moves on. I have to confess that I never gave Squawky much thought again until one day twenty-two years later I happened to be driving past that Somerset village (the prep school had long since closed) and turned down its only street, trying to remember where precisely Squawky had been housed. I recognised the cottage straight away, unmissable for the spacious wire-netting aviary attached to its gable end. I parked the car and walked up the garden path. To my utter astonishment, I was met by rasping cries from a ragged-looking and extremely ancient rook with an almost bald head. It was Squawky.
He was certainly not beautiful. His naturally featherless cheeks had developed the leathery baldness of a welding glove, a mark of age all rooks over three produce as an adaptive response to habitually piercing the damp soil with their dagger bills in search of leatherjacket grubs. The soiled feathers around the bill simply give up and fail to grow; in the same way some vultures and storks are bald for endlessly thrusting their heads inside rotting carcasses. At nearly twenty-three Squawky’s cheeks were huge and as muddy white as a mushroom, made more sinister by the almost total absence of black feathers on his domed skull. He looked like a bad caricature of a vulture with a straight bill or a stork with a short one. But most comical of all were his pantaloons. His feathery trousers, reaching well below his black-scaly knees, were a cross between gamekeepers’ plus-fours and the 1930s tennis shorts worn by Indian army colonels.
The kind farm-labourer husband was long departed to build celestial aviaries, and Squawky and the widow Ruby, his almost-stone-deaf, now-in-her-eighties mistress, had lived on in happy andro-corvid companionship for many years. I spent a rapt and nostalgic hour shouting to her so loudly that Squawky, several yards away outside, became agitated and excitedly joined in most of the conversation. Her hearing can’t have been so bad because at one point I made the forgivable slip of calling the bird ‘my rook’. As quick as a flash the old lady leaned forward and corrected me: ‘No, dearie, my rook.’
I fed Squawky some porridge and scrambled egg – his favourite dish of more than two decades lovingly prepared by Ruby, which he gobbled noisily and with great vigour, swiping his bill clean on the edge of the bowl when he’d finished. I departed still not quite believing that rooks could live so long.
* * *
My enthusiasm for rooks has digressed me from what was so extraordinary in November. They should not have been nest-building at all. I didn’t know it at the time, but something was upsetting the biorhythms that govern the lives of most of our wildlife, whether visible from my bath or not. The rooks were confused. At first I thought it might be the length of daylight that baffled them, imagining that early November had the same length of day at our latitude as their normal nesting time in February, but I was wrong. There is more than an hour and a half’s difference – far too broad a wedge to disorientate an intelligent bird like a rook.
Could the temperature have been the same, triggering some deep genetic impulse to build nests? But, no, the mean temperatures for early November and late February were more than 4º Celsius apart for the previous year. So what had done it? What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?
5
Prints in the Snow
What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen,
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
‘Sonnet 97’, William Shakespeare
December is winter, no denying it. If wet November winds pile in, sodden but mild, you can still argue that autumn lingers on, but not in December. November trails its coat; December slams the door. And it isn’t just the long darkness, although its melancholy gloom does smother everything, even hopes and dreams.
It’s the shopping list winter brings to our Highland glen that becomes so inescapable in December, and any of it can happen at any time: the bone-aching cold, as temperatures skirt around freezing for days on end, a cold that seems to penetrate far deeper than that of harder frosts and from which I can find relief only with a hot bath. Then the unexpected plunge to –15º Celsius of a moonlit night; squalls of merciless sleet; the mess of slush; black ice bringing sudden, bruising falls to the unwary; castigating rain; knife-edged winds from the north and east that slice off your legs at the knees; the absurdly crimped daylight for any outdoor work. As our field centre maintenance man, Hugh Bethune, says of outdoor chores, with characteristically succinct Black Isle sagacity, ‘In December if you don’t get it done before lunch, you’re buggered!’
Little wonder the badgers stay curled up underground for up to ten days at a stretch. One animal we monitored carefully with stealthcams all winter chose to emerge only as far as the sett entrance, sniff the cold, wet wind and turn back to bed. Even when we put out tempting food for him he would stray only a few feet from the sett to reach it before shuffling back. Yet, for a naturalist, one of the joys of early snows is the chance to read the land and its wildlife in a way you can only dream about until that first tell-tale dusting. Snow brings a new dimension of awareness, a brief window into the other world, the world of animals abroad and of life unseen and uncharted for the rest of the year.
Last night’s was well predicted. The council gritter came through in the early morning and did its stuff; well before dawn I could see its amber flashing light on the glen road in the distance. An inch and a half at most – nothing, really – but I couldn’t wait to get out. It had fallen wet, not powdery, deep enough to take a full print, and the temperature hovering at zero had just clinched its sharp edges, preventing any melt – perfect tracking snow. It made that rubbery crunch as I trod, packing fast into the tread of my boots.
It is the silence of mornings like this that always grabs me, makes me stand and listen. It is as though the world has stopped spinning for a moment and everything is still. The birds, those few that are left through the cold months, are also silent. I have to stand for several minutes before I hear the thin seep-ing of goldcrests high above me in a Douglas fir. Then a cock blackbird comes hurtling through, heading for the bird table. He lands with a chuckle, ebony tail erect and his tangerine bill flaring in the new light, like a struck match.
December is not a month for birds. We have the tits, of course, the busy blues, the bossy greats and the cheeky coals. They all visit the bird feeders and tables together in a flutter of tiny wings, tolerating each other, but only just. Our resident robins come too, prattling and ticking, rather than singing, saving their energy to fight off the cold. The common woodpeckers of the north, the greater spotteds, decked in their livery of black and white and red, like a guided missile, slice through the cold air in an undulating bee-line for the suspended peanut feeder. The woodpeckers always bring a touch of style and regimental sharpness to the group as they cling vertically to the wire. Recently a cock pheasant has been striding in to peck and scratch under the feeders. He doesn’t belong here and won’t stay long, but his extravagant Oriental glamour makes me smile. I’m not out for the birds this morning. I want to see who else has been calling.
First to the hen run. If we’ve had visitors in the night it will always be to the hens. Over the years I have found the tracks of just about everything with sharp teeth surrounding the wooden hen-house: foxes, badgers, stoats, pine martens, wildcats, otters, weasels, even mink. It must be exasperating for a hungry predator on a night of stinging cold to know that a hot, delicious dinner is only an inch or two away on the other side of slender boards.
Every once in a while something scores. Usually a pine marten, unless (happily only on rare occasions) one of us forgets to drop the hatch at dusk (Lucy blames me, I her) – then Mr Fox has the time of his life. In the morning headless corpses are strewn all round the paddock, and for weeks afterwards the dogs find straggled hands of feathers, the ragged ends of wings or the odd scaly foot abandoned under dense rhododendrons.
The pine marten is a different matter, harder to keep out and devastating if he gets in. Martens are intelligent, diligent and dextrous. If one chews his way in under the door, squeezing his liquid body through the gap like toothpaste from a tube, the result is mayhem. Once the killing instinct is triggered, and because he can’t drag a dead hen out through