Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  We have seen only too clearly what happens when there is no legal protection for wildlife. We have lived through dismal eras of not just persecution but of annihilation of our native wildlife in the name of game shooting and direct and indirect commercial exploitation. I have no reason to believe that the same thing wouldn’t happen again. For me it boils down to a matter of ethics, of personal philosophy and national responsibility.

  Man’s record of looking after wildlife is grim. A free-for-all for whales for commercial gain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drove several species to the very brink of extinction. We still have to argue fiercely at the International Whaling Commission to prevent that happening again. Penguins used to be rendered down for their blubber and seal pups were skinned alive for their fur. In Canada by 1877 tundra swans had been hunted for their quill feathers down to the last sixty-nine birds left in the wild. Beavers were hunted to extinction for their fur throughout a dozen European countries. Elephants were and still are slaughtered for their ivory, and the Chinese market for rhinoceros horn remains a threat to the survival of critically endangered African rhinos. The list goes on and on.

  In a country of starving people, it is very hard to argue that wildlife should come before people – impossible to say, to an African hunter, ‘You can’t feed your family today,’ because the bird or antelope he wants to kill is endangered. But in a wealthy country like Britain there can be no valid argument against protecting wildlife, with measures in place to mitigate against serious pests to food production and injurious or disease-carrying species, such as rats.

  Economic arguments, such as those wheeled out by the game-shooting fraternity – ‘This estate needs commercial pheasant shooting to survive’ – aren’t really economic arguments at all. They are code for ‘We want to shoot pheasants or grouse or partridges and we don’t want wildlife to interfere with that.’ To argue their case at an economic level is to imply that the estate has no choice, whereas, of course, there are many ways in which estates can and do make money without having to engage in commercial shooting. There are also many ways of conducting a shoot and of developing a sporting culture that works with wildlife rather than against it.

  I entirely accept that it may not be possible to shoot as many pheasants, partridges or grouse by doing things differently, but I seriously question whether the enjoyment of shooting necessarily requires a huge bag. Some of the very best shooting days I have ever had have been what are called ‘rough’ days of walking with a gundog and two or three friends; days when we have taken healthy exercise, tested our skills and accuracy, thoroughly enjoyed the fresh air and ended the day with a mixed bag of pigeons, a few pheasants, a brace of partridges, a couple of rabbits and a hare, perhaps even a duck or a goose. For me those memorable shooting days are enhanced by seeing a buzzard and a red kite, perhaps a peregrine or a hen harrier, occasions when we can stop and admire their aerobatic agility and delight in the diversity of our countryside.

  I’m not arguing against responsible shooting. I was reared in the country among shooting and hunting people; I was very predatory in my youth, shooting most species on the quarry list from ptarmigan on the snowy mountain tops to standing up to my waist in the freezing slush of a tidal ditch on a January dawn waiting for a flight of wild geese. Before the myxomatosis virus decimated rabbits in Britain in the 1960s, and when they were a serious agricultural pest, I remember shooting rabbits at harvest time until the barrels of my gun were so hot that I couldn’t hold them. Game shooting is an important recreation and social activity in the countryside, but it sometimes gets out of control.

  In the past Britain’s shooting culture has operated strong ethical standards and codes of practice, but those have slowly eroded as the sport has been commercialised as a result of sharp changes in leisure time and the availability of the sport at every level in society. At the same time agriculture has been industrialised, hedges ripped out and fields purged of invertebrate ‘pests’ and ‘weeds’, so that the opportunities for wild game species, notably the native grey partridge and feral pheasants, to survive and breed in the wild have radically reduced, thereby necessitating that shoots buy in reared birds for release.

  Often in pretty unsavoury battery conditions the game-farm industry now produces some thirty-five million pheasant poults for release into the British countryside every year. I recently learned with horror of one English estate that ‘put down’ (a euphemism for ‘released into fields and woods’) 150,000 reared pheasants, partridges and mallard ducks every year so that a continuous procession of commercial shooters could be flown in for a day’s massacre of birds forced into the air by battalions of beaters, six days a week throughout the shooting season. I was told that a digger had dug a mass grave in the form of a long trench so that the virtually valueless shot birds could be tipped in and buried.

  Practices such as these are not sport; nor are they ethical. They are a disgrace and will eventually bring the whole shooting world into disrepute. The authorities and game lobby groups need to act quickly to outlaw such gross infringements of what should be a reputable and responsible country activity. I cannot help observing that many of those pheasants, whether as poults just released, killed on roads or wounded with shot and crawling off to die, will have been substantially responsible for fuelling the sharp rise in buzzard numbers throughout the UK. No, for me, along with other birds of prey, the buzzard remains an enjoyable signal of countryside diversity, not a threat to be vilified and ‘controlled’. And what would come next? Herons at fish farms? Ospreys on fishing rivers and streams? Peregrines on grouse moors? Golden eagles? Why not control otters that have the temerity to eat fish?

  Before leaving this subject there is one more angle to explore – actually a much more far-reaching and urgent aspect of the countryside-management debate and one already alluded to. Those memorable days of rough shooting almost always took place on old-style farmland where there was a broad mix of long-established habitats. There would be rough pasture for sheep and cattle, arable cropland of plough or stubble, root and cover crops, all broken up by windbreak copses of tight-packed conifers, dense hedgerows, old stone walls, boggy and marshy corners of fields, stagnant ponds, patches of scrubland, thickets of hawthorn, broom and gorse, gentle woods of native trees of all ages and many different species. This uplifting mosaic of habitats would always be bound to produce some rabbits and a hare or two, a covey of partridges and a few pheasants, one or two mallard and plenty of wood pigeons. It is also a sound descriptor of Countryside, with a capital C. It is what Countryside perhaps could be like again, at least in some areas. Add to this cocktail some open heather moorland, windswept mountains and lakes, a bog or a fen, and you have achieved a nature-conservation ideal rich in wildlife. But that is not the reality of the world we live in.

  What we have is 78 per cent of the UK landmass locked into industrialised agri-business of cropland mechanically and chemically purged of everything that lives and moves except the desired crop. Perhaps as much as 80 per cent of farmland in our countryside is dominated by these agricultural monocultures dedicated to food production. We should not be surprised that shoots have to import reared pheasants.

  In recent years, farmers, conservationists and governments have worked much more closely to re-create threatened habitats and to move towards a richer biodiversity. There are many commendable ‘stewardship’, ‘wider countryside’ and ‘native woodland’ schemes, and there are many farmers, big and small, who really believe in maintaining a healthy diversity of wildlife on their farms. European funds are paying for hedges to be planted again. There is also a slowly expanding organic sector, but the reality remains that the huge majority of cropland has to be fed with fertilisers, sprayed with pesticides and prepared and harvested with giant machines.

  Livestock farms are mechanised too. Single-species leys of nutritious rye grass have replaced ancient flower- and clover-rich pastures; meadows have vanished, and cattle and sheep are dosed with systemic drug
s to eliminate pests and diseases, often resulting in toxic dung, which, instead of being a vital food source for invertebrates, kills off bugs, beetles and flies in the fields. That is the world we live in and the dog-and-stick days of buttercup-twirling yore are not likely to return anytime soon.

  Worthy though many of these schemes are, we have been very slow to understand that we face an invertebrate crisis in Britain. The knock-on effect of decades of chemical farming (fertilisers are chemicals) is that the most basic foundation of biodiversity, the microbes in the soil and the invertebrates – bugs, beetles, bees, butterflies and other beasties most of us have never heard of – all of which serve to feed most birds and ultimately just about everything else, have been slowly and silently declining; the seed-bearing weeds upon which so many invertebrates and birds depend have been selectively poisoned out. Stewardship schemes unquestionably help, but until we face up to the looming invertebrate crisis and begin to restore these essential building blocks of wildlife habitats, vast swathes of our countryside will remain locked in sterile paralysis.

  It is sad that conflicts between farming, shooting and nature conservation tend to be polarised. I have enjoyed shooting and been a livestock farmer on a modest scale for forty years. I am very well versed in the economic arguments, but I also care passionately about wildlife. Working with nature rather than directly against it is always likely to be more successful for everyone – a principle we are often slow to acknowledge. It was those two soaring buzzards this morning that brought me back to my desk and I am grateful to them for that.

  *  *  *

  After beginning with a snowstorm, April descended into a washout. It rained and rained. Winds racked the trees and the land was sodden. One morning I awoke to an uncanny silence. The recent and entirely normal racket of the rooks was gone. I went to the window and stared out at the rain-filled skies. I couldn’t see a single black silhouette in the rookery trees. Hurriedly I dressed and took the dogs out, walking briskly the hundred and fifty yards to the first nests. Silence.

  I knew they had laid eggs early in March because husks of hatched shells appeared on the twig-strewn and guano-spattered grass beneath the trees. The incubating parent birds had hunkered down inside the nest cups, invisible from the ground, but as the temperature hovered around freezing and snow squalls came barrelling through, I had a sinking feeling that they were fighting a losing battle.

  I had also watched them at work in the fields, searching for food, where they strode about in rowdy gangs and seemed to be finding something to eat, probing here and there, plunging their sharp, four-inch bills into the soggy turf. Then came the frost: –8º Celsius for a week. Bright sun by day, swingeing cold by night. The full moon fell on 6 April. With it came an anticyclone that sucked any remaining heat from the land. Overnight the temperature plunged to –12º Celsius. Everything froze.

  The rooks were in turmoil. Feeding in the frozen fields became hopeless and, anyway, any emerging bugs would have been killed off. For several days hungry rooks flew round their rookery trees cawing loudly. They had pitched on the nests and taken off again straight away, seeming to signal that they had no food for the delicate young chicks.

  The chicks should now have been well on and constantly crying for food. There should have been a cacophony of rook gossip, to-ing and fro-ing of parent birds, and the gargling burble of strong chicks calling as their gaping mouths were stuffed with regurgitated food. Instead, the leaden silence of emptiness. Nothing moved. Not a single rook was in attendance at this crucial moment in their breeding calendar. Quite simply, they had given up and gone. Twenty-nine nests, and possibly as many as a hundred chicks, abandoned. They had all starved.

  I don’t know where they went, but it seems likely that they had joined up with other rooks on the east coast where there was less frost and where the arable soils delivered up a more reliable supply of food. I was gutted. In forty years of living at Aigas I had never known the rookery fail. We missed their baggy-legged bustling, their bossing and bullying and their constant corvid backchat. My morning baths had lost their appeal. The dawns were strangely silent and the skies disturbingly empty. They had given up and gone from our lives.

  A few days later, still lamenting the loss of our rooks as I walked the Jack Russells early one morning, a movement among the nests caught my eye. I looked up to see two black birds. My heart leaped. Perhaps, after all, at least one rook nest had survived. I moved to a better place and homed in with binoculars. My spirits tumbled into a downward somersault of macabre confirmation. They weren’t rooks: they were carrion crows feeding off the dead chicks in the rooks’ nests. Corvid eating corvid. Rook chicks die: crow chicks thrive. Nature isn’t choosy; it just gets on with it. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

  *  *  *

  I began to realise what had happened. March had been glorious. All that warmth had brought with it an exceptionally early Highland spring. Buds had unfurled, chloroplasts had streamed, and deep in the secret crannies of the soil invertebrate larvae, especially leatherjackets, had awoken from long sleep and wiggled to within three inches of the surface, later to emerge as crane flies. The rooks had loved it. Every day I had seen them out there, gorging on these fat, protein-filled delicacies. Right across the landscape life had awoken exceptionally early. The benison of solar energy and heat had created a false dawn of fecundity. Everyone was fooled. Then came the snow and the swingeing frosts. A week of –8º Celsius will always be a killer of young and tender life. A whole age class of invertebrates was wiped out before it had got going. There were no leatherjackets left, no bugs to feed the rook chicks.

  When, later in April, the swallows and house martins arrived back from Africa, there were no flying insects to feed them. They went away again. The great tits, an irrepressible species if ever there was one, abandoned their nests of young. One pair that had previously nested successfully in a box fitted with a camera under the eaves of our environmental education centre did manage to lay a single egg and raise one chick – that from a species capable of laying a clutch of six to ten eggs and raising them all. There were no caterpillars to feed the adults or the young. Just about everything had been deceived, lulled into false security by the errant sun, then massacred like innocents by the sudden return of winter.

  14

  Comings and Goings

  What I cannot see, no matter how closely I look, is what drives this small creature, barely heavier than air, to make the journeys that it must make. What thousands of miles have passed beneath its stubby wings, which seem so ill-suited to the task but which have carried it back here again. It knows and I do not.

  Living on the Wind, Scott Weidensaul

  The world’s favorite season is the spring.

  All things seem possible in May.

  Circle of the Seasons, Edwin Way Teale

  Somehow we arrived at May, but you would have been forgiven for not knowing it. April had plunged us back into winter; the buds and leaves that had so exuberantly burst in March were now frost-scorched and shrivelled. Day after day an icy rain spat upon Scotland, now sleet, now flurrying snow that shrouded our dawns, making us think that March and April had been a turbulent dream and that we were really still stuck in February.

  A north-east wind kept us well wrapped throughout April; to venture out was to reach instinctively for a hat, gloves and a scarf. No thought of shedding a garment of any kind for the first eleven days of May. May! Where were your darling buds and surging hormones? We were bewildered; the birds were befuddled; the bugs were nowhere to be seen. Yet despite everything, a tentative greening did creep back into our world. Surreptitiously, uncertainly, almost suspiciously, ought-not-to-be-here-like – the trees leafed up again.

  Then, with ill-concealed relief, the tune of the television weather reporters changed. They turned prophet with a smile. Off the map to the east, approaching Scandinavia from eastern Europe they had spotted a large high-pressure zone expanding, sliding sideways and o
utwards towards us, like ripples on a pond that grew and grew. Windless in its tranquil core, and very stealthily, it spread its heartening gospel to the west until it embraced most of northern Europe.

  The bookies nervously halved their odds for a record-breaking May temperature from 16:1 to 8:1. Overnight on 21 May it arrived. The clouds vanished. By morning our temperature had rocketed from the unseasonal chill of 9º Celsius to 24º. By midday at Altnaharra in Sutherland, an hour and a half ’s drive to the north of us, the temperature zoomed to 27.3º Celsius – just 1.7º short of an all-time record for May. No wonder the bookies were twitchy. What they had boasted as a safe bet had become a real possibility in just thirty-six hours. As the temperatures levelled off, their sigh of relief was audible.

  We’d had the wettest April for a century and the coldest for twenty-three years. Now May was heading for the record books too. A headline in the Daily Mail trumpeted that Inverness, only sixteen miles to our east, was hotter than Ibiza. With withering sangfroid, Mike Silverstone, head of the BBC’s weather centre, observed, ‘May can be a very fickle month. Weather in spring can be very varied.’

  The thing about heat and sun is that it pumps up the endorphins; everyone smiles. When you’re smiling you tend not to notice the downside. Of course, we loved it. Just as we had back in March, we swanned about in T-shirts and no shirts, in sandals and shorts, sun hats and shades. We fell into the loch, even though the dark, peaty water was barely 9º Celsius. And, just as it had in March, it took our breath away. We didn’t care: we had waited weeks for this.

  In the first few days of that surge of endorphins, as I sat in a deck-chair beside the loch one balmy afternoon, faint strains of the unmistakable, squeaky-scratchy chatter of wild geese came to my ears. Looking up, shading my squinting eyes, I could just make out a broad skein high above me in a long, wavering V. They were greylags, flying at four or five thousand feet, fifty or sixty of them, strung out in constantly shifting formation, like performing jets. These were not local, non-migratory greylags just drifting about Scotland, they were migrating – of that I am sure. They were heading north, back to their breeding grounds in Iceland nearly a month later than normal, going home. They must have been the straggling last few; for whatever reason, they had lingered. Perhaps the winds had been wrong; perhaps the roller-coaster weather had confused them too. Perhaps they had wintered in the Low Countries and had taken a detour, dawdled across to us to try to find a favourable wind to carry them back to nest in the tundra wastes of Iceland, now just emerging from eight months of winter.