Several months later, one of the field centre’s education officers needed a piece of reindeer fur to demonstrate the efficiency of natural fur insulation to some visiting school-children. I opened one of the bags and was astonished to find that large patches of the pelt had been shaved clean down to the leather and the removed fur, both woolly and brittle, had been skilfully woven into an orb-shaped nest the size of a cantaloupe melon. On pulling it gently apart I found that the hairs had been systematically sorted and separated: the long hairs for the structure of the ball and the softer wool for the inner lining. The inside of the nest issued the essence of fertility, like leaf mould, making me think of wood anemones and unfurling ferns in spring – none of that uric rodent reek I remember from keeping pet mice as a boy. I was sorry I had disturbed it and put it back carefully, glad that they had found a use for the reindeer skins and happier to have them living in the cellar than in my wardrobe. It would be hard to imagine a warmer, cosier or more secure winter refuge from which to produce a family.
* * *
As I walked back to the house from the rookery, the unmistakable yelping chorus of geese floated to me on the damp air. I stood still and squinted into a sky of dulled metal. They were high, just below the ruffled cloud base at around three thousand feet; it took me a moment to locate them. There they were, in an uneven V-formation, shifting and flickering in a large wavering skein of tiny silhouettes, like flies on a high ceiling. I shivered. Not a shiver of cold – I was well wrapped – but a shiver of deep, transcendental unity. No sound in the world, not even the rough old music of the rooks, etches more deeply into my soul than the near-hysterical ‘wink-winking’ of pink-footed geese all crying together high overhead. It is a sound like none other. Sad, evocative, stirring and, for me, quintessentially wild, it arouses in me a yearning that seems to tug at the leash of our long separation from the natural world.
Their arrival in the early autumn sets a special seal on the turning year, repeated again with their departure, back to their Arctic breeding grounds in the spring when the last few rise, with rattling pinions, and wheel away into the north. Autumn or spring, I never tire of their unrestrained dissonance, which surrounds us during the winter months when tens of thousands of grey geese gather on the Beauly Firth. Scarcely a day goes by without a skein or two passing over, or when we go east to the Black Isle, the moist coastal fields are always cluttered with their corn-gleaning and grass-plucking flocks.
It seems that naturalists (and perhaps not just naturalists) need these sounds to help us locate our passions, to ground us in the beliefs we hold about the natural world and to link us with our origins. My old friend Brian Jackman, the celebrated wildlife journalist, who has enjoyed a forty-year love affair with East Africa, tells me it is the night roaring of lions as he lies awake in his tent on the Masai Mara that does it for him. For Lennart Arvidsson, the half-Lapp-half-Finnish doyen of the Arctic forests, who first showed me wild lynx tracks in the Sarek snows, it is the long-drawn howls of timber wolves, rising and falling on a moonlit night. Dame Jane Goodall insists it is still, after nearly half a century since they catapulted her to world fame, the hoots and pants of a troop of chimpanzees deep in the forest that sets her blood tingling. Television wildlife cameraman John Aitchison recounts that, for all his globetrotting, it is the calls of waders – greenshank, curlew and redshank especially – on the Scottish salt marshes of his Argyllshire home in the crisp air of a morning in early spring that raises the hairs on his neck. And Roy Dennis, my ornithologist (and a brilliant all-round naturalist) colleague and friend of more than forty years, once told me that the combined fluting calls of tens of thousands of common cranes assembling on the wetland steppe of Hortobágy-Halastó in Hungary was a moment of pure transfiguration for him.
My geese and the shiver pass together. It is autumn, late autumn, and winter is no longer imperceptibly snapping at our heels. Its clawing fingers have finally gripped. I know there will be a piercing frost tonight. I pray that the rooks still gleaning manna from the barley fields are well prepared; bad luck for the hungry barn and tawny owls – I know that at least some of the wood mice have moved indoors. Like the robins and the blackbirds, the shrews have no choice: they have to keep going whatever the season, bound to the treadmill of twitching out from the dark confines of the leaf litter their own body weight of invertebrates every day.
The squirrels are well stocked up and these last, straggling goose arrivals will have joined the vast flocks that are gorging on the late spillings from combine harvesters on the stubbles of the Black Isle. A final few ash leaves gyrate silently to the yellow carpet of their own design. The crinkly oak leaves hang stubbornly on, only reluctantly releasing when winds scour through. And the silky-haired beech leaves will rattle like crisps until the spring when the new growth will finally force them off.
As I return to the house I see wood smoke pluming from a chimney. Lucy has lit the sitting-room fire, a sight that brings an inner glow and a smile to my tingling face. As the darkness closes in I shall repair to my old armchair with a book. The Jack Russells will yawn and sigh as they stretch themselves across the hearth rug at my feet. Winter brings blessings of its own.
3
So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Hebrews 12:1
Those few last geese to arrive from the Arctic, straggling down from the great heights at which they travel, often many thousands of feet, are special to me not just because I love to catch their excited voices on the wind and see their silhouetted chevrons against the clouds, but because they are living, crying witnesses to nature’s biorhythms present within us all.
We all migrate. We venture out and we return home. We send forth our young. The winged seed spiralling to Earth from a sycamore or an ash; the rowan berries ingested by Scandinavian fieldfares and redwings are cast to the hills; the lonely ‘outcast’ badger that dug himself a temporary home among the roots of one of our western red cedars last year; the spiders I witnessed ballooning down the wind on their silk threads; the rooks and jackdaws I was watching this afternoon, surfing the wind over the river fields; the swallows and house martins swooping low into the stables each spring; the salmon surging up the Beauly River to spawn every summer – all of these and myriad more organisms around my home, around all of us all the time – are responding to the secret codes emitted by the sun and the spinning Earth, received and processed to serve each species’ individual ends. ‘So great a cloud of witnesses.’
They’re heading out, patiently running the race their needs have set before them. They all need to feed, to breed and to survive, like surfers riding the waves of Fate. I, sitting tapping these words into my laptop, and you, reading them – whoever we are, wherever we may be and whatever our private pretensions – are also part of that same grand opera: the pull of life’s imperatives. We migrate, whether a few yards before finding a suitable place to put down roots or circumnavigating the globe, like the Arctic tern, which travels ten thousand miles to the Antarctic and back again every year, patiently making the most of our lot, our personal shout at the survival of ourselves and our species. That’s what migration is.
These days we understand it – at least, quite a lot of it. Seasonal bird migration in particular has been well and widely studied. We now know, for instance, that migration can be triggered by temperature, by length of daylight hours, by weather conditions and by diminishing food supplies, but we also know that it is genetically controlled. Glands churn and swell, hormones swirl. The imperative to get up and go when we need to is written into the electrochemical circuitry of human brains as well as bird brains.
In the case of geese, intricate studies have demonstrated that their innate circuitry and navigational skills are added to year on year by experience. Old birds get canny: they learn to read the wind. They know exactly the right moment to head off, and the youngsters follow. I’ve always loved the expression ‘wise
