The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (19 page)

So no precise details about where. But the landscape was fascinating, low rolling hills of thin topsoil, seeming very bare, with scarcely a windbreak: an eastern England archetype. ‘My God, it’s cold here in the winter,’ Gill said. It was the morning of 2 March. It was cold and dry. To my delight, there were lapwings calling and displaying. We walked down a path through a small wood and out on to the plains, and at first we saw no sign at all of
Lepus europaeus
, while I asked Gill about the animal’s attraction for her.

People were misinformed about it, she said, mentioning the female hare’s habit of giving birth to her young, the leverets, in the open field, in a mere depression in the grass called a form, in contrast to the rabbit’s comparatively safe birthing chamber in its burrow. ‘People said hares are poor mothers, that they have their babies on the ground and leave them. But when I took time to study them, I found they were brilliant mothers, absolutely wonderful mothers. Before they have their young, they spend weeks watching who goes across their land. Female hares will have their young almost in the same spot all their lives; they will find an area that’s very safe, and before they even mate, they will know what crosses that area.’

Over the years she had built up a rich body of observation, with many small curious details. Hares took dust baths, she said. ‘When they find an area of dry powdery sandy soil, they will go and roll in it. There’s a sort of etiquette. A hare will wait for another hare to finish before that one goes in.’ The youngsters would gather together in a group and chase other creatures. ‘I’ve watched them chase crows, pheasants, anything that happens to settle near them. They’ll chase them away.’ You could tell a young hare, she said. ‘The snout is shorter. There’s no damage to the ears. Older hares have damage to the ears, especially the bucks.’ And of course, she had often witnessed the mating behaviour,
the mad March hares, the chasing and the boxing, which was once thought to be two males battling over a female, but is now thought to be nearly always a doe hare fighting off an unwanted buck’s advances.

Hares gradually began to appear on the fields as we walked deeper into the farmland, usually fairly distant, the odd animal here and there, and then small groups of them, scattered around, some of them closer. Once you got your eye in they were conspicuous, not least for their ears, black-tipped and perpendicular, and it became clear they were plentiful. God bless the farmer. They seemed to be calmly going about their business – ‘nibbling o’ the green’ – but as I scanned one of these groups two animals suddenly leapt at each other face to face with a flurry of forepaws and I cried out: ‘Yes!’ Gill smiled and said: ‘There you are.’ It was just for a second, though. Quick as a shooting star. I found myself wondering, had I really seen it? And then it happened again, this time for longer, and in the binoculars I could see the hares’ white bellies as they danced at each other, circling around upright on their hind legs with their front paws frantically flailing, trying to land blows. They stopped and sat watching each other for a short while a few yards apart, like boxers in their corners, then – almost as if the bell for the next round had rung – came together again in a collision that was truly aerial: each leapt up towards the other and their whirling paws clashed while they were still in mid-air, before the frenzied sparring continued on the dancing hind legs, and in my mind I heard the shout of young schoolboys alerting their companions when a scrap breaks out in the playground:
Fight! Fight! Fight!

Up and down the rolling hills we saw it then, in different groups of the animals, short outbursts of boxing, longer matches, interspersed with frantic chasing of one hare by another, which more hares would sometimes join – Gill said it was the youngsters, who would do it even though they didn’t know why they
were doing it – and watching it all, I found an unstoppable elation spreading through me, which was more than just the excitement (though it was tremendously exciting) and more than just the gratification of finally catching up with the rarely seen reality behind a figure of speech. There was a sense of privilege: I was seeing a part of the reawakening, of the movement towards new life, which was extraordinary, which you wouldn’t ever normally see, and that was what was joyous.

It was like seeing the sap rising.

It was like seeing the sap rising at supersonic speed.

•

The other unconventional marker of the reviving year which I have experienced and found joy in is so unusual that I don’t actually know how to characterise it, as it emerges from modern electronics.

In the summer of 2011 the British Trust for Ornithology, Britain’s leading bird research organisation, began a project in which I had a strong personal interest. It concerned the cuckoo, the European cuckoo, the bird with a double claim to fame: it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, and its two-note
cuck-coo
call when it arrives in Britain in April is the best-loved, most notable, and most distinctive of all our sounds of spring, being a perfect musical interval (a descending minor third).

I was interested in what the BTO were doing because two years earlier I had written a book about the British birds which are summer visitors, the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, such as the swallow, the nightingale, the willow warbler, and the cuckoo in particular – the spring-bringers, I called them – some of which, the cuckoo included, were undergoing alarming declines in numbers. It was difficult to know where the problem lay, as migratory birds ‘live in multiple jeopardy’ – they may
face difficulties on their breeding grounds in Britain, or on their wintering grounds in Africa, or on the immense and gruelling journeys between the two which they annually undertake.

Quite a lot had by now been established about what cuckoos did during their summer breeding season – how they outwitted the other birds in whose nests they laid their deceiving egg, such as reed warblers or meadow pipits, how the cuckoo chick got rid of its rival chicks once it was hatched, to monopolise the attention of its foster-parents – so the BTO research project was an attempt to focus on the rest of the cuckoo’s year, the journey back to Africa and the time spent there, to see if that might offer any clues as to its decline. Virtually nothing was known of it. There was a single piece of relevant data: a cuckoo ringed as a chick in a pied wagtail’s nest in Eton in Berkshire, in June 1928, was found dead in Cameroon in West Africa in January 1930.

That was it.

The rest was a blank. Where do cuckoos from Britain go in winter? Nobody had any idea.

The project aimed to remedy this by the use of modern communications: the miniaturisation of satellite transmitters had now gone so far that they could be fitted to birds and the birds’ progress followed step by step around the globe. It had already been done with larger species such as ospreys, and by 2011 the satellite ‘tags’ were small and light enough for a cuckoo to carry one without being hindered in its flight. In the event, five male cuckoos were caught that May, all in East Anglia not far from the BTO’s headquarters at Thetford in Norfolk, and ringed and fitted with satellite tags before being released.

In a clever move, the BTO gave them names. In the past, subjects of such serious and expensive scientific research (the tags cost £3,000 each) would probably have been labelled XPWS137 to XPWS141 or some such, but the trust had a sharp eye for public support and it named the five Clement, Martin,
Lyster, Kasper, and Chris. They sounded like the members of a boy band. And it went a step further in sassy modern media terms: it gave them each a blog, on which details of their separate journeys would be recorded, and which could be followed on the BTO website by anyone, more or less in real time.

The project paid off instantly and spectacularly, demolishing once and for all the accuracy of the ancient cuckoo nursery rhyme:

In April

Come he will;

In May

He’s here to stay;

In June

He changes his tune;

In July

He prepares to fly;

In August

Away he must.

August, huh? Well, Clement left Britain for Africa on 3 June and was in Algeria by 13 July. You start on your winter and it’s not even midsummer yet? The BTO scientists were astounded. Clement hadn’t changed his tune in June. He’d simply scarpered, and he was soon followed by Martin, Kasper, and Chris (although Lyster stayed in the Norfolk Broads till mid July). That was only the start of the revelations. The researchers were further taken aback by the direction and nature of the migratory journeys, as they unfolded, for they split into two vastly distant routes but ended up in the same place. Three of the birds, Chris, Martin, and Kasper, flew down through Italy, over the Mediterranean, and straight across the Sahara desert, while the other two, Clement and Lyster, went to Spain and flew around Africa’s Atlantic edge, more than a thousand miles to the west. Yet by the end of the
year they had all recongregated in the same, little-known part of the continent, the Congo river basin. Cuckoos from southeast England, it was revealed, fly 4,000 miles to Congo for their winter (not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the DRC, the huge former Belgian colony, but its smaller neighbour to the north, Congo-Brazzaville, the French Congo that was). Nobody knew that. No one had any idea. It had been assumed that they probably went to West Africa, to Senegal or somewhere. Even more surprising was just how close to each other they ended up. By the new year, Clement, Martin, and Lyster were all wintering on the Téké plateau north of Brazzaville, a sparsely inhabited area of grasslands with forests along the rivers, Kasper was on the Téké plateau’s southern end, while Chris was further to the north-east, just over the border in the DRC.

As someone with what you might call a professional interest in cuckoos, I was wholly absorbed by all of this, and followed the fortunes of the five birds closely from the start: you could see precisely where they were (or at least, where their tags had last transmitted) at any given time, on Google Earth. It was wonderful, cutting-edge ornithology, it was thrilling to see the discoveries as they happened, to watch the ancient migration mysteries unfold, surprise after surprise. But a greater surprise lay in store.

On 7 February 2012 I logged on to the BTO website and its cuckoo pages and read the summary of what was happening with the birds, which had now been in Congo for two months. There were no recent data on Chris or Clement. Lyster had moved 75 miles north to Ndzakou. Martin had moved 90 miles north and was close to the Likouala river. And Kasper had leapfrogged these two, and from further south, had moved 350 miles north to be close to the Congo border with Gabon.

Something stirred in my brain.

I read it again. Lyster had moved north. Martin had moved north. Kasper had moved north.

I clicked on the map and looked at the movements, the thin straight lines, orange for Lyster, green for Martin, and yellow for Kasper.

They were all pointing in the same direction. Northwards. Northwards towards . . . where I was sitting . . . and with a mixture of astonishment and intense delight, I began to realise what I was witnessing, on the screen in front of me.

They were coming back.

The great migration cycle had begun again, and it suddenly dawned on me, however impossibly hyperbolic it might sound, that I was seeing something no one in human history had ever seen before.

I was watching the spring coming, from 4,000 miles away.

I wanted to shout out, at the top of my voice. I wanted to run out into the street, grab the first passer-by, drag them in to my computer screen and cry,
Look! Look! It might be February, it might be freezing, but here comes the spring! Down in central Africa! On its way to us! Right now!
But the pathetically conformist part of me prevailed and I merely sat there, awestruck at what I was watching, and let the joy wash over me (for joy it truly was) while I wondered what had triggered the great shift. What was the cue? Some whisper in the tissues of faraway Norfolk, and its reed warblers, and their tempting riverside nests? A change in the African rainfall pattern? A variation in day length? Whatever it was, it had instructed the birds, in imperious terms which brooked no denying:
start again
.

From then on, of course, I closely followed their return journeys, which provided another revelation – all British-breeding cuckoos, whichever route they take to fly south for the winter, fly back north in just the one way, with a major detour, a major left turn, to the West African rainforest; they swing across to Nigeria, Togo, and Ghana, where the spring rains bring forth a burst of insect life, which the cuckoos use to refuel before the arduous crossing of the Sahara.

They need it. For it was a period of cuckoo tragedy as well as cuckoo triumph, illustrating just how dangerous and demanding the annual migratory treks can be. Clement, who had left England so astonishingly early, died in Cameroon on 25 February, cause unknown – he could have been taken by a predator or shot for the pot by human hunters – while Martin died, the scientists believed, in an unseasonal and severe hailstorm near Lorca in southern Spain on 6 April, and Kasper stopped transmitting in Algeria on 9 April, although it was thought that could be a case of tag failure. But Chris and Lyster successfully made it to England in late April – and on 30 April the BTO team actually went and found Lyster in the Norfolk Broads, and caught sight of him, to say welcome back. They were elated.

At one remove, I was elated too. Not only for the happy return, but to have witnessed the detailed unfolding of these 8,000-mile odysseys, through some of the most starkly differing landscapes on the planet. Since leaving the placidity of East Anglia, the cuckoos had plunged into extremes: they had crossed the world’s biggest desert, the Sahara, and the world’s densest rainforests, in West Africa. They had flown around the Atlas mountains and the western Congolian swamp forests (legendary home of the mokelembembe, Africa’s version of the Loch Ness Monster). They had seen not only France, Italy, Spain, and the Mediterranean, but also Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic. They may have seen Paris; they may have seen Timbuktu.