Although each of our days, after 21 December, is a few minutes longer than the previous, the dark nights seem to drag on relentlessly and unchanged, for quite a while. January is a strange, slow sort of month, gripping autumn with one hand and spring with the other, standing motionless in frigid neutrality. The month is named after the Roman Janus, a human king who became a god, but deification caused him to develop two faces, one looking back to the old year, the other looking forward. The Anglo-Saxon name for January was Wulfmonath, the month when starving wolves were driven to descend, desperate and ferocious, on human settlements. Only plants like the crocus and the snowdrop brave January’s temperatures, the crocus giving us colour that is astonishingly vivid against the surrounding greys, and the snowdrop, which gleams bright and new, offering hope that spring is near.
I have never forgotten the words Shakespeare used to describe the winter season in As You Like It:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
Thou are not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.
And in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick, the shepherd, blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail …
When the days dawn bright and clear, however, January has many gifts to bring. It is a good month for tackling the hills for a walk, and if it has been frosty, usually boggy terrain is firm and lightly crunchy underfoot. We are fortunate to live near the Dublin Mountains, and we have a choice of hills on which to stretch our legs. Nearby, Ticknock is a particularly inspiring place after a light fall of snow. The outlook down to the dark, dirty-looking city makes one so grateful to be high up in a glistening landscape, and the myriad sparkles in the soft dry snow would brighten any spirits. Teresa likes it when the snow is fresh and a couple of inches thick; she says it’s like walking on a duvet. A particular bonus of these conditions is the impossibility, if you watch out for them, of missing the prints left by passing fauna, prints that are not readily visible in normal conditions.
fox
red deer
While most bird species can be relatively easily spotted, even at a distance, because they can make an escape by taking to the air, many of our small corps of mammals, owing to aeons of human predation, tend to be secretive and nocturnal. Often their presence in a particular area can be discerned only by the tracks they leave, or indications of their feeding or grooming, or from as prosaic a matter as their droppings. Some animals, like humans, move from place to place in a fixed routine, and often this means that their frequently used routes can be identified. An extreme example of this is perhaps cattle moving every day from the field where they have been grazing to where they are milked; they walk in single file and wear down the grass to a narrow, bare earth path. It is rarely this extreme in the case of wild animals because they are much lighter on their feet, but it is often possible to see clearly the habitual route a badger takes through long grass, and the tunnel in vegetation the animal makes through a hedge or under a barbed wire fence.
Being able to identify what animal left what prints makes it easy to get an idea of the variety of species that frequent the countryside when you are not there. John Burroughs wrote, ‘The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectively as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbour, the fact is chronicled.’ The best time to read prints in the snow is when it is fresh and the cover is no thicker than an inch or so; in these conditions the prints are well defined without any distortion or blurring. It is also important to try to get out before other walkers and their dogs complicate the situation!
Even if the snowfall occurred only a few hours before, it can be surprising to see how much traffic there has been. Once you learn what the footprints of foxes, hares, rabbits and deer look like, the remaining question that one has to work out is the sequence of passage – which animal came first? On heathery Ticknock, well away from the telecommunications masts, there are often numerous tracks of birds in the snow, particularly those of the red grouse; by carefully observing what you find, you may be able to discern the shape of the smaller female’s foot from the longer, larger male’s.
Hellfire Hill is nearby and is another great place for us to take a walk. Recently, walking in a light covering of snow on the west side of the hill, where less people stray, I was surprised to see how many deer had been active there. The snow showers had been about dawn, three hours before I got there, but the forestry road was full of deer prints, and there were places where you could see that they had dug in the snow to get at grass. There were also lots of rabbit prints, and a fox had been about.
Foot or paw prints are only one of the signs of an animal’s passing that you can detect if you are observant; the term ‘spoor’, an Afrikaans word, means the wide range of signs that wild animals leave behind, such as prints, droppings, signs of grazing, tufts of fur or bark nibbled off a young tree. Sometimes the spoor can tell a story. On one frosty morning in late January on Ticknock I came across the oval-shaped prints of what I took to be a fox. The fox is still a hunted animal, and I could see that, most of the time, it had placed its rear foot precisely in the footprint of its front foot, to reduce its spoor by 50 per cent. I followed it for about forty metres, and then it looked as if the animal had speeded up; the prints were blurred and it seemed as if the fox was kicking up flurries of snow in its wake. The confused trail ended in a hollow where there was much disturbed snow, a tuft of fur, and small patches of frozen blood. I was able to see that at this particular point the fox’s trail had intersected with that of a rabbit, which had run fast for the last few moments only to be caught by the fox. Leading out of the hollow were only the fox’s footprints, a little deeper than before, because he was carrying the rabbit, but reverting to halving his spoor again. I followed him, but the spoor disappeared into a maze of rocks and gorse. By learning more about these signs that animals have been about, we can enrich our outdoor explorations and get a glimpse into aspects of their way of life.
You don’t have to wait for snow to give you a chance of seeing what has passed by before you; wet ground, muddy patches and, indeed, certain kinds of vegetation can all display signs of an animal’s passing. To immerse oneself in the art of identifying spoor is to add an entirely new dimension to one’s countryside wanderings. It is useful to arm yourself with an appropriate book, such as the Hamlyn Guide to Animals Tracks, Trails and Signs, or The Nature Tracker’s Handbook by Nick Baker, because once you begin to look carefully at the ground, you will be surprised at how much you will find that cries out to be identified.
One bird that is always active in the early weeks of the year is the raven, because these birds appear to start their courtship in the winter months. Ravens contrive to have their young at the same time as lambing occurs on the hillsides, and so must start the process earlier than most birds. Lambing provides them with nutrient-rich placentas scattered about the fields, perfect food for their hungry young nestlings. Most farmers hate ravens. When a lamb is born with a serious defect, it is often abandoned by its mother, leaving it to the cruelty of nature. Ravens will concentrate on these, but if there are no sickly lambs about, they can often gang up on a healthy lamb and peck out its eyes or tongue;