Gods of the Morning

John Lister-Kaye

Description

'No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill, about encounters with wild creatures. Its pages course with sympathy, humility, and wisdom' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkFrom his home deep in a Scottish glen, John Lister-Kaye has watched and come to understand intimately the movements and habits of the animals, and in particular the birds, that inhabit the wild and magnificent Highlands. Drawing on a lifetime of observation, Gods of the Morning is his wise and affectionate celebration of the British countryside and the birds that come and go through the year. It is also a lyrical reminder of the relationship we have lost with the seasons and a call to look afresh at the natural world around us.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Northern Scotland

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782114161
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

GODS OF THE MORNING
‘I love this book. It quickens the heart with hope and wrests real beauty from keen observations of the natural world. If only we could all be as attentive to the life around us as John Lister-Kaye. No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill, about encounters with wild creatures. Its pages course with sympathy, humility, and wisdom’
Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
‘Gods of the Morning is an exquisitely observed account of a year in the life of a Scottish glen, backed by a deep understanding gleaned through decades of study by a working naturalist, and homing in on the struggle the local wildlife is facing in coping with weather patterns that have become more and more unpredictable’
Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country
‘The spirit of nature holds many unknowns, mysteries and magic. John Lister-Kaye questions these unknowns with perfectly crafted words, delving so deep that you can almost feel nature’s pulse’
Colin Elford, author of A Year in the Woods
‘Gods of the Morning is an extraordinary, beautiful and honest book by a writer of profound personal and scientific knowledge. Few books urge me to read them again but this is one of them’
Virginia McKenna
‘John Lister-Kaye is a rare species – a respected naturalist and a consummate wordsmith. Whether in person or on the printed page, there is no one I would rather choose to guide me through the glens in search of Scotland’s wildlife’
Brian Jackman
‘John Lister-Kaye is one of the most joyful, inspirational naturalists I know’
Kate Humble
‘Gods of the Morning is a rich treasury of secrets stolen from the Highlands, seen through the eyes of a great naturalist’
Chris Packham
Also by John Lister-Kaye
The White Island (1972)
The Seeing Eye (1979)
Seal Cull (1979)
Ill Fares the Land (1994)
One for Sorrow (1994)
Song of the Rolling Earth (2003)
Nature’s Child (2004)
At the Water’s Edge (2010)
GODS OF THE MORNING
A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year
JOHN LISTER-KAYE

CANONGATE
Edinburgh · London
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 415 4 eISBN 978 1 78211 416 1
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Ted Hughes extracts on p.43 ‘Crow’s Theology’ & p.50 ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’ from Crow, p.68 ‘The Thought-Fox’ from The Hawk in the Rain, p.176 ‘Deceptions’ & p.191 ‘March Morning Unlike Others’ from Season Songs. All reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; p.120 & p.152 J. A. Baker, The Peregrine. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1967, J. A. Baker; p.158 From Nature Cure by Richard Mabey. Published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group; p.203 Scott Weidensaul Living on the Wind, North Point Press, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; Edwin Way Teale Circle of the Seasons. Works by Edwin Way Teale are copyrighted by the University of Connecticut Libraries. Used with permission; p.215 Extract from Richard Ryan’s ‘The Thrush’s Nest’ by permission of the author, from Ledges (published by Dolmen Press, Dublin, Oxford University Press, London, Humanities Press, New York, 1970); p.249 From ‘Natural History’ © 1930 E. B. White. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved; p.261 From Crow Country by Mark Cocker. Published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; David Wheatley ‘The Pine Marten’, by kind permission of the author c/o The Gallery Press; p.279 From The Man Made of Words © 1998 by Scott Momaday. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.
For Arthur Williamson with love
‘Let us haste to the cool fields, as the gods of the morning begin to rise, while the day is young, while the grass is hoar, and the dew on the tender blade most sweet to the cattle.’
Georgics 3 324 ff – Virgil
Contents Preface    1    Blackcap    2 That Time of Year    3 So Great a Cloud of Witnesses    4 And Then There Were Rooks    5 Prints in the Snow    6 A Swan for Christmas    7 The Day the Sun Stands Still    8 The Gods of High Places    9 A Dog’s Life 10 The Memory of Owls 11 The Long Wait 12 The Sun’s Rough Kiss 13 Buzzard 14 Comings and Goings 15 Nesting 16 Summer Night 17 A Day of Spiders 18 Gods of the Morning 19 Arthur and the Treecreeper Acknowledgements
Preface
In all its incalculable ramifications and contradictions, nature is my love, and its study and interpretation – natural history – have been my life and my work for half a century. How many people, I often wonder, can indulge their private passion in their everyday job? I don’t have to be told how lucky I am. But it doesn’t end there. For more than forty years I have lived and worked surrounded by mountain scenery that can still stop me in my tracks, and by some of the most highly specialised wildlife to grace Britain’s wild places. How many people in Britain today ever get to see a golden eagle?
In 1976 I set up a field studies centre here at Aigas, an ancient site in a glen in the northern central Highlands – it was Scotland’s first. It is a place cradled by the hills above Strathglass, an eyrie looking out over the narrow floodplain of the Beauly River. Aigas is also my home. We are blessed with an exceptionally diverse landscape of rivers, marshes and wet meadows, hill grazings, forests and birch woods, high moors and lochs, all set against the often snow-capped four-thousand-foot Affric Mountains to the west. Golden eagles drift high overhead, the petulant shrieks of peregrines echo from the rock walls of the Aigas gorge, ospreys hover and crash into the loch, levering themselves out again with a trout squirming in their talons’ fearsome grip. Red squirrels peek round the scaly, rufous trunks of Scots pines, and, given a sliver of a chance, pine martens would cause mayhem in the hen run. At night roe deer tiptoe through the gardens, and in autumn red deer stags surround us, belling their guttural challenges to the hills. Yes, we count our blessings to be able to live and work in such an elating and inspiring corner of Britain’s crowded isle.
Yet, for me, the real joy and sometimes the pain of living in the same place for all these decades is that I have come to know it at a level of intimacy few can achieve, and as a result the Aigas place has infiltrated my soul. Of course, in that time I have witnessed disasters as well as triumphs. We have lived through insensitive developments and land-use practices that have been profoundly damaging to the essential wildness of the glen and its wildlife. But we have also witnessed the return of the osprey and the red kite, and the pine martens have recovered from being one of Britain’s rarest mammals when I first moved here to being locally common and a regular feature of our lives.
Birds have been at the heart of my work and my life. So much more visible than most mammals, they are my gods of the morning, lifting our days with song and character. But they have also been important thermometers of environmental health and change – not always a happy story. Like so many other places, we have lost our moorland waders: curlew, lapwing, greenshank and redshank all nested on our moors and rough pasture thirty years ago – none now – and the quartering hen harriers and short-eared owls have vanished with them. Even the oystercatchers, whose exuberant pipings used to be the harbingers of spring, have gone from the river.
Whether these dramatic shifts in wildlife fortune have been brought about by climate change alone, or whether the various seismic shifts in agriculture and forestry policy we have lived through have changed the nature of the land, or whether some more insidious cause lies hidden is very hard to guess at, far less to know. It could be, of course, that, as is so often the case in ecology, the combined impact of several factors colliding at once has made survival so unpredictable for so many species.
I am wary of blaming climate change for everything. In my opinion it has become a touch too glib an explanation for too many aberrations in long-established wildlife patterns, such as the arrival and departure of migratory birds; a convenient get-out for those who are not prepared to admit that relentless human pressure on the globe and its natural resources has always brought about the extinction of species and the destruction of their habitats. That is what humankind has always done. But I cannot deny that in the last few years it would appear that the pace of climate change has accelerated and we have entered a period of total weather unpredictability.
We have no idea from one year to the next whether the summer will be hot and dry or dismally cold and wet; whether winters will be absurdly mild or gripped by snow and ice, or what extremes of heat or chill we can expect. We can no longer predict how successful our common breeding birds will be – the swallows didn’t bother to nest in 2012 – and we aren’t the only ones kept guessing and bewildered. Some wildlife can adapt quickly; others fail and disappear, with us at one minute and gone the next.
This is a book of encounters, observations and speculations based on what I have witnessed around me in my time. It attempts to explore how some of those changes have affected our common and not-so-common birds, their breeding successes and failures, their migratory arrivals and departures, their interactio