We’ve come to a special place.
It’s high, this place, nearly all the way up the side of a mountain. And when I say ‘up’, you may safely assume I use the word in its strongest sense. This isn’t a Cotswolds up, nor even a Peak District up. This is a Dolomites up – and in that rugged, dramatic scenery, up means up. The ascent also involves a fair amount of back and forth, in the form of multiple hairpin bends. All well and good until you meet a pick-up truck coming down the hill, with nothing between you and a potentially messy return to the bottom except a narrow verge, a flimsy crash barrier and a couple of whippy-but-probably-not-going-to-bear-the-weight-of-even-the-smallest-hire-car-for-more-than-a-few-seconds saplings.
But now we have our reward, a tiny cabin set in a scene of almost obscene idyllitude. Craggy mountains in the distance, their aspect changing by the minute in the shifting light. Framing them, trees of the pointy kind – your spruces, your pines, your larches – conveniently arranged to allow us the best possible view.
We feel as if we’re in a car advert.
And then there’s the silence, a silence unfamiliar not just to city dwellers like us, but to most people. A silence without the low background hum of traffic, without the regular drone of passing aeroplanes, without the shrill accompaniment of power tools. The silence of a secluded cabin set on the side of a mountain 1200 metres above sea level. The loudest thing in this tableau is the drifting of the mist in the valley below.
I describe all this not because I want to rub the reader’s nose in the excellence of our holiday experience – that’s merely a pleasing fringe benefit from my point of view – but to emphasise the extraordinary tranquility of the scene. You can hear the breath of a goldcrest, the rustle of one larch sprig against another, the tiptoeing of a fire salamander through the moist leaf litter.
It’s really really quiet, is what I’m trying to say. And the purpose of all the above is merely to set the scene for what happens next.
Because what happens next is enough to shatter, just for an instant, both the peace and my sangfroid. It takes the form of an unearthly shriek from the trees close behind the cabin.
Didn’t have that on the bingo card.
The thing about unearthly shrieks, if you’re familiar with the genre, is that it’s all about context. An unearthly shriek of human provenance, deep in the dark woods? Run. Run fast. Run far.
This one, though. Not that. Not human. Not a prompt for a sprint. Distinctly avian, this one.
There aren’t many birds capable of uttering unearthly shrieks. The barn owl is one, and a truly chilling sound it is to hear on a dark and lonely night – an almost voiceless echo, the sound of a lost soul wandering the earth, condemned to roam the hinterlands of the spirit world in an eternal and doomed quest for resolution. Jays also have an unearthly shriek up their sleeve, the sound ripping through the woodland air on many an autumn morning. The screech of a parakeet, the aggrieved squawk of a herring gull, the plaintive mew of a soaring buzzard. All unearthly, all – each in their own way – shrieky.
But this is none of those. No, this sounds like the involuntary ejaculation of someone given a sudden, terrible shock. Perhaps they were going about their business in the normal everyday way, stooping to pick up the milk from the doorstep, and they looked up to find – two feet away from them and as if apparated from thin air – Jeremy Vine, wearing nothing but a Union Jack jockstrap and a toothy smile.
That kind of sound.
Whatever froid was left of my sang is immediately scattered to the four winds. Because this sound, I’m near as dammit certain, is being made by a black woodpecker, and a black woodpecker is a very special thing indeed. Striking, weird, endearingly clumsy in flight, the black of its plumage offset by a red splash on its crown, it’s particularly special because for me it’s a New Bird. And no matter how much I trumpet the positive values of the familiar, the local, the everyday, nobody is truly immune to the thrill of the New Bird.
You will search the woodlands of Great Britain in vain for a black woodpecker. Not a single one has been recorded here, which is mildly surprising given that they’re fairly well known in northern France and the Netherlands and so forth – the shortish hop across a narrowish body of water is evidently just too much bother for them. The closest I’ve come to seeing one was when cycling through Germany. Every new piece of woodland seemed to have an information board at its entrance, the kind of board that raises your hopes by showing you what nature you’re likely to see in the area. The scene represented is invariably quivering with activity – activity rarely reflected in real life, even in part. The likelihood of seeing a black woodpecker on such boards in Germany is, in my experience, in inverse proportion to the likelihood of seeing one in the feather. They are, to be fair, famously shy and elusive, but still. Throw us a bone, eh?
Relatively common throughout north-western Europe, here in the Dolomites they’re at the edge of their range, and I had them tentatively on my informal hit list of ‘birds I’d really like to encounter but you know how it is, just my luck, I probably won’t’.
And here it is, before I’ve even started.
The prospect of New Birds exists anywhere, and there are enough possibles in northern Italy, especially at altitude, to imbue each outing with an added frisson of anticipation. Will we see alpine choughs – diminutive corvids with striking yellow bills – at Cinque Torri, the spectacular group of five pillar-like rock slabs up above the clouds that was the venue of our longest and steepest walk?
We will indeed – a group of three, swooping and diving and calling to each other, making the most of the unique acoustic of the vertical rock faces to make their evocative twanging calls ping around us like bullets in a Western.
Will we be lucky enough to catch sight of a nutcracker – a bird that when it occasionally turns up in Britain causes birders to absolutely lose their shit – on a walk in the woods? Not only will we catch sight of them, we won’t be able to get away from them. It turns out that in this part of the world, nutcrackers are as common as magpies are in West Norwood, and just as belligerent. They engage in an almost constant turf war with the jays of the surrounding woods, their twin shrieks of fury and indignation at the others’ presence echoing across the valley.
Will there be crested tits, black redstarts, crossbills and crag martins – all birds I’ve encountered before, but none on the regular roster – to add interest to every walk? Will there be a pair of ravens soaring above the cabin with a greeting gronk to welcome us back when we return weary from a happy day of hiking?
Damn right there will.
On the fourth morning I wake early. Nursing a coffee, I sit in contemplation of the ludicrous picturesqueness surrounding me. My ear is caught by a scrabbling from a nearby tree. Unlike the many smaller birds chipping and peeping and chiddly-wipping in the canopy, this one isn’t hard to see. Black, striking, with a red splash on its crown. It rootles around for a bit, apparently unfazed by my presence. Then it gives a brief but nevertheless unearthly shriek and flaps clumsily away.
Thankfully, of Jeremy Vine and his Union Jack jockstrap there is no sign.
Ottimo, come sempre.
I am so incredibly jealous (and happy for you I suppose) that you got to see a Black woodpecker. I am also very concerned that I am going to have horrible Jeremy Vine nightmares tonight.