look; the nest box has a hinged lid secured with a twist of wire, but it seems an unmerited intrusion at this delicate moment in their new lives, so I abandon the thought. She is in and out in a flash, a tiny buff and black torpedo exploding out of the hole with those white cheeks gleaming like a nun’s alb. She alights for a second on a twig, just long enough to pull focus. She’s as tight as a nut, sleek and pressed together like modelling clay. Did this really evolve from the amoeba by the gradual process of random change? Did Stanley Miller’s experiment running wild for a few million years cause methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour to fuse and spark into this bright, hot, fizzing fistful of protein; this seeing, singing, dutiful, nest-proud mother of five to eleven would-be replicas, blind and naked and unspeakably ugly, trapped in the moss and down cup she has so lovingly woven?
It’s far too comfortable to live with assumptions. Although adult great tits eat a wide variety of insects, seeds and fruit, they feed their chicks almost exclusively on caterpillars. It is safe to say that without a steady supply of caterpillars they couldn’t raise their young. So all they have to do is lay their eggs fourteen incubation days before the caterpillar glut emerges and that’s them sorted – isn’t it? But how do they know when the caterpillar glut will be? It peaks at widely differing times, sometimes by up to three weeks from year to year, dependent upon the weather, but particularly the temperature in late April.
If it’s very frosty caterpillar eggs won’t hatch because buds won’t open, the leaves will be retarded and there won’t be anything for the caterpillars to eat. These hatchling tits have to be fed immediately. They will quickly weaken, chill and die if each chick doesn’t get a good feed in the first few hours. I do the crude sums in my head: let’s say nine chicks, each needing at least fifteen of these squiggly loopers a day, plus a couple of good fat ones of other species if possible – that’s a hundred and fifty-three caterpillars to be garnered in across the fourteen hours of daylight available to them, as well as food for the parents themselves to keep up their strength – call it one hundred and eighty. That’s ninety per adult bird: six and a half per hour if they don’t rest – a beak-ful back at the nest every thirteen minutes, including travelling and searching time. No wonder they’re not singing. And they have to keep it up for the full twenty days before the chicks fledge and another week after that before they can feed themselves. So how do they know just when to start laying eggs?
Is there some grand programme out here? Are we back at school, obediently plugged in to a timetable? Is there a Fat Controller in charge, keeping everyone up to speed, frantically barking out rules and regulations like the Water Authority? Or is it just chance; are we all a mess of pottage and protoplasm, tossed in together like the kestrel and the slow worm – some you win, some you lose – and you just keep praying that your number comes up? Hmmm. Maybe I should have stuck with the hazens. I walk on, wishing the sun would get to work.
‘Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in his essay ‘Nature’.
. . . The simple perception of natural forms is a delight . . . To the body and mind . . . cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman . . . comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself.
Somewhere in the Massachusetts woods, the cradle of American literature, the transcendentalist writings of Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were to change the English-speaking world’s perception of nature. They established a distinctive rhythm for this literature of meditative excursions. They mark a purposeful shift from the imperative Abrahamic diktat requiring the conquest of nature in Genesis – ‘. . . and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ – later to be justified and permanently imbued in the founding principles of Christian society by the seminal thirteenth-century teachings of St Thomas Aquinas.
At a time when many of the great wildernesses of the New World were being opened up for the first time, Emerson and his colleagues leapt from the notion of taming the wild to harmonising with it in spirit and deed. The concept and philosophy of nature conservation as we know it owes much to these exuberant and assertive scripts. But they also perpetually question what it is all about. ‘To what end is nature?’ asks Emerson early in his famous essay, a question that presents itself to every naturalist over and over again. As science systematically strips back the scales from our eyes the questions loom larger, not smaller. ‘God knows why I’m here at all,’ a man I met working in the woods said enigmatically to me recently. A few days later I saw a teenager walking down the Inverness street with ‘Perhaps the Hokey-Cokey is what it’s all about’ boldly printed across the back of his sweatshirt.
Out there, just over the fence and up the steep field, on a high spot where, like clenched knuckles, grey boulders nudge through the grass, sits a solitary hooded crow, a blackguard of the crow clan known round here as a ‘hoodie’ – a term as far away from endearment as you can get, but one often spoken with the sort of respect afforded to Attila the Hun, or, in Highland Scottish parlance, the Wolf of Badenoch, the fourteenth-century warrior chief (Alexander Stewart, 1st Earl of Buchan) who sacked Elgin Cathedral and many other sites. The hoodie has a reputation. It also knows exactly why it’s here.
It is a handsome bird, strong and well balanced, with a black hood – as someone once said to me, ‘as black as Calvin’s bible’ – and a grey mantle as pale and soft as a cloud that threatens a shower. Everything else is black, crow-black: the sharp, powerful bill, the gimlet eye, the tough, springy legs and scaly feet, the long wings and tail – the satanic reputation. It is, of course, a race of the carrion crow, Corvus corone, one of the arch-rogues of the bird world, but the hoodie is awarded its own ensign – cornix, ‘of crows’. So he becomes the ultimate crow of all crows, the highly intelligent arch-knave of the corvid tribe, craftier than a raven and quicker to seize upon an opportunity; more cunning than his cousins the artful jackdaws, magpies and jays. Unlike the rowdy, gregarious rook, he is a loner, usually working alone or as one of a pair, furtive, sly and often seen to be malevolent with it. You can’t impugn a hoodie; he’s been there before you.
It is hoodies that will spot a sore on a sheep’s back and harry it, landing over and over again, savagely pecking so that the wound stays open, letting in flies to lay their eggs. Before anyone notices it the sheep is down, ‘struck with the fly’, as they say round here. Hill sheep often lie undiscovered for days. Maggots will do the rest. A suppurating carcase is a hoodie’s idea of nirvana.
It is the hoodie that will swoop down and chisel its stabbing bill into a clutch of four newly hatched curlew chicks, one by one, as they struggle to find cover among the heather, leaving them maimed and strewn across the moor like victims of a sniper, cheeping out the pathos of their own imminent destruction, moving on to the next one, and returning later to finish them off, while the yikkering cries of the frantic mother rend the air overhead.
This one bird on the rock looks innocent enough, sunning itself, occasionally preening. But it is neither innocent nor alone. Its partner is perched atop the lightning-scorched mast of a Scots pine, only just in my view some three hundred yards away to the left. Between them they can scan a whole hillside containing the spread hirsel of my neighbour Geordie McLean’s sheep. They are waiting. Opportunistic patience is the name of this game. They are waiting and watching the lambing field: waiting for events to unfold, for an afterbirth or a stillborn lamb, watching for the slightest chance to raid and plunder.
It is May and the wide pasture is dotted with ewes like a repeating emblem on a counterpane. Many are yet to produce. Little gangs of strong lambs cluster like schoolchildren in a playground. They rush off in a game of Tag, tearing
