Gods of the Morning (15 page)

A raging fire, a fire out of control, seems to awake some deep primeval fear within us all. For thousands of years mankind has used and abused fire in equal measure. Like water, fire is an elemental component of our lives, echoing back to our long ancestral origins; we welcome it into our homes and we would miss it terribly if we couldn't. To me a living fire is one of the essential comforts of home; as I sit and stare into the flames it seems to tug at the long leashes of our cave-dwelling past. To have to live without it would close part of me down and gnaw at my soul, denying a fragment of who I am. Yet its control is such a fine line, as anyone who has witnessed a house fire, or even a bad chimney fire, knows only too well. The sight of this blaze lighting up the night sky in a sinister orange glow, which,
people told me later, could be seen fifty miles away, filled me with a deep and humbling dread.

The ranger team pitched in with vigour. Warwick, Brenna, Elspeth, Alicia, Dave, Scott, Duncan, Kate and Sarah surfed into the fray on a gut-clenching wave of adrenalin. They swung and they beat and they cursed the night air blue. They stamped and they flailed their beaters and shovels with all the gusto of rampaging Vikings. They were magnificent.

The choking smoke blackened their faces and seared their lungs. The oxygen they so desperately needed was being sucked away by the flames so that they had to turn back, coughing and spluttering to gulp cleaner air where they could find it. Their hearts thumped, like military drums, and their arms flailed endlessly, up and down, up and down, relentlessly, urgently, dangerously, often hopelessly. Their eyes, crazed with a mix of fear and tenacity, streamed tears of anguish, exhaustion and stinging pain. Still the fire came on in tireless rushes of snapping and charging flame, and always suffocating heat. No sooner had we extinguished a few yards of heather than we had to rush back because it had sprung to life again. The swirling wind dervishes, born of the sucking heat, seemed to taunt us with ever fiercer spurts of bursting, racing flame.

There was little I could do to help them. Their young arms and legs and lungs were far better suited to the fight than mine so I busied myself with ferrying water to drink and wet cloths to cool their blackened brows, stamping the embers behind them, boosting morale wherever I could. Lucy and her team of domestic helpers arrived with
sandwiches, chocolate and steaming, sugary tea to fuel their energy and sloosh down their searing throats. There was no time to stop: refreshment had to be taken on the job, snatching a bite here and a swig there.

They kept going long into the night. Just when I thought they must surely collapse and give up, fired by some strange inner strength, they seemed to find a renewed burst of power to keep their flailing arms at work. It was heroic and the battle analogy was frighteningly real. Often the enemy wouldn't die. It took two, three, sometimes four blows to subdue the flame, only to find that it flared up again a few feet away to shouts of ‘Look out! Behind you!' and ‘Quick, it's getting away!' so that they had to turn back and flail all over again. It was as if they were fighting for their lives, calling up feats of endurance way beyond any prior assessment I could have wildly guessed at. As I stood back and watched them, a line of shadowy figures lit like entranced fire-dancing tribesmen in the smoky darkness, I felt an overwhelming wave of pride.

They kept it up all night, holding the fire at bay. Only as the dawn emerged in a steely line behind us did the brigade boys come up and join us with their smart equipment. The knapsack sprayers were a great help and I was glad to call the rangers in, back to our little environmental centre, the Magnus House, where we had set up a command post, a place to eat and wipe charred faces and collapse into a chair after many hours of punishing toil.

We had done well. Winning? Perhaps not, but we had certainly slowed the fire's progress and contained it
throughout the night. Without their effort it would have reached our woodlands for sure. Elspeth, the nimblest and fittest hill runner in our team, offered to sprint up the half-mile of open moorland to Bad à Chamlain, the trig point on the high peak of the moor, to view the extent of the damage and the direction of the flames. The news she radioed in was deeply depressing. The fight was far from over and a new fire from further up the valley was now heading our way again on a brisk breeze.

What was clear was that we needed superhuman help. I asked the brigade chief to telephone for a helicopter. ‘We'll be there in half an hour,' promised the control room. Helicopter fire-fighting protocols are well rehearsed in the Highlands and I knew what a boon it would be to have airborne support. The aircraft dangles a nylon bag on a long line, dunking it into a loch or river, scooping up a ton of water at a time, then flies straight to the line of flame, laying out the water in a drenching rain just where the fire would like to go.

We were lucky. The pilot was an ace. Each ton of water came at four-and-a-half-minute intervals, streaming back and forwards between the loch and the fire, the pinewoods between them thudding and swaying with the power of the blades and the downdraught. Neighbours streamed in to help at both ends of the fire. Farmers, crofters, keepers and stalkers willingly piled in, a gang of local men and boys to join the line down in the valley with the pros. Our ranger team had had an hour off, an hour of food and rest, while we took stock in the rising light of the morning.

As I looked from face to face, the young people with whom I work every day were scarcely recognisable. The smoke-blackened faces and blistered hands, the broken fingernails, the singed eyebrows, eyes rubbed red and streaming, hair in wild tangles, girls' soft complexions smudged and blotched, the boys' unshaven, charred and streaked, like commandos after a jungle skirmish.

When the helicopter thudded into view to tackle the moor, the team leaped to their feet and headed off up the hill once more. They joined the line of pros, now fifteen of us, all fighting the moorland together, Warwick directing the helicopter to douse the new fronts. I was speechless with admiration, a heart overflowing with the gratitude of a people being delivered from a vicious and brutal occupation. I stood a little way off and watched. We were winning at last.

*  *  *

It was to be another full day before we could be confident the dragon was dead. The brigade boys stayed with us to the bitter end, then another night just to make sure it didn't spring to life again. The ordeal was over. We had lost about two hundred acres of scrub and another hundred of moorland, all consumed in Shakespeare's ‘violent ends'. Twenty-four hours later it rained – the first wet day for six weeks – and as April arrived it snowed.

We had crashed from the sublime to the absurd and alarming. Winter returned not just to Scotland but right across the UK, with swirling rage and dramatic destruction.
On 3 April the
Telegraph
reported:

Tens of thousands of homes have been affected by power cuts over the last two days, as companies blamed snow for the disruption. Motorways were jammed as perilous ice and frozen snow forced drivers to slow down, with drifts up to seven feet high on exposed higher ground. Yesterday, a snow plough – sent out to rescue a stranded motorist – came off the road itself and had to be rescued by gritters, while unsuspecting campers woke up to waist-high snow on the North Yorkshire moors.

Temperatures plummeted. Here at Aigas we recorded –8º Celsius overnight on 4 April. Sharp frost continued for a full week. This was much more than old Dunc Macrae's lambing storm. It was just the sort of extreme climatic aberration we had been warned would characterise climate change. It was sudden and severe, actually the worst April weather for thirty years. Even when temperatures began to lift, brooding clouds dominated our days. Rain and wind kept our heads down and our collars up. April would eventually record 250 per cent of normal rainfall for the Moray Firth area.

The fire had been a huge distraction at the end of our heatwave, and it continued to be so as we tried to assess the damage it might have done to wildlife, particularly to ground-nesting birds and, doubtless, invertebrates too, although mercifully the nesting season was barely under way. It would be many more weeks before we could draw any firm conclusions. Now, looking back, we know that,
frightening and potentially disastrous though the fire was, it was but a missed note in the bigger opera of that unseasonable heat wave and its abrupt reversal into winter, followed by the soggiest spring for years. None of us had any idea how devastating it would be to so much around us – but that comes later.

13

Buzzard

High, high, buzzard, high
From scarce moving wings
Suspended in the sky
Tear, tear your metallic scream
From the lava lungs
Molten through the throat.
Terror, terror is struck,
Into the soft gloved ear;
And the frantic brain
Spins the limbs to action,
Or to frozen fear –
Of the butchering plummet,

the entering claw,

Of the sweeping sickle,
And the ravening maw.

‘Buzzard', J.L-K.

April normally means buzzard. Wings suspended in the sky, circling high. It is now that they pair off and display, often two or three pairs together in a spiral of reaching pinions, turning, tilting, wings and backs glinting in the bright sunlight between bursts of fizzing showers. I hear their
blade-thin cries slicing the new day soon after sunrise. A glance upward tells me that again this year they will nest in the birch wood behind the loch.

Few birds and sounds so roundly augment this landscape. We have golden eagles and ospreys and peregrines, all iconic species of the wild Highlands, of course, but I see those species as the lofty aristocrats who may or may not deign to grace us with their presence, the occasional ormolu on the satinwood frame of our glens and hills. But buzzards are the yeomen of everyday occurrence, the working tenantry of the land, and a buttress to the fabric of our days. As the robins and rooks are to the gardens, so the buzzards are to the fields and woods and moors. They are a given, expected and required. Our woods would not be the same without them.

As a small boy of perhaps seven or eight, I was walking through an English wood with my father. We came to a clearing where pheasants had been fed grain from a hopper. There, in a tangle of pale feathers, lay a dead buzzard, recently shot or poisoned by a gamekeeper. I had never seen a buzzard close up before. In fact, even if one had been pointed out to me as a silhouette in the sky, I don't think I had ever properly imagined what it was like. Now it was here, at my feet. My father wouldn't let me touch it for fear that it was contaminated with strychnine, the poison regularly used back then, but gingerly he held it up by a primary feather and its broad outstretched wings dangled four feet to the ground. The silence and the charged pathos of the moment are as vivid to me now as if it were yesterday.

In those days buzzards were an uncommon sight in the countryside throughout Britain. They had been persecuted – shot on sight, trapped and poisoned for killing pheasant poults and partridges – to such an extent that they had been driven out of the farmed countryside and survived only in remote and mountainous regions. They are still persecuted in some places today, but the protection afforded them by the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act has enabled a steady recovery to their present status of being possibly the commonest bird of prey in Britain, at around 80,000 pairs. They are also highly visible. Their habit of perching on telegraph poles and other prominent viewing points, their soaring spirals on bright days of lifting thermals and their mewing cry (much abused in television dramas the moment a scene goes anywhere near a forest, a mountain or a moor), all blend to make the buzzard's presence very obvious.

Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetised to the other,
Float orbits.

‘March Morning Unlike Others',
Ted Hughes

So successful has their recovery been that there is now talk from sporting lobby groups of lifting legal protection or even ‘a licensed cull' of buzzards in and around pheasant shoots, an action that could be technically possible under the terms of the Act, as it is with fish-eating goosanders and
cormorants on salmon rivers. There is no doubt that buzzards kill pheasant poults. It is hardly surprising that if thousands of young, inexperienced game birds are released together in one place they are going to create a honey pot of attraction for predators of all sorts. I have some sympathy for gamekeepers who do their best to guard against predation by carefully siting their feeders and release pens and by providing lots of cover for the young pheasants, but I would never support lifting the legal protection for birds of prey and certainly not ‘a cull' of any kind.

We have seen only too clearly what happens when there is no legal protection for wildlife. We have lived through dismal eras of not just persecution but of annihilation of our native wildlife in the name of game shooting and direct and indirect commercial exploitation. I have no reason to believe that the same thing wouldn't happen again. For me it boils down to a matter of ethics, of personal philosophy and national responsibility.

Man's record of looking after wildlife is grim. A free-for-all for whales for commercial gain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drove several species to the very brink of extinction. We still have to argue fiercely at the International Whaling Commission to prevent that happening again. Penguins used to be rendered down for their blubber and seal pups were skinned alive for their fur. In Canada by 1877 tundra swans had been hunted for their quill feathers down to the last sixty-nine birds left in the wild. Beavers were hunted to extinction for their fur throughout a dozen European countries. Elephants were and still are slaughtered
for their ivory, and the Chinese market for rhinoceros horn remains a threat to the survival of critically endangered African rhinos. The list goes on and on.

In a country of starving people, it is very hard to argue that wildlife should come before people – impossible to say, to an African hunter, ‘You can't feed your family today,' because the bird or antelope he wants to kill is endangered. But in a wealthy country like Britain there can be no valid argument against protecting wildlife, with measures in place to mitigate against serious pests to food production and injurious or disease-carrying species, such as rats.

Economic arguments, such as those wheeled out by the game-shooting fraternity – ‘This estate needs commercial pheasant shooting to survive' – aren't really economic arguments at all. They are code for ‘We want to shoot pheasants or grouse or partridges and we don't want wildlife to interfere with that.' To argue their case at an economic level is to imply that the estate has no choice, whereas, of course, there are many ways in which estates can and do make money without having to engage in commercial shooting. There are also many ways of conducting a shoot and of developing a sporting culture that works with wildlife rather than against it.

I entirely accept that it may not be possible to shoot as
many
pheasants, partridges or grouse by doing things differently, but I seriously question whether the enjoyment of shooting necessarily requires a huge bag. Some of the very best shooting days I have ever had have been what are called ‘rough' days of walking with a gundog and two or three
friends; days when we have taken healthy exercise, tested our skills and accuracy, thoroughly enjoyed the fresh air and ended the day with a mixed bag of pigeons, a few pheasants, a brace of partridges, a couple of rabbits and a hare, perhaps even a duck or a goose. For me those memorable shooting days are enhanced by seeing a buzzard and a red kite, perhaps a peregrine or a hen harrier, occasions when we can stop and admire their aerobatic agility and delight in the diversity of our countryside.

I'm not arguing against responsible shooting. I was reared in the country among shooting and hunting people; I was very predatory in my youth, shooting most species on the quarry list from ptarmigan on the snowy mountain tops to standing up to my waist in the freezing slush of a tidal ditch on a January dawn waiting for a flight of wild geese. Before the myxomatosis virus decimated rabbits in Britain in the 1960s, and when they were a serious agricultural pest, I remember shooting rabbits at harvest time until the barrels of my gun were so hot that I couldn't hold them. Game shooting is an important recreation and social activity in the countryside, but it sometimes gets out of control.

In the past Britain's shooting culture has operated strong ethical standards and codes of practice, but those have slowly eroded as the sport has been commercialised as a result of sharp changes in leisure time and the availability of the sport at every level in society. At the same time agriculture has been industrialised, hedges ripped out and fields purged of invertebrate ‘pests' and ‘weeds', so that the opportunities for wild game species, notably the native grey partridge and
feral pheasants, to survive and breed in the wild have radically reduced, thereby necessitating that shoots buy in reared birds for release.

Often in pretty unsavoury battery conditions the game-farm industry now produces some thirty-five million pheasant poults for release into the British countryside every year. I recently learned with horror of one English estate that ‘put down' (a euphemism for ‘released into fields and woods') 150,000 reared pheasants, partridges and mallard ducks every year so that a continuous procession of commercial shooters could be flown in for a day's massacre of birds forced into the air by battalions of beaters, six days a week throughout the shooting season. I was told that a digger had dug a mass grave in the form of a long trench so that the virtually valueless shot birds could be tipped in and buried.

Practices such as these are not sport; nor are they ethical. They are a disgrace and will eventually bring the whole shooting world into disrepute. The authorities and game lobby groups need to act quickly to outlaw such gross infringements of what should be a reputable and responsible country activity. I cannot help observing that many of those pheasants, whether as poults just released, killed on roads or wounded with shot and crawling off to die, will have been substantially responsible for fuelling the sharp rise in buzzard numbers throughout the UK. No, for me, along with other birds of prey, the buzzard remains an enjoyable signal of countryside diversity, not a threat to be vilified and ‘controlled'. And what would come next? Herons at fish farms? Ospreys on fishing rivers and streams? Peregrines on
grouse moors? Golden eagles? Why not control otters that have the temerity to eat fish?

Before leaving this subject there is one more angle to explore – actually a much more far-reaching and urgent aspect of the countryside-management debate and one already alluded to. Those memorable days of rough shooting almost always took place on old-style farmland where there was a broad mix of long-established habitats. There would be rough pasture for sheep and cattle, arable cropland of plough or stubble, root and cover crops, all broken up by windbreak copses of tight-packed conifers, dense hedgerows, old stone walls, boggy and marshy corners of fields, stagnant ponds, patches of scrubland, thickets of hawthorn, broom and gorse, gentle woods of native trees of all ages and many different species. This uplifting mosaic of habitats would always be bound to produce some rabbits and a hare or two, a covey of partridges and a few pheasants, one or two mallard and plenty of wood pigeons. It is also a sound descriptor of Countryside, with a capital C. It is what Countryside perhaps could be like again, at least in some areas. Add to this cocktail some open heather moorland, windswept mountains and lakes, a bog or a fen, and you have achieved a nature-conservation ideal rich in wildlife. But that is not the reality of the world we live in.

What we have is 78 per cent of the UK landmass locked into industrialised agri-business of cropland mechanically and chemically purged of everything that lives and moves except the desired crop. Perhaps as much as 80 per cent of farmland in our countryside is dominated by these
agricultural monocultures dedicated to food production. We should not be surprised that shoots have to import reared pheasants.

In recent years, farmers, conservationists and governments have worked much more closely to re-create threatened habitats and to move towards a richer biodiversity. There are many commendable ‘stewardship', ‘wider countryside' and ‘native woodland' schemes, and there are many farmers, big and small, who really believe in maintaining a healthy diversity of wildlife on their farms. European funds are paying for hedges to be planted again. There is also a slowly expanding organic sector, but the reality remains that the huge majority of cropland has to be fed with fertilisers, sprayed with pesticides and prepared and harvested with giant machines.

Livestock farms are mechanised too. Single-species leys of nutritious rye grass have replaced ancient flower- and clover-rich pastures; meadows have vanished, and cattle and sheep are dosed with systemic drugs to eliminate pests and diseases, often resulting in toxic dung, which, instead of being a vital food source for invertebrates, kills off bugs, beetles and flies in the fields. That is the world we live in and the dog-and-stick days of buttercup-twirling yore are not likely to return anytime soon.

Worthy though many of these schemes are, we have been very slow to understand that we face an invertebrate crisis in Britain. The knock-on effect of decades of chemical farming (fertilisers are chemicals) is that the most basic foundation of biodiversity, the microbes in the soil and the
invertebrates – bugs, beetles, bees, butterflies and other beasties most of us have never heard of – all of which serve to feed most birds and ultimately just about everything else, have been slowly and silently declining; the seed-bearing weeds upon which so many invertebrates and birds depend have been selectively poisoned out. Stewardship schemes unquestionably help, but until we face up to the looming invertebrate crisis and begin to restore these essential building blocks of wildlife habitats, vast swathes of our countryside will remain locked in sterile paralysis.

It is sad that conflicts between farming, shooting and nature conservation tend to be polarised. I have enjoyed shooting and been a livestock farmer on a modest scale for forty years. I am very well versed in the economic arguments, but I also care passionately about wildlife. Working with nature rather than directly against it is always likely to be more successful for everyone – a principle we are often slow to acknowledge. It was those two soaring buzzards this morning that brought me back to my desk and I am grateful to them for that.