Aigas Field Centre. - Gods of the morning: a birds eye view of a Highland year

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 natures 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 Scotlands 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)

Natures Child (2004)

At the Waters Edge (2010)

GODS
OF THE
MORNING

A Birds 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 Crows Theology & p.50 Crows 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 Ryans The Thrushs 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. Martins 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

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 dont have to be told how lucky I am. But it doesnt 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 Britains 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 Scotlands 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 Britains 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 Britains 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.