It was an ordinary tree in an ordinary street in a Hungarian town in winter. Our guide, Bela, instructed us to gather underneath it and look up. We tipped our heads and gazed up into the conifer’s canopy. All I saw was rough bark, needles growing in fractal clumps, dead twigs, patches of sky. For the longest time it was only tree. Then, with a hot shock of surprise, it was not. A patch of bark resolved into a long-eared owl. And then another. Then more. All were roosting with their eyes closed and faces screwed tight, taloned feet gripping branches beneath long, ash-streaked feathers that looked wrought of wood. There must have been 15 owls in that single tree, where at first I saw no owls at all.
It was a lesson in how astonishingly effective animal camouflage can be. The plumages of ground-nesting birds like woodcock and nightjars perfectly mimic dead leaves, fallen twigs and grass. The zig-zag black and silver scales of adders might, on a plain background, be bright as a new five-pence piece, but they make the snake vanish in sun-striped heathland. Ringed parakeets glow absurdly green in full sun but become invisible in leaves.
Camouflage is a fiction. When the trick is uncovered it’s a shock for the observer. In that wrench of comprehension, figure suddenly stands out from ground. It’s a moment that can feel very close to fear. We thought we knew the terrain around us, but we did not. We almost stepped on the snake in the leaves, failed to see the mountain lion with haunches hued like the sandstone it lies upon. The shock reminds us that we are fallible, vulnerable creatures with limited senses.
Camouflage fails with a sudden change in background. The ochres and greens of military multi-terrain camouflage are highly visible after a sudden snowfall, so soldiers pull on white cagoules in response. Animals have no cagoules, but some do change colour to match winter snow. The tactic is called seasonal polymorphism. It’s more common in arctic climes, but Scottish mountain hares moult into white coats in autumn, making them far less visible to predators in snow, and some stoats become the creatures we call ermine, turning ivory except for their black-tipped tails. Such moults were once thought to be a response to changing daylight hours or falling temperatures, but it seems that in mustelids like stoats and weasels there’s also a genetic component involved, with some populations remaining brown no matter the weather and others turning particoloured in winter.
High in the Scottish Cairngorms, ptarmigans turn entirely white except for a neat black beak and a red patch of skin above dark eyes. These small grouse are phenomenally well adapted for winter, digging holes in the snow with fluffy feet to roost and puffing their feathers out to trap their body heat. In some populations, female ptarmigan moult into their brown summer plumages earlier than males in spring. They find whiter males more attractive, so the selective pressure of mate choice conflicts with the pressure to hide from predators. As nesting begins, the males use a different tactic to camouflage themselves in a snow-free landscape. They decrease their whiteness six-fold by purposefully smearing their plumage with mud and dirt.
Understanding and witnessing seasonal changes like these is part of why I increasingly think that animals cannot be meaningfully separated from their environment. Everything around us encourages us to think otherwise. Wildlife photographers fill their frames with the animal; field guides draw creatures separate from their backgrounds; taxidermied animals and study skins in museum drawers are dry husks torn from their lived reality of cloud and branch, water and soil and snow. But the more time I spend watching animals in their habitats the more I comprehend that a weasel is not quite a weasel without the pile of leaves it’s playing in, the hole it sleeps in; a ptarmigan is at least as much a thing of sunlit snowbanks as it is a bird.
I’ve been thinking of these colour-shifting adaptations lately for strange and sad reasons. These last weeks, mud-coloured torrents flowing through town and village streets have carried away cars, inundated houses and worse. Watching them on the news has been disturbing evidence of a broken contract between us and our unquestioned expectations that the environment around us is a predictable, stable and solid background to our everyday affairs.
Back at the beginning of the pandemic I read a scientific paper that detailed an increasing mismatch between seasonal colour change in mountain hares and the reality of the conditions they now live in. Scottish hares turn white in October, ready for snow. But increasingly there is no snow, or it comes late and is only partial, so the bright white dots of hares against dark hillsides render them highly conspicuous, vulnerable to golden eagles and hunting foxes. The changing climate is breaking a contract between figure and ground, between animal and safety. The age-old trick isn’t working any more, and the hares can’t evolve fast enough to fix it.
The floods reminded me that we make the mistake of thinking we are separate from the ground we move upon. It’s not a personal mistake, like failing to see an owl in a tree. It’s a cultural one. It’s history and habit and the human assuredness that comes from believing the structures supporting us are robust, and that the world around us will continue to be predictable.
Like the white hares on a muddy hillside, we’re newly defenceless in this world of increasing climate emergency. And when things happen that break that unexamined contract between us and the ground, the rupture is a shock like that of seeing a venomous snake at one’s feet, emerging from a pattern of hues we thought was simply leaves.
[See also: The secrets of the heath]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024