Two Hours

I go out at five o’clock. The idea of staying inside by the windows overlooking the lake is very tempting, but it feels as though there was more to be seen elsewhere on the reserve. Five is official closing time at Caerlaverock Wetlands Centre, but we are staying in the farmhouse there, and so are unaffected. On our first night we’d encountered various hardcore birders in the hides, but this time my wife has dozed off upstairs, and outside all I see is people heading home for tea.

I think regretfully of the cup of tea I’ve just gulped down as the cold late-March rain whisks across the courtyard. I jam my hands in my pockets and go the opposite way to everyone else, mud sponging out under my boots.

The reserve, close to the Dumfriesshire coast and the English border, covers a huge area, but most of it is off-limits to humans. They walk at the bottom of the great tree-lines trenches. Chaffinches and sparrows sing and flit in the licheny branches below the wind-line. Every hundred metres or so there’s a hide. Some are proper buildings, brick-walled, with heavy doors. But most are made of big plastic water tanks sawn in half, with narrow rectangular viewing windows cut in the remaining end. Mostly, these have wooden screens across them – whether they do or not, if they face the wind it comes in wielding its knives on fingers.

Once opened, the hide windows reveal a narrow strip of vision, a Chinese scroll world coloured green and grey, with the ideograms of birds moving as the eyes moves. Caerlaverock hosts 30,000 barnacle geese every winter. As evening begins they fill the sky, “skeins” of shadows and calls – a city of birds.

In among the “barnies” are other species. One hide, the one from which we had watched hares chase each other the night before, looks out onto a group of curlews. Their long beaks probe the ground. I followed the leader of the group through my binoculars, watching its misty brown-grey shift and bob. Between the curlews and the barnies – complete indifference.

Moving from hide to hide is to walk in mud, slipping, the wind whipping sounds across the top of the trench. In the grander hides, the door closes with a boom, but it’s not much warmer. Silence trails behind me to the windows. Only by the glass do the honks and trills penetrate from outside. I follow the movements of lapwings up and down the bank of a wind-blown pool. When they fly, the great black patches make the ends of their wings look absurdly heavy, as though they were boxers with horseshoes in their gloves.

The wind is eldritch around the top of the tower hide. To the naked eye, most birds are no more than white dots, but at least I don’t have to worry about my shadow on the glass. (In the previous hide, I drove off two crows and two mallards in this way, though the pair of teal on the water carried on unperturbed.)

Two male swans are muscling at each other. A female swims closely around them. The fight breaks out, neck-to-neck wrestling. But they’re evenly matched. Push and push, they go, then start reaching over each other’s shoulders to pull at flight feathers with their beaks. They slip out of the water. They slip in. For a while all I can see through my binoculars is a knot of wings just above the surface, and the female circling and circling.

The fight goes on. For a moment it looks like one swan is drowning the other, but suddenly they’re back on even terms. I get bored, a small flock of redpolls, a species I’ve not seen before, settles in the tree right below me. When they leave, I look back at the swans – still fighting. After 20 minutes, I feel at risk of frostbite, and the swan battle has still not finished. Time to move on.

The reserve is empty of people. I am a rat in this bird city, scurrying along tunnels. I don’t think about humans any more, only the shift from species to flock. I follow patterns, I follow individuals. It is tempting to dream myself an explorer, categorising this and that, but allowing the tides of my senses to wear away at my thoughts.

But cold is a constant, and the birds are beginning to settle for the night. I make this the last hide. A part of me wants to stop myself going back into the human world, preferring the scrolls of sky and water. I make a compromise. No more listening for birds – their calls, the sweeps of their wings. Only listening.

I let the tide of sound flood me. Geese overhead, swans on the lake, chaffinches in the trees, crows on the grass below. Everything gathered into a single sound, a clustering, melting glitter across the landscape. For that time, no more of me, only listening.