LINDISFARNE UNDER MIDWINTER STARS, a thin, gnawing east wind off the sea. When Margiad Evans wrote “the wind is a tooth in the breast” this is what she meant. The sky is ragged with clouds and fitful moonlight. The land lies so low against the sea that it could be Holland. In Highland mountains, with so little sky at your disposal and the rocks pressing in on your mind from both sides, such a night stuns the land with the illusion of profound stillness. On Lindisfarne, the entire world is astir. The sky with its unravelling patchwork clouds and hide-and-seek moon and stars is as mobile as it is vast. The falling tide has uncountable voices from far-out breakers to inshore white horses to the last sand-slapping tumble of spent waves and the hissy slither of inch-deep foam among seaweed and the myriad questing legs of wading birds.
The arrival of more and more birds as more and more beach unveils, birds in dozens and hundreds and accumulating into thousands, adds to the notion that even the land is jigging to the infectious rhythm of nature’s island night. They come in low and loud (oystercatchers, curlews, redshanks, brent geese, six whooper swans) and they come in high and silent (plovers, a morose greenshank). From the sea too, the creamy voices of eiders drift ashore where they lay strange harmonies on the muted brass of the swans. Nothing sleeps at such an hour in such a place, for there is night feeding for all and a flickering moon for a candle to light nature’s table.
Enter stage right from the shadows of the dunes where they have been toying with and terrorising the rabbits through the dusky hours, two foxes. On Lindisfarne the foxes’ diet has salt with everything. The fur of rabbits on such an island is routinely drenched with wet salt winds. And when the tide falls, the foxes take to the beach and explore the rockpools for crabs and washed up fish, but when the beach is as full of birds as this, and nightfall subdues their daylight-red coats to a dull and indeterminate grey, they are apt to set their sights a little higher up the food chain. The birds know they will come, of course, for they come every tide of every day and night, but the beached flocks display a fatalism based on safety in numbers, in much the same way that they respond aerially to the ripping flight of the peregrine. The theory is that the sheer weight of numbers and the chaos such numbers create in the face of a predator will defeat that predator more often than not, and if there is a casualty it is one casualty at a time and every other bird has survived, so the law of averages is stacked in their favour.
The foxes don’t seem to feel the need for stealth at night, and trot along the edge of the water not a hundred yards from the nearest crowd of waders, while looking all around, sizing up possibilities. It may be (I have been told) that the birds’-eyeview of them in this light does not recognise them as foxes, but I am sceptical. I think that many thousands of years of evolution will have taken care of that. On the other hand, most beaches are not like Lindisfarne beaches, and most beaches don’t have foxes, so it may be that there are exceptional Lindisfarne dimensions in the relationship between predator and prey species.
From where I am sitting at the top of the beach (and where I have been sitting since before the birds began to arrive and since before the foxes got fed up chasing rabbit shadows), and what with the moonlight and a good pair of light-gathering binoculars, the foxes still look like foxes to me even at two hundred yards. They look skinnier and longer-legged than the mainland mountain foxes I know best, but that could be just because they are wet most of the time, or perhaps (it’s impossible to tell from here at night) they are last year’s cubs out on the prowl and struggling through their first winter.
One fox has stopped, and flattens on the sand like a collie awaiting instructions. The other has trotted on as if it has not noticed. I suspect a ruse. Unease whispers through the flock like wind through a reed bed. My problem now is that the foxes are a hundred yards apart and I can’t watch them both in the glasses. I opt for watching both without glasses. The walking fox stops suddenly, sits on its haunches, yawns, looks round, looks bored, scratches its nose with a hind leg.
The other fox is still motionless on its belly, but is it my imagination or has it squirmed ten yards closer? The sitting, scratching fox stands again and begins to trot towards the birds, looking for all the world as if it has still not noticed they are there. The flock’s tolerance snaps, there is a mass movement to turn and fly away from the trotting fox which means that the birds furthest from it are the last to fly and as they turn and shake out their first few wingbeats they find the second fox almost in their midst. Even as it leaps off the ground to snatch a bird from the air it is clear that the birds have got away with it this time, with about a yard to spare.
It is the first time I have seen foxes hunting as a pair, deploying tactics. The night is chaotic with wings for several minutes, the air alive with milling winds, but surprisingly few bird voices. The foxes have come together on the sand to dance around each other for a few moments then they trot back to the shadows.
I am a rare visitor to Lindisfarne. It is an island with a very persuasive magic, but my island-going inclinations tend to lure me north and west rather than south and east. So I don’t have enough of a picture in my head of the way the island foxes do business. I do know, however, that like foxes everywhere, they suffer at the hands of some of the human natives. There are communities all over the country that make a lot of money from visitors who come for the landscape and the wildlife – for nature. Accommodation adverts for Lindisfarne always mention the birds, and, the foxes. But I have yet to find a community the length and breadth of the land that is without a hard core that will make an exception of the fox in their relationship with nature. The following is from a fine little book called Lindisfarne Landscapes (Saint Andrew Press, 1996) by Sheila Mackay, a friend of many years who for a while was a part-time resident of Lindisfarne:
The afternoon of New Year’s Eve had been arrestingly dramatic. Walking on the Snook I noticed a man perched high on Primrose Bank, dark-sweatered, clutching a shotgun, immobile, with his head turned towards Snook Point. Watching, concealed, I wondered what would happen and could scarcely believe my eyes when a posse of maybe twenty men and older boys appeared, strung out in a line from Primrose Bank to the North Shore, each with a shotgun at the ready.
Passing Snook House garden, they saw me and their greeting dispelled my apprehension: they had seen four foxes but killed none. The foxes had to be flushed out and killed, they said, for they were plundering the refuse bins and attacking the village hens.
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EVEN HERE, I THOUGHT, even in this place so given over to nature, so shaped and reshaped by nature, so defined and redefined by nature, so dependent on nature for its bounties and (as far as the people are concerned) for a living… even here, there is intolerance for foxes. No matter how many mice and rats the foxes will kill, no matter how much joy the presence of the foxes brings to so many people, it’s the same old damnable story.
I am very fond of Lindisfarne. It has a unique atmosphere. It is an astounding theatre of nature even at night. Especially at night. Its relationship with foxes is no worse than anywhere else, but in the eyes of a nature writer it is perhaps just a little more disappointing. Every time I hear about retribution being visited on foxes because they attack hens, I remember the words of the old Scottish naturalist David Stephen: “I never yet saw the fox that had the key to the hen house in its jaws.”
It has taken perhaps ten minutes for the sands to start filling up with birds again, although the swans did not fly, but only walked away a few yards, muttering querulous pairs of muted-brass semi-quavers in their throats. I have yet to meet the fox, no matter how hungry, that that had any appetite for a head-on confrontation with a healthy adult swan.