Gods of the Morning (18 page)

Back at the turn of the twentieth century, in the very early days of the nature-conservation movement, and when the Victorian obsession for killing wildlife for museum collections was beginning to wane, attention turned to critically endangered species, particularly birds. Egg-collecting was widely practised and accepted, but because it was patronised and supported by such high-profile society figures as the plutocratic zoologist Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild of Tring Park, who had created a private natural history
museum at his home, it would take several decades to surface as the conservation threat it really was. Only when the Liberal politician and former governor-general of South Africa, Earl Buxton, criticised the practice at a public meeting of the RSPB, warning of the distinct menace posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithological Union (of which Lord Rothschild was a prominent member) that pressure began to be brought to bear.

Rothschild and his associates were furious. He joined ranks with another fanatical collector, the widely respected ornithologist the Rev. Francis Jourdain (he of Witherby, Ticehurst, Jourdain and Tucker's
Handbook of British Birds
, first published in 1938), and formed a splinter group calling themselves the British Oological Association, later to be renamed the Jourdain Society after Jourdain's death in 1940. Lord Rothschild, who became famous for driving his carriage harnessed to a team of six zebras to Buckingham Palace to prove that zebras could be tamed and trained, had died a year earlier, still immutably convinced of his egg-collecting contribution to zoology. He is now best remembered for his private museum, which was the largest zoological collection ever amassed by one person. On his death his family gave it to the nation: it is now run by the Natural History Museum, including the largest egg collection in the world of around two million individual eggs.

Yet for a few obsessively addicted enthusiasts it was apparently impossible to give it up. One of the most infamous in recent times was the late Colin Watson, who plummeted to his death in 2006 aged sixty-three after falling thirty-nine feet
from a larch tree while prospecting a sparrowhawk's nest. Watson's collection numbered more than two thousand eggs, including osprey, golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, Slavonian grebe, peregrine falcon, merlin, red kite, avocet, corncrake, cuckoo and many other very rare species. He had been caught many times, prosecuted by the RSPB and fined thousands of pounds, to little avail. To this day to a small number of zealots, egg-collecting remains a burning, almost manic compulsion, which can drive them to enormous lengths to evade detection.

Ian Prestt, a former director general of the RSPB, told me the remarkable saga of a well-known obsessive called Edgar Lear, who had been prosecuted several times, and who, the RSPB knew, would never abandon his lifelong fixation. Sometime in the 1960s a pair of wild whooper swans nested on an island in a remote Scottish loch. Such breeding attempts by whoopers are very rare in the UK: the species is migratory and normally breeds in the Arctic. Perhaps one of the birds was unwell and couldn't migrate, or perhaps it was simply aberrant behaviour, as happens from time to time in all animal populations, often spawning whole new colonies.

The RSPB species-protection officers were certain Lear would try to take the eggs, so as soon as the pen swan began to lay, with the help of the local police they mounted a twenty-four-hour guard.

Sure enough, on a drizzly overcast night he appeared in a black wetsuit, creeping through the heather with a specially constructed box strapped to his back. Only a pinpoint of
torchlight gave him away. He slipped into the water and swam quietly to the island. The RSPB officers followed the tiny light through binoculars from a distance before closing in to apprehend him as he returned. To be sure of a prosecution they had to catch him red-handed in full possession of the eggs.

Lear was on the island for only a few minutes; then back he came, swimming slowly to the shore with all four eggs – the entire clutch – carefully packed in cotton wool, warm and dry in the little waterproof box on his back, straight into the custody of the officers. The police took him away to be charged and the RSPB men rowed the eggs back to the swans' nest. They stayed only long enough to ensure that the pen went back onto them. Lear was duly charged, appeared before the magistrate, convicted and fined.

Some weeks later the eggs hatched and soon the four fluffy cygnets grew into fine young swans. But something was badly wrong. It quickly became clear that they were not whooper swan cygnets, but common mute swan cygnets with ‘S' shaped necks and developing black and orange bills, instead of the straight necks and bright yellow nares of the whoopers.

Lear had known very well that the nest would be guarded and that he was very likely to be caught, but the fervour of his obsession had led him to employ a level of guile even the RSPB had never met before. Earlier that afternoon he had raided a common mute swan's nest somewhere else and put the eggs in his waterproof box. Mute and whooper swan eggs are virtually identical, both large and plain white,
slightly pointed ovals – you would need callipers to detect the difference in size. Then he set off on his masterly raid. Once on the island he stole the whooper eggs and quickly buried them in a shallow hole to be recovered for his collection much later. He swam back to the shore, perfectly content to be apprehended.

They didn't know it, but the RSPB officers had been roundly duped. They confiscated the eggs from his box and replaced them in the nest, sure that they had won the battle of wits, that a wicked egg-collector had been caught and that they had ensured the breeding success of the rare whooper swans. They crowed about their prowess, going public with a triumphant press release when Lear was prosecuted. Later, long after the RSPB had ceased to watch the island, Lear returned and recovered his precious whooper eggs for his collection. When, several years afterwards, his house was raided by police, his collection of more than twelve hundred rare birds' eggs was confiscated. There, immaculately blown and labelled, were the whooper eggs.

The Jourdain Society does still exist, but has gone underground and probably only survives as a dining club. Its members have dwindled with age, some now in their eighties, most having received convictions for illegal possession of eggs. A police raid on a society dinner at a Salisbury hotel in 1994 resulted in at least eleven thousand eggs being seized from members' houses around the country. Six members present at that dinner were convicted and fined.

*  *  *

Far out of the reach of egg-collectors are the nests of our goldcrests, the smallest bird on the British list, 30 per cent smaller than the willow warbler, a tiny, febrile jot, an oh-so-little-bit of a warbler weighing just 5–7 grams (less than a quarter of an ounce). If we didn't have a tree-top hide at Aigas I don't suppose I would ever have witnessed a goldcrest nest being made. They spend most of their lives high in the uppermost branches and crowns of conifers, pines, spruces and firs, where they hunt small insects. Their nests are famously difficult to find.

Yet for all their diminutive size, they are strikingly beautiful warblers – if you can ever get close enough to see one properly. The males are principally a pale olive green with the eponymous distinctive orange-flame stripe running back over the crown, fringed with a striking black border against the green of the head. The females are the same, but the stripe is buttercup yellow. When I was a boy they were called golden-crested wrens but, like the willow wren, it was a confusing misnomer. They aren't wrens and the golden stripe is not a crest. Golden-crested warbler would be far too pompous. Goldcrest is much better.

To the boisterous hilarity of visiting school students, last year a pair of swallows nested inside the roof of our tree-top hide, delivering a constant fall-out of chalky white excrement onto the students to shrieks of ‘Yeah! Nice one!' and ‘Look at Caitlin. Serves you right!' yelled at those unfortunate enough to receive a direct hit. I climbed the thirty-seven steep steps to the hide for the express purpose of meeting the rangers' demands for a ‘shit board' to try to contain
some of the swallows' fall-out, which was serving as such a distraction to their control of whole classes of eight- to ten-year-olds who found ducking the dive-bombing swallows to be much more fun than learning about the ecological significance of regenerating woodlands.

I fixed the board to the roof beams quickly and easily, then decided to sit for a few minutes to gaze out over the moorland and the glacial valley stretching before me. A sharp-eyed raven floated by, swerving away as soon as it saw me, and a buzzard soared and wheeled lazily high in the blue above. Just as I was about to go I spotted a movement in the verdant foliage of the Norway spruce whose upper branches almost touched the hide. It was a female goldcrest only a few feet away. I sat still. It seemed that she wanted to join me. She edged nearer and nearer in jerky little flits, approaching and then nipping back again when her courage failed her.

After a few minutes of indecision, she entered through one of the seven wide open viewing hatches and flew quickly up into the rafters. She was only there for a few seconds. As she flew out again I noticed a fine filament trailing behind her. It took me a moment or two to understand what she was up to. She disappeared into the foliage of the spruce, but was back again only a minute later. This time I was ready to watch more closely.

Back into the dark confines of the rafters I saw that she was collecting gossamer strands of spiders' web. With another beakful she skipped back into the same spruce frond and disappeared. I quickly moved to a better position and
examined the branch through my binoculars. Sure enough she was building a nest in the outermost reaches of the Norway spruce. This intrigued me: I had never seen a goldcrest nest before but, annoyingly, there was one needly spruce frond obscuring my view. I decided to go for a pair of secateurs.

By very carefully leaning out over the thirty-five-foot drop to the forest floor I was able to snip away bits of the offending frond – a minor level of gardening I was sure she wouldn't mind – so that I could see. I was right. In seconds she was inside the hide mining strands of spiders' web once more, then straight back to her nest. This time I could see what she was up to.

You would think it might be safer to nest within the shelter of the tree, closer to the trunk or at least on a sturdy branch. Since the bird is so tiny, and the nest smaller than a tennis ball, built in layers of moss, fine twigs and needles, then whiskery
Bryoria
and
Ramalaria
lichens, all stitched together with spider silk, you would imagine that on an outer frond it would be very prone to being tossed aside or blown out altogether by any forceful gust of wind. Not a bit. This resourceful little warbler is well aware of the risks and takes the precaution of actively guying and binding the nest to the surrounding spruce needles and supporting stem with multiple strands of spider silk (which, I learn, is five times stronger than the equivalent high-grade alloy steel and has the added qualities of flexibility and elasticity in any temperature), weaving it round and round with her tiny bodkin of a bill until she was entirely satisfied the nest was secure.

I was gripped by this macro-ingenuity. There is no end to nature's awesome creativity. I sat transfixed, occasionally ducking the swallows' best efforts to bomb me. Two hours slid past and still she was beavering away, back and forth, in and out, weaving, plucking, pulling and winding, drawing threads like a skilled seamstress, tucking in ends, twisting them off and busying round and round the nest. She was a perfectionist, a precision purist, sometimes pleased with her work so that she could start afresh somewhere else, and sometimes clearly not, unpicking it and starting all over again, nipping back for more silk thread until the result matched the demanding standards of her innate conditioning.

The following day I hurried back to see what more she had achieved. The sun flashed and glinted on the silvery web so that I could see the full extent of her labours. I was dazzled, swept up in this minuscule feat of avian aptitude, this astonishingly deft warbler dexterity. It would have taken a mighty wind to unravel or wrench free that remarkable little orb of a nest. Now both birds were at it, the male arriving with an endearing flurry of wing fluttering and a chatter of thin, high-pitched calls. The female had moved on to the all-important insulation lining of the nest. She still seemed to be doing most of the work, but the male, unmistakable beneath his bright orange flash, was at least bringing in strands of sheep's wool. These she took from him as though she didn't trust him to do the weaving properly. Off he went again. This time he returned with what I could clearly see were two long russet hairs from my Highland
cattle, with red shaggy coats and buffalo tough hides. So tough that they delight in scratching on barbed wire, clogging the barbs with the fine russet filaments, long and silky, perfect for goldcrests to weave into the lining of their nests. His female seemed very pleased with these; she sent him off again while she bent to the task of weaving the hair, just as she had done with the spiders' web.

When I returned the next day I could see the almost completed nest. The interior lining was now a mix of tiny feathers bound into the moss and lichen with hair, smoothly and delicately woven. The birds were nowhere to be seen and they never did nest there, although I failed to discover why not. Perhaps, after all, she wasn't satisfied. Had the next class of rowdy school-kids spooked her? Had the swallows dive-bombed her because she was so close to their territory? I will never know. But I came away richer for the instinct-driven little pageant I had witnessed. The industry, the dedication, the skill, the thousands of journeys for materials, the embroidery, the genius of design and construction, the intricacy, the detail and perfection all came together in a triumph of creative brilliance.