Gods of the Morning (6 page)

These more conversational utterances call for a gentler tonal approach altogether, and a much wider choice of pitch. ‘Rirrp', ‘trip', ‘braa', a high-pitched ‘creek' and the disyllabic ‘err-chup' and an ‘err-eek' exclamation can emerge from the same rook within the same conversation. Then there is a sharp, wholly un-rook-like click or clunk, such as you might make with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, often repeated over and over again. All this is often accompanied by a low, drawn-out ‘er-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-k', a sound better suited to a tropical jungle than a Highland glen, uttered from somewhere gullet-glottal, somewhere in the depths of the corvid syrinx, very easy to imitate by drawing your breath slowly into your chest across your vocal cords, an irritating sound I delighted in making as a small child in the full knowledge that it would annoy adults. Rooks can keep this up for several seconds at a time, often eliciting astonishment from friends and visitors: ‘What on earth is making that noise?'

To me, to someone who loves rooks, these sounds are interesting and reassuring, but the overall generality of rook
music (yes, I find them musical), when the rookery is in full nesting swing, when the fifty or sixty birds are constantly on the move, bickering and haggling, like Arab traders in a bazaar, crying as loudly as they can, thrilling the air with a living resonance, is as evocative and emotive a natural presence as the slow thunder of breakers on a shingle shore or the muffled silence of Christmas snow.

Just now our rookery has twenty-nine nests. Years ago, when gentle crofting agriculture in the glen delivered its beneficial nutrients to all manner of wildlife (we had lapwings, curlews, corncrakes, grey partridges and corn buntings here, all now long gone), the Aigas rookery rose as high as thirty-eight, but the gradual arable abandonment has taken its toll and twenty-nine now seems to be the most they can manage.

They are big nests, each one the size of a pumpkin jammed into a high fork. They are often very close, occasionally touching each other, the spread apparently governed by the availability of suitable forks rather than any other territorial imperative. They occupy five big sycamores in one cluster and two fine old English oaks, and then an outlying nest in the lime tree I view from my bath, a hundred and sixty yards as the rook flies, off to the west. This last is recent, only a few years old, whereas the others are decades established, repaired and rebuilt year after year in the same places.

At first I thought the new nest (claimed as ‘my pair') was a welcome expansion, but extending my daily bath time (to Lucy's irritation – ‘What
are
you doing in there?') just to spy, I became concerned. There are plenty of big trees to
expand into alongside the main rookery, so why, I wondered, was this pair building so far away? Slowly I came to realise that something else was going on. The two birds responsible, clearly a pair-bonded item, seemed to be outcasts from the main colony. And there was mischief afoot – more than mischief.

Right from the first day that they started to build a nest they were being mobbed by gangs from the main flock. Rowdy threes and fours would fly across at regular intervals to harry them. Initially they surrounded the incipient nest and harangued its builders with aggressively raucous cries, hopping from branch to branch, occasionally diving in and clashing with the builders. Then, when each of my pair flew off to gather sticks, one or more of the gang would follow and mob the poor bird, often causing it to drop its twig. Meanwhile, if they left the nest unattended even for a minute, others of the gang would nip in and dismantle it, skimming back to the main rookery with stolen twigs in their bills.

I watched this going on for days (‘Do hurry up and get out of the bath, John'), slowing the nest-building process right down – two twigs forward, one twig back – but never quite defeating my poor outcasts. Long after all the other nests were complete and most of the hens were incubating, my valiant pair was still patching and repairing, still suffering raids from occasional mobsters, until finally the bullies had too many domestic duties of their own to bother. Only then was my pair able to lay eggs and settle to some quieter level of conjugal privacy and isolation.

It was also an interesting observation of human behaviour
to note that when rook domesticity finally won through, Lucy began to take much more interest in the whole drawn-out affair. Our morning bath sessions became punctuated with ‘What are they doing now? Have they managed to lay eggs yet? Do you think the chicks have hatched? Oh, I do hope those beastly bullies will keep away.'

They did somehow manage to rear two young, and a year later a second nest was built beside the first, perhaps by one of my pair's young with a new partner, but they were to suffer the same treatment to such an outlandish degree that after a while they gave up and disappeared. A Mafia mob from the main rookery quickly stole all their sticks, dismantled the whole assemblage so that the nest vanished altogether, a thuggish gang retribution as if they had refused to pay their protection dues. This quite upset the normally placid Lucy, whose verdict was immediate and damning: ‘Those bullies deserve to be shot.'

This outcast/outlier nest phenomenon is not unknown. It's well documented in the literature, although it seems to be shrouded in myth and folklore. One plausible explanation is that rooks are so obsessively gregarious that they won't allow new nests unless they are very close by. This is all very well, but it doesn't explain why the outcasts should be outcasts in the first place. One frequently cited report claims that following the destruction of an outlier nest the outcast pair were then subjected to a ‘rook court' where the elders of the colony sat round in a ring in a field and appeared to be admonishing the demoralised pair in the middle. Hmm, well, I think that may be one for Old Malkie.

Admonished outcasts or not, my pair won. They hung on and raised their brood and to this day the nest is intact, a handsome black blob high in the lime, and I can still lie in my bath and watch them hubbub-ing about their urgent affairs. Whether or not they are now accepted members of the main rookery is unclear. They still draw attention from the mob, but far less aggressively, and for the present the nest remains perhaps not
virgo
, but certainly
intacta
.

*  *  *

Before I depart the colourful world of rooks (for now – their story is far from over), I have one more tale to tell. In the 1950s, when I was twelve years old and at a Somerset boarding school, I rescued a fledgling rook that had been storm-gusted from the nest before it could fly. I don't think it was badly hurt, but it sat huddled in the long grass at the foot of a large elm, crying wheezily to its parents high above who probably hadn't noticed one of their brood missing.

I was thrilled. By the age of twelve I had raised (not always successfully) many orphans: squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, a whole brood of greenfinches after their mother was snatched by a sparrowhawk, even a fox cub. I caught the genderless rooklet in my hands and carried it home rejoicing. I gave it a suitably sexless name – Squawky. For the rest of that summer term, my last at the school, I was the envy of many boys, who vainly searched the drive avenue of elms for Squawkys of their own.

Squawky never flew and I never knew why. There was
nothing broken, both wings flapped vigorously, and he knew enough about flight to use them for extended flapping lurches from perch to shoulder or head or other convenient landing. Try as I might, I never got him to do more than cross a room. Outside I thrust him up into the air in the hope of teaching him the joy of rapturous flight. He flapped raggedly to the ground twenty yards away where he landed entirely normally, then strutted about looking indignant. I took him back to the avenue to show him the wavering in-and-out flights of his own kind and to listen to their raucous chorale. He would sit on my forearm, head tilting quizzically at the wild birds high above, but with no hint of any inclination to join them. After many fruitless attempts I gave up.

He became my constant companion. During lessons he would sit outside the classroom on a windowsill peering in and occasionally tapping on the glass to attract my attention. Other boys either loved Squawky and followed me enviously about, begging me to let them ‘have a go', by which they meant let him sit on their shoulder for a while, or they jealously resented the attention I garnered and sniped at me with snide remarks like ‘Serves you right if he craps on your essay.' Even the headmaster revealed tolerant sufferance in his mild but humourless sarcasm, ‘Lister-Kaye seems to know nothing about arithmetic but everything about crows.'

At the end of term, and to my utter desolation, on the illogical pretext that because I was moving on to another boarding school I couldn't look after a pet rook, I was not allowed to take Squawky home. A friendly domestic lady
called Ruby, who worked in the school kitchens and who for many weeks had offered a clandestine supply of left-over scraps for Squawky, came to my rescue. A gem she truly was. She took pity on me or the rook, or both, and offered to have him. Her farm labourer husband agreed to build an aviary onto their cottage in the village nearby. With a heavy but grateful heart, I delivered the rook into it on my last day.

Life moves on. I have to confess that I never gave Squawky much thought again until one day twenty-two years later I happened to be driving past that Somerset village (the prep school had long since closed) and turned down its only street, trying to remember where precisely Squawky had been housed. I recognised the cottage straight away, unmissable for the spacious wire-netting aviary attached to its gable end. I parked the car and walked up the garden path. To my utter astonishment, I was met by rasping cries from a ragged-looking and extremely ancient rook with an almost bald head. It was Squawky.

He was certainly not beautiful. His naturally featherless cheeks had developed the leathery baldness of a welding glove, a mark of age all rooks over three produce as an adaptive response to habitually piercing the damp soil with their dagger bills in search of leatherjacket grubs. The soiled feathers around the bill simply give up and fail to grow; in the same way some vultures and storks are bald for endlessly thrusting their heads inside rotting carcasses. At nearly twenty-three Squawky's cheeks were huge and as muddy white as a mushroom, made more sinister by the almost
total absence of black feathers on his domed skull. He looked like a bad caricature of a vulture with a straight bill or a stork with a short one. But most comical of all were his pantaloons. His feathery trousers, reaching well below his black-scaly knees, were a cross between gamekeepers' plus-fours and the 1930s tennis shorts worn by Indian army colonels.

The kind farm-labourer husband was long departed to build celestial aviaries, and Squawky and the widow Ruby, his almost-stone-deaf, now-in-her-eighties mistress, had lived on in happy andro-corvid companionship for many years. I spent a rapt and nostalgic hour shouting to her so loudly that Squawky, several yards away outside, became agitated and excitedly joined in most of the conversation. Her hearing can't have been so bad because at one point I made the forgivable slip of calling the bird ‘my rook'. As quick as a flash the old lady leaned forward and corrected me: ‘No, dearie,
my
rook.'

I fed Squawky some porridge and scrambled egg – his favourite dish of more than two decades lovingly prepared by Ruby, which he gobbled noisily and with great vigour, swiping his bill clean on the edge of the bowl when he'd finished. I departed still not quite believing that rooks could live so long.

*  *  *

My enthusiasm for rooks has digressed me from what was so extraordinary in November. They should not have been
nest-building at all. I didn't know it at the time, but something was upsetting the biorhythms that govern the lives of most of our wildlife, whether visible from my bath or not. The rooks were confused. At first I thought it might be the length of daylight that baffled them, imagining that early November had the same length of day at our latitude as their normal nesting time in February, but I was wrong. There is more than an hour and a half's difference – far too broad a wedge to disorientate an intelligent bird like a rook.

Could the temperature have been the same, triggering some deep genetic impulse to build nests? But, no, the mean temperatures for early November and late February were more than 4º Celsius apart for the previous year. So what had done it? What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?

5

Prints in the Snow

What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!

‘Sonnet 97', William Shakespeare

December is winter, no denying it. If wet November winds pile in, sodden but mild, you can still argue that autumn lingers on, but not in December. November trails its coat; December slams the door. And it isn't just the long darkness, although its melancholy gloom does smother everything, even hopes and dreams.

It's the shopping list winter brings to our Highland glen that becomes so inescapable in December, and any of it can happen at any time: the bone-aching cold, as temperatures skirt around freezing for days on end, a cold that seems to penetrate far deeper than that of harder frosts and from which I can find relief only with a hot bath. Then the unexpected plunge to –15º Celsius of a moonlit night; squalls of merciless sleet; the mess of slush; black ice bringing sudden, bruising falls to the unwary; castigating rain; knife-edged winds from the north and east that slice off your legs at the knees; the absurdly crimped daylight for any outdoor work. As our field centre maintenance man, Hugh Bethune, says of outdoor chores, with characteristically succinct Black Isle
sagacity, ‘In December if you don't get it done before lunch, you're buggered!'

Little wonder the badgers stay curled up underground for up to ten days at a stretch. One animal we monitored carefully with stealthcams all winter chose to emerge only as far as the sett entrance, sniff the cold, wet wind and turn back to bed. Even when we put out tempting food for him he would stray only a few feet from the sett to reach it before shuffling back. Yet, for a naturalist, one of the joys of early snows is the chance to read the land and its wildlife in a way you can only dream about until that first tell-tale dusting. Snow brings a new dimension of awareness, a brief window into the other world, the world of animals abroad and of life unseen and uncharted for the rest of the year.

Last night's was well predicted. The council gritter came through in the early morning and did its stuff; well before dawn I could see its amber flashing light on the glen road in the distance. An inch and a half at most – nothing, really – but I couldn't wait to get out. It had fallen wet, not powdery, deep enough to take a full print, and the temperature hovering at zero had just clinched its sharp edges, preventing any melt – perfect tracking snow. It made that rubbery crunch as I trod, packing fast into the tread of my boots.

It is the silence of mornings like this that always grabs me, makes me stand and listen. It is as though the world has stopped spinning for a moment and everything is still. The birds, those few that are left through the cold months,
are also silent. I have to stand for several minutes before I hear the thin
seep-
ing of goldcrests high above me in a Douglas fir. Then a cock blackbird comes hurtling through, heading for the bird table. He lands with a chuckle, ebony tail erect and his tangerine bill flaring in the new light, like a struck match.

December is not a month for birds. We have the tits, of course, the busy blues, the bossy greats and the cheeky coals. They all visit the bird feeders and tables together in a flutter of tiny wings, tolerating each other, but only just. Our resident robins come too, prattling and ticking, rather than singing, saving their energy to fight off the cold. The common woodpeckers of the north, the greater spotteds, decked in their livery of black and white and red, like a guided missile, slice through the cold air in an undulating bee-line for the suspended peanut feeder. The woodpeckers always bring a touch of style and regimental sharpness to the group as they cling vertically to the wire. Recently a cock pheasant has been striding in to peck and scratch under the feeders. He doesn't belong here and won't stay long, but his extravagant Oriental glamour makes me smile. I'm not out for the birds this morning. I want to see who else has been calling.

First to the hen run. If we've had visitors in the night it will always be to the hens. Over the years I have found the tracks of just about everything with sharp teeth surrounding the wooden hen-house: foxes, badgers, stoats, pine martens, wildcats, otters, weasels, even mink. It must be exasperating for a hungry predator on a night of stinging cold to know
that a hot, delicious dinner is only an inch or two away on the other side of slender boards.

Every once in a while something scores. Usually a pine marten, unless (happily only on rare occasions) one of us forgets to drop the hatch at dusk (Lucy blames me, I her) – then Mr Fox has the time of his life. In the morning headless corpses are strewn all round the paddock, and for weeks afterwards the dogs find straggled hands of feathers, the ragged ends of wings or the odd scaly foot abandoned under dense rhododendrons.

The pine marten is a different matter, harder to keep out and devastating if he gets in. Martens are intelligent, diligent and dextrous. If one chews his way in under the door, squeezing his liquid body through the gap like toothpaste from a tube, the result is mayhem. Once the killing instinct is triggered, and because he can't drag a dead hen out through the hole, he fires his frustration and his ripping canines into every last bird. He becomes a terrorist. Mayhem ensues. To open the door at first light is to view Samson's slaughter of the Philistines. Corpses heaped in every direction. Once it was twenty-seven hens.

There is extra pathos to a murdered hen. It's that pale lower eyelid half eclipsing the eye and the slight gape of the beak that does it; the ignominious end to an undignified existence. The majority of hens live lives of witless desperation in batteries, but Lucy's are the lucky ones, loved and well blessed. A constant cocktail of left-overs from the kitchen is mixed with their corn; let out every morning,
tucked up every night, and a half-acre of wormy old paddock to roam and scratch in. But when I'm sent to collect the eggs and I have to sneak my hand in under a hot, fluffy bum, stealing her pride and her only treasures, I feel a clawing sense of guilt, assuaged only by the thought of scrambled egg the colour of dandelions and by convincing myself that the poor bird has neither the sense nor the instinct to comprehend this outrageous exploitation of her most precious assets.

Not so when the pine marten strikes. Even a hen knows a predator when she sees one. Wild Indian jungle fowl,
Gallus gallus
, the progenitor of all domestic chickens, have been dreading predators for something close to a hundred and fifty million years since they emerged in the Jurassic as dinosaurs in feathered disguise. There is nothing we can teach them about fear of predators. In that terrible moment of catatonic panic the hen-house flips in an instant from a sanctuary into a bloody death chamber.

I've never witnessed that panic, but I've heard it. The cacophony of screaming hens woke me and sent me rushing out, pyjamaed, across the yard to do what little I could. Too late. As I opened the door the marten shot out between my legs and vanished into the darkness. It was years ago and I can't remember now how many survived, but only one or two. The rest lay twitching and flapping in the sawdust as if they had been electrocuted.

*  *  *

This morning, before the lie-abed sun stirred, I circled the hen-house slowly, carefully placing my feet so as not to blot out the tell-tale prints. The day rose around me, pale and silent. The pine marten had called, all right, all round, up over the nest box lids and onto the felted roof. Searching . . . searching . . . longing for the chink of a gap he could work at – to no avail, I'm glad to report. The prints are immaculate. I can see all five toes and the rosebud curve of the centre pad, claws like punctuation marks dotting each toe. I see where he leaped up onto the nest box lid . . . along it . . . and then long scratches, like etched runes, as he sprang up again, as agile as a squirrel, across the roof.

I try to imagine his every move. I can read the pauses, see the head rise to look around, the front pads pressing further in – martens are as constantly on the
qui vive
as a nervous meerkat. I see where he has risen onto his hind legs, intelligent pointed little face testing the air, his long tail faintly feathering the snow behind him, then bounding on in the sinuous, looping pace that so characterises all martens. I guess at the time spent, probably only a minute and a half, ninety seconds of fiercely focused scrutiny, before he headed off again to check out the next best chance of supper.

A fox has been here too, but earlier, because the marten tracks have crossed on top of the fox's. How much earlier is anyone's guess. I stand and stare. A dog or a vixen? I wonder. The sun is struggling through, glowing in a sea of mist. The morning spreads in front of me like a vision. The
snow begins to sparkle, brimming with new light. A hoodie crow comes rowing across the lightening sky, sees me and swerves away. As he goes he calls out, once, twice, three times in a mocking cry, rough-edged with contempt. The fox prints weave a thin line across the lawn, purposeful, but not hurrying. They are bright-rimmed, shining with reflected sun, and dark-shadowed in the sunken pads, bringing them into sharp relief.

He stopped at the base of a large Oriental spruce and scraped at the ground, turning a small stone – a beetle perhaps? Then urinated by lifting a leg – ha! This was a dog fox, not a vixen. He skirted the hen run – tracks now crisscrossed with those of the marten – as I guess he does every night, snow or no snow, so he knows very well that if the hatch is shut it's not his lucky night. So he passed on, across the paddock and over the broken fence, rear pads side by side, pressed deeper as he springs, touching just once with a scuff on the top rail, then onto the old farm road. I curse silently: I have often noticed those scuff marks before, scratches in the lichen and the green
protococcus
algae on the rail, and wondered what had made them. Rooks, I had guessed, wrongly. I should have thought fox: I knew this was his circuit, his private byway. I had often caught a snatch of his vulpine scent, as rich as pickle, just here beside the fence. A thought passes through: perhaps the spurt of effort for springing up releases extra scent, or could it be that, because he is raised as he leaps onto the fence rail, closer to the human nose, he laces another layer of air with molecules of animal musk, an invisible stratum that lingers
in the static air, wafting like smoke? Hmm. I had never linked the scent with the scuff marks until now. I set off up the hill, following his trail and feeling a little foolish.

He's not walking; he's trotting in a leisurely but springy pace. His oval pads are evenly spaced and almost in a straight line, but not quite, like the repeating pattern of pansies on a quilt. ‘Here he went' is what I see and I must conjure the rest out of familiarity. Out of film and pictures in my head, out of long-ago glimpses, out of chance encounters, out of that electrochemical album in my brain. Images filed away in my pre-frontal cortex, where he is now and where I want to fix him in absolute concentration. But imagination is not enough on its own. Like Ted Hughes's ‘The Thought Fox', I want to think fox and think this fox right into my head.

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow . . .

For a while he sticks to human paths, the old farm track to the top fields and the moor, as though he is travelling somewhere particular. It's known. I'm sure he does this regularly, relying on opportunism and luck to deliver, or perhaps he's
en route
; perhaps he has somewhere in mind; perhaps to the relative warmth of the pinewood beside the loch where foxes know they will find beetles, where there
will be good hunting. Somewhere I can't know; something not my business.

As a teenager in the sixties, I used to turn out, like most country boys, to watch the hounds of the local Seavington Hunt, which met outside the Rose and Crown in the Somerset village near my home. The master and hunt servants in pink jackets with mustard collars, breath pluming from the horses' nostrils on a frosty morning and the hounds milling among the crowd. It was a social convention, a ritual mingling of farmers large and small and their many labourers of those days, of gamekeepers, trappers, landowners and gentry, of unshaven old country yokels in ragged raincoats, leaning on sticks, pipes clenched in their teeth under greasy caps, pork-pie hats or battered brown trilbies, weather-tanned faces all smiling toothily, all amiably chatting, all excited at the prospect of a good day.

Every now and again a hound would stray too far and a whipper-in would call him back, ‘Thrasher, git orn in!' Their riders immaculately turned out, handsome, heavy-boned horses with huge glossy flanks champed impatiently at their bits, froth dribbling to the ground. Leather boots and saddles creaked through air thick with the tang of hoof oil, Stockholm tar and the rich stable savoury of fresh horse dung. Steel shoes stamped impatiently as the more excitable horses fidgeted, anxious to be off. ‘Steady, Damsel, steady now!'

It was colourful and friendly and had about it an air of old country stability and of things unchanged and unchallenged in a pre-mechanised landscape of ponds and ditches,
of hand-laid hedges around small fields and cows still milked by hand. Its people all knew each other and seemed to me to belong to the countryside in those days, to be immersed in it and shaped by it, no one out of place. The master called for ‘Hounds please!' The horn sliced through the gossip and, to the clatter of shod hoofs on tarmac, the pack moved off.

I remember leaning on a gate next to an old character in leather gaiters and a tatty serge jacket with a collar ripped to the ticking that might once have been a postal or railway uniform. In silence we watched the horses streaming across a hillside two fields away on the far side of a little valley. We could hear the thin wail of the horn and the belling of hounds somewhere in a deep wooded covert to our left. A shout went up from some foot-followers in the field immediately below us. The fox had broken cover and was streaking across open ground, heading right. I jumped up and made to run off in the direction it was taking.