Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Panting, the haul up seemed steeper in the gloom, hands pressing down on knees, chest heaving. I had to stop every few minutes to let my heart subside. That last push, although only three hundred feet, seemed much more than that. It was a relief to come onto the gently sloping lichen heath less than an inch high – the vegetation of all exposed tops in the Highlands – to the summit where the trig point stood out in hard black silhouette. As I did so, the northern horizon came into view.

  Breathing deeply I leaned against the cold concrete of the trig. My phone said 02.18 a.m. I placed it on the flat top of the trig and pressed the compass app. The pointer swung smoothly to the north where the tips of a distant spruce plantation stood as sharp and clear as crocodile’s teeth. I was surprised to see how much light glowed behind them. I glanced at the time again – 02.23 a.m. I hadn’t expected that in the north so soon. A dawn at 04.28 a.m. was fixed in my head: still two hours to go. When I picked the phone up again it felt greasy and I realised that I had inadvertently placed it on fresh bird droppings unseen on the flat top. Hmm, I thought, as I wiped it clean. Something perches here. I settled down to wait for the dawn.

  I suppose it was inevitable that I would fall asleep again. For all my alertness and heightened sensitivity, it was the middle of the night. But a two-hour wait was too much. I was comfortable with my back against the sloping concrete, the lichen cushioning my bottom and, with nothing much to look at, ‘the trailing garments of the Night’ claimed me. I nodded off.

  I awoke with a jerk. It was much lighter: dawn had sneaked in around me without waking me. I felt a little foolish, blinking into full unexpected daylight. I sat there waiting for my eyes to adjust and gradually sensed that I wasn’t alone. Perhaps it was the slight scrape of its arrival on the trig point that had brought me back to life. Very slowly I turned and looked up. There, with its back to me, was the certain author of the white excrement I had wiped from my phone. It hadn’t seen me. Against the lightening sky it was in silhouette, so, snail-like, I eased myself away from the concrete, turning as I did so, until I could see properly who my neighbour was.

  A small bird sat there, no bigger than a blackbird, but this was no blackbird. I could see a blue-grey back and long folded wings with tips of jet and a long, slate grey tail, dipped in Indian ink at the very base. My brain screamed, ‘Merlin!’ Unmistakably an adult male merlin, the smallest of the British falcons; a bird I never, ever get to see close up. Merlins are hunters of meadow pipits and skylarks, chasers-down of unwary tits and siskins crossing open moors. They are fast, determined, unforgiving and fierce. All I usually see is a darting crossbow silhouette against the sky, or a fleeting arrow streaking across the heather, barely time to focus in with my binoculars. Now there was one a yard away, wings crossed behind its back, the early-morning light glinting silver from the top of its head.

  A falcon’s eyes look directly forward with binocular clarity for sharp focus on the prey it’s chasing. Facing away from me, this bird had no idea I was there, would not have detected any movement behind it. It must have perched on that trig point on hundreds of undisturbed mornings; a perfect vantage-point for the first hunt of the day, binocular orbs scanning the moor below, searching for that first unwary meadow pipit to emerge from its heather roost. Why would a merlin think of looking behind the trig? And why on Earth would a human be sleeping there at four o’clock in the morning? A preposterous notion to a falcon intent on a breakfast hunt. Besides, this was his trig point. With an upward flick of his long tail he had claim-marked it with a long white streak. It was his.

  I was sitting, knees up, arms resting on them. I froze, my eyes fixed on the bird. I knew that sooner or later he would discover me and I prayed that I would be granted a little longer to drink in his image, his splendid blue jacket and long black primaries. And I wanted to see into his eyes, his large, round black-opal orbs ringed with a thin circle of citrus yellow. He shuffled his wings as if about to take off and then he thought better of it, flicked them once from the shoulders and sprang lightly round as he did so. It seemed that nothing had attracted him to the south, so he would try the north. He was looking straight at me.

  Falcons cannot register astonishment. It exists in neither their vocabulary nor their repertoire. All they can do is stare – or perhaps ‘glare’ is a better word. A glare-stare. A stare of astonishment, a glare of indignation, of outrage, of affront, of how-dare-you irritation, of incredulity, all rolled into one un-frowning, wide-eyed falcon scowl. It was awesome in its diminutive power. I felt I ought to apologise, to back off bowing. Was Merlin the wizard named after the merlin bird, or vice versa? I don’t know, but under the spell of that stare it would not have surprised me if I had vanished in a puff of smoke or suddenly found that I was a frog. This was a wizard-bird and a bird-wizard, both. And he was magnificent, perched heraldically upon his personal obelisk, neat, elegant, haughty, commanding and as taut as a bowstring.

  I now don’t know how long we stared at each other. I’m sure it was only minutes, but it could have been days, months, years. I have the image now: it’s as clear and crisp and captivating as it was that day. I have only to close my eyes and he’s there again, still glaring, still commanding. When it ended he gave no hint of alarm or warning. He sprang into the cool morning air, his short pointed wings flicking him away and down round the hill with all the sudden decisiveness of a shooting star. He was gone. I leaped to my feet and ran to the edge, but I was too late. He had vanished. He had skimmed away across the lumpy contours of the heather and the sphagnum where he belonged, lost in the lifting light of the morning.

  I turned back to the trig point and stood looking out at the light streaming in from the east. I glanced at my watch. It was 04.37 a.m. The sun was smouldering below the horizon of trees, firing them as if to burst into flame. With a head full of falcon I moved to the edge to begin my careful descent. I looked up for one last time and there it was – a clear, bright emerald flash shot up from the trees and vanished into the silver sky.

  17

  A Day of Spiders

  The spider, dropping down from twig,

  Unfolds a plan of her devising,

  A thin premeditated rig

  To use in rising.

  And all that journey down through space,

  In cool descent and loyal hearted,

  She spins a ladder to the place

  From where she started.

  ‘Natural History’, E. B. White

  July spilled into August, like a rich, syrupy white wine from the Austrian Burgenland, luxuriant, embracing, irresistible. Early-morning mists now hung over the dark river and the loch, reluctant to leave. Our days were lit with rolling surf of sun-burnished cloud and our nights washed with warm rain as the rowan berries yellowed through to tangerine; by the end of the month they would be scarlet.

  Like godly ladies at a church fête, peacock and red admiral butterflies thronged the buddleia blooms, flashing their rococo wings, pushing each other aside to feast on the nectar. In the fields drifts of the little umber and orange-tipped Scotch argus, a seasonal delight in these hills, danced across the candelabrum heads of creeping thistle. At night autumn moths, with names as lovely as their exquisite patterns of mimicry and camouflage, emerged and took to the wing: black rustic, silver Y, antler moth, angle-barred sallow, yellow underwing, bordered beauty, gold spangle. Drawn to the outside lights, they were hawked and feasted upon by a constant fluttering fly-past of soprano pipistrelle bats.

  August: the month that gives and takes away. The hovering month, the month that could yet turn out to be a high summer of long, dreamy days, but which will always end in autumn. Whatever the temperature or whatever the hours of sunshine, the days are in retreat, dawns creeping later with the stealth of a wildcat, and the stretch of darkness closing in on us, like a medieval army, herding us inch by inch towards winter whether we notice it or not.

  For all its many inducements, I cannot love it. With February, August is stuck fast at the bottom of
my score-card of un-favourite months. Its bothersome images are too firmly logged; too many decades have proved them true. The word immediately conjures tiresome midges and flies, sultry nights and muggy days, tourist traffic clogging our single-track roads and the sudden rash of litter spilling out of bins in car parks. But more than all of those, it is also a natural-history hiatus, a fact that strikes at the heart of our daily lives. August cramps our style.

  Our loyal field centre rangers have to work much harder to earn their laurels. Long gone are the comfortable days of certainty, knowing where birds are nesting, where the pine martens have a den, where a bank of Trollius globe flowers shimmers in the sun. Life has changed for us all. Most of the summer migrant birds have suddenly vanished, finished breeding and fled south. Hard-wired to know what’s coming, they have slipped away in the night for the security of food and warmth. The woods and fields are strangely empty. The winter incomers, the ducks, geese and swans from their Arctic breeding grounds, have yet to arrive. Most wild flowers are over; they’ve melted away as though they were never there at all, and the rude and bully-boy weeds – the bracken, the docks, the rosebay willow herb, the brambles and wild raspberries – have shouldered in and taken over. All subtlety has disappeared and a great green stain has descended across the land.

  Nothing looks fresh any more, no breeding plumage – the Slavonian grebes have shed their dinner jackets and marmalade eyebrows, they will be off to the coast any day now, and those red-throated divers as are left on their breeding lochs now deny their name in overalls of workaday grey. No dawn chorus, no blackcap rhapsody or cascading willow warbler any more, even the rooks and jackdaws are reticent, only the robins chinking and tinkling a new pre-autumnal refrain as if to make the point.

  It brings out the worst in me; having the Highlands to ourselves for most of the year can make us selfish and irritable when we are forced to share it – the Highlanders have a word for it, ‘crabbit’. It turns me introspective with a shoulder-shrugging denial; I don’t want to go out. Sometimes it gets to me and I hide away.

  In such moods I like to escape to the high pastures, steep fields rank with thistles and rushes, Rumex docken stems with dry seed heads burned to Tuscan umber by the summer sun among the multiple florets of ragwort as bright as fresh English mustard, much hated by stock farmers for the toxic sugars in their dried stems if they get swept up in the hay bales.

  These high fields have rocky outcrops and hollows where the terrain is too rough or too steep to cut for hay. The lazy grazers have passed them by and the long, coarse grasses have long since gone to seed. Their sere fringes bend to the breezes riffling through like wind on water, and their friendly shuffling stems whisper a perpetual gossip of indecipherable intimacies. I find such corners of accidental wilderness alluring at this pivotal turning of the year. I love to lie down where it’s thickest, stretched out on my back, face to the heaving clouds laced with the aerobatic skimmings of swallows and house martins hawking the late summer harvest of flies.

  It is here, in these unplanned sanctuaries of wildness, that I can see most clearly what has gone so badly wrong with the British countryside. If I turn my face to the forest of stems and lie still, within the space of one minute I can witness the full spectrum of summer fecundity we now unkindly and dismissively lump together as ‘biodiversity’. This accidental savannah is a long way from its prosaic generalisation, and August seems to be its apogee. It is uncountably rich in insects, flies, ants, bugs, beetles, spiders and other invertebrates, a bustling, crawling throng as busy, colourful and varied as a medieval bazaar. By lying still and just surveying the stems in my immediate vision I can quickly count a dozen different species from as many diverse families, many of which I cannot name. There are froghoppers, lacewings, ladybirds, grasshoppers, spiders and harvestmen, weevils, aphids and leaf hoppers, ground bugs and mirids. I would need a week with an expert to begin to sort them all out.

  Turning to the sky again, overhead, flitting among the softly waving seed heads are tiny brown diurnal moths, dancing butterflies, hoverflies and gnats, and then the occasional bumble bee comes barrelling through. There is nothing romantic about this superabundance of invertebrate life, nothing of the buttercup-twirling rural idylls of Cider with Rosie or Akenfield; nor is it an elegiac reflection of a former agricultural existence, although it has its place in any corner of undisturbed countryside. No, rather it is simply what nature properly is when, either on purpose or by accident, man eases back the pressure, steps aside and allows it to happen.

  It is a sad fact that corners of unkempt wildness, such as here at Aigas, are rare in the British countryside today. We are not a nature reserve. We haven’t set land aside or specifically ring-fenced it for any species or habitat, but we do our best to respect all of nature’s functions and we just let things happen on their own. We avoid all chemicals – weed killers are banned, as are chemical fertilisers – and cattle- and sheep-stocking levels are sympathetic to our land and its vegetation. We favour permanent pasture fertilised by cow dung and the die-back of its own grasses and weeds. We don’t drain the wet flushes. We leave the stinging nettles for butterflies. We go light.

  As a result, nature takes over and builds its jungles and forests. Fungus churns invisibly in the soil and humus assembles its own working capital. The cattle drift through. Their emery tongues rasp and tear, loosening roots. Their liquid dung is tart with precious nitrogen and the softer ground is pitted and pierced by their heavy cleaves. Dung flies and beetles motor in. Nutrients disperse in the rain. Invertebrates of myriad species find a home, breed and disperse. It isn’t wilderness, but it is a doffed hat to nature’s grand ambitions, a chance for bugs and birds, mice and voles, weasels, stoats, brown hares, foraging badgers, opportunistic pine martens and the omnipresent wild deer to stake their claims.

  *  *  *

  Sitting at my desk one morning I looked up to see a thin veil of smoke passing the window. Puzzled, I rose and walked across the room to the bay window that looks out over the river fields. Normally I can see right across the glacial valley to the forested hills on the other side, the river glinting in between. That morning I could barely see the far side at all. It couldn’t be smoke, I reasoned, there was too much of it. It must be drifts of low cloud. Then it cleared and handed back the view.

  I returned to my desk. A few moments later I noticed it again; another pale shroud passing on a gentle south-westerly breeze, funnelling along the valley. But something wasn’t right. Late summer mists don’t do that, they hang, and anyway, the cloud base was high. Perhaps it was smoke, after all. I got up again and stood in the window just as another cloud closed off my view. I always keep my precious Swarovski binoculars on my windowsill so I took a closer look.

  What I saw was a breath-taking spectacle of such overwhelming natural abundance that I was lost for words. I picked up the phone to Ian Sargent, our field officer, who was off duty with his girlfriend Morag Smart, who ran our schools programmes. ‘Come quickly. You must see this.’ As always, when I stumble across some extraordinary natural phenomenon, my first instinct is to share it. But I also wanted witnesses. The world is full of cynics. I knew people wouldn’t believe me if I kept it to myself.

  It was neither mist nor smoke. It was silk. Spiders’ web silk. The massed gossamer threads of millions of tiny spiders dispersing by a process known as ‘ballooning’. Every long grass stem, every dried dock head, every tall thistle, every fence post held, at its apex, a tiny spiderling – what we commonly know as a money spider – poised, bottom upturned to the wind in what has been described as the ‘tiptoe position’ and from which single or multiple threads of silk were being spun. Other spiders were queuing beneath, awaiting their turn. As each slowly lengthening thread caught the wind we could watch the spider hanging on, tightening its grip on the stem or the seed head, while the gently tugging threads extended ever longer into the breeze.

  For the tiniest spiders lift-off happened when the threads were ten or
fifteen feet long, but slightly larger spiders spun for much more – perhaps twice that length. Then they let go. The spiders were airborne, sailing gently up, up and away across the fields, gaining height all the time, quite literally ballooning down the valley with the wind.

  The pure physics of this feat is best demonstrated by holding up a long length of ribbon on a windy day. The ribbon is never straight. It bends and buckles, folds and twists and tugs at your hand with the turbulence of the wind. The constantly changing contours of the silk thread give it the lift and the mobility, providing sufficient sail to carry the weight of the tiny spider. The longer the threads, the more lift and sail they provide. Whether the spider knows instinctively when to let go, or whether it is dragged off when the pull of the thread gets too great for its grip, I have no idea. Perhaps the spider hasn’t either.

  What I do know is that while this is a well-known and widely practised mechanism for spider dispersal across many Arachnid families, it only very rarely happens in such vast and impressive multitudes. The valley was full of silk. Surely not by intent the millions of gossamer threads collided and entangled, creating ever bigger and more effective sails as they drifted down the wind. It would be almost too much to ask of natural selection for an organism to have evolved not just to best-guess the weather, but also somehow knowing in advance that by a simultaneous release of silks its species could enhance the efficacy of their dispersal mechanism, creating a collective sail for hundreds of thousands of spiders together. So, until someone convinces me otherwise, I conclude that the extraordinary coagulation we witnessed was accidental, a freak of timing and the weather conditions of the morning. Freak or not, it was astonishing. Whole zeppelins of money spiders were heading east towards Inverness.