It is a gamble. If, as seems likely, birds are triggered into migrating by the length of daylight, they must also assess the weather, choosing suitable conditions and the right wind to travel. Two years ago the Scandinavian woodcock got their timing horribly wrong. They arrived in the Highlands, which were gripped by an unseasonably severe November frost. There had been a light snowfall immediately followed by –18ºC, even on the coast.
The land fell silent. The Beauly River froze over. The loch became gleaming glass in the low-angled sun, and huddles of disconsolate mallard sat about preening on the edge of the rigid marsh. There was nothing else to do. The ground and its snow crust, even in the sheltered woods, was as rigid as concrete. Woodcock are woodland waders with long probing bills for winkling invertebrates out of the litter layers of damp forest soils. Unable to break through, they starved. My good friend and colleague Peter Tilbrook, former Nature Conservancy Council and Scottish Natural Heritage director, who lives on the east coast at Cromarty, doesn’t miss much. He phoned to tell me that migrant woodcock, which had just arrived, were starving in his wooded garden. They were so weak that he could pick them up.
In the Aigas garden there is a small patch of wet woodland where a spring rises. I have never known it dry and I have never seen it freeze solid, although in very hard winters the open pool has grown a skin of thin ice. The spring water seeps away into the soil beneath the spreading branches of 120-year-old, close-planted western red cedars, whose closed evergreen canopy provides a resin-scented arbour like a secret den – a place where my children loved to hide when they were small. Following a hunch after Peter’s phone call, I went to have a look.
There they were. Three woodcock stood together on the damp soil, their large black eyes in sculpted soot- and cinnamon-barred heads stared blankly at me. I backed off, reluctant to stress them any more than the weather already had. The ground was dotted with the pockmarks of their hungry probings. I prayed they were finding something to sustain them. They stayed there a week, until the anticyclone drifted back towards Norway and a mild west wind flooded in to free us up.
How did they find that lonely wet patch, I wondered, the only one in a world of ice? What tricky avian sensibility had led them to that secret place? Could they scent the damp soil over the heady essence of cedar resin? Had they been there before in hard times? Did one wise old bird tell the others? So many questions, so many riddles. Such a cloud of witnesses.
4
And Then There Were Rooks
Above the dark and drooping world
Let the empty skies disclose
Your dear, delightful crows.
‘Crows’, Arthur Rimbaud
Crow realized God loved him –
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
‘Crow’s Theology’, Ted Hughes
I can’t claim any prescience; neither am I given much to old wives’ tales or pithy country aphorisms. An abundant fungal flora or a heavy crop of rowan berries doesn’t seem to me to mean anything more than a bumper year for fruiting fungi and rowan trees. When the greylags and pink-footed geese arrive earlier than expected, harrowing the September skies with their treble-pitched clamour, all that it tells me is that the season in their Arctic breeding grounds – Greenland, Iceland, Lapland – is turning, and that their migratory instincts have fired a little earlier than in some other years.
Not so Old Malkie, famous round here for his doom-laden predictions, when I bumped into him at the Beauly petrol station. ‘That’ll be the snow on the way any day now,’ he gloomed, waving his walking stick to the puckering late-October clouds and shaking his platinum curls. (To my intense chagrin, three days later there was a sugaring of snow on the three-thousand-foot pyramidal crest of Beinn a’ Bha’ach Ard [hill of the high byre], which impales our cloud-laden horizon to the west.)
Yet despite all the head-shaking and dark muttering by the nay-sayers and would-be country sages in our glen, it did not seem to me to follow that blizzards are imminent, that we are in for a harsher winter than usual or that the end of the world is nigh. But I am moved by the wholly unexpected.
In early November our rooks arrived back at their long-established nests in the tall limes, oaks and sycamores that line the Aigas drive. You couldn’t miss them. They were their usual boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly and generally carrying on like – well, like rooks always will. They were nesting – at least, they were going through the unmistakable motions of nesting. They were paired off, gathering and stealing each other’s sticks, repairing old nests and even building from scratch. But it was only just November. Now that was unusual. We don’t expect the rooks to attend their nests until February, sometimes late February, if the weather is hard. But November?
It didn’t last. In ten days they were gone again, flocking away in rowdy gangs tangled with jackdaws, down to the potato and stubble fields recently harvested, the arable soils of the Beauly Firth as dark and rich as molasses, where they joined up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others from far and wide. I never did discover why they had arrived back at their rookery so unexpectedly, so absurdly early. It was as though they were feeling some collective corvid memory lapse and a need to check it all out, just to make sure they were still welcome there, like old boys and girls heading back to school for nostalgia’s sake. I logged it away as odd and, as the New Testament has it, ‘pondered these things in my heart’.
With hindsight I now know that something other was indeed up, although it took a long time to become clear to me. At a human level we tend to view and assess climate change by large events, not small ones. Hurricanes, cyclones, storms and cloudbursts, rampaging floods and withering droughts are the dramatic yardsticks by which we measure swerves away from expected ‘normal’ patterns of weather. It’s hardly surprising: they come rampaging in and imperil us with their power and potential for disaster – or far worse. But in reality they are probably just the crescendos in the overture, the pushy high points of much more subtle shifts and pulses that are happening, pianissimo, all the time, most of which go unnoticed or at best recorded only by meteorological boffins with their noses pressed to electro- barographs and computer models.
In just a few weeks we would know that whatever undetected signal had triggered the rooks’ unseasonal return to their nests was indeed part of some much grander orchestration, something much more all-encompassing, much more . . . yes, perhaps ‘sinister’ is the right word, after all.
* * *
Not just God, but I also love rooks: Corvus frugilegus, the very fittingly named ‘foraging crow’. The onomatopoeic crow – hrōc in Old English, rork in Old Dutch, craa in Old Scots, all, including the word ‘crow’ itself, inflections of the distinctive kraa calls everyone immediately recognises. I love them for their dissonant, rough-edged, pub-brawl rowdiness, all of which, as one of my earliest childhood memories, is permanently etched into my cerebral cortex.
I need to come out and declare this now because so many people seem not to like rooks, lumping them together with every other crow and often refusing to acknowledge the many differences – although getting it off my chest feels a bit like owning up to some contemptible vice. Farmers grind their teeth and spit venom when packs of rooks swoop down, like brigands, to raid their winter barley fields, ripping the germinating seeds and the stash of protein-rich sprouts from the rain-sodden tilth, just like the old Scottish Border reivers, ‘. . . where all men take their prey’.
In a fit of rage a farmer near here felled a handsome spinney of mature Scots pines just to prevent the rooks nesting there, and another, also given to uncontrollable outbursts of anger against many aspects of the natural world, attempted to sue his peace-and-wildlife-loving neighbours for having the temerity