Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  As soon as she had left I took a look. Five tiny white eggs flecked with red pepper. The nest was crafted from woven grasses and entirely lined with feathers – feathers of all sorts – some big, some minute and fluffy. I didn’t touch it, but in the curved rim of the nest I could see the speckled grey breast feathers of guinea fowl from Lucy’s hen run; some were a softer grey and white from, I’m quite sure, a wood pigeon.

  A few days before I had seen the carcass, a sparrowhawk kill, plucked feathers scattered to the winds. Some other feathers were too small to tell whose they had been, perhaps even the warbler’s own. The nest curved in at the top, almost creating a globe with an open top smaller than the bowl below, so that when she was on and snuggled down she was barely visible. And it was deep: the eggs nestled fully three inches below the rim, couched in a feather bed. I backed off again, quickly.

  In six minutes she was back, flitting from tree to tree until she was close, then a pause, a moment of anxious hesitation because instinctively she knew that this last dip down to the nest is the one that could give her nest away to predators. Then she was down, down and shuffling round through 150 degrees until she was comfortably settled, bare brood patches on her underbelly delivering 36.6–37º Celsius of heat pulsing straight onto the eggs. Her minute leaf-like form entirely filled the opening, trapping in the heat and closing it off with the smooth, olive-fawn feathers of her back fluffed out. Her head lowered and merged with her back, hunkered down. The only hint that there was anything there at all was that tiny, ever-watching jewel of an eye.

  What had made her choose that place? What was so right about it that action fired into place in her half-ounce, peanut-sized cranium? Why not here where I’m standing, where the grass and the daffs look exactly the same or, better still, securely in a thicket? Why not back in the wisteria? We can fiddle about with DNA and invent all the new genera we like, but we still know so very little when it comes to it.

  I like to think it was intuition; that she, too, could blend instinct with experience and come up with a perfect fit. Perhaps she was born into a grass nest herself and the memory of flickering sunlight and the breeze-rustle of grasses was wired into her taut little brain, claiming her back to the orchard just as the salmon is drawn to its natal river to spawn. And once here the nostalgic rightness of the orchard and that particular grassy space flooded over her so powerfully that she just went for it, plucking and weaving the blades, round and round, crafting them, like clay on a potter’s wheel, until the nest was a perfect circle. Then the search for the feather lining. Off to the hen run in short, darting sallies, dipping down to snatch them, one at a time, instinct commanding the size and shape to go for, and back again, flitting through the apple and plum trees, a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t being observed, down and in.

  Did she know that the pigeon had died? Had she spotted the dread sickle of the hunting wing? Had she crouched among the new leaves of the ash tree, as soft lemon as her own throat, frozen with fear, knowing that any movement could give her away? Had she witnessed the unwary young pigeon, only recently fledged, snatched in mid-air, crash to the grass, seen the mad fire in the sparrowhawk’s eye? Had those little warbler beads eyed the plucked kill, the hawk mantled over its prey, the bloodied bill, the pale soft feathers drifting on the wind, and noted it all in her warbler memory bank? Or was it chance, just good fortune that feathers of every size and shape were right there, conveniently spread out for her on the mown grass only thirty yards away?

  Perhaps that’s what warblers do when they arrive here from their long migration from Africa. Perhaps the availability of suitable feathers triggers the nest-building, helps choose the site. Isn’t that what we do when we’re nesting, when we’re moving house? Check out the local schools, the distance to the shops or the bus stop? If the food supply is good and the habitat seems right, perhaps it needs that extra component to fire up the warbler action to nest.

  Swallows and house martins can be persuaded to nest with a supply of wet mud of the right consistency. Was it those pigeon feathers that had determined just where the nest would be? Who knows? So many questions; so few answers. For now I am just happy to have found the nest, to have glimpsed her five peppered eggs and marvelled at the intricate beauty of her work. I can watch her now from a discreet distance, check her out every morning and hope to learn a little bit more.

  *  *  *

  If I close my eyes I can recall in immaculate detail the first nest I was ever shown, even though I can’t remember exactly what age I was – four or perhaps five. I was taken by my grandfather’s large, loving hand and I remember my own hand lost in his. He understood that all children should learn about nature and led me out into the garden, along a stone-flagged path mossy with age, to a small enclosed lawn surrounded by neatly trimmed box hedges three feet high. There, by gently parting the springy stems of the box, I was encouraged to look into a blackbird’s nest. The four blue eggs, ‘four freckled ovals of perfect sky, luminous with heat’, seemed to stare back at me, an image I can picture as vividly now as all those years ago. Very gently, I was allowed to touch them – something I would not do now. The heat startled me; at that unthinking age, I had no idea about eggs or incubation. Then I was led away to stand quietly and watch the hen blackbird return.

  A few years later I was encouraged to collect eggs. With my father I made a small cabinet to hold them with trays of my butterflies and moths pinned to their balsa-wood backing. I had drawers of eggs carefully labelled with date and source, just as I had been taught: ‘Starling – hole in stables roof, 10.vi.53’; ‘Magpie – very thorny tree, 27.v.54’ or ‘Blackbird – yew hedge, 16.vi.55’. I adhered strictly to the amateur naturalist’s unwritten rules of those days: wait till the bird comes off, don’t frighten it; never take more than one egg; take it straight after laying or not at all because you can’t ‘blow’ an egg (the liquid contents removed through a single small hole) with a chick in it; never tell anyone else where the nest is.

  Amateur and museum egg-collecting – oology is the study of birds’ eggs – was widespread and considered virtuous in Victorian times, an almost genteel pastime, persisting well into the 1950s. For centuries it had been seen as reputable, even educational, a worthy hobby for country boys (no doubt a way of keeping them out of trouble), and many bird books and scientific ornithological volumes of the day freely acknowledged the help and information provided by amateur egg collectors. Of necessity, finding the nests trained you to become an acutely observant ornithologist. John Clare’s ‘The Green Woodpecker’s Nest’ could not be more explicit:

  Ive up and clumb the trees with hook and pole

  And stood on rotten grains to reach the hole

  And as I trembled upon fear and doubt

  I found the eggs and scarce could get them out

  I put them in my hat a tattered crown

  And scarcely without breaking brought them down . . .

  I was very proud of my collection but, to my dismay, it had to go. Collecting protected birds’ eggs, but not possessing a prior collection, became illegal with the passing of the Protection of Birds Act 1954, but it would still, with the exception of a small number of unrelenting obsessives, take a long time for the practice to fizzle out. It was finally endorsed by the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, which made it illegal not only to take but also to possess egg collections.

  Back at the turn of the twentieth century, in the very early days of the nature-conservation movement, and when the Victorian obsession for killing wildlife for museum collections was beginning to wane, attention turned to critically endangered species, particularly birds. Egg-collecting was widely practised and accepted, but because it was patronised and supported by such high-profile society figures as the plutocratic zoologist Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild of Tring Park, who had created a private natural history museum at his home, it would take several decades to surface as the conservation threat it really was. Only when the Liberal politician and f
ormer governor-general of South Africa, Earl Buxton, criticised the practice at a public meeting of the RSPB, warning of the distinct menace posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithological Union (of which Lord Rothschild was a prominent member) that pressure began to be brought to bear.

  Rothschild and his associates were furious. He joined ranks with another fanatical collector, the widely respected ornithologist the Rev. Francis Jourdain (he of Witherby, Ticehurst, Jourdain and Tucker’s Handbook of British Birds, first published in 1938), and formed a splinter group calling themselves the British Oological Association, later to be renamed the Jourdain Society after Jourdain’s death in 1940. Lord Rothschild, who became famous for driving his carriage harnessed to a team of six zebras to Buckingham Palace to prove that zebras could be tamed and trained, had died a year earlier, still immutably convinced of his egg-collecting contribution to zoology. He is now best remembered for his private museum, which was the largest zoological collection ever amassed by one person. On his death his family gave it to the nation: it is now run by the Natural History Museum, including the largest egg collection in the world of around two million individual eggs.

  Yet for a few obsessively addicted enthusiasts it was apparently impossible to give it up. One of the most infamous in recent times was the late Colin Watson, who plummeted to his death in 2006 aged sixty-three after falling thirty-nine feet from a larch tree while prospecting a sparrowhawk’s nest. Watson’s collection numbered more than two thousand eggs, including osprey, golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, Slavonian grebe, peregrine falcon, merlin, red kite, avocet, corncrake, cuckoo and many other very rare species. He had been caught many times, prosecuted by the RSPB and fined thousands of pounds, to little avail. To this day to a small number of zealots, egg-collecting remains a burning, almost manic compulsion, which can drive them to enormous lengths to evade detection.

  Ian Prestt, a former director general of the RSPB, told me the remarkable saga of a well-known obsessive called Edgar Lear, who had been prosecuted several times, and who, the RSPB knew, would never abandon his lifelong fixation. Sometime in the 1960s a pair of wild whooper swans nested on an island in a remote Scottish loch. Such breeding attempts by whoopers are very rare in the UK: the species is migratory and normally breeds in the Arctic. Perhaps one of the birds was unwell and couldn’t migrate, or perhaps it was simply aberrant behaviour, as happens from time to time in all animal populations, often spawning whole new colonies.

  The RSPB species-protection officers were certain Lear would try to take the eggs, so as soon as the pen swan began to lay, with the help of the local police they mounted a twenty-four-hour guard.

  Sure enough, on a drizzly overcast night he appeared in a black wetsuit, creeping through the heather with a specially constructed box strapped to his back. Only a pinpoint of torchlight gave him away. He slipped into the water and swam quietly to the island. The RSPB officers followed the tiny light through binoculars from a distance before closing in to apprehend him as he returned. To be sure of a prosecution they had to catch him red-handed in full possession of the eggs.

  Lear was on the island for only a few minutes; then back he came, swimming slowly to the shore with all four eggs – the entire clutch – carefully packed in cotton wool, warm and dry in the little waterproof box on his back, straight into the custody of the officers. The police took him away to be charged and the RSPB men rowed the eggs back to the swans’ nest. They stayed only long enough to ensure that the pen went back onto them. Lear was duly charged, appeared before the magistrate, convicted and fined.

  Some weeks later the eggs hatched and soon the four fluffy cygnets grew into fine young swans. But something was badly wrong. It quickly became clear that they were not whooper swan cygnets, but common mute swan cygnets with ‘S’ shaped necks and developing black and orange bills, instead of the straight necks and bright yellow nares of the whoopers.

  Lear had known very well that the nest would be guarded and that he was very likely to be caught, but the fervour of his obsession had led him to employ a level of guile even the RSPB had never met before. Earlier that afternoon he had raided a common mute swan’s nest somewhere else and put the eggs in his waterproof box. Mute and whooper swan eggs are virtually identical, both large and plain white, slightly pointed ovals – you would need callipers to detect the difference in size. Then he set off on his masterly raid. Once on the island he stole the whooper eggs and quickly buried them in a shallow hole to be recovered for his collection much later. He swam back to the shore, perfectly content to be apprehended.

  They didn’t know it, but the RSPB officers had been roundly duped. They confiscated the eggs from his box and replaced them in the nest, sure that they had won the battle of wits, that a wicked egg-collector had been caught and that they had ensured the breeding success of the rare whooper swans. They crowed about their prowess, going public with a triumphant press release when Lear was prosecuted. Later, long after the RSPB had ceased to watch the island, Lear returned and recovered his precious whooper eggs for his collection. When, several years afterwards, his house was raided by police, his collection of more than twelve hundred rare birds’ eggs was confiscated. There, immaculately blown and labelled, were the whooper eggs.

  The Jourdain Society does still exist, but has gone underground and probably only survives as a dining club. Its members have dwindled with age, some now in their eighties, most having received convictions for illegal possession of eggs. A police raid on a society dinner at a Salisbury hotel in 1994 resulted in at least eleven thousand eggs being seized from members’ houses around the country. Six members present at that dinner were convicted and fined.

  *  *  *

  Far out of the reach of egg-collectors are the nests of our goldcrests, the smallest bird on the British list, 30 per cent smaller than the willow warbler, a tiny, febrile jot, an oh-so-little-bit of a warbler weighing just 5–7 grams (less than a quarter of an ounce). If we didn’t have a tree-top hide at Aigas I don’t suppose I would ever have witnessed a goldcrest nest being made. They spend most of their lives high in the uppermost branches and crowns of conifers, pines, spruces and firs, where they hunt small insects. Their nests are famously difficult to find.

  Yet for all their diminutive size, they are strikingly beautiful warblers – if you can ever get close enough to see one properly. The males are principally a pale olive green with the eponymous distinctive orange-flame stripe running back over the crown, fringed with a striking black border against the green of the head. The females are the same, but the stripe is buttercup yellow. When I was a boy they were called golden-crested wrens but, like the willow wren, it was a confusing misnomer. They aren’t wrens and the golden stripe is not a crest. Golden-crested warbler would be far too pompous. Goldcrest is much better.

  To the boisterous hilarity of visiting school students, last year a pair of swallows nested inside the roof of our tree-top hide, delivering a constant fall-out of chalky white excrement onto the students to shrieks of ‘Yeah! Nice one!’ and ‘Look at Caitlin. Serves you right!’ yelled at those unfortunate enough to receive a direct hit. I climbed the thirty-seven steep steps to the hide for the express purpose of meeting the rangers’ demands for a ‘shit board’ to try to contain some of the swallows’ fall-out, which was serving as such a distraction to their control of whole classes of eight- to ten-year-olds who found ducking the dive-bombing swallows to be much more fun than learning about the ecological significance of regenerating woodlands.

  I fixed the board to the roof beams quickly and easily, then decided to sit for a few minutes to gaze out over the moorland and the glacial valley stretching before me. A sharp-eyed raven floated by, swerving away as soon as it saw me, and a buzzard soared and wheeled lazily high in the blue above. Just as I was about to go I spotted a movement in the verdant foliage of the Norway spruce whose upper branches almost touched the hide. It was a female goldcrest only a few feet away. I sat still. It seemed that she wa
nted to join me. She edged nearer and nearer in jerky little flits, approaching and then nipping back again when her courage failed her.

  After a few minutes of indecision, she entered through one of the seven wide open viewing hatches and flew quickly up into the rafters. She was only there for a few seconds. As she flew out again I noticed a fine filament trailing behind her. It took me a moment or two to understand what she was up to. She disappeared into the foliage of the spruce, but was back again only a minute later. This time I was ready to watch more closely.

  Back into the dark confines of the rafters I saw that she was collecting gossamer strands of spiders’ web. With another beakful she skipped back into the same spruce frond and disappeared. I quickly moved to a better position and examined the branch through my binoculars. Sure enough she was building a nest in the outermost reaches of the Norway spruce. This intrigued me: I had never seen a goldcrest nest before but, annoyingly, there was one needly spruce frond obscuring my view. I decided to go for a pair of secateurs.

  By very carefully leaning out over the thirty-five-foot drop to the forest floor I was able to snip away bits of the offending frond – a minor level of gardening I was sure she wouldn’t mind – so that I could see. I was right. In seconds she was inside the hide mining strands of spiders’ web once more, then straight back to her nest. This time I could see what she was up to.

  You would think it might be safer to nest within the shelter of the tree, closer to the trunk or at least on a sturdy branch. Since the bird is so tiny, and the nest smaller than a tennis ball, built in layers of moss, fine twigs and needles, then whiskery Bryoria and Ramalaria lichens, all stitched together with spider silk, you would imagine that on an outer frond it would be very prone to being tossed aside or blown out altogether by any forceful gust of wind. Not a bit. This resourceful little warbler is well aware of the risks and takes the precaution of actively guying and binding the nest to the surrounding spruce needles and supporting stem with multiple strands of spider silk (which, I learn, is five times stronger than the equivalent high-grade alloy steel and has the added qualities of flexibility and elasticity in any temperature), weaving it round and round with her tiny bodkin of a bill until she was entirely satisfied the nest was secure.