Travel plans up in the air
Santa has put his feet up and can rest for another year.
The few remaining turkeys can relax in the knowledge that they are safe for now.
Yet Christmas has not really been the happiest time for domestic poultry. For instance, the threat of bird flu has meant that my motley little flock had had to be confined to a life indoors because of an order that all poultry must be kept isolated from wild birds. Mind you, they managed to miss the passage of Storms Barbara and Conor as a result.
I find this restrictive decree slightly puzzling in view of the 50 million (at the latest count) pheasants released during the past year and currently wandering about the British countryside. I would have thought that they might have posed a rather more serious threat of transmitting bird flu due to their wilder state, their regular contact with wild birds and the likelihood of closer contact with far-travelled migrants. Migrating birds, it is said, are the likeliest sources of infection.
Bird migration totally baffled our ancestors. The concept of millions of birds translocating across thousands of miles was beyond the thought processes of folk who mostly knew very little about the world beyond their own home patch.
I have known people whose knowledge and experience of the wider world has not been expanded. For instance, I once had cause to know a farm worker who toiled away daily on his brother-in-law’s farm in the remote Northern Pennines. This hard-working soul freely admitted that he had never seen the sea, which was not more than 30 miles from where he lived. Indeed, he was moved to enquire as to what the sea looked like.
Goodness knows what my farm-worker friend might have made of the logistics of bird migration. I wonder too what he must have made of the sea when he finally got to see it, probably on a minuscule television screen.
As one who is old enough to recall people living in such real isolation, the recent exploits of a dedicated ornithologist in following the migratory journey of Bewick’s swans from northern Russia to their Slimbridge in Gloucestershire is utterly mind-boggling. The fact that she followed them using a motorised para-glider is even more mind-blowing.
Here we are approaching the seventh day of Christmas. Upon this day, the carol tells us, an unlikely romantic sent his true love seven swans-aswimming and here is this young lady flying with not seven but hundreds or even thousands of swans across 7000 frozen miles of northern skies.
Bear in mind that throughout her three-month journey she was as exposed to the treacherous weather of northern Europe as the swans themselves. They, however, are clad in a suit of feathers, while she had to rely upon modern clothing technology. Rather her than me.
The reason for this extraordinary, life-risking adventure, perhaps the most amazing piece of avian research ever undertaken, was to find out why the population of these swans has been falling so alarmingly.
In hindsight what she discovered was not altogether surprising. One fact seemed to stand out above any other: the people who inhabit the truly remote northern regions of Russia seem to remain locked in a time warp.
They are, she discovered, guilty of shooting the swans because they had come to believe that they scared off the geese which regularly fly in formation with the swans and which they shoot to eat. They are aware that the swans are protected but believe that this protection is because they appear in fairy stories.
What those isolated northern folk made of this dedicated lady’s exploits aboard a motorised kite, all in an academic pursuit of birds which they randomly kill, makes for some interesting speculation.
Nevertheless, this was an outstanding piece of work concerning the smallest of the world’s swans, similar though they are to the whooper swans we play host to each winter. Whoopers also breed in Arctic regions. The ones that winter here all come from Iceland but other populations winter in other parts of Europe.
A good number of years ago I was lucky enough to spot a Bewick’s swan off the Ayrshire coast. It was the first one to have been spotted in that part of Scotland and the only reason I was able to identify it as a Bewick’s swan was because it had been dyed yellow in an effort to trace its movements. In those days it was much easier to catch the bird and dye it than try to fly with it.
There will be readers, I’m sure, who think that such highflying exploits go way beyond the pale.
However, as we say farewell to 2016 that intrepid traveller has most certainly made her mark. Therefore she is my personality of the departing year without question.
I hope you and she all have a guid new year.