last orders has sounded loud and clear. Even the moon seems to know it, as it rounds to its chilly apogee, trailing mercurial pallor across the lawn and freezing the shaggy world with an icing that crackles like fire beneath my morning feet. By the time the stifling snows and vicious frosts arrive, for many it will be too late. Nature takes no prisoners; it renders no quarter to the unprepared.

  The red squirrels were busy building a new drey. I was watching one yesterday, scurrying (its Latin name is Sciurus). It was pruning fresh larch and pine fronds and bearing them along in its teeth, fronds sometimes fully its own length, then weaving them together with the practised eye of a gypsy wife making baskets, pushing, bending, pulling, intent, labouring away with paws and teeth, totally oblivious to, or more likely just ignoring, my silent presence a few yards from the foot of the tree. Time-served though they may be, my field skills cannot boast the fooling of a squirrel on high. It knew I was there, all right, but I was no threat to that tail-flicking, nose-twitching, bright-eyed red, busy about its urgent affairs. Only one thing burdened its mind: winter.

  Earlier in the day I had watched two of these enchanting native squirrels at the nut box I had put out for them. (We have no pox-carrying greys in the northern Highlands yet – they haven’t crossed Loch Ness – and I pray that we may have the resolve to keep them out.) They were busy feeding, laying down fat, but also carrying off the hazelnuts in their teeth and burying them with rapid, jerky forepaws, scrubbling out the shallow cache pit, carefully dropping the nut and filling it in again, even scattering a few leaves over the top, all in a matter of a few seconds. Then back to the box for more. What makes me chuckle at this important caching of winter supplies is the ritual furtiveness of the process: the casting-around to see who else might be watching, with the shifty look of a shop-lifter about to pocket something, the nipping off to a quiet corner, the frantic digging, then more furtive glances while sitting upright on its tail for a better view, and scuttling back for another nut.

  And the question I am so often asked: can they remember where they have buried the food? The evidence seems to be that they can – at least some of the caches. It would be a dangerous waste of energy and food if they couldn’t. But undoubtedly some nuts survive to germinate and grow a hazel tree and the squirrels must be saluted for fulfilling that important, if accidental, ecological role. I am glad I saw them building that drey and I noticed that, whether by chance or design (surely design), it was built on the sheltered side of the trunk, away from the prevailing wind. Squirrels don’t hibernate, so I find it a comforting thought that when the bitter winds slice through in the long December nights they will be in there, tucked up in their long fluffy tails, curled as tightly as a barrister’s wig.

  This mom
ent in the year is also marked by the very sensible migration indoors of wood mice, Apodemus sylvaticus. Voles and shrews are fascinating, but wood mice are classy. Hamster-golden with huge ears and big glossy eyes as black as polished ebony, underbellies as white as the rose of York, and their extravagantly long tail (they used to be called long-tailed field mice) pursues them, never touching the ground, flowing with all the elegance and style of Elizabethan calligraphy. They skip across the ground with the grace of a gazelle, barely seeming to touch the surface, and they can climb and leap like a trapeze artist. I’m entranced by their speed. I have always admired them and, unlike Lucy when she’s in hyper-efficient housekeeper mode, I am overcome by a downward somersault of the spirit when called upon to trap them. The notion of poison has always been abhorrent to me – out of the question.

  There are times when I have had to set my natural-history instincts aside and give in to lobbying from household and family. After all is said and done, they are mice – beautiful mice – but with all the mouse potential for causing trouble. If they do become a nuisance and I am harried into taking action, I use Longworth live traps and transport the captives a few miles up the glen before releasing them, wishing them well and apologising as they go.

  At first I made the mistake of thinking that releasing them in the garden was good enough until one day I caught one with the tip missing from his tail. The very next day he was back in the trap in my daughter Hermione’s bedroom. I was pretty sure it was the same mouse so I took him much further away, about three hundred yards. Two days later he was back in the trap. To be certain I now marked his back with a touch of nail varnish between the shoulder blades where I reckoned he couldn’t groom it away. I took him to the village a quarter of a mile to the east and furtively released him into someone else’s garden. This time it took a week, but back he came, straight into the trap, proudly showing off his tell-tale smudge of oyster-shell pink. I was left scratching my head, pondering the mysteries of animal behaviour. Just how does a mouse, two inches high and six inches long, find its way over a quarter of a mile of what, presumably, must have been entirely strange and hostile territory? Is it scent? (We know that a male moth can detect a female’s pheromones up to a mile away.) Or is it some electro-magnetic homing compass we don’t properly understand? It seems entirely logical that any foraging species with static young in a nest must be able to find its way back over distances appropriate to that species. But a quarter of a mile? That seems absurdly adventurous for even the most ambitious mouse foray. And yet I know very well that I shouldn’t allow myself to be surprised by this amateur circumstantial evidence of my own concocting.