Findings Read online

  Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic, oyster catchers. In the school playground, sparrows – what few sparrows are left – chirp from the eaves. There are old swallows’ nests up there. It’s late April, but where are the swallows? The birds live at the edge of my life. That’s okay. I like the sense that the margins of my life are semi-permeable. Where the peregrines go when they’re not at their rock ledge, I couldn’t say.

  By the last days of April the swallows had arrived to twitter on our telephone wire. I refocused, and there were the peregrines sitting a yard apart up on the cliff. He was still as stone, like a little votive statue on a high plinth. She was restless, stretching and preening. She lifted her wing and stretched it slantwise across her back, a balletic movement. Then she scratched her ear with her yellow claw. Then she preened her breast. It was about 8.30 on a Saturday morning. The children came into my room demanding breakfast, but I was leaning out of the window in my nightclothes staring through binoculars. I thought she might be going to fly soon, and wanted to catch the exact moment when she stepped off the ledge and flew, to see where she headed.

  ‘Swallows are back. Can you hear them?’ I said.

  ‘Mum, can we have our breakfast?’

  ‘Just a minute…’

  Dammit. I’d glanced away for a moment, and when I looked back the peregrine had quit fidgeting and flown. But the door burst open again. ‘Mum – can we have our breakfast? In the living room? So we can watch the cartoons on telly?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m coming.’

  I took an hour at lunchtime to cycle out and see if the ospreys were on the nest, this year as last, and they were. Even from two fields away I could see a black and white head, like a helmeted guard looking over a rampart. There was a stiff breeze and blousy clouds; the light was so bright it made your eyes ache. The tide was in and I made my way down to the estuary by a farm track which ended at a place where a smaller river empties into the Firth. When it got too muddy, I left the bike and found a way through the reed-beds till the water was before me like a secret place. Gathered in the mouth of the smaller river, just resting on the water, were swans – nine-and-fifty of them, like Yeats’s flock at Coole. Lots were youngsters with brownish plumage showing through the white, so I wondered if this was a gathering of those too young to breed, a club for adolescent swans. Now one would rear and beat its wings, then settle again on the choppy water.

  I’d seen my ospreys, and the gathering of swans, and satisfied I turned to head for home again. Walking back to the bike I happened to glance upward, and there, flying toward me, was something huge, something I knew I had never seen before. The hair crept on the back of my neck and I fumbled to get the binoculars back out again. As it approached, it was like a brittle flying stick, side-on, growing thicker as it neared. It flew hugely and slowly, and looked as if it would pass directly overhead. I knelt down on the earth to make myself small, and steadied myself to focus the glasses on it, all the while telling myself to be calm, to look carefully and remember. It was big. Look at the wings, I told myself: straight and rectangular, with black and fingery ends. See how it’s flying – not like a heron, not with heavy, confident wing-beats, but more…shivery. As it passed right over my head, it was the strangest thing, a weird cross-shape. I swivelled round on my knees to watch it travel southward over the fields and the village. It seemed to be making toward the pass in the hills the motorway takes, and the binoculars foreshortened the image, making the hills stand forward and loom bigger as the bird moved against them. Then it turned side-on, and its flight was almost tremulous for one so big. In profile, I could see clearly the head held far out on a neck so long and fragile it might snap, and the long legs and feet extended just as far behind.

  Like some medieval peasant granted a vision, I was kneeling in a field, fixated by this uncanny cross in the sky. Then, as it moved slowly out of sight, I raced for home excited as a child, holding its image in my head like a bowlful of blue water – mustn’t spill a drop.

  This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.

  There is an RSPB reserve some twenty miles away, and I called the warden there. He was warm in his enthusiasm. Probably a common crane, though not so common here, only ten had ever been recorded in the county. They breed in Scandinavia, so it had wandered a long way on its long, nervy wings.

  I watch the peregrines. On my desk the binoculars are closer to hand than the phone, than any reference book. If I swivel my chair and lift the binoculars, I can see them. It’s becoming a tic. I remind myself of two friends, one who lays his mobile phone on the pub table, or surreptitiously in his pocket, and checks for messages. The other has trouble with her contact lenses and glances sideways for long moments as she’s speaking, until the lenses float back over the iris and she can see clearly again. I don’t know if either are aware they’re doing it. How many times a day I glance through the glasses at the peregrine’s ledge, I don’t know. Could be thirty, could be a hundred.

  I’m worried about them, though. When you’d think they should be sitting on eggs, both were often on view. Now, I haven’t seen either for days.

  J.A. Baker says, if you can’t see the falcon, look up, and though I scan the sky I see nothing but grey clouds, and I wonder instead about J.A. Baker. Who was this man who could spend ten years following peregrines? Had he no job? Perhaps he was landed gentry. What allowed him to crawl the fields and ditches all day, all winter, until he could tell just by a tension in the air that there was a peregrine in the sky? His book is full, tremulous, overwrought, hungry. He writes like a falcon must see and so allows us to see, too. I walked up through sloping fields of coconut-scented whin, onto the crest of the hill, and watched a pair of buzzards wheel and cry above me, so close I could see her beak open as she mewed, and the pale, barred undersides of her wings.

  This is the paradox: here is a person who would annihilate himself and renounce his fellows, who would enter into the world of birds and woods and sky, but then in an act of consummate communication to his human kind, step back into language and write a book still spoken of forty years on.

  The RSPB man urged me to write to the county bird recorder with a description of my crane, and I did. The bird recorder – an amateur position – is an ornithologist who gathers and collates sightings and reports sent by other birdwatchers in the county. The recorder emailed back a friendly reply, saying my sighting would be circulated to the rarities committee and ‘judged’. I imagine them at once, these judges of bird-sightings, bewigged and beaked like young owls. He attached last year’s bird report for the county, ‘In case you’re interested.’ I am, though pushed to explain why. It pleases me to know that on September 12, at Braco, were gathered 119 mistle thrushes, or that a crossbill was present in the Black Wood of Rannoch. It’s what Louis MacNeice speaks of – the world being ‘incorrigibly plural’.

  Out of the window this dull morning, four or five crows were harassing not a peregrine, but an osprey, which was making, with steady beats, along the hillside. The osprey twitched at the crows, tilted, recovered and continued in its purposeful flight. The male peregrine turned up at exactly ten to three. I had to leave to fetch the kids from school, and glanced with the glasses just in time to see the resident jackdaws waft upward as he jinked through them and arrive at his stance. He stood for a few minutes, preened a little, then was gone again. It’s the first time I’d seen either in days and I’m beginning to wonder if they’re nesting at all.

  April went out like a lion, with storm rains and winds. I’m sure now there’s something wrong. The peregrine’s ledge has an unlived-in, derelict air, a dock leaf twirls in the wind. ‘Keep watching!’ the bird recorder had said, cheerfully, and I’ve been watching for four days now, but seen neither peregrine. It seems they have vanished into thin air. It happens – the Bird Report records only two pairs of peregrines attempting to nest in the entire county. Both failed. I may be wrong, I often am, but the peregrines’ plinth is losing its specialness, just becoming part of the rockface again. If I was J.A. Baker, I’d feel the

  absence of their gaze.

  Gales blew up during the evening. Dark fell early. From the front windows we watched black clouds driving down the estuary, but the back gardens were a tropical sight; trees and bushes in their full green bent and swayed. I slept badly, hearing the wind banging in the chimneys. In the morning the radio reported that gusts of 100mph had blown over Cairngorm, but at four I had been lying awake, wondering about birds. There are many things to fret about in the small hours, but never before have I worried about the tensile strength of an osprey’s nest, atop its swaying pine.

  By morning, the rain had blown over but still the wind blew. I was fetching the children’s school clothes out of the tumble dryer, when I chanced to look out of the window and saw the male osprey himself, taking the same route eastward as he had before. He was again following the line of the hill, but then, with difficulty, he turned into the wind and began to tilt and battle against the gusts. His underwings looked very white when he banked, the tips dark and splayed. Two or three crows made half-hearted sorties toward the osprey, but they were minor nuisances and the big bird flicked them away. He looked as though he was trying to
get enough lift to carry him up and over the summit. There’s a fishing loch over there stocked with trout, a fast-food takeaway for a bird like this. Then the osprey was gone and I turned back to the dryer, looking for matching socks.

  What pleases about the ospreys is the quiet success of their return to their rightful place. A damage remedied, a change of direction in our attitudes, as the bird itself makes the turn into the prevailing wind. These were native birds, but they were hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century. Then, in the mid-twentieth, they began to creep back, and with human help the osprey have now re-established 150 nest sites in Scotland, and even one in England. Some sites are famous; they are public spectacles with viewing places and video link-ups. There are large road signs directing us to birds’ nests, and we don’t find this bizarre. I like knowing these things. I like being able to glance up from my own everyday business, to see the osprey or the peregrine going about hers.

  The crane was strange, out of place, a huge cross trembling in the air, the stuff of omens and portents. It made me excited and edgy for a couple of days. I await my ‘judgment’. With the peregrines, though, it’s something else: not the falconer’s worship of mastery, not a wish to identify with terror, with the predator over its prey. What it is about the peregrines is their rarity. I’m sure they’re gone now, but for a while I enjoyed the pleasure of a warm secret: I could watch this uncommon and handsome bird from my own window, and know it was there. J.A. Baker uses the word ‘flicker’. The peregrine flickers at the edge of one’s senses, at the edge of the sky, at the edge of existence itself.

  Last night, when long shadows lay across the fields and the evening sky, winnowed by the wind, was whitish blue, I cycled out to check whether the ospreys’ nest had indeed survived the gale, but a man was lying in the way. He was flat on his back on the path, ankles crossed, his hands neatly linked on his chest. A tobacco tin was sticking out of his trouser pocket, and he was drunk as a lord. Like one enchanted, he was gazing up through the branches of some pines. The rooks who live there were perplexed and they hung cawing in the wind as they looked down at the prostrate man who was looking up at them. I gave the man a wide berth, and cycled on.

  Findings

  Bone is subtle and lasting

  GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

  I hacked off the gannet’s head with my penknife, which turned into one of those jobs you wish you’d never started. It was a Swiss army knife, with a blade only two inches long, and a diving gannet can enter the water at 90mph: they have strong necks. It was early morning, low tide, and I was glad to have the beach to myself. When the head was at last free, I rolled the body with my foot. It was light and dense at once, still with much of its plumage, but the white breast was dirty and the black-tipped wings bedraggled. No doubt it was an Ailsa Craig gannet because it was washed ashore on Arran. Then I left the body among the dried wrack and shell-grit, and took the head home in my bag.

  It was the skull I wanted, a sculptural form, the sightless sockets and that great piercing bill. I could picture it mounted in a glass box and hung on the wall or, better, displayed on the low table here in my study. Phil, my husband, had made the table from a huge piece of oak he hauled out of the Firth. Two hefty, deeply weathered supports were each joined with six through-tenons to the single board of the top. The top is a slab an inch and a quarter thick, but light-coloured. A bird’s skull would sit well on such solid oak. Phil reckons it must have been a pier stanchion, before it came journeying downriver to wash up among the reeds. It was so big he couldn’t lift it, he had to tie it fast, wait till the incoming tide, then float it on a rope behind him to the slipway. There he sawed it into three, before he could get it home piece by piece in a rucksack. ‘Like carrying a fridge,’ he said.

  I put the gannet’s head in a jar in the outhouse and poured over it a solution of caustic soda. When we were kids, we used to shine pennies with HP sauce or Coca-Cola. I had a notion that caustic soda would dissolve the skin and flesh, but leave the bones intact. Nothing happened. Daily, I stirred the mess with a stick, but the gannet merely bobbed up to glare at me from the pot, the feathers still adhering to the skin of its skull. Eventually the bones didn’t clean but softened, and the liquid turned a foul brown-green and, gagging, I tipped the lot into a hole in the flowerbed.

  But there was Phil’s table and, on it, two white sticks I’d found at the east end of Loch Avich. There were thousands washed up there of these irresistible white sticks. They weren’t straight like magic wands or conductors’ batons, but sinuous like eels. I’d chosen two and left a whole strand of them behind. According to Norse mythology, the first woman and first man were fashioned from two sticks of ash washed up on a strand, and I remember thinking about that as I pleutered about on the loch’s shore, holding this stick and then that up to the evening light, and deciding between them.

  A gannet’s skull would be good to have. Or a whaup’s, but bird skulls are rare to find. I dare say most seabirds die at sea, and their weightless bones are pulverised by the water or the wind.

  Once, on a flawless sandy beach in Donegal, I found five silver fishes, freshly abandoned by a wave, glittering and bright as knives presented in a canteen.

  The yacht Annag was riding at anchor in the Sound of Shillay. The Sound separates two of the Monach Islands, Shillay itself and Ceann Iar, and although the sound was sheltered from the wind, the yacht was rolling and I was climbing over her side, clinging to what I’d learned to call the shrouds.

  We hadn’t intended to come here – in truth, I’d never heard of the Monach Islands before, but I lowered myself down the red plastic ladder toward the inflatable. We’d hoped to reach St Kilda but, as the skipper noted gruffly, nothing’s guaranteed in this life. He was an awk-shaped man called Donald Wilkie. The wind persisted too much in the east for St Kilda, and he was going to anchor here for the day. Meanwhile, we could go ashore if we wanted to, and see what the morrow brought.

  Suddenly, the yacht’s side heaved upward and the tender dropped away, a yard of sea water opened beneath me and I took fright. Donald shouted above the wind, telling me to tuck round behind him, and make room for the others. When they were both aboard he started the engine, moved away from the yacht’s white sides and turned toward shore. Sea water splashed over the prow and swilled around our feet, rain blew into our faces. We were all cowled in waterproofs and Donald looked especially monkish, as he stood at the tiller: a seafaring monk in a yellow habit.

  From their haul-out on the rocks ahead, grey seals watched our approach. Sometimes on the yacht, during a brief lull in the wind, we had heard them singing their sad whoops, each to each, but now we could barely hear ourselves speak above the engine. The seals seemed not to mind our coming, but as we neared, a party of eider drakes put out into the waves. We rode so low on the water in the inflatable, it was the island that looked as though it were being pumped up, swelling and assuming what shape it had. It was a low, uninhabited place ringed with dunes and pale sands. When we reached the shore, Donald used the thrust of the engine to hold the boat against the rocks just long enough for us to clamber out, find our footing and struggle up onto the grass.

  I’d never set foot in a yacht before this trip, never sailed the sea in anything smaller than a CalMac ferry, never approached land from the sea without a harbour and a town and all the panoply of human activity – stacked creels, diesel fumes, a church on a hill with a fish-shaped weather vane. I’d never understood you can draw a straight line across the ocean and call it a course. Ceann Iar is uninhabited by people but birds were breeding here, the air was worked by oystercatchers, fulmars, terns, and there were many rabbits, and sheep.

  When we were all three ashore, Donald turned the tender and headed back over the waves to his yacht. I stood for a few minutes, following his progress, letting the movement of the sea settle in my ears. Martin and Tim were taking off their red life jackets and zipping them round the horizontal bars of a sheep fank, so they couldn’t blow away. Maybe this is where the sheep are shorn. There were dollops of fleece at our feet, too rain-sodden to be blown away, though the wind blew strong.