The Claim

First stake your claim. This must be a law of nature, although I don’t think biologists would sign up to it in quite those terms. There are words, such as succession and colonisation, which scientists use to describe the natural processes of species moving in and grabbing opportunities, but none of them seem to me to be all-embracing, nor do they express the rugger-scrum urgency of nature muscling in. None seem quite to grasp the surging reality of what is going on out there, every minute of every day in every season. The best I can manage is the claim. I like the claim because it also seems to chime with some inner connection, making it a private and personal coda for my own existence, for what I have done in my lifetime, claiming space and letting it possess me as I possess it to meet my own biological needs and those of my family. I witness manifestations of the claim everywhere I look. I find it in every visible living organism: plants, birds, reptiles, insects, bugs, mammals, fish, algae, fungi and bacteria. On my way to the loch I stumble across it every day.

June 17th This morning I’m back in the pinewood. It would be good to see the red squirrels or the tiny crested tits – a species utterly dependent upon pine forest – that flit and trill through the high canopy; but today I have another purpose. I’m heading through to the regenerating birchwoods on the western slopes draining into the loch, to check out a warbler. A bird-watching friend has reported an attractive but, by warbler standards, unmelodious trill he thinks might belong to a wood warbler. I am sure it is – it wouldn’t be the first time we have recorded this inconspicuous little migrant songster with a timorous tune in our woods – but I want to hear and ideally see it for myself before we record it formally among the year-on-year increasing list of small birds in our new, precious wild woods.

They are new because there were no birchwoods behind the loch when I came to live here thirty years ago; the land was desolate, sour moorland that had been grazed bare by centuries of livestock, principally sheep, right through the nineteenth century, and, throughout the twentieth, increasing pressure from rapidly increasing numbers of wild red deer. With the removal of the hill sheep and some effective deer control the birches have seeded themselves and waxed strong under the smiling sun, now proper woodland, maturing year on year, niches filling, new life streaming in and claiming the woodland soils, the minerals, the moisture, the leaves, the dead wood, the leaf mould, the shelter and the shade for themselves. That’s what also makes them precious. They signal hope for our long future – man giving something back to nature after taking too much for so long. The spring bird list is just one way of measuring the success of the expanding woodland; the more productive the woodland, the longer the species list grows. These are some of the things naturalists get up to: watching, finding, recording and listing, although for many years I have been happy to leave the paperwork to others more scientifically orientated and methodically inclined.

Halfway through the pinewood a wet flush runs down from the moor towards the loch. The ground is permanently boggy here, almost running in winter, but dense with lush grasses all summer long. Where the red deer have picked their way through, their cloven slots have left deep pouches where water the colour of brandy stands and shines. Bending down to inspect one of these I see a tiny wriggling disturbance beneath the surface of the water. The same repeats from pouch to pouch, seems to be true for them all. Some sharp-eyed opportunist insect of the wet woods, most likely a species of gnat, has found these egg-cups of static water to be just right for their particular domestic purposes. They have nipped in and laid claim to these unlikely legacies of chance. Eggs have been laid and the aquatic larvae have hatched and grown fat, grazing on microscopic diatoms in the safety of the water. Hanging below the surface they have probed a tail-end snorkel upwards through the surface tension to breathe. They have claimed their private space and their world is air and food and the protection of the dark micro-ponds in which the parent gnat so thoughtfully spawned them. I bend down to see more clearly. As the shadow I cast and the vibrations of my footfall alert them to danger, so they wriggle free from the surface and disappear to the murky bottom of their tiny, sherry-glass home. All unwitting, intent on another claim of their own, the deer have sauntered through leaving their trail of perfectly shaped pockets for something else to use. Nature never sleeps, opportunities are snatched, claims staked. That’s the way it all works. Nature doesn’t miss tricks.

Pondering the mysteries of chance and opportunity, the two immeasurable constants that shape our world, I begin to cross the broad, wet stripe in front of me. In the wettest runs, those that stay damp all the year round, bright red and lime-green sphagnum mosses in opulent, domed hassocks plump enough to grace the altar rail of any cathedral have forced out the grasses, taking over, claiming the moist, peaty sediment for themselves. I pick my way carefully through; I know the mud beneath is deep and to put a foot wrong will always bring the discomfort of a wet foot for the rest of my walk.

I found my warbler – that is to say, I caught its distinctive shivering trill and its thin, plaintive follow-on – stalked it in to only a few yards, and saw an almost liquid, citrine flash disappear through an eared willow thicket and up into a high birch. Song is often the best way to identify a bird. It was exactly where I was told it would be – where it had been before. I would have been surprised if it hadn’t been there. It, too, had found its patch and staked its claim. Its tremulous and repetitive song, described by Gilbert White in Selborne as ‘a sibilous shivering noise in the tops of the tall woods’, was its best shot at informing the world and any other wood warblers that may be around.

Every time I make my circumambulation of the loch I pass several obvious boundaries. There is the wire stock fence containing Geordie McLean’s sheep; a dry-stone dyke marks the boundary of crofting land from two centuries ago; I, in my time, have erected fences on my own ground; behind the loch a mesh deer fence at the rim of a Forestry Commission plantation unsuccessfully attempts to keep the red deer off the pasture land; and a line of long-defunct pig-iron posts with the wires almost completely corroded away reveals where in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the crofters divided up their grazing rights on the high moorland. Fences and walls are the convention we humans have always used to mark out our claims to the land. Then we back it up with maps and deeds, just in case. But these visible artificial boundaries are as nothing compared to the other boundaries I cross in the course of my walk. I cannot guess at their number – I can only list a few of the most obvious to me.

We all make claims. Claims are an essential component of day-to-day life in the human as well as the natural world. Claims are how animal societies are ordered and maintained; they have to be staked out and boundaries have to be set and patrolled. Claims are made to the three physical dimensions of space and the further far less obvious three of scent, sound and time, some very brief, some becoming permanent, immutable features in the lives of the species concerned. Claims are staked to food supplies and the territory required to supply that food, and, almost the most vital of all, to mates. Food, a home and a mate, those three; life’s triple imperatives we all need, and to which, sooner or later, we all lay claim, from the lowliest gnat larva in the footprint of a deer to those who run great government oligarchies like the Forestry Commission.

Three-dimensional claims are easy to see. Each fence post reveals a need on the part of the claimant: the forester, crofter or other stakeholder. The bigger the fence or the wall, the greater the need. Some animals have fence posts of their own. Beside the burn, a convenient linear physical feature, I find a line of badger latrines – shallow dung pits – which mark the edge of a badger territory. Badgers live in family groups, sometimes called clans, and are deeply territorial. They stake out their ground with scent from under-tail scent glands and with lines and groups of dung pits prominently placed. The intention is to keep at bay any other badgers from neighbouring clans straying into their feeding grounds. The burn is an obvious natural boundary and the badgers have used it to define their territory and reinforce their claim.

Resorting to modern technology to assist our knowledge of these crepuscular undertakings, one of my colleagues recently set a concealed automatic camera (Stealthcam) on a tree beside the badger latrines. He also sprinkled some peanuts around beneath the camera. In the morning the camera had fired three times, revealing a solitary badger devouring the peanuts as expected. It was reset and more nuts were put out, and he confidently expected the same result. But the next night produced a fine dog fox, precisely mirroring the actions of the badger, and, almost as a gesture of defiance, a sort of fox V-sign, defecating full and vividly right beside, but not in, the badger dung pits. The fox had claimed the peanuts – thank you very much – but seemed unable to resist scornfully defying the badger boundaries, leaving a handsome, black and twisted marker of his own.

Protective of their feeding and breeding grounds, the roe bucks constantly patrol their patches of woodland and take great trouble to skin the stems of prominent saplings with their antlers. They also have a scent gland, in their case positioned between the antlers, so that by rubbing up and down on a slender stem and peeling the bark bare they can create a highly visible marker post, greatly assisted by the obvious die-back of browning leaves when the sapling has been ring-barked, which remains a flag for other bucks to keep out, long after the scent has evaporated.

Otters spraint conspicuously in the same places over and over again. I know a stone at the water’s edge just under the bridge over the burn where I will always find a fresh, black, slightly oily, fish-smelling deposit. At the head of the loch there is a large, mossy, bank-side cushion in the marsh where the bright green of the moss has been entirely burned back to a lifeless grey by the trampling and strongly nitrogenous sprainting of the otters over many seasons. They also raise their tails and spray their urine against way markers – a tree stump or a boulder – to leave a lutrine signal and a lingering scent that wafts off around the loch or is carried downstream by the movement of the water to greet any other otter passing through. Man’s ability to detect scent is crude and vestigial. If we ever had it, we’ve lost it; evolved it out over millions of years of developing an intellect which rendered superfluous that particularly vibrant dimension of the natural world. It’s our loss. We can only guess at what the full sentiment of the otter’s message might be.

Scent is multi-dimensional. All I can see as I stroll my way through the many territories of the wildlife around my home are the visible signs – a pine marten scat parked prominently on a stone, the twisted cord of fox faeces very ostentatiously left on the path, roe deer and badger paths winding through the woods – but I am conscious that I am also perpetually trespassing. I wend my way through uncharted waves of scent too refined for my feeble and inchoate olfactory equipment. If only we could somehow colour each animal scent with wisps of smoke: red for roe deer, green for badgers, yellow for wildcats, blue for pine martens, brown for foxes, orange for stoats, purple for the red deer . . . the land would become a perpetual rainbow of magical, interwoven lattices, an intricate sunset of spectral beauty, twisting and turning with the contours like a mad Van Gogh painting.

Supreme in the claim-staking art is the red deer stag. He has it all; he wraps all six dimensions into his display with anarchic domination, to hell with anything or anyone else. In the rut his testosterone-driven bravura transcends all boundaries. He powers his authority throughout his domain. Like a body-builder, he has perfected his physical attire: the fine head of antlers, the shaggy, black mane, the rippling muscles, the haughty eye. Then he marks out his ground. He stamps and rips at the heather with his hooves and antlers, digging a wet, peaty pit in which he urinates and wallows. When he emerges, rank, black and dripping, to other stags and to his hinds looking on, his stature and his authority are hugely enhanced. His cervine pungence fills the air. Then he roars. He tips back his head and hurls his challenge to the winds, to the high hills, to the waiting, quaking world. It is one of nature’s most refined utterances, once heard never forgotten; a roar that intensifies life and validates the wildness of the hills, the moors, the forests and the seasons. He repeats it over and over again, daring the world to venture onto his stance or to threaten his harem of hinds – roars that lay claim to his wives, his land and his future.

And then there is birdsong. Robins, unable physically to mark the land, choose prominent perches from which to sing vigorously, to keep neighbouring birds at bay during the mating and nesting season. My spring walks are uplifted by their rich, melodious and robust solos – a sheer joy to us, but a deadly serious signal to other robins. The heron hoarsely barks his grating claim to the marsh. The nesting ospreys and peregrines shriek theirs into thin air while mobilising their aerial brilliance to attack and see off any intruders. So do the ravens; their profundo ‘Cronk! Cronk!’ echoes from the sheer rock walls of the river gorge, audible up to half a mile away. When the security of their nest site is intentionally or unintentionally threatened, by either other passing ravens or perhaps a buzzard or a golden eagle just wheeling through, they too take to the air and use their size and very accomplished aerial skills, amplified by their low-frequency mountain calls, to harry away the intruder, often mobbing it relentlessly for a mile or more.

To a bird there is no poetry in birdsong. For all our fanciful notions, the plain truth is that birds sing to attract a mate and to form a pair bond – and to keep others out. Most birds, even those which happily flock together for a large part of the year, are deeply territorial when they need to be. Anyone who lives near a rookery knows that. As I walk up the Avenue every spring the pageant being enacted high above me in the twiggy tops of the limes and horse chestnuts is a constant racket of corvid clamour. The rooks are yelling at and to each other all the time. Rooks that feed side by side in the field, flocking in hundreds, suddenly become angrily defensive of their little perch of nest space. During the noisy building process one bird will sit and defend the nest against others building nearby, while its partner flies off to search for more twigs. All that wonderfully evocative countryside racket simply repeats over and over again: ‘Keep off! This is our space.’

Our woods ring with chaffinch song throughout the spring, another species that flocks in large numbers in the winter. But with the breeding season the birds pair off and mate. While the hen perfects her nest and lays her eggs the cock birds perch prominently on the outermost branch of a tree or the tip of a bush and hurl out a constantly repeating refrain for all they are worth. Throats dilated and vibrating, their buoyant melodies weave elegance and grace into our spring, but to other chaffinches the claim message is clear: ‘This site is ours!’ Once the breeding game is done, the urge to sing evaporates and falls back to a pathetic, repetitive cheep. For the rest of the year they barely sing a note.

Every once in a while, the song doesn’t seem to work. In my journal I hoard incidents like pocketed pretty shells from the beach. Much later they become touchstones, assuming a broader significance. One nesting season entry records a claim that seemed to have failed. Departing the dam an hour after dawn, I was walking quietly down the path when a ball of feathers tumbled through the pine branches above me and landed at my feet. I stopped in amazement. Three blue tits were locked together in what appeared to be mortal combat. With feet and beaks they gripped fiercely on to each other, and their tiny wings whipped angrily in an attempt to beat their opponents into submission. It was impossible to discern more than a ball of rolling, fizzing, flapping blue, green and yellow. It was impossible to tell who was fighting who; was it two against one, or were they all equally angry with each other? I had no idea whether they were all male, or whether an unfortunate female was caught up in a vicious mating triangle. That such tiny birds could display such anger was astonishing to behold. A high-pitched chatter of rage, as though emitted through clenched teeth, was all I could hear.

I was transfixed by this extraordinary behaviour. What fury burned in these pulsating, thumb-nail breasts to make them abandon the safety of the trees? What passion clouded their tiny avian brains? Did they know they had fallen to the ground; that all their defences were down; that they were doubly vulnerable to predation, rolling about on the ground broadcasting their presence with their angry chatter? Any pine marten, wildcat, stoat, weasel, buzzard, sparrowhawk, hoodie crow or fox in the vicinity could so easily have nipped in for a cheap meal.

After watching for several minutes, and seeing no victor or any hint of a breach in the impasse, I stepped forward and bent to pick them up. For a moment I was able to hold them in my hands, still fizzing like a bomb, tiny shoulders still ramming angrily home. Then the truth seemed to dawn; one bird let go with its bill, eyed me for a split second of awful recognition and tore itself free, quickly flying away leaving a dusting of sulphur-tinged feathers floating to the ground. The other two looked faintly silly and then broke as well. In a flash they were gone.

I have often seen blue tits as well as other tit species fighting. They can be fierce little tykes with a special street-urchin charm, aggressive and feisty by nature, denying their diminutive size, soft, pastel-hued plumage and endearing confidence on our bird tables, but I had never before witnessed such relentless spleen, none of them apparently prepared to yield a fraction of an inch. Whichever bird made the claim that day obviously didn’t make it forcefully enough. Another bird, perhaps two, saw a chink in his armour and made a challenge.

Animals are by no means alone in staking claims. Every seed that falls and germinates is a claim in the making. From the first sprout veering skywards from the splitting seed case, and the first root hairs tentatively heading down, every plant, whether mighty tree or tiny flower, is grabbing space and opportunity to establish its claim on sunlight, soil and moisture. We see only the delicate nodding of the wood anemone; we overlook the innate aggression in its leaves and roots, fighting for the space to survive, mustering its inner forces, doing its last-ditch best to force any other competing plant out of its patch. Some species, such as rhododendrons, resort to dirty tricks to win their space. Their roots release toxic phenols into the soil so that nothing else can grow there. They poison their way to the sun. Others, such as beech trees, produce a heavy canopy of shade to stifle the photosynthetic chances of anything else germinating around them, removing competition for precious water and nutrients for their own roots at the same time as saturating the ground with capillary root hairs so that nothing else has a chance. There is a war going on out there, endlessly, inexorably, day and night, in every ecosystem and habitat throughout our wondrous world, and always utterly without quarter. There is no place for charity in the natural world.

In the wrong place some claimants are thoroughly unwelcome. The Victorians planted an American red oak in what is now my garden. In a hundred years it had grown well to become a fine, handsomely spreading tree until it was claimed as a desirable host by honey fungus (Armillaria mellea), a devastating parasite of trees and shrubs from which there is no escape. It infects roots and butts, eventually fatally invading the whole tree with a white, fibrous rot. With a heavy heart I felled the oak and removed the stump, burning it and all the brash wood in the vain hope that I could contain the spread of the fungus. I dug out the ground around the stump and replaced it with fresh soil from another part of the garden. But the fungal spores are airborne and will have proliferated far and wide long before I took action.

To me and in my garden context, the honey fungus ravaging so fine a tree was a plague I could well have done without. But from an ecological standpoint I should not be so quick to damn its name. In a natural climax forest, where honey fungus will certainly have evolved, there must always have been many more trees than it could infect, and its depredations will have done no more than create a constant supply of dead wood for many other species, especially invertebrates and other saprophytic fungi, to claim for their own particular needs. In the long term the tree would decay back to the soil to feed new growth. The spaces in the forest its demise created would also have freed up opportunities for other trees and plants to colonise. Nature’s generous spirit always seems to have room for its own.

For those who have the time and the inclination to explore it, nature is a constant source of joy and delight to the human eye. But there is another view of this marvellous cosmos in which we gloriously spin. For the moment mankind has grabbed the initiative; the world has been our oyster since we discovered how to dominate it, there for the taking and the keeping in our time. We have staked our claim with a terrible and merciless vengeance. But we should not be so complacent.

The ascent of man has always been at the expense of the natural world; we have always destroyed our own habitat and the fellow creatures that would share it with us. But for most of human history the world was a big enough place to absorb our impact and to repair the damage as fast as we laid waste. When we felled forests they grew up again. When we broke camp and moved on to a new abode nature strode in behind with the beneficent process of re-colonisation and restoration. We left nothing behind us but ash, bone, redundant timber, dung and clearings, all of which nature can cope with in a flash. Then Civilisation strode into the arena. In awe of its compelling logic we stepped away from nature and abandoned the wild that had served us so well. We pillaged the forests to build great cities.

The advancement of knowledge and the birth of science and technology seemed to be everything we could have wished for, matched in scope only by the conceit and complacency that spawned it. What we had not bargained for were the numbers of human beings that would arise as an inevitable consequence of advances in medicine, energy production and global mobility. Nor had anyone given thought to the space we would need to feed those ever-expanding populations. We lived with the grand assumption that there would always be enough land-water-food-natural-resources for us all. For long enough there were. For several thousand years ‘Moab was our washpot and out over Edom did we cast our shoes’, and we got away with it; although perhaps we should have learned a few lessons from the felling of the great cedar forests of Mesopotamia which had built and ultimately brought about the downfall of the great Babylonian civilisation and the permanent aridity (much of southern Iraq) that followed our devastation of that great natural resource.

Three thousand years later we are still making the same mistakes for much the same reasons. Now, in such a short time, less than my own lifetime, powered by cheap fossil energy we have created mountain ranges of waste, and pollution has run rampant through just about everything we do. We have created chemical compounds far too complex for any known microbe to break down. Only God knows how long it will take evolution to come up with ways for nature to break down plastics, to say nothing of nuclear waste.

Very few who are ecologically aware believe that we can get away with such profligacy indefinitely. Only very recently have our leaders openly begun to discuss some of the very serious impacts we have imposed on our planet. In the last three hundred years we have pumped carbon faster into the atmosphere than it has ever known since life emerged, and the unimagined consequence of so doing has begun to release methane from the melting permafrost zones of the vast tundra wastes. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. No one knows how or where the consequences of this new threat will come home to roost. Vast regions of the sub-tropics could be heading for desert, a potentially irreversible condition it would take hundreds of thousands of years of no greenhouse emissions at all to repair. Against this the felling of forests and over-fishing of seas look temporary and trifling. It seems very likely that one day we shall reap the whirlwind – forces of nature way beyond our control may claim back the global domination we have celebrated as so great a human achievement for so long. Perhaps it has already begun.