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with their dagger bills in search of leatherjacket grubs. The soiled feathers around the bill simply give up and fail to grow; in the same way some vultures and storks are bald for endlessly thrusting their heads inside rotting carcasses. At nearly twenty-three Squawky’s cheeks were huge and as muddy white as a mushroom, made more sinister by the almosttotal absence of black feathers on his domed skull. He looked like a bad caricature of a vulture with a straight bill or a stork with a short one. But most comical of all were his pantaloons. His feathery trousers, reaching well below his black-scaly knees, were a cross between gamekeepers’ plus-fours and the 1930s tennis shorts worn by Indian army colonels.
    The kind farm-labourer husband was long departed to build celestial aviaries, and Squawky and the widow Ruby, his almost-stone-deaf, now-in-her-eighties mistress, had lived on in happy andro-corvid companionship for many years. I spent a rapt and nostalgic hour shouting to her so loudly that Squawky, several yards away outside, became agitated and excitedly joined in most of the conversation. Her hearing can’t have been so bad because at one point I made the forgivable slip of calling the bird ‘my rook’. As quick as a flash the old lady leaned forward and corrected me: ‘No, dearie, my rook.’
    I fed Squawky some porridge and scrambled egg – his favourite dish of more than two decades lovingly prepared by Ruby, which he gobbled noisily and with great vigour, swiping his bill clean on the edge of the bowl when he’d finished. I departed still not quite believing that rooks could live so long.
    *  *  *
    My enthusiasm for rooks has digressed me from what was so extraordinary in November. They should not have beennest-building at all. I didn’t know it at the time, but something was upsetting the biorhythms that govern the lives of most of our wildlife, whether visible from my bath or not. The rooks were confused. At first I thought it might be the length of daylight that baffled them, imagining that early November had the same length of day at our latitude as their normal nesting time in February, but I was wrong. There is more than an hour and a half’s difference – far too broad a wedge to disorientate an intelligent bird like a rook.
    Could the temperature have been the same, triggering some deep genetic impulse to build nests? But, no, the mean temperatures for early November and late February were more than 4º Celsius apart for the previous year. So what had done it? What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?

5
    Prints in the Snow
    What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen,
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
    â€˜Sonnet 97’, William Shakespeare
    December is winter, no denying it. If wet November winds pile in, sodden but mild, you can still argue that autumn lingers on, but not in December. November trails its coat; December slams the door. And it isn’t just the long darkness, although its melancholy gloom does smother everything, even hopes and dreams.
    It’s the shopping list winter brings to our Highland glen that becomes so inescapable in December, and any of it can happen at any time: the bone-aching cold, as temperatures skirt around freezing for days on end, a cold that seems to penetrate far deeper than that of harder frosts and from which I can find relief only with a hot bath. Then the unexpected plunge to –15º Celsius of a moonlit night; squalls of merciless sleet; the mess of slush; black ice bringing sudden, bruising falls to the unwary; castigating rain; knife-edged winds from the north and east that slice off your legs at the knees; the absurdly crimped daylight for any outdoor work. As our field centre maintenance man, Hugh Bethune,