Gods of the Morning (14 page)

In captivity mallard have survived in breeding condition for twenty years. In the hazardous wild it is likely to be much less, but assuming an average lifespan of only eight years, during that time a duck can produce hundreds of ducklings. Even though only one or two may survive each year, if she herself survives, by the time she succumbs she may well have replaced herself and her mate many times over.

Other species can't do that. Wrens and other small birds,
such as tits, live for only two or three years, so they have to have another trick – that of extra-large, multiple broods. If wrens have been hit by a hard winter, which they often are, suffering as much as 60 per cent losses – tiny bodies can't maintain their heat in long periods of sub-zero – the survivors are well known to take up the challenge of rescuing the species by producing up to twice the size of egg clutch, from a norm of five or six eggs to ten or eleven, then repeating it a few weeks later. Wrens in particular seem to know that they will die in extreme cold so they gang together in tight spaces for mutual body warmth. There have been some remarkable instances of dozens of wrens all jammed together in nest boxes. The British Trust for Ornithology cites the record number of wrens roosting together in one box to be sixty-three, but the RSPB lists a record of ninety-eight wrens emerging from one hole in an attic. The largest I have found was twenty-one, in the extreme winter of 1998, all jammed together in a tit nest box. The nail had rusted through and the box fell to earth. A dead wren lay beside it. When I lifted the lid and looked inside I was astonished to find what I took to be another twenty dead wrens. I was horrified. I tipped them out onto a tray, then noticed a slight movement. A single leg stirred. They weren't dead, but comatose with cold. I put them in the Aga warming oven and brought them back to life. When they had completely recovered I released them again and nailed the box back onto its tree. Two nights later all twenty were back in the box. It had worked for them once, why not again?

Yet all these commonplace survival tricks that have evolved
over many hundreds of millennia, perhaps even millions of years, to enable species to fit the climate and habitat available to them, all have to submit to the caveat ‘if everything else is equal', by which I mean on the assumption that the species in question has sufficient food to feed itself and its offspring. Jenny Wren can produce as many extra-large clutches as she likes, but if there is no food for her chicks, they are all doomed within hours of hatching. Similarly, if there are no insects on the water or in the marsh for the ducklings to eat in the first week of life, the mallard has no hope of raising even one duckling. That is what makes rapid climate change so scary – as we would discover, there's nothing ‘equal' about it.

*  *  *

What was happening around us in the early spring was the beginning of a catastrophic inequality. An unforeseen factor was about to shoulder its way in to complicate the lives of just about everything around us. February had been dry and cold – nothing so unusual about that. The rooks came and went, checking things out, ready to pitch into nesting as soon as the conditions were right. By March everything looked good. Every day the sun rose with renewed determination and with it, as though to urge it on, came an unusually warm southerly breeze. It was gentle at first, delicious and, oh, so welcome. The rooks revelled in it, cawing incessantly as they busied back and forth around their bulging nests. Secateurs in hand, Lucy rushed out into the
garden and vanished into a herbaceous border for hours at a stretch, stripping out the winter-killed stems of last autumn's blooms. I started the rounds of the many nest boxes on our trails, scribbling notes as I went. Great, blue and coal tits were all busy carrying filaments of moss and sheep's wool. It seemed we were ‘set fair', as the barometer says.

Normally – and I can only really speak for the ‘normality' of the last forty years – March in the Highlands is treacherous. It can be warm or icy, wet or dry, calm or stormy, through all of which the daffodils struggle valiantly into full bloom at last, and that splendid normality is leavened by the lifting sun supplying us with a broadly upward temperature trend zigzagging gently towards April. Years ago old Dunc Macrae, my crofting neighbour Finlay's father, now long dead, told me he never fussed about snow in March: ‘Ach, it will na stay. It'll be away in a day or two.' Dunc's reassurance was unnecessary, the snow never came. It was the last thing on my mind. The long wait had taken its toll: I was sick of waiting, sick of winter. As far as I was concerned, spring had arrived. Now, along with just about everything else, I was enjoying the warmth.

12

The Sun's Rough Kiss

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume.

Romeo and Juliet
, Act II, scene vi,
William Shakespeare

Looking back, we had no idea. It all seemed normal. February had surrendered to March without a fuss. Only the moon noticed the difference, off on its rounds again. Despite the first daffodils' most ecstatic fling, nobody round here expected March to be anything but another month of winter dragging its feet. Even April can hang in the balance, so in March we expected to wait on, patiently, trying hard to avoid the word ‘spring', although the great tits were nagging and the wrens were taunting us all day long.

Frosts had crisped the lawn for the last two weeks of February and mists hung over the river until noon when, like a bolshie teenager, the sun seemed to wake up properly and managed a smile. It was good. Most days were dry. We were out and about, doing tasks we hadn't been able to do for months. Then, without warning, everything changed.

A gentle wind moseyed in, like a cruise ship docking from the Mediterranean, dragging with it a Continental high more appropriate to Monaco than the Moray Firth. It shimmied its glowing warmth up the whole of Britain. Overnight the clouds of our little wintry world vanished. There was no excuse for the sun now. March glowed and then it blazed. Average seasonal temperatures doubled from 10º to 20º Celsius and more. Records began to tumble. People rushed to the seaside and leaped into rivers and lakes. Camping shops sold out of tents. Three weeks later, as the month drew to a close, television news was reporting crazy temperatures: 23.6º Celsius at Aboyne, only an hour's eagle flight to the east of us in Aberdeenshire. The whole of March had been dry, most of it what us Brits like to call
hot
.

We loved it, of course. We strode about in shirtsleeves or none at all. We swam in the loch. The young field centre staff lay about sun-basking through their down time. A pensioner died from heat-stroke in Scarborough and no one seemed to care. We laughed and joked endlessly about summer, like most northern-hemisphere humans do when the sun shines for more than a day and a half. It was all jolly good fun. Every morning we awoke to a constantly expanding chorus of triumphant birdsong: chaffinches bellowing, woodpeckers drumming, robins carousing and wood pigeons, over and over again, calling out their soothing, summery instructions, ‘Take two cows, Susan, take two cows.'

The rooks came home in force. Their nesting trees were a constant hubbub of domesticity. They carried in fresh sticks and set about rebuilding their twiggy piles with a perpetual
racket of corvid commentary. They strode about the lawns as if they owned the place, drilling their gimlet bills into the turf, plucking unsuspecting leatherjackets into their hungry gullets. When we approached the paddock with a bucket of kitchen scraps for the hens, the rooks parachuted in like a pack of black vultures, lining the paddock fence in haggling gangs, loudly cawing their approval.

The first small tortoiseshell butterflies shook themselves free from hibernation, dancing prettily among daisy and dandelion blooms that suddenly studded the lawns, and queen wasps emerged from under the roof slates two months earlier than usual, droning slowly and purposefully in through bedroom windows thrown wide, diligently searching for secret hideaways to fashion their delicate little paper lanterns. It all seemed so good.

Brown hares deserted the woods and lolloped aimlessly about the fields, as if they couldn't quite believe the grass was growing. They cast nervously around, long, black-tipped ears ceaselessly swivelling and twitching with neurotic anxiety as though they oughtn't to be there at all. When they settled to graze, laying their ears back on their shoulder blades, through binoculars I could see their vibrating whiskers and curling, trembling lips taking each protein-laden growing point, hauling in each blade in turn.

Ears and eyes. That's what I love about hares. Those acutely honed senses, unsleeping ears, like satellite dishes, and big brown bulbous orbs set into the skull flanks for 170º vision on either side. That leaves twenty degrees of relative blindness, five to the front and fifteen at the back, for the
ears to cover. An alerted rabbit just looks cheeky and mischievous, but the hare's glaucomatous eyes, bulging madly from a narrow, chiselled head full of sculpted hollows and angles, give it a look of crazed melancholy, whetted by perpetual terror. They remind me of a sensitive girl I once knew whose confidence had been terribly crushed by overweening parents.

The March hare brings the spring
For you personally.
He is too drunk to deliver it.
He loses it on some hare-brained folly –
. . . All year he will be fleeing and flattening
His ears and fleeing –
Eluding your fury.

‘Deceptions',
Season Songs
, Ted Hughes

I grew up with a print of Albrecht Dürer's meticulous hare drawing (1502) on my bedroom wall. It was mesmerising. As a small boy I stood and studied it intently. I wondered how he had got so close, how he had achieved so much vibrant detail from a living hare without the help of binoculars, detail that vanishes the moment the animal is dead. Did he just sit quietly with his sketch pad? Would they come close enough? It seemed unlikely. Did he have a tame hare or did he stalk his hares or use a hide? I decided to try for myself and I quickly found that stalking was not easy.

Hare-stalking is a game of great skill and no little
vexation. The best approach is from directly behind, but head-on can work too; from the side is hopeless. First, you have to slough off any thoughts of being human, hunker down into your careless senses and engage with the hare's own animal magnetism, with its force field of twitchy hyper-sentience, blocking everything else out. Wait until the head is down and grazing; be ready to freeze when the ears swivel to your direction or the head suddenly jerks up, which it will at intervals, regardless of whether it has detected you or not. Scent is important too: you must approach down-wind; gauge it on the tip of your tongue. Stick to cover until the last possible moment, and when you have to move out into the open imagine you are a tree. When you freeze don't look at the hare; fix on a point to one side of it and don't move your eyes.

It's Grandfather's Footsteps taken to the limits of human stealth, and a game the hare inevitably wins, flattening with the first hint of danger and freezing until its fear gets the better of it, then careening off at up to 70 m.p.h. On rare occasions I have got as close as ten yards, but at that range it's almost impossible for a human to move without making a hare-detectable sound.

Lepus europaeus
, the brown hare, is a woodland animal and normally nocturnal, but gardens and fields of crops are often irresistible to them. I had seen none all winter but now the sunshine and the smell of new grass winkled them out of the woods. They gambolled and frolicked across the lawns in the dawn dew, adopting our mood, as excited about the radiant spring weather as the rest of us.

Buds began to explode. The birches, usually not leafed until the end of April, shimmered in a pastel haze. The horse chestnuts are always the first to leaf in spring and to colour up in autumn. They burst through their cinnamon sticky buds thrusting their five-to-seven-lobed leaflets into the sunlight as though they had something to prove. The avenue of balsam poplars hovered in a mist of heady scent, known as the Balm of Gilead, oozing from gummy oleoresins in the leaves' brown and papery protective sheaths, not from the leaves themselves. As they split open, for a few days we drifted through an aromatic tunnel as old as the Bible. Like birthday candles, hazel catkins trembled in fired sunlight, firing puffs of yellow pollen into bright air.

It wasn't just hot, although it certainly was, it was also refreshing. As smooth as silk, an alluring breeze fluttered through every day, teasing its way unnoticed into every cranny. Its invisible caressing fingers probed deep into places not normally warmed until July. Bumble bees hummed through glowing sheaves of daffodils. Oh! How we were all duped. Looking back, recalling the laughter and the happy surge of endorphins that wafted us through our work for the whole month, how completely we were taken in. How drugged we were by the sun's brassy overtures. I overheard someone say, ‘If this is global warming, I like it. Bring it on!'

Global warming it may or may not, in the long run, prove to have been; a climatic aberration it certainly was. It was a ludicrous extreme, a ridiculous blip, a spike of perfidious deception. And we fell for it. We thought it was the early spring to crown all springs. We thought it would never end;
that it would mellifluously drowse into a summer of dreams and the bright remembered days of childhood. ‘Isn't it great?' We all nodded.

*  *  *

The main road winds up the glen mimicking the meanders of the river. To the north-west the glacial valley is a wall of spiny gorse, hundreds of acres of steep, impenetrable thicket. It's one of the great delights of spring in the glen. We move in a golden dazzle of coconut and almond perfume. The gorse and broom flowers daub the sun-facing, thousand-foot slope of the valley-side in a blur of gaudy colour. Beneath it lies a dense, umber quilt of winter-killed bracken, the new crozier shoots still to appear in April. At its height in August, unshaded by trees, the bracken can reach over six feet tall. Deer vanish into its jungle in an instant. Wading through is a strength-sapping struggle against rigid, stringy stems and rough, scratchy fronds. When the frosts return in the autumn it pleases me to see it rust away, finally collapsing to a foot-snagging tangle of crinkly undergrowth, where it lies all winter. When the snows cover its tangle, it provides a haven for voles and mice, but it is also where the lissom weasel hunts unseen.

The snows were long gone. February had been dry and cold, March was now hot, and that beguiling, desiccating breeze had been insinuating its way into the dead bracken for weeks. The gorse sizzled around it, wallowing in its orgy of scent and colour. Both were as dry and crisp as cornflakes.

Longing for a beer at the end of a long hot day, my son Warwick took off for the pub three miles away. He arrived at eight thirty and at last the pint foamed in front of him. As he raised it to his lips his mobile phone rang – a friend calling from the other side of the valley. ‘Sorry, mate, but do you know your house is on fire?' Warwick never got his beer.

We should have seen it coming. We were half asleep in all that sunshine. We hadn't even put out a fire warning. We all knew the bracken was tinder and the gorse was explosive. We were caught napping.

For ten minutes mobile-phone signals fizzed from the mast high above us. It was a call to arms. Some of us were in baths, others asleep; some were online, yet more slumped in front of the television after a full day's work. Glinting in the evening gloom, cars streamed, like frightened fish, the quick mile to Warwick's house. Thankfully it wasn't on fire, but the hill behind it had exploded, making it appear that the house was engulfed.

Something, perhaps a cigarette carelessly thrown from a car window, or possibly even a mindless youth ‘seeing if it would burn' – something we'll never know – caused a flame to lick into that roadside bracken. In seconds it was an inferno. The breeze tunnelling down the glen quickly fanned it up the steep slope and into the dense jungle of pyrotechnically charged gorse. By the time we got there it was an unassailable wall of flame and smoke five hundred feet high, stretching a quarter of a mile down the valley towards Aigas.

Between us and the source of the fire, dotted along the
valley, are five houses. These had to be our first concern. The fire brigade, a gang of local Beauly boys, arrived with a tender and immediately radioed for more. An hour later there were eleven. They came from far and wide, their blue lights flickering through the darkness. Their screaming sirens could be seen and heard for miles before they arrived. Once we knew that the brigade boys were stationed beside each house, spraying roofs and gardens, and that the occupants were safely evacuated, we could gather our team of field staff to assess the task ahead. Young ranger trainees and old hands, all nine of us, accompanied by a tender and a professional team of firemen impressively equipped with masks and goggles, breathing apparatus, knapsack sprays and fire-proof suits and helmets, progressed to the moor above the loch, to a downwind position overlooking the fire. What we saw stopped us dead in our tracks.

A mile away, a cliff of flame and smoke three hundred yards wide was surging towards us as fast as a man could run. It raged through banks of gorse and broom and was rapidly fanning out into the open heather. There was no chance of tackling it in the gorse thickets – the heat was immense – but we could at least slow its progress as it probed and zigzagged out into the heather. Hopefully we could prevent it closing in on our precious native woodlands and forestry plantations.

At this moment came a shock, which, at first, we couldn't take in. The senior officer in charge of the professional fire-crew told us that he and his men wouldn't be able to help us fight the fire. They were bound by ‘health and safety
regulations', he explained. After dark they were allowed only to fight fires that were threatening houses and lives. ‘But it
is
heading towards us, towards our houses and our lives,' we pleaded. ‘If this wind keeps up it will be on us in less than a couple of hours.'

‘Sorry.' He shook his head. ‘We can't help, but you can borrow our long-handled beaters.' It was no good standing arguing. With torpedoed hearts we headed towards the flames.

I can tell you that fighting a bush fire is a hell all of its own. Armed with shovels and beaters we pitched in. Warwick took charge. He lined up the team a few yards apart and attacked the vanguard of the flames charging towards us like an angry enemy. The plan was to break up the line of fire into more manageable bites.