Gods of the Morning (17 page)

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, dodging 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.

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.