On the contrary, they go their own mysterious way, and so retain their magic.. The whole point about woodcocks is that they cannot be reared artificially, like pheasants or partridges They cannot be corralled or decoyed. It makes perfect sense that the birds should head south for Portugal, Spain, northern Greece and Turkey, to escape the northern winter; but why should they risk a transit of the North Sea when they could travel more safely, and in easy stages, overland? (Experts assume that if strong south-westerly winds blow up, thousands must drown.)A recent, fascinating suggestion is that the birds are still following the migratory routes pioneered by their ancestors millennia ago, before the North Sea existed, from the time when Britain was still part of mainland Europe. In flight she looked abnormally upright and elongated, so heavy that she could barely clear the brambles. Staring, I realised that she had a fluffy baby clamped between her knees. Having plopped it down on a new site some 20 yards off, she made two return trips to collect the second and third of her brood.Migration to Britain, however, remains the most curious facet of woodcock behaviour.
It is said that during daylight she slowly rotates on the nest so as to keep her head away from the sun and prevent her eyes giving off any tell-tale glint that might betray her presence. Certainly woodcocks’ eyes are enormous, and set very high on the sides of the head – so high, in fact, that biologists believe the birds can see not only all round them, but over the tops of their heads as well, without moving.Rotation on a nest is something I have never witnessed. What I have seen is another peculiar habit often dismissed as a fairy tale: a mother carrying a chick between her thighs. One summer afternoon, as I walked quietly along a woodland ride, a woodcock burst out of the undergrowth a few feet away, and I saw at once that there was something odd about her. All the time he is turning his head from side to side and uttering two quite different calls: one a single, high-pitched squeak, the other a guttural urk, urk.His mate, meanwhile, is nesting on the ground, often at the foot of a tree. If she has chosen a bed of beech leaves as a site, her wonderful camouflage – marbling of dark brown, light brown and black – makes her almost impossible to pick out.
On late spring evenings a male will launch into the form of display known as roding, during which he patrols his territory with long, circular flights just over the trees.Back and forth through the dusk he goes, not dodging about as he would in the wood, but flying straight and fast, with heavy, owl-like wing-beats, sometimes in an oblong loop which may be half a mile from end to end, sometimes in a huge figure of eight. For decades a Christmas tree meant a Norway spruce, picea abies. It still accounts for around two thirds of the total sold, but other contenders are eating into its one-time monopoly. The great failing of the Norway spruce is a tendency to part with its needles – a trifling 150,000 of them on a four-footer.Two handsome conifers with a greater reluctance to shed their clothing are the Nordmann and Noble firs But they are both slower growing, so more expensive. All but 7 per cent of these were home-grown, an enterprise requiring an amazing 12,000 acres of land.
Choice has also expanded. What sort of tree should you buy – and how do you dispose of it once the lights go out? Tom Barber advises
Christmas trees are a boom market. The threatened takeover by glitzy plastic jobs seems to have receded, and the comforting tradition (even though Germanic in origin) of using a real tree has re-asserted itself.
Over the past few years sales have grown steadily, reaching a peak of five million last year. The rate for Hotel Bajo El Volcan is 256 pesos a night (00 73 12 48 73).`Malcolm Lowry’ by Douglas Day is published by Oxford University Press, 1984 (now out of print) and `Pursued by Furies’ by Gordon Bowker is published by HarperCollins, 1993.. He travelled between the two cities by bus, train and plane.In Vancouver he paid $149 per night (about pounds 70) at the Downtown Best Western (00 1 604 669 9888) and in Cuernavaca he stayed at Las Mananitas for 630 pesos a night – about pounds 50, but well worth it (00 73 14 14 66). Works of imagination are altered by the passage of time, sometimes beyond recognition. But more often than not it’s a joy to be somewhere that once existed solely on the pages of a book, but now stands before your very eyes.
And my journey was more than a visit – it felt like a pilgrimage.Malcolm Senior paid pounds 583 for an “open-jaw” return on British Airways – flying from Heathrow to Vancouver, returning from Mexico City to Gatwick, booked through Airline Network (01772 727272) in Preston. There is the Casino de la Selva; derelict in the novel, rebuilt and then left to ruin once more in real life. There is the Jardin Borda and the unsigned brown swinging doors of the town’s forbidding Cantinas, now covered in posters of wet gringo girls in wet T-shirts.Visiting the locations for books and films risks the disappointment of reality. Either way, it seems reasonable to believe that the house doesn’t exist any more.Apart from its name, the hotel also has a role in our tale. Part of it is the tower where the character Jacques Laruelle lived, and where Lowry stayed when he inadvisedly returned to Cuernavaca with his second wife, Margerie, in December 1945. The hotel also overlooks the ravine where the Consul’s body is dumped along with one of the novel’s ubiquitous pariah dogs Other locations from the book abound.
