Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Were they adapting, responding to climate change before my very eyes? Was I witnessing a shift in behaviour by these robust, archetypal geese, which for decades have been successfully expanding their numbers and their range right across northern Europe?

  Some farmers don’t like geese stealing their grass and winter corn, but it is our own fault. On the back of modern agriculture we have supplied them with just what they need: potato and stubble fields when they arrive for winter, keeping them fat with winter-sown cereals, the stronger and fitter for the migration home in spring, the more likely to breed successfully. Can geese choose their migration dates at will? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that geese and swans (and probably many other birds) have to learn their migration routes.

  The work of Canadian ornithologist H. Albert Hochbaum, published in 1955 from many years’ study at the Delta Waterfowl Research Station in Manitoba, demonstrated that goose migration – in his case Canada goose migration – is a learned behaviour passed down from parent to offspring. Subsequent studies on other geese have demonstrated that his findings stand for most migratory species of Anatidae – the goose family – in the northern hemisphere. He suggests that the approximate timing of migration is innate, triggered by length of daylight hours, as are the orientation and celestial navigation skills present in most birds, but that in geese these can be and are superseded by direct learning and experience. Female geese are hard-wired to return to their birthplace every spring, but not the males. The pairs bond and the males just tag along, back to their self-evidently successful nesting grounds. Come the autumn, when it’s time to head south again as the frosts descend and the Arctic winter closes in, the young birds are led south by their parents in tightly knit family groups, learning the route, the stop-overs, the feeding grounds and the best places to over-winter. Hochbaum called this learned behaviour ‘traditions’. If they can learn all that, I feel sure they can learn to adjust those traditions to allow for freaky weather too.

  *  *  *

  Back in the blowsy but short-lived treachery of March’s heat wave, the first swallows and house martins had arrived in Scotland. They had been sighted over Loch Ness, only a few minutes’ skimming flight away. But they hadn’t come to us. I was glad. It was too early, and I knew from bitter experience that those early birds find nothing to eat and are forced to go away again, back to lower, more sheltered landscapes or to the coast, where they can flick along the beaches for sand flies. In the slicing chill of April one or two birds had arrived in the glen, but they were gone again straight away. But hardy wheatears had arrived on the moors, and the first brave willow warblers had been heard cascading defiantly from the birch woods.

  Now, in mid-May, with all this bursting warmth, the full rush of summer migrants piled in, almost as though they had been queuing just down the road, like impatient shoppers waiting for opening time. Cuckoos prattled and cuck’d from the hill behind the loch, and tree pipits were suddenly spilling their shrill whistles and trills from the bright lime-budded tips of larches. Chiffchaffs announced themselves from the willows at the marsh and whitethroats chittered from those banks of golden broom and gorse left after the fire. Warwick opened his front door to find an exhausted redstart on the mat. He brought it to work to show me – we don’t get many here: we haven’t got enough of their favoured habitat of mature oaks. After a rest it seemed to perk up and fluttered up into a sycamore. Now at least there were a few insects about to boost its strength.

  For me the real joy of that warmth was the return of our blackcaps. They, too, were almost a month late, but they came. The dawns, now at three forty-five a.m., pulsing towards the summer solstice at eight minutes of increased daylight every day, rang with their fluting, melodic exuberance. There is a large clump of snowberry in the garden much loved by both wrens and blackcaps. Brambles entwine its woody stems, making it impenetrable even to my probing inquisitions. I peer into nothing but twiggy darkness. But I suspect it is a haven for spiders and consequently for anything that enjoys a spider repast. I can rely upon that shrubbery for the first blackcaps of the year and it hasn’t let me down yet. Later on, when they start to nest they move much more freely through the gardens and trees so that all day our little world floats aloft, enriched by the sheer joy of their constantly repeating canticle.

  I read that in southern England blackcaps are now present all the year round. It seems that the warming climate and food, particularly fat balls, on suburban bird tables has meant that they can survive. But these are thought not to be our migratory birds, but another ‘new’ strain of central European and Scandinavian blackcaps that have started to migrate away from Continental cold to the much milder winters of England’s south and south-west – a shorter migration, a better climate and a more reliable source of food. That’s how adaptation works: life keeps moving on.

  I can’t be sure where our blackcaps go in winter, but I read that it’s southern Europe, the Mediterranean countries and further even to sub-Saharan Africa. I find it hard to comprehend that the little scrap of ashen feathers I held in my hand last autumn had made it all that way and back again, possibly several times. Like Scott Weidensaul, I am dazzled. That tiny pulsing heart, those fluttering wings, the beady eyes scanning the land beneath, and that fizzing brain no bigger than my little fingernail, all perfectly in sync, like a tiny electric toy. All driving, pushing, steering, navigating, eyeing up the stars, sharp little bill thrust into the wind, skimming across seas, weaving through woods, fields, gardens and parks, orchards, vineyards and olive groves, flickering over mountains and dales, skirting great lakes and snatching a roost and a rest wherever strength and energy supplies demand. Is it two thousand miles, or three? Does it take a week or two, or three, even a month? I don’t know, and until some boffin manages to radio tag or track a blackcap’s migration, I don’t suppose anyone else can be sure either. But it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that it makes it there and back again safely. I would rejoice if I could find a way to tell it how very pleased I am.

  *  *  *

  It was only then, still basking in the warmth of what would turn out to be a disappointingly brief spring, the memory of which is made the more piquant by the sorrowful summer that would follow, that I realised the full extent of the damage that treacherous burst of heat in March had done. All those life forms that had been tricked, lured into exposing themselves far too early, had been ruthlessly obliterated by the subsequent frosts and snows, many never to emerge again. The buds and blossoms that had flung themselves apart; the tender leaves that had sloughed off their protective sheaths; the bugs, the beetles, the butterflies and moths that had crawled out of hibernation or pupae that had split; larvae that had prematurely rushed their next instar phase; frogs and toads that had pumped their spawn into pools that would soon be smothered by an inch of ice; birds, such as the rooks, that had laid their eggs and hatched their chicks into a world of frost and starvation. Everything had suffered. If it was a roller-coaster for us, it was a death slide for them.

  *  *  *

  Climate change. I am wary of that catch-all excuse for anything we can’t explain or don’t like. Its brackets are too large, too all-embracing – a tad too convenient. The rub that leaves me uncomfortably pensive is that we simply don’t know. What little I do know tells me that, however real climate change is, it is unlikely to be the sole reason for those changes to the natural world we can see and document. It is when several factors come together, bringing an insupportable pressure to bear upon species and ecosystems, that things go most seriously wrong.

  Perhaps this is what we have to expect now: massive swings and surges; unreliable seasons; soaring and plunging temperatures; exceptional storms and their consequent floods. Have we done this? Have we brought it on ourselves? Are the excesses of the Industrial Revolution to blame? How much worse will it get? Is this to be Gaia’s nemesis? The scientists continue to argue and no one really knows what is happening and ho
w it will alter our lives. But the rooks know, and the great tits and the crane flies and the looping caterpillars. They all know that they have to adapt quickly if they are to survive.

  Have we got it all wrong? Has the march of what we have labelled ‘civilisation’ now taken us so far away from nature, from biorhythms, from contact with the soil that we have lost the ability to assess what damage our actions inflict upon the planet? Have we abandoned the precautionary principle, or did it never really exist? Does it remain simply a notion, two catchy words that never stood a chance against the march of our irrepressible greed? Or then again, was all this destined to happen anyway? Has one major event on the surface of the sun spun us into disarray, just as has almost certainly happened many times before during the four thousand million years of life on Earth?

  That certainly was the well-aired view of the former Astronomer Royal, the late Sir Bernard Lovell FRS, who told me shortly before he died that the fuss we were making about climate change was ‘laughable’ in the context of the planet’s history. He was a man who knew a thing or two about the sun and the Milankovitch cycle and solar flares, about axial tilt and the precession index, all those tricks on our eccentric path around the sun which dictate the levels of solar radiation on Earth and are supposed to ordain the measure of our seasons. It’s hard to shrug off the opinion of such a venerable old scientist, especially one who, at the very end of his long life, was busy planting an oak wood for future generations. ‘It’s the best thing I can do for the planet,’ he said, with a wry smile. ‘Don’t stand about. Come and help me.’

  At Aigas we have gone green – actually been heading green for decades. We do respect the precautionary principle, and if there is something sensible we can do, whether it works or not, we’re prepared to give it a fair wind. We have reduced our carbon footprint where we can. We’ve installed biomass-boilers and ground-source heat pumps, photovoltaic panels and solar collectors; we’ve composted our waste and insulated our houses, and we have preached sustainability to the thousands of school pupils who come through our environmental education programmes, but we have done so on a wing and a prayer. Our environmental education centre, the Magnus House, is even a demonstration of sustainable building techniques. We capped the source of building materials at fifty miles, using only locally grown timber, and we used no nasty chemicals in the building at all in order to create a hypo-allergenic environment for school-kids. The insulation is plastic water bottles shredded and spun into an inert wool, applied thirteen inches thick to walls and ceilings. The roof is turf from the neighbouring field, lifted and laid by hand.

  We can measure exactly how much energy we are consuming and precisely how much electricity or fuel oil we save by these actions, but we have no way of knowing whether it will make any difference. Our principle has been: ‘If it seems like a good idea and is likely to reduce man’s impact, let’s try it.’ Like Sir Bernard, we know that our efforts are not likely to benefit us very much in our time, but perhaps for those who come after us . . . Who knows?

  15

  Nesting

  Her black pebble-eyes dazed

  With waiting, the mother snaps

  Alive at my presence, grabs

  Air, screaming – reveals her shining

  Hoard: luminous with heat,

  Four freckled ovals of perfect

  Sky . . .

  ‘The Thrush’s Nest’, Richard Ryan

  Where clumps of bramble berries are

  The haychat makes her slighty bed

  Dead airiff stalks and horses hair

  And glues or sewed with spiders thread

  And many are the spots indeed

  She tries . . .

  ‘Birds Nest III (The Haychat)’, John Clare

  I still don’t know what made me look. I was out walking – just being out because the May sun was smiling and the sky I could see from my window shone like polished lapis lazuli, as beckoning blue as the tiny petals of milkwort now blooming on the moor. I’d been stuck at my desk for hours and I badly needed to get out. So I wasn’t looking for anything, nor was I really thinking about much. I was sauntering, dawdling, idling along, gulping down the warm afternoon air, heading nowhere in particular. The orchard grass was thick with fresh growth, dragging on my feet, and bright with the year’s first buttercups and wood anemones. I suppose I must have been looking down, brain in the clouds, but feet instinctively avoiding the clumps of naturalised daffodils now rapidly dying back.

  Can it be that after years of training your eyes they merge with instinct? Can they meld into that fabled sixth sense we so often speak about? A dry-stone diker once told me that when looking at a pile of stones he knew instinctively which one would best fit the gap he needed to fill. ‘Instinct?’ I quizzed, as diplomatically as I could. ‘Experience, surely.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, laughing, ‘it’s both. Let’s call it intuition.’

  So perhaps it was intuition. I should have a trained eye by now: I’ve been searching for birds’ nests for more than fifty years. But I certainly wasn’t searching that afternoon, not thinking bird at that moment, even more certainly not willow warbler. The last willow warbler’s nest I’d found a year ago was low down in the wisteria creeper on the garages, a tiny grassy-licheny-feathery cup securely wedged between the woody stem of the vine and the wall. She sat so tight that I could gently part the leaves and peek straight in.

  But that afternoon something stopped me on my gentle amble through the orchard’s withering daffodil spears and brown-tissued blooms. We don’t cut the grass until the daffs’ leaves have browned off altogether, keen to get every last pulse of solar energy into the bulbs to shore them up for their long, subterranean wait, so the grasses around them – timothy, cocksfoot and Yorkshire fog – surge upward in rampant competition with each other for the new, fresh sun. I must have been glancing down.

  I stopped. There, not six feet in front of me, was an eye. Just one, a tiny black bead, fixed and shining through a slender gap in the grass stems. I froze, and I knew with that same time-honed instinct that it was a bird. I was staring into the jet fovea of a small bird’s eye. I stepped back, slowly, then again and again. I stood still. The eye still stared, unblinking, as rigid as a gem set in stone. Gently and slowly I raised my binoculars. The bead had a fawn stripe running through it and a hint of lemon beneath. That was all I could see.

  A willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus – the cascading leaf-watcher) is an unexceptional little bird, often our first summer migrant, an arrival announced by the male birds rendering a rippling, descending peal of pure notes tinged with mild complaint, but as pretty as a summer waterfall. It’s a refrain that rings through the spring woods, repeating over and over again, lifting to a brief, pleading crescendo, then slowing as it falls and, diminuendo, fades away at the end. It seems to be calling out, ‘Now that I’ve arrived, what am I going to do?’

  I can bring myself to forgive those who would write it off as a little brown bird. It is famously difficult to watch, even with binoculars, because it favours leafy trees and never sits still as it flits from branch to twig, searching for spiders, aphids, caterpillars and leaf bugs. And I freely admit that it’s not the most exciting bird to see. But when at last you do get a proper view its other qualities emerge and you find it isn’t brown at all. Across its head, back and wings it is the late-summer green of fading willow leaves with the palest grapefruit-yellow throat and underbelly. It has a sharp little bill, straight and to the point, perfect for snatching bugs.

  Like the blackcap, it resides in that large family of typical warblers that come and go every summer without any fuss, unnoticed except by ornithologs like me and a few thousand binocular-toting others to whom these tiny creatures assume an importance far greater than their size. If they’ve heard of a willow warbler at all, the vast generality of people don’t know that it has just completed a global marathon, back from wintering in southern Africa, a migration of three thousand miles of skimming arid plains, d
odging desert sandstorms and leap-frogging seas and mountains, and they probably wouldn’t care much either. ‘All little brown birds are the same to me,’ I’m told, over and over again. But not to me: for me they all carry meaning and I thirst to know more.

  Sylviidae, the family that used to be called the Old World Warblers and are now just Leaf Warblers, is a huge group with hundreds of species world-wide, although taxonomist boffins have rendered them into many different genera, a process now thrown into glorious confusion by the arrival of DNA testing, none of which bothers the willow warbler one jot. They are insectivorous and they favour deciduous woodland clearings, of which birch and willow seem to be among the most alluring. It is by far our commonest warbler at Aigas. Years ago they used to be called willow wrens, although they certainly aren’t wrens. I remember my good friend the late Julian Clough – a dedicated amateur naturalist of the old school if ever there was one and a staunch recorder for the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club – telling me that his local woods were ‘lousy with willow wrens’! He was right. In May and June our birch woods resound with ever-repeating peals of their querulous, catechistic jingle.

  Here am I, standing in the long grass, peering down through binoculars. There is this little bird, fixed onto its eggs in freeze mode until such time as I become too great a threat. I don’t want to disturb it, so I back off to a post-and-rail fence fifteen yards away. I settle down in the sunshine and wait. It could have been a long wait, but today I am in luck. The afternoon sun was strong and the bird knew it was okay to nip off for a feed, or a wash, or perhaps just to flex her wings after a long stint of incubation.