Life

Nuala McCann: Sadly, hibernation is not an option – for squirrels or us humans...

Before the industrial revolution it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep. The first or 'dead' sleep lasted from the evening to the early morning and the second, the 'morning' sleep took the snoozer safely to daylight

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Humans don't get to hibernate for the winter...
Humans don't get to hibernate for the winter... Humans don't get to hibernate for the winter...

THE squirrels in the park refuse to believe in hibernation. Never heard of it. They scamper in the grass and hare up trees with all the grace of Olympic gymnasts at the whiff of a dog wanting a chase.

Surely they should have gathered their acorns and be dozing somewhere for the winter?

Apparently not. At the risk of delivering a nature lesson for which I'm definitely not qualified, I have just recently learned that the only UK mammals that really hibernate are bats, hedgehogs and dormice.

Once, we spied a hedgehog scampering across our front garden. He got a little alarmed at our excitement and jumped straight into the hedge where he got stuck, bottom facing out; legs wriggling. Then he froze.

Like the emu sticking its head in the sand, he appeared to think he was well hidden, so we left him to get on with the disappearing act and disappeared ourselves.

I read about hibernation in Katherine May's Wintering – billed as 'a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life.' It is.

Hibernation, writes May, is not one long monotonous sleep. Dormice wake up every 10 days to bring their metabolism back up to speed for a short while, flush their kidneys and check that their nest is still a safe place.

As someone who finds winter dark, depressing and difficult, hibernation has always sounded like the ideal solution – a way to dodge the darkness if you can't afford to baste in the Canaries for a few months.

Long ago in the Alps, people did spend the winters in hibernation. In the summer, they worked to grow the crops and harvest them: in the winter they were completely snowed in.

In some villages, it was so bad, that, if you died, your corpse had to be wrapped up and stored on the roof of the house for burial when the thaw came in Spring.

Meanwhile, people gathered at the fire to eat, drink, play cards and chat.

Katherine May's book Wintering also poured balm on the curse of insomnia. I suffer like her – circa 4am is my witching hour. The first few hours of sleep are good, then suddenly, somebody throws a switch on a blazing supertrooper of a light in my head and I'm wide awake, even as the rest of the house slumbers.

I take myself downstairs to greet our resident house spider; sip a hot drink; read a book.

Years ago, I fought it; lay in the darkness, a lump of seething resentment. Surrendering to the early waking proved the answer – finding joy in the peace of the house.

May has found joy in the night waking – it feels 'elemental', she writes. She quotes historian A Roger Ekirch, who in A Day's Close wrote that before the industrial revolution it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep.

The first or 'dead' sleep lasted from the evening to the early morning and the second, the 'morning' sleep took the snoozer safely to daylight. In-between was an hour or more called 'the watch', when people got up to urinate, smoke tobacco and even visit close neighbours.

They made love, prayed or reflected on their dreams – the darkness gifted them a powerful intimacy. This late night time was calm, reflective, otherworldly.

And, when I'm sitting eyeing our spider who has crawled out of the safety of her hearth and is eyeing me back, I remember an old storybook that I used to read to my son. It was about all the animals who stay hidden away in the daytime and come out at night – foxes and owls, hedgehogs, bats.

"And spiders, too," I tell our spider, who freezes stock still when I look her way. It's like the children's game of One-Two-Three Red Lights. I look away, she unfreezes and scampers softly back to her hiding place.

She has, in the past, been kindly evicted, but miraculously returned – it has to be her.

Remember the snail experiment, where someone painted nail varnish on the garden snails and then took them to a faraway field? They returned with all the instinct of homing pigeons – the varnish on their shells proved it was them.

Now, late at night – on watch – our spider and I embrace the holy stillness together. Insomnia? No, this is merely the night watch.

An owl hoots, a cat yowls, the old house sighs… and the bats, the dormice and the hedgehogs slumber deep in their hiding places.