jiggery crakery

Walking on Iona at 1am on a summers night. There are some short seconds when you don't hear the rasping of a corncrake. All other moments are occupied with the call and its echo richocheting off drystone and mortar. A single sound in the still darkness of sheep fields, meadows, ancient burial grounds, hotel gardens and abbey herb patches. It is reminiscent of something that I cannot place. Perhaps a cross between a washboard and the beginning of a Deus song that I don't remember the name of (incisive!).

The next afternoon Deob and I stood a long time, leaning on the party wall between Relig Odhrain (the ancient burial ground) and the neighbouring field that has been left to meadow. There was one of the birds just there and it creaked at us, keeping its head below its grassy parapet. We wanted to spy it. We whispered. The thing immediately stopped and we knew it was scuttling away on its long legs only to taunt us from a position of safety 10 feet away, where sure enough the creaking started again 5 minutes later.

The great corncrake of which we hear so much, because it is heard so little. Maybe they will start a special Relig Ocrake for the prized birds, on the other side of the Street of the Dead. All along the island's roads and paths people were playing a game of inverted musical statues when the rasping started. A Corncrake!

Earlier Deob had pointed out a young starling on a telephone wire above the house, it warbled a medley of birdsong, mimiking the calls of blackbirds and curlews. Deob doesn't just spot creatures, he creates new hybrids. A few years ago and across the water on a granular black sand Mull beach, near the skeleton of a little whale: the creation of a Deobosaur by sticking a limpet to his forehead.

The next night-morning a tramp across fields at 4.30am in almost daylight, a flock of dozing sheep blinked awake. And more creaking in the long grass.