Rough Music at Bishopstone

Walking the eastern downs is a relatively treeless and bird-light pastime, especially in winter. Gulls and game are often seen along with my indifferent friends the rooks, but there are sometimes few other species to keep them company, save for an occasional jolly of wagtails. It is always with great pleasure therefore that a walk takes me through the trees at Bishopstone with its abundance of ash, elm and sycamore alive from canopy to ground with avian chatter.

I set out a few weekends ago beneath a dark, clear, moonless sky to enjoy the late-November dawn. A gentle climb from South Heighton up to and along the crest of the Firle plain to Bo-peep, along the gentle sweep of the Cradle Hill escarpment, where the first pale light seeped out of the eastern horizon and, before heading home, a final plunge back down into Bishopstone and its wet meadows and trees. By this time the day had beaten the darkness away, the stillness in the air stirred by the dawn breeze from the east, and the robins and blackbirds had had their say, leaving the soundscape to later risers. Rooks and jackdaws could be heard from a distance in the treetops, their indiscretions a banner to all within earshot that this land belongs to them, the trees of Bishopstone Wood their palisade wall.

I skirted up and around the rookery so that I could climb and look down on the leafless canopy, swept clean the week before by the first winter storm of the season. Leaving the wet meadows behind me, I climbed alongside a scrub fringe towards what sounded like a disagreement involving jays and magpies. Jays established themselves here only in recent years, but have become a regular and welcome sight. A few weeks earlier I saw between Stanmer and Ditchling Beacon what I thought was a terrible disagreement between a mischief of magpies and jays. I suspected a raptor of some sort - a buzzard is often the subject of their scorn - but the pell-mell was hidden in the privacy of autumn leaves and I walked on without learning whether they were collaborating against a common foe or facing-off against each other. Seldom do birds muster such a cacophony as jays and magpies.

Today I was able to creep unseen up to the melee. As I rounded a bush the scrub opened up and I saw two jays, which straight away saw me and sat silently upright like children caught in the act of something naughty. The magpies, though, were oblivious in the pell-mell: ten of them screeching around the scrub. I stood still as a sleeping horse, hoping not to send every bird scooting into cover. Next, a surprise in dozens of mixed tits: great, blue and long-tailed, all busy uttering alarmed calls amidst the jays and magpies. The scene was chaotic, the noise confusing and wonderful to behold, like rough music! Not, then, a fight between jays and magpies; more likely cooperation on some level involving more species than I might see along all of the previous nine miles.

My question of where the raptor was hiding was quickly answered: it wasn't a raptor, but it was a predator and another recent arrival in the Rookery. A tawny owl broke cover low down, flew directly towards me and shot into the deep scrub just a few metres before where I stood, blowing my cover to all present. The corvids retreated to a safer distance and the tits melted back into the scrub edges. The owl, a creature which feeds on small rodents and insects rather than other birds, was now perceived as less of a threat than I. But there was no rough music for me, only a hush.

Rough music is one of folklore's popular rituals for dealing with bad behaviour, keeping a community safe, and something that might have been borrowed by people after watching birds like those before me. The origins of this might be found in the wassail - a similar ritual in which a cacophony was made to scare off evil spirits from apple trees before they were blessed at the end of Christmastide. A rough music ritual may have been popular with those dishing out the punishment, but it was less so for the person at the receiving end; a wife- husband- or child-beater. A noisy procession would be led after dark through the village to the wrongdoer's house, clashing metal tins or sheets and chanting along the way. The procession would stop outside the culprit's house and a chant was made warning them to mend their ways. Sometimes an effigy would be carried and burnt outside the house. The ritual would be repeated over several nights if required until the person relented. Sometimes they packed up and moved away, unable to cope with the naming-and-shaming and rejection by a close-knit community. With little else to entertain a village at night, rough music was an attractive pastime to those who might already have taken a few liveners at the local inn and this no doubt helped instil their determination to mete out a traditional form of justice, even in later times when told to desist by the local policeman. It was the peoples' form of justice and their right to give it.

Rough music lives on today in the tradition of Bonfire. Everything is there: a culprit, the effigy, processions, chanting, loud noise, fire, the burning. Every Bonfire in Lewes gives rough music to politicians and the Pope, just at that time of year when the days darken and the world plunges into the long, uncertain, winter. A time when dark spirits walk the land.

Back at the rookery the owls have the trees only by night, their hoots answered only by the occasional complaining jackdaw or rook. There is no place for them during daylight hours, nor any place for people. The rooks and jackdaws, the magpies and jays and the little birds all give us rough music and move us on. Following the hollow way out of the trees, I headed out over open ground again. Amongst the rooks and gulls I counted a jolly of thirty wagtails bobbing along the drills.

Secrets of a small rookery, part three: Crow Culture

Wheatfield with crows by Vincent van Gogh (1890), oil on canvas

What is a crow to you, reader? The answer will vary depending on who you are, where you live and the ways in which - and the extent to which - you connect with your environment.

To many people, crows are a noisy, messy, annoying family of birds with unpleasant voices who attack bins and rubbish sacks, steal songbird chicks from nests, steal farmers' crops and generally cause a nuisance. To others they are intelligent creatures, innovative problem-solvers - fascinating to observe and a source of immense pleasure. I am firmly rooted in the latter camp.

In about 1995, while walking along the Ouse riverbank between Newhaven and Piddinghoe in East Sussex, I witnessed a group of several Carrion Crows manoeuvring a square of plywood, which looked like an old drawer-base that had been washed along the river and stranded on the high tide line. One crow wrestled the square of wood down the riverbank and into the water, where it floated. Each crow in turn then flew into the air and attempted to land on the floating wood, not very successfully, and suggesting an appearance of novice surfers, but obviously able to take an idea and put it into practise. This level of enquiry on the part of the crows was remarkable to observe. Whether they were playing or attempting to gain some advantage, perhaps by using the floating wood as a fishing platform, I could not speculate about, but it convinced me that crows are clever birds.

Soler & Møller (1990) demonstrated that Magpies (Pica pica) learnt to detect Great-spotted Cuckoo (Clamator glandarius) eggs when their nests had been parasitised in areas where the two species had coexisted for some time. The ability to detect these eggs was reduced in areas where coexistence was more recent and, where their ranges did not overlap at all, there was no recognition. Magpies had developed the ability to recognise cuckoo eggs through learning experiences and had tweaked their behaviour accordingly. Other victims of brood-parasites, such Reed Warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) and Dunnocks (Prunella modularis), have shown no such recognition of Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) eggs. The New Caledonian Crow (Corvus moneduloides) is a well-documented problem-solver, tool-maker and tool-user (Hunt, 1996). Crows are clever birds and their intelligence has impressed and captured the imagination of the humans in their midst.

To many human cultures crow species are a defining cultural reference: gods or messengers of gods, spiritual beings who may deliver the souls of the dead to the afterlife. They are emblematic, their image having been used in aboriginal art including cave paintings and aboriginal names and costumes, heraldic coats of arms, place names (Rookery Hill, Rookery Way and The Rookery are all about a mile away, as the crow flies, from where these words are being written) and in numerous other creative works. We have exploited crows in our culture and crows have adapted to exploit us too. This entwined relationship can be termed cultural coevolution.

Ravens scavenging a wolf kill-site carcass

Here is an example of cultural coevolution: the automobile is one of the defining images of the American Dream. Perhaps there is an inevitability, therefore, that the American Crow (Corvus brachyrhyncos) has adapted its own culture in response to road vehicles. Traditionally, Ravens (Corvus corax), Magpies (Pica pica) and other corvid species adapted and evolved to scavenge the carcasses of hunted animals which they locate by flying and searching across the landscape, perhaps following packs of wolves or humans to a kill-site. Roadkill could be considered to provide the same opportunity, particularly in areas where kill-sites are less common now than they were in the past, so it is not much of a cultural shift on the American Crow's part to follow roads, which cut like rivers through the landscape, searching for dead deer, rabbit or birds. American Crows have also been observed picking dead insects from the fenders of stationary cars. These behaviours should still be considered as a cultural response; they have been observed in North America (Marzluff & Angell, 2005), but probably also occur wherever crows and humans with cars coexist. In Japan in 1975, Carrion Crows (Corvus corone) were observed at a driving school placing shelled walnuts before the wheels of parked cars so that they would be cracked open as the cars drove over them and away. This behaviour has been adopted by observant crows and has since spread some miles along the Hirose River region (Nihei & Higuchi, 2001).

Further reading provides a wealth of examples which demonstrate the effect that crows have had on European culture, and particularly so on our languages, which will be the subject of part five of this corvine compendium.

I think the relationship between crows and humans, whether it is welcomed, tolerated or despised, dates all the way back through human history, back beyond the 150,000 or so years that Homo sapiens has walked across the world, even back beyond the seven million years since our evolutionary trajectory branched away from our closest extant relatives, Bonobos and Chimpanzees. Crows have been on the wing all this time - they evolved (I think) in the Eocene Epoch about 50 million years ago, although the species we share the world with today are more recent. At the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago, Hunter-gatherers would doubtless have been in close contact with Ravens, who followed or possibly even led humans along the migration routes towards the great herds of ungulates, where we might have revered the birds, tolerated them or chased them off from a kill. As farming practises spread from the Middle-east westwards across Europe and into Britain about six or seven thousand years ago, we would have put down roots and found ourselves closer to other crow species such as Rooks and Jackdaws, who colonised the fringes of the land cleared by our ancestors and who plundered the insect pests which devoured our ancestor's crops and then helped themselves to the same crops as they ripened.

Four seeds in a hole,

One for the Rook, one for the Crow,

One to rot and one to grow.

During the past few thousand years of civilisation and warfare, battlefields strewn with dead soldiers would have been a happy hunting ground for Ravens, Carrion Crows and Magpies. Survivors who witnessed the battlefield-fallen being pecked and torn apart in a corvine feeding frenzy could be forgiven for holding a fear or awe of those birds whenever their paths crossed.

Gallows-crows

The same crows would have perched upon gibbets and gallows and it is easy to imagine them gathering ahead of a public execution - observant and intelligent birds would learn to recognise the signs, the noise of excitable crowds. The black, ravenous birds would understandably have become symbols of judgement, both human and divine judgement.

The crow or raven might have been the influence of the beak-shaped mask worn by plague-doctors in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. The costume of a waxed or leather cloak was topped with a mask and beak. The beak was filled with straw and aromatic herbs and oils - all to filter and protect the plague-doctor from miasma (putrid air), which was considered until modern times to be a vector of disease. Even Florence Nightingale is alleged to have believed in misama theory, but the Nightingale is a different bird altogether. The beaked mask of the plague-doctor is still a chilling sight.

We have shaped crows' culture and they have shaped ours. It is no wonder that crows became symbols of fear, death and perdition. It is via this background that crows and crow-culture have become braided into our language.

Plague Doctor costume

References:

Hunt, Gavin R. 1996. Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian Crows. Nature 379: 249-25.

Marzluff, John M. and Angell, Tony. 2005. In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Yale University Press: New Haven.

Nihei, Y. and H. Higuchi. 2001. When and where did crows learn to use automobiles as nutcrackers? Tohoku Psychologica Folia 60: 93-97. 

Soler, M. & Møller, A.P. 1990. Duration of sympatry and coevolution between the great spotted cuckoo and its magpie host. Nature. 343, 748-750. 

The Walking Landscape

Walking is a pastime which I have always engaged in with great pleasure and, over the years, with a growing sense of mindfulness. Many a walker may agree that it is the easiest way to meditate: to root oneself in the moment by tuning into the sights, sounds and smells of the landscape and to appreciate its changes throughout a day or from one day to the next, or seasonally.

Walking is definitively human, or hominine. From the time several millions of years ago that Africa tore itself apart to form the Rift Valley, stranding our Australopithecine ancestors in an increasingly treeless landscape, walking became an essentially bipedal necessity of adaptation and natural selection. They thought and walked and somehow survived against overwhelming odds, developing an increasingly confident, upright gait as they did so. Before the invention of the wheel or the domestication of beasts of burden, everything was done with two feet in touch with the ground.

A mindful walker can find that through participating mindfully in any given moment, one can become a part of the living landscape and return to Mother Nature. Not only can one react to the things which stimulate one's senses; those things also react to your presence in a place: the persecuted Magpie is usually the first to take flight upon our approach, whereas the Robin may be of a roughly opposite persuasion. Insects evade capture as a shadow brushes past them. These are roles played out step by step in an unfolding drama.

I believe that walking, above all other modes of locomotion, roots the pedestrian within a landscape in a fluid, progressive state, regardless of an urban or rural setting. Many would agree that riding a horse or bicycle offers a similar sense of rootedness, but walking makes known an opportunity to give one's senses over completely to what is before and around you, more so than all other modes of transport, which require a part of the mind to be given over to driving. Spiritually, we follow a path. The destination is not as important as we might think it is - progress is made simply by following the path.

Walking offers an intimacy which weaves together the light, the sounds, smells, feelings and sights of the enveloping landscape into a sensual tapestry. There is an excitement in exposing oneself to the elements, to leave behind the convenience, the luxury and the safety of modern life and return to that primitive state. Walking is rhythmic, melodious. Walking inspires pure thought, clarity of mind, imagination and creativity.

I am no peripatetic philosopher. Most writers could present you with a more eloquent, articulate manifesto championing the benefits of walking over other means of locomotion. I am a wanderer who feels that walking, when it is possible to choose to walk, ignites something in one's imagination which is otherwise sleepwalking within or in a state of suspended animation during a journey by car or public transport. The vehicle accelerates its passengers, and isolates the commuter, taking away the possibility to join with the landscape and to contextualise the role one might play in the landscape as it speeds past in a long chain of lost opportunities.

Hilaire Belloc, in his 1906 work Hills and the Sea, expressed this feeling perfectly: "The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all".

Driving through a landscape we are, at best, only forming an abstract connection with it. We retreat into a part of our consciousness and often do not remember how we get from point to point, even though we have safely navigated past cyclists, through traffic signals, around roundabouts and stopped or slowed as necessity demanded. We may safely navigate a car across a landscape, but we are not really a part of it in the way we are on perhaps a bicycle or horse, but especially so on foot.

To intimately know a landscape changes the manner in which one passes through it. One might walk on or over an unfamiliar landscape, rather than in or amongst it. A familiar landscape shares its secrets. The Downs are my landscape; I know them and to walk upon them is like returning home. Walking into one's home is to return to familiar, beloved surroundings. The Downland landscape is my home and my companion which allows me into its welcoming embrace. One is enveloped into its folds and combes and dry valleys, and then the landscape unfolds with the progression of each footfall and its secrets are revealed.

A voice whispers in the ear of the familiar walker: "Welcome back, friend. Come, walk with me and I will share with you my secrets". And everywhere then you share the joy of nature, such as in watching Small Tortoiseshell butterflies basking in the March sun by their rabbit-hole hibernaculum; a joy punctuated by the pain of tragic, brutal lives cut short when a dead fox or rabbit or pheasant is revealed before it has met the gaze of the crow or magpie or, increasingly, the red kite.

For a time, whether it may be for the duration of a single walk or for a lifetime, I am a part of this landscape, as it is at all times a part of my inner landscape. That landscape is changed because of my presence within it and, returning home to the place where I have put down my roots, I too am changed, always for the better.

The downland landscape from Swanborough towards Firle (© Steven Teale)