Too Cold For Snow

this summer. There’s work to do by day and night, but anyway you’re a young bloke and won’t need too much sleep,’ said Teale, without any ill-feeling.
    They were all three up early to catch some birds for ringing. They unfurled the mist nets and set them between bamboo poles in the withy beds where they would trap birds in pockets of netting. While they waited for some birds to be caught they walked to the shore. Light was widening as a line above the horizon. Small birds, willow warblers and a few whinchats, flitted among topiaries of gorse, sculpted into dense, contorted thickets by the prevailing wind. There had been a significant ‘fall’ of birds overnight, determined migrants which had been blown off course, attracted by the light, fluttered pathetically to the ground at the base of the lighthouse.
    The three men walked to the shore and shared a thermos of coffee above the cove called Solfach. The pulsing flashes of the lighthouse dimmed in effect as the sun rose in the east, ballooning slowly over the peaks of Snowdonia and the ridgebacks of Yr Eifl, Pegwn Nebo and Mynydd Rhiw.
    Twenty minutes later they visited the nets and all of them had caught: all in all some ten species of passerines, including a beautiful male redstart, in a livery of black, grey and red, which Kenny thought was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen in his life.
    Ryan deftly unfurled the birds from the pockets of net into which they’d settled and popped them into canvas bags to carry them back to the ringing room in one of the Cristin outbuildings. There Kenny was shown how to measure the wings and weigh the small birds in small plastic cones clipped to weighing balances. They noted the abrasion on the wings, which helped age them, and then attached the tiny aluminium rings on their legs, gently squeezing each one closed before releasing the captive bird into the safety of one of the fuchsia bushes.
    Once he’d been shown how to process a morning’s worth of catch, Kenny was told he could do the following day’s rounds himself. He was also taken through his other duties including earning a place on the rota for emptying the chemical latrines. The other assistant, Twm, offered him a clothes peg to cut off his sense of smell in busy visitor weeks. Twm was a funny man. Had a bag of clothes pegs, too.
    The days passed as a series of reveries for Kenny who was lost in the delight of the place. It was a mad swirl of sense and experience. The tang of seaweed reminded him of the iodine his mother would put on cuts. He was given two lobster pots for his own use, which he placed in the protected waters of the Cafn. Favourites, above all else, were the whirling nights when shearwaters claimed the air above the island. Cocklolly, they screamed. Cocklolly! Whipping through like tiny gusts. Nothing that happened by day could compete with the joys of shearwatering. The birds gathered offshore in roosts on the water, waiting for the safety of darkness to settle. Kenny studied them. On land they were ungainly, their legs set far back so that they could barely manage a brief waddle into the safety of their nesting holes. At night they ran a gauntlet of great black-backed gulls which stood sentinel at the nest entrances, eager to guzzle down the little petrels, bite sized snacks for the voracious, powerful birds. In the morning the island was littered with the remains of these feasts – sternum bones picked clean of flesh attached to the indigestible bird parts: the feet and wings. As if supplying a soundtrack for these vicious meals, the shearwater cries were bloodcurdling. In the dark they were the banshee wails of disembodied spirits.
    ‘Those cries are what kept the Vikings from landing on the Calf of Man,’ said Ryan as he picked up one of the birds to ring it. ‘They were in their longboats ready to seize the island at night when they heard all these voices as they headed there, imagining them to be the ghosts of long drowned sailors and they decided not to claim this cemetery of a place and carried on further south.’
    One afternoon they were walking past Sister Briony’s house when they both saw something terrible. Sister Briony was a nun who lived alone in a house called Tyddyn Non and devoted much of her time to keeping the holy wells on the island open. One almost always saw her carrying a First World War trenching tool.
    ‘Fucking hell, she’s crucified herself!’ said Ryan, pointing to where the old woman