Gods of the Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Arctic, straggling down from the great heights at which they travel, often many thousands of feet, are special to me not just because I love to catch their excited voices on the wind and see their silhouetted chevrons against the clouds, but because they are living, crying witnesses to nature’s biorhythms present within us all.
    We all migrate. We venture out and we return home. We send forth our young. The winged seed spiralling to Earth from a sycamore or an ash; the rowan berries ingested by Scandinavian fieldfares and redwings are cast to the hills; the lonely ‘outcast’ badger that dug himself a temporary home among the roots of one of our western red cedars last year; the spiders I witnessed ballooning down the wind on their silk threads; the rooks and jackdaws I was watching this afternoon, surfing the wind over the river fields; the swallows and house martins swooping low into the stables each spring; the salmon surging up the Beauly River to spawn every summer – all of these and myriad more organismsaround my home, around all of us all the time – are responding to the secret codes emitted by the sun and the spinning Earth, received and processed to serve each species’ individual ends. ‘So great a cloud of witnesses.’
    They’re heading out, patiently running the race their needs have set before them. They all need to feed, to breed and to survive, like surfers riding the waves of Fate. I, sitting tapping these words into my laptop, and you, reading them – whoever we are, wherever we may be and whatever our private pretensions – are also part of that same grand opera: the pull of life’s imperatives. We migrate, whether a few yards before finding a suitable place to put down roots or circumnavigating the globe, like the Arctic tern, which travels ten thousand miles to the Antarctic and back again every year, patiently making the most of our lot, our personal shout at the survival of ourselves and our species. That’s what migration is.
    These days we understand it – at least, quite a lot of it. Seasonal bird migration in particular has been well and widely studied. We now know, for instance, that migration can be triggered by temperature, by length of daylight hours, by weather conditions and by diminishing food supplies, but we also know that it is genetically controlled. Glands churn and swell, hormones swirl. The imperative to get up and go when we need to is written into the electrochemical circuitry of human brains as well as bird brains.
    In the case of geese, intricate studies have demonstrated that their innate circuitry and navigational skills are added to year on year by experience. Old birds get canny: theylearn to read the wind. They know exactly the right moment to head off, and the youngsters follow. I’ve always loved the expression ‘wise old bird’. It’s never truer than of mature geese, sometimes individual birds that have made their twice-annual trek more than fifty times. A ringed (banded) snow goose hatched in Alaska and wintering in Mexico has been recorded still migrating at twenty-six years old – that’s more than 130,000 miles of reading the wind. I ask myself just what huge range of conditions and changes, trials and close-calls lurk behind the twinkle in that wise old bird’s eyes.
    We also know that different families of birds respond to and navigate by different signals, reflecting each species’ needs and capabilities and determining their route and destination. Experiments in planetaria have proved that some Silviid warblers, such as the blackcap, are genetically wired to navigate by the stars, requiring them to migrate at night. Artificially exposed to different seasonal constellations, caged birds become restless and flutter to the north or south, according to their migratory instincts. Other species can detect the Earth’s magnetic field or memorise significant landmarks, such as