The Outrun (13 page)

At this time of year in Orkney – the weeks around midsummer – it barely gets dark overnight: the sky just dims. This time between sunset and sunrise is known as the ‘simmer dim’ or the ‘grimlins’, from the Old Norse word
grimla
, which means ‘to twinkle or glimmer’. I feel like the only person awake on the island, and am usually the only driver on the road. On a clear night with little cloud, there is a perpetual sunrise or sunset during the hours of my survey.

I am lucky to have an excuse to stop and listen. It takes a few seconds for the car’s engine to stop running and quieten, then for my personal velocity to come to a halt, heartbeat to slow, clothes to stop rustling, for the noise in my head to fall away and the sounds of the night to reveal themselves. I become dark-adjusted and alert to noise: chin on the open window, cool wind on my face, occasionally catching my reflection in the wing mirror, ears held forward by my woolly hat into prime listening position. Two minutes can seem a long time when you’re concentrating.

Even at one a.m. – the darkest point of the night in British Summer Time – the birds are going bonkers. I hear the ‘classic three’ Orkney birds – bubbling curlews, piping oystercatchers and lapwings, which sound like a dial-up modem – nearly every time I stop. I note down unfamiliar calls to ask my knowledgeable
colleagues back in the RSPB office: ‘creaking bedsprings’, ‘haunted chicken’. They inform me that the ‘shivery baby goat’ sound I hear is snipe ‘drumming’, an eerie, memorable wobble made by its tail feathers. There are other noises too: of wind turbines, domestic animals and livestock, a flowing burn, the sea, wind and rain. I learn that, although I can’t see much on foggy nights, sound travels further in the mist.

The sun both rises and sets north-ish at this time of year, just dipping below the horizon, so surveying the north coast is particularly special. Speeding home, just getting light, the currents of Eynhallow Sound are churning through the mist. I park at the top of Wideford Hill next to the communications pylons and look down at the lights of Kirkwall.

I can go for nights without hearing a corncrake. The weather gets into the car. On the rare occasions I see another vehicle I wonder what they’re doing out in the country at this time of night, and they think the same about me. A few times farmers, and once a police car, ask me what I’m doing but I have a good reason. At times I’m scared, down an unfamiliar country road alone at night, shocked by a scarecrow. I’m connected to the world through my phone, Google Maps helping me navigate in the dark. On Friday and Saturday nights, I think about what my friends are doing back in London, reading their drunk tweets before they delete them in the morning. The survey can become monotonous, but when I’m flagging, the sky does something amazing. I love the mist that hangs below me in Orkney’s gentle valleys, as if I’ve climbed to the top of the beanstalk.

In the bottom right-hand corner of my photograph is a pair
of bright flashes – the eyes of a sheep I hadn’t even realised was there when I pointed my phone camera into the night. Livestock are close by, dark and quietly chewing. I’ve caught a goose, a hare and a teenager in my headlights. I caught the full moon in my wing mirror. I drove to the edge of the cliff, trying to get closer to the sky, looking out to smaller islands, with their lighthouses glowing, flashes of colour in the dark, reflected on Scapa Flow. I share the night with cats – their eyes shining in the dykes – voles and hedgehogs.

According to the timestamp on my photograph, it was 1.08 a.m. when I saw noctilucent cloud for the first time, on a back road in the Stenness area. I knew its visibility was limited to more northern latitudes, the weeks around midsummer and late nights, so I had a chance of seeing it when out doing the corncrake surveys. Tonight there it is, at the top of my field of vision, unmistakable. Fifty miles high, in the deep twilight, icy blue wisps hang like lightning crossed with cotton wool. I get out of the car and hold my phone to the sky, smiling like a nutter. At this time of night most clouds are silhouetted but the space cloud – it shines.

I am in perpetual hope. I want to hear corncrakes at each stop and briefly mistake for its call the quack of a duck, the churning of the blades of a wind turbine, the rasping breathing of a cow. But although I have heard quite a few, I have not seen one yet. They are extremely secretive birds, hiding low in the long grass.
In his poem ‘The Landrail’, John Clare describes the phenomenon of birds that can be heard but rarely seen as ‘like a fancy everywhere/ A sort of living doubt’. I begin to doubt my belief in corncrakes.

When I do find a corncrake – on a still night, they can be heard a kilometre away – it’s almost too much to believe. I get out of the car and, keeping to the road so I don’t disturb the bird, lit by the grimlins and my headlights, I move slowly towards the call until I can pinpoint its location by ear.

In my confusion I don’t know where I am. Dusk blends into dawn and I can’t say whether the day is ending or beginning. Then I’m confused by the sight of a cruise ship, all lit up out to sea, like a tower block floating in space.

But the light – by three a.m. I don’t need the car light to read my map – reveals where I have been all along. It’s just my familiar island. Surveying the West Mainland in particular, each road is full of memories. I stop at the former post office where my birth was registered while Dad was in hospital, at the school bus stop where I often found four-leaf clovers, at the passing place near Yesnaby where the police caught me drink-driving. I’ve driven thousands of miles within a fifty-mile-diameter island. I have driven all of Orkney’s roads and traversed its tracks, grooved its geography into my mind, its contour lines onto my skin, making it more difficult to leave again.

I have had to visit some of the smaller Orkney islands and I travel to them on the roll-on, roll-off – ‘ro-ro’ – car ferries that run on bacon butties and in nearly all weathers. On Sanday, I see a couple walking their ferrets off the ferry, hear two male
corncrakes call in competition from either side of a loch, and a story about a cow that swam a mile. I’m told on Stronsay about a corncrake that got caught in a lobster creel. On Eday, where there are no corncrakes, I hear about how fishermen on the isles didn’t want to learn how to swim so that if the boat went down they would drown more quickly. On Burray, the haar comes in but the fog turns pink in the sunrise and I can hear seals, across the fields, down on the shore, howling like ghouls.

As I drive, I try to unpick what happened: all the houses I’ve lived in, the lost jobs, the treatment centre, my aching heart. At first, I counted the days I had been sober, then the weeks. Now it’s just the months and the cravings come less frequently, but they still come. Driving home in a beautiful dawn, the only person on the road, listening to happy hardcore, I feel like the Queen of Orkney. Then, suddenly, all I want is a bottle of wine and it’s a good thing the island has no twenty-four-hour off-licences.

The main reason for the decline in numbers of corncrakes over the twentieth century is increasingly mechanised farming methods, in particular larger and more efficient grass mowers. Most corncrakes live in fields intended for hay or silage and when the mowers come to cut the grass, the birds – particularly the chicks – are usually killed. Corncrakes move away from the mower into the ever-decreasing area of uncut grass, and are eventually caught in the middle of the field and mown to death on the final swathe.

Once I’ve located the corncrakes, through reports from the public and my night surveys, I visit the landowners. I feel nervous driving down unfamiliar tracks, knocking at farmhouse doors, dogs barking. Older Orcadians tend to refer to women, regardless of marital status, as ‘wives’ so, arriving at farms to speak to farmers about the endangered birds on their land, I am announced with ‘The corncrake wife is here.’ The RSPB offers the farmers money to delay cutting or grazing the grass, or to mow in a ‘corncrake-friendly’ pattern: from the inside of the fields outwards, giving the birds more of a chance to escape. Every farmer is willing to discuss the options with me. I find them knowledgeable about the wildlife on their land and most are able to change the mowing pattern, although delaying the crop until August is often, despite the payment, too drastic a change. No one flat-out refuses: that’s not really the Orcadian way. They just say they’ll think about it, then I never hear back.

I learn as much as I can about this one species. I read scientific papers and follow research on their migration routes. They’re all that people ask me about. I accidentally replace other words with ‘corncrake’ when I’m typing; I change my ringtone to a corncrake’s call; I set a Google alert for corncrake references in the world’s media. Somehow this bird has become my thing. I am hallucinating a
Crex crex
call in the background of music on the radio and at night I dream of corncrakes.

In June 2011, fifty adult male corncrakes were caught on the Hebridean island of Coll, lured into nets by a taped call of what they thought was a rival male. Geolocators, weighing less than a gram, were attached to their legs on plastic rings. The following
summer, some of the birds were re-caught, and their tags revealed that they had travelled all the way to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This seems incredible: in Scotland, corncrakes are reluctant to fly at all, which is what makes them so vulnerable to farm machinery. There is even local folklore about them going ‘underground’ instead of migrating, turning into moorhens or perhaps riding on other birds’ backs. But fly they do, although just 30 per cent of adults survive the migration to return to Orkney the following year. Many are trapped in hunters’ nets in north Africa. Corncrakes need to rear a lot of chicks just to replenish the population, let alone increase it.

Since before I started the job, I’ve been reading
Moby-Dick
. I’ve been reading it for so long it feels like I’ve been on a three-year round-the-world whaling trip, carrying it back and forth every day, hefty in my shoulder bag, like a harpoon. I’m storm-crazed Captain Ahab, but instead of a whale I’m chasing an elusive bird. Although I’ve heard almost thirty males, I still haven’t seen one. The corncrake is always just beyond me.

On tough nights, I start to ask myself questions. Why save this bird, a bird seldom seen, a relic from the crofting times, a bird unable to adapt to modern land use? What difference does it make? And then I learn that, in 1977, corncrake remains were excavated from the Pictish and Viking Age site at Buckquoy, in Orkney’s West Mainland. It shocks me to discover that corncrakes had been here for thousands of years, yet in less than a century
we have all but wiped them out. Their decline is undoubtedly down to human activity so it seems right that we should take responsibility to conserve the last few.

An isolated male, perhaps the only corncrake on his island, calls for three, four, five hours a night, for months. One was heard calling on Flotta all summer, and I am delighted to learn that chicks were seen at the end of the season – he found a mate, after all.

I reach a total of thirty-two calling male corncrakes heard in Orkney during the season, just one more than last year. Each male that calls from the same spot for more than a few days is assumed to be accompanied by a female. Although numbers still remain low, since the RSPB’s Corncrake Initiative has been running, there has been a slight upward trend in Orkney. Unlike the fabled drowning sailors, the corncrakes are struggling against death and somehow it is as if my fate becomes intertwined with that of the bird. I’m trying to cling to a normal life and stay sober. They are clinging to existence.

My friend told me about when her mother died, leaving behind a husband and three young children. The family went on holiday in America, and my friend described her dad as ‘just driving’. You might feel that you can’t go on, yet you do, just driving to give yourself something to do while things settle, shift and gain form, until the way that life is going to be makes itself clear. I’m driving on, one-kilometre grid square by one-kilometre grid square. Imperceptibly, the churning in my chest is subsiding. Like when I cycled at night in London, I find relief by being in motion. One night, I realise I’m feeling
easier and more normal, even lucky to live and work here in Orkney.

This is a different kind of nightlife. The life I had in the city – parties and clubs – is no longer there for me but these never-nights, marking off grid references and following maps in the mist, they are my own. I’ve found no corncrakes tonight but dawn is coming, I’ve got a flask of coffee and I can hear seals.

There are wonderful moments. I make eye contact with a short-eared owl, plentiful this year and known locally as ‘catty faces’. It’s on a fence post next to where I park, and we both turn our heads and see each other. I gasp, the owl flies. One still-pink dawn, just before midsummer, I stop at the Ring of Brodgar on the way home. There’s no one around, and I take all my clothes off and run around the Neolithic stone circle.

Then, just after three a.m., when I finish my survey one night towards the end of the seven weeks, I pull away slowly in the car and something unexpected happens: I see a corncrake. It’s just a moment but it’s in the road right in front of me, running into the grass verge. Its image – the pink beak and ginger wing – keeps darting through my mind: just a second that confirmed the existence I’d spent months searching for. My first and only corncrake. Usually dawn comes slowly but tonight I drive out of a cloud and suddenly it’s a new day.

15

ROSE COTTAGE

VISITING THE SMALLER ISLANDS FOR
the corncrake surveys I get to know their individual landscapes, from fertile agricultural Shapinsay, to the moors of Hoy – ‘the high island’. There are twenty inhabited Orkney islands, with populations ranging from two to hundreds. On these islands there are often more houses than people now: low ‘butt and ben’ crofts, some derelict, some carefully restored and updated; caravans held down against the wind by ropes and breeze blocks; and farms, from small and old-fashioned to modern and slick. Studying maps and driving, past rusting vehicles and abandoned baths at the side of the road, I notice odd farm names, often with their roots in the Norn language that was once spoken, and often repeated on different islands: Woo, Queer, Balaclava, Windywalls, Patience, Flaws, Crook.