The Shark and the Albatross Page 10

  In the ancient world, overlaps like these, between birds’ lives and peoples’, were taken seriously. The crane was the symbol of Greek astrologers: it must have seemed reasonable that such high-flying and widely travelled birds knew a thing or two about the world and their flocks were scrutinised for clues about what the future might hold. The Romans also believed this and our word ‘auspicious’ (literally ‘bird watching’) comes from their practice of foretelling luck from the behaviour of birds. Other words have cranes in them too: the Romans called the birds grues, for their calls, and because cranes seemed to discuss and coordinate their actions, congruere became the Latin word for agreement. Our modern word ‘congruence’ comes from the same root. Several letters of the Greek alphabet are said to be based on the shapes of migrating flocks of cranes, including lambda, which gave us our letter L.

  The birds may have been familiar but why they migrated was the subject of much speculation. Aristotle thought they flew to Africa for the winter but the ancient Chinese believed something else: that cranes bore away the spirits of the dead on the longest journey of all.

  From the hide I check the sky. There is no sign that any cranes or swans are coming to join the godwits on the muddy fringes of the lake. The waders are chattering away out there, but their flock is not entirely harmonious. Their worst insult is a sharp jab of that long bill to another bird’s backside. I recognise them now: these are black-tailed godwits, exactly the same type I watched as a boy, on the salt marshes close to Portsmouth. They’re part of my childhood and I’m thrilled to be spending today with them all around me, quite unbothered. That’s what I love about my hide: this sense of being invisible and of getting close.

  Waders are great travellers. For black-tailed godwits there is no real difference between flying from Iceland to Britain, or from Russia to China, as long as they have worms to eat when they arrive. Their close cousins, bar-tailed godwits, make some of the most impressive journeys of all: theirs are the longest continuous migration flights ever measured, flying 11,500km (more than 7,000 miles), directly between Alaska and New Zealand, in nine days at altitudes up to 4,000 metres (13,000ft). Siberian cranes travel over land, so unlike the bar-tailed godwits they can break their journeys to feed, but they still fly thousands of miles. None of it would be possible without the everyday miracle of feathers.

  For its size my crane’s feather weighs almost nothing but it is remarkably strong. It has a smooth shaft – the part that was once embedded in the bird – sending news about turbulence and airflow, faster than thought. Where the smoothness ends it sprouts threads of silk, like the plumed antennae of a male moth, as though the feather’s heart has opened to the sky. I trace these new threads with my finger. They climb around the shaft on both sides, with the subtle curves of a boat or an aircraft, and together they form the vane, the aerofoil. My hand slides across it, as the air must do, almost without resistance.

  There are clues about where on the crane this feather belonged, and what it was used for. It was not one of the wingtip ‘fingers’, the bird’s primary feathers, which are the stiffest and longest, pre-stressed with a twist to bring them into their perfect aerodynamic shape in flight: an idea now mimicked by engineers. It was one of the secondaries, the wing’s workhorses, which form its trailing edge and most of its lift-generating curve. I know this from its size, while from its bias and its curvature I can see that it once graced the bird’s left wing.

  The godwits have now surrounded my hide, all of them probing with their long bills, up to their eye sockets in ooze. Sometimes they plunge their heads completely underwater, shutting their eyes at the last moment – and here’s something new: they have delightfully white eyelids, which somehow stay clean despite the mud. I watch one execute a perfect worm pull: plunge, grip, pull. Pause. Plunge again, adjust the grip and … pull. Out comes the worm. It is three seconds’ work and the godwit moves on. They do need a lot of worms.

  A tapping starts, gently, just an inch above my head: it’s rain falling on the canvas. Hides are best of all when it rains, even better than camping, with the cosy smugness that brings. A hide is just a tent with a picture window and I have seen so many memorable sights through this window. On the canvas next to it I often write the places and the animals I’ve filmed, so now I add, Godwits at Poyang Lake, avoiding the drips. On the birds’ backs the rain makes silver beads, which run off like mercury.

  The crane’s feather has water droplets on it too, tiny lenses magnifying its details: the parallel threads, with even smaller threads branching from them into tiny hooks, all interlocked. I stretch their weft and warp across my finger with a sound like a zip being pulled, until it parts with a pop, but a feather can heal itself and, smoothed between my fingers, the tear becomes invisible. I imagine the thousands of times the crane did this simple, miraculous thing, by preening: mending itself with its beak.

  Eventually feathers wear out. The vane of this one is ragged at the end, suggesting that the crane did not die to leave the feather where Jun found it: its job was done once it had helped the bird fly here from Siberia and it was moulted on purpose, to be replaced during the winter. Although Poyang is the best place in the world for Siberian cranes it seems unlikely that we will see any more of them than this feather. The lake is large enough for the birds to avoid people if they choose.

  My phone beeps: it’s a text from Echo. She’s playing cards with those men in one of their tents. They weren’t so grumpy after all. The rain falls faster and I film the godwits feeding on, stitching the mud like sewing machines. Water drums on the canvas, rushing down inside one wall of the hide and flooding my binoculars from a pocket. As the rain becomes torrential the birds fall silent and crouch into the wind, with drips forming on the ends of their bills. A heron marches among them and hunches there like a wet, grey skyscraper.

  The rain slowly eases and the godwits twitter and preen, as if they’ve just bathed, which, in effect, they have. Preening is far from easy for them, with such long bills. Their equally long necks mean they can just about reach their breast feathers, but scratching an itch on their heads is more complicated and requires balancing on one leg, while the other one reaches over a wing. How ignominious for a godwit to lose its balance and fall in the mud. Preening over, each one makes a brief helicopter flight to dry its wings, fanning its tail and spattering mud from its feet.

  It has not been the day we’d planned but in a sense we have been lucky anyway, with the photogenic rain and the ‘wrong’ type of birds, and for that I have to thank the confiding godwits, as well as my hide, and even the drunken boatman.

  The television news has been reporting that several Siberian cranes have been shot recently and part of the reserve is now closed to the public. None the less Uncle Jo is determined that we should not leave without seeing his cranes. On our last day he bends the rules and drives us there before dawn, without telling the guards who patrol the closed area. As we pass their guardhouse, the lights come on in the window.

  Dangling from the rear-view mirror in his car there is a small picture of Chairman Mao. It sways wildly as we leave the road and bump away to sit in the darkness, watching the guards’ headlights pass as they search for us in vain. We learn later that they thought we were poachers. Even their cook joined the search, armed with a meat cleaver.

  At first light Uncle Jo shows me where I can creep to the edge of the lake. I crouch there, in a natural hide among the tall reeds, waiting for the cranes. Here, at last, they come flying: singly and in small family groups. Their wings are very long and square-ended, abruptly black, as though the white primary feathers have been dipped in ink. Pairs of adults flap in time with each other, gliding low and stalling to land with short runs, on the far side of a narrow strip of water. Some raise their wings and tails like bustles and call together, pointing their bills at the sky and then at the ground. They are elegant birds, standing taller than me while I’m crouching by the camera. The shapes and colours of the adults are as simple as they are
beautiful. Red patches reach from their bills to just behind their pale yellow eyes and their legs are pink. Apart from the ends of their furled wings, their feathers are as pure white as the one Jun found. The few youngsters are quite different. Their plumage is mottled fawn and white. They make wheedling calls and follow their parents closely as they probe for food among the wet plants, ready to pick up titbits exposed by the adults.

  In China cranes are revered for their longevity as well as being symbols of good luck. Their reputation for living a long time is justified. One captive Siberian crane in Wisconsin lived to be at least eighty-three and was still fathering chicks in his seventies. For a wild bird to live that long would take a large dose of their famous luck because their round-trip migration of 9,000km (5,600 miles) puts them at great risk from hunters. Their lives also depend on finding wild and wet places to rest along the way. Increasingly these vital wetlands have been drained to grow crops. The greatest value of these places lies not in rice or wheat, but in something that is lost for ever when marshes are replaced by fields. The American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about this in the 1940s, in his classic Sand County Almanac:

  The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate.

  Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words … Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction … The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes.

  Uncle Jo and I share no language but his face lights up when I play back the morning’s shots in the viewfinder, and I know that he feels this too. He asks Echo to tell me that he has never seen the cranes in this way and she replies that, apart from a single feather, we have never seen them at all.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘it is our last day,’ and she persuades him to join her on the roof of his car, where they stand laughing, with their arms outstretched like wings: being cranes.

  We have passed whole days like this at Poyang Lake, laughing together while we watched or listened to distant birds, waiting for something to film. It is impossible to know precisely when the birds and the weather and the light will combine to make something beautiful, and often the long waits turn out to be for nothing. When that happens I can only try again and hope for better luck next time, but there is a point to all the waiting. Occasionally we do have a bit of luck and then, when the camera is close enough to the cranes or to a flock of godwits in the rain, half a billion Chinese television viewers might discover that birds are not just tasty: they can be mysterious and beautiful too.

  AN UPDATE ON SIBERIAN CRANES

  There are so few Siberian cranes, and their lives are so fraught with risk, that they are officially classed as ‘critically endangered’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Helping them is made more difficult because they pass through, or spend the winter, in ten different countries, from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and Mongolia to Iran. They all return to Russia to breed in the forests and marshes of Siberia. Although these areas are increasingly being exploited for oil and gas, the cranes’ crucial nesting places have recently been given more protection.

  The birds also ought to be safe at the other end of their long migration, when they arrive in the National Nature Reserve at Poyang Lake, where virtually all of them spend the winter. Unfortunately the lake also supplies water to a million people and its position, upriver from Shanghai, has made it a convenient source of the sand needed for the city’s building boom. In recent years the lake has fallen to record lows, as more water is held back by dams upstream. Paradoxically, the biggest threat to Poyang Lake is a plan to raise the water level by damming its outflow, in order to improve navigation and generate power. This would flood the mudflats where we filmed the godwits and deprive the cranes of their most important food, the tubers of wetland plants that grow only in shallow water.

  Following criticism of the hydroelectric scheme by Chinese ecologists, it remains to be seen whether the latest, simpler designs will make life more secure for the world’s Siberian cranes. Wetlands like Poyang can be managed for the cranes’ benefit but the birds will need all the luck they can muster if doing so brings them into competition with China’s economic growth.

  – SIX –

  THE PATIENCE OF A BEAR

  ‘So, you are a wildlife cameraman? You must be very patient.’

  Everyone says this, but filming polar bears hunting is a good way to find out if it’s true. At the moment this entails standing on the deck of the Havsel, as we edge towards some of the largest bird cliffs in the far north. So far we can’t see a thing. Cold air is blowing towards us from the ice nearby. It smells like a struck flint and it is breeding fog, which has shrunk the world around the ship to a circle 100 metres wide. The chart of this coast shows that large areas have never been surveyed. Bjørne is feeling his way towards the land like his Norse ancestors, who discovered Iceland and Greenland by following birds. Streams of auks fly out of the fog, passing us in a flash of dark wings and vanishing again.

  ‘Normal people, they don’t go here,’ Bjørne says.

  We are almost touching the cliff when it looms out of the murk, dark and immense.

  A sound comes from it like surf crashing on a beach, drowning the ship’s engine. It is the massed voices of around a million seabirds, called Brünnich’s guillemots. Their backs are black and their bellies white as they hurtle upward towards their nesting ledges, which are invisible in the fog. We can certainly smell them. The overpowering mixture of used fish and ammonia makes Bjørne’s drying cod, still hanging from the bow rail, seem even less appealing than usual. Icicles are growing on them, as well as on the ship’s rigging. Floating ice, patterned by the birds’ lozenge-shaped feet, presses against her sides. The water here is too deep for Bjørne to anchor and he says we must wait in a safer place until the fog has gone. One of the few marks on his chart of this coast is a light pencil cross. I ask Steinar if it shows an anchorage.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s where a friend of ours died this year, in May. His snowmobile fell through the ice.’ Steinar, who rarely goes long without cracking a joke, is very quiet as we travel to the next fjord and drop anchor. After just a few hours the engineer comes in yelling, ‘Wake up, wake up! The fog has gone.’

  The ice floes have gone too and the water is now covered with guillemots, washing and diving for fish in front of the spectacular rock wall of their colony. It is like a Hollywood set designer’s idea of how a bird cliff ought to be, with Gothic buttresses, turrets and perfectly level ledges. Steinar says he once saw a bear searching for eggs high on this cliff, spread-eagled like an inept human climber. When he came back a few hours later, it had fallen and was floating face downward in the sea.

  There are no signs of bears today, apart from some footprints in the snow, so we set about filming the birds with an underwater camera on a pole. They cluster so closely around the boat that we can see their hazel irises and their pin-prick pupils. From below their bellies look like silver bowls with fast paddling feet. They peer down at the camera then tip vertically to fly below the surface, wearing layers of air like second skins. The guillemots can dive to 200 metres (650ft) but they are so buoyant that they return to the surface in moments, trailing bubbles. Above us the sky is so full of birds that they look like motes of dust caught in a shaft of light. We close our mouths when we look up, against the steady drizzle of their droppings. The cliff faces north, so only the midnight sun can light it, and to make the most of this golden time we switch to filming at night. The ship’s crew stay on daylight hours, which makes for unusually hearty breakfasts, such as stew and dumplings. After one of these, Steinar, Mateo and I carry the camera equipment partway up the cliff, to be closer to the birds. In our red and white immersion suits we are hardly the
world’s most camouflaged wildlife filmmakers but a chasm separates us from the jam-packed guillemots and they seem unconcerned. Far below, ripples spread like a giant fingerprint across the sea. The water reflects the light and makes us comfortably warm for the first time.

  Seabird colonies are fascinating places and we soon lose ourselves in the intricacies of the birds’ lives: filming pairs gently preening each other’s necks, their eyes half closed. There are occasional fights and glimpses of blue eggs. The buzz of birds coming and going does not falter, showing how productive the Arctic summer can be, when the sun never sets and the sea is full of fish.

  As well as shining on us the midnight sun has been warming the snow on the steep cliff above, and with a crack like a rifle shot the whole mass breaks loose. An avalanche of snow and ice thunders down. I set the camera going and we stumble away. Pieces as big as footballs smack into our backs but most of them plunge past and down into the chasm. The camera’s recording catches the moment when one flying piece hits the tripod, rocking it onto two legs before falling back onto all three. If it had toppled the other way the camera would have fallen into the sea. We had no inkling that the avalanche was coming and it’s only afterwards that the near-miss sinks in: if slightly more snow had fallen, or its route had been a little different, the three of us would have joined the camera at the bottom of the cliff. Risks like this are similar to filming polar bears – the most dangerous are those you haven’t seen coming.