The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  The big wind was driving the light show both in the south and the west. In the south, it force-fed low, winter-white sunlight into holes among fast clouds, so that the light was never still. In the west, dense showers marched round the arc of the mountains as they so often do. As flashing sunlight worked on them, a mobile, patchy rainbow travelled among them. When it reached Ben Ledi, the nearest of the mountains, there was a sudden tear in the shroud, a sudden glimpse into the tormented mountain world beyond, a sudden revelation of the summit pyramid draped in snow. Seconds later the rainbow passed across it and seemed to have the effect of healing the breach, for as it danced on, the mountain vanished again, the clouds lowered, thickened and darkened, and advanced on the foothills.

  Through it all, the wide, flat sprawl of the Carse, its grassland farms, its slow, coiled river, its small woods and its patches of standing floodwater . . . all that lay in a kind of stupefied calm. Patches of sunlight flared and dowsed everywhere, but nothing else moved. It was as if nature had its hands full of sky and mountain and storm, and the needs of these were all-consuming.

  Stirling was designed by nature to be a fulcrum in Scotland’s story, the belt-buckle at her waist clasping Highlands and Lowlands together, a fortified glacial plug guarding the only usable crossing of the Forth if you were a king with an army, and whether defending or invading. As a result, the native-born sons and daughters are Sons of the Rock and Daughters of the Rock. So there are elements in the make-up of the place that appeal to the kind of writer I have become. The proximity and the permanence of mountains is the foremost of these, a relationship that colours much of my writing.

  Chapter Five

  A Diary of Early Winter

  December 2016 settled into a yawn of mild gloom. That bejewelled foray in the Pentlands two days before might have been another country in another time zone. According to the Met Office, the 1st of December is also the first day of meteorological winter. It was clear at once that no one had told winter that year. Sometimes the solution to such pervasive and windless greyness lies in a short, sharp ascent from low to high ground. The shortest and sharpest available to me is via the south-facing slopes of the western edge of the Ochil Hills up onto the airy plateau of Sheriffmuir, whose historical claims to fame are a wretchedly indecisive battle of the 1715 Jacobite uprising in which Rob Roy MacGregor may or may not have participated, and an inn which was once home to a much more famous grizzly bear called Hercules. Today, the battlefield is more or less constantly under siege by the forestry industry, which seems to be obsessed with obliterating the undisciplined regime of heather-moor-and-scattered-Scots-pine, and replacing it with admirably disciplined ranks of non-Scots conifers drawn from the ranks of the usual forestry industry suspects. Sundry clan societies protest, but the clans hold fewer terrors for the establishment in the 21st century, and the forestry industry has more clout, more lawyers, and for that matter, more money.

  Sheriffmuir’s battlefield is an eerie place on such a day. The Gathering Stone lies prone and broken, and protected by an arched cage of metal bars from those mysterious elements of society who think it might be worth stealing. Its value, of course, is all symbolism, but it’s hardly the Stone of Destiny, is it? I don’t like battlefields, I never have, even when they have views of Highland mountains, as Sheriffmuir has on better days than this. The only one that ever moved me was Flodden, and I never rationalised why. Perhaps because James IV was killed there, and he was one of our better kings, although demonstrably he was a lousy soldier. Humanity’s appetite for wars is its least appealing character trait, second only to its insistence on commemorating them so ostentatiously. I would dig up all the battlefields, remove their every memorial, demolish the wretched visitor centres of the more commercially-astute custodians (the National Trust for Scotland’s coach-hungry money-spinners at Bannockburn and Culloden spring effortlessly to mind), and turn them all into nature reserves, but I have not attracted many followers to that particular crusade.

  I left the sword-smitten ghosts of Sheriffmuir to their grim inheritance and went in search of some of the more life-affirming inhabitants of my doorstep hills. The second highest field of a particularly marginal species of farm just below the first slopes of the open hill ended in a wide swathe of rough ground. Tall, wild grass, withered wild flowers, and winter-bared scrub amounted to the kind of field edge where nature thrives. Beyond that was a fence and a shelter-belt of small, wind-tormented trees. Between the edge of the field and the fence was a long, narrow space the width of the whole field, a kind of roofless tunnel with the trees on one side and the tall grass on the other. I was driving slowly up the deserted single-track hill-road, window-down, half an eye on the road and one-and-a-half-eyes on the possibilities of the field.

  A shape fell. That was all I saw. But it was enough to persuade me to pull over.

  The first thing to establish was where it had fallen from. Then I spotted a wire – a telephone cable – slung on skinny poles across the top of the field. I guessed that was where the shape had been. I examined the terrain more carefully. I thought: if I had asked nature how to design a suitable terrain up here for a hunting sparrowhawk, it might have replied that ideally, it would like a kind of roofless tunnel between field and trees to facilitate a low-level, high-speed approach from which to launch an attack on, say, perched wood pigeons or thrushes or starlings or jackdaws on the wire, the fence or the trees; with the added option of a grasstop-level raid on large flocks of seed-feeders.

  A small bird, a sparrow I think, blurred across my binocular lenses from right to left, or from field to trees, followed almost at once by a second blur, a slate-blue-and-orangey rasp of a blur. The first blur buried itself deep in the trees. The second baulked in front of the trees, rose in a phenomenally tight climbing turn and dropped to the ground inside the roofless tunnel. The bird was a dark shadow in a hall of shadows. Then it flew: a flat-out dash a foot off the ground fifty yards along the tunnel, then up through the grass to emerge into daylight a few inches above the grass, scattering small birds in every direction, and inciting a gruesomely discordant chorus of jackdaw and pheasant cries. There was a low and wide clockwise circle, which drew another blank, and it ended perched in full daylight on the fence and facing the field. Behold the male sparrowhawk in all his finery.

  The back and the folded upper wings were more or less the same colour as the day’s sky, a muted blue with strong overtones of grey. The closely barred breast was somewhere between reddish chestnut brown and burnt umber. In sunlight, which was quite absent at that moment, it can be deep orange, a breathtaking shade of flame in full flight.

  But it is the sparrowhawk’s eyes that you remember. Are there yellower eyes anywhere in the land than these? There are, after all, no wolves. Their black setting intensifies the shade, exaggerates their lethal potency. I suppose that from time to time, in this no man’s land between hill and farm, sparrowhawk must lock eyes with short-eared owl, an exchange of intensity that surely generates a degree of mutual respect? On the other hand, the legs were long and skinny and a somehow less credible shade of yellow than the eyes, and just a little bit disappointing. They looked like they could be on a coot, for example, although I wouldn’t say that out loud within the hawk’s hearing. Its attitude changed from horizontal to vertical, suggesting it planned to hang around for a while, and once it had perched upright on the fence I could hardly see the legs, and the whole bird was an agreeable package of aesthetics.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then ten more. The hawk made no attempt at concealment in that time, but I think that what he was doing was becoming a fragment of the landscape. I had noticed that over those few minutes, the small birds had come out of hiding and were once again seed-feeding in the field edge, the nearest of them not fifty yards from the motionless hawk. Patience and stillness is how you get close to nature, you let it come to you, and that is how you get results. It is as true for a nature writer as it is for a sparrowhawk. Then he flew, flat-out from a
standing start, low over the grass, a quick flip of his left wing, down into the depths of the grass, from which he did not reappear, or if he did, I never saw him go.

  High overhead, flying in the slowest of wide circles, a red kite had been watching proceedings for some time, watching from the wings you might say, for few birds appear to inhabit flight with such leisurely poise.

  * * *

  I had lunch with a raven. In this nature-writing life, it’s the kind of thing that happens when you take your lunch for a walk. And taking lunch for a walk is always easy to justify to yourself even if it consumes three midday hours, because you end up sharing it with a raven and your lunch just served you up something quite unforeseen to write about, and that is the nature of the job after all. The first proper snow had come to the mountains two days since, and then it stopped and the temperature rose and the sun shone and I decided I would take lunch for a walk where I could see the mountains, before the snow vanished again.

  I made for a low ridge, a topographical no man’s land between Lowlands and Highlands. It is mostly plantation forest, but I know a way through that puts snowy, sunlit mountains at the far end of every gap in the trees. And given that the natives include pine martens, foxes, red squirrels, red deer, roe deer, buzzards, crossbills, siskins, jays and (the new kids on the block) nuthatches, there was always the chance that something would show up to prolong lunch. What showed up was the raven.

  A wide-open area just below the ridge was recovering after felling operations. Not only have the fellers left stands of pine and larch and still-standing deadwood, they also revealed an unsuspected old footpath that tiptoes discreetly away from the main forest track. A mile along the path, I stopped on a still and sunny acre on top of the ridge, sat on a tree stump, and unpacked lunch. Then I heard the raven. The voice was a soft, hoarse contralto, well short of the characteristic, all-out, far-carrying “kruuk!”, and I had trouble finding the source of the voice. But then it moved to a broken branch on a dead tree silhouetted against the sky and about a quarter of a mile away, and I found it as it fussily adjusted its stance. Then it called again.

  Ravens are among the easier birds to mimic. They are also among the most eager call-and-response enthusiasts. So I called back while I watched through binoculars and saw its head turn in my direction. Soon we were chatting away in variations on a theme of “koo”, “kroo”, “kroo-kroo” and an occasional lower-pitched “kaak”, which I found trickier to imitate. Almost twenty years ago now, I met a university biologist on the Canadian side of the border with Alaska, and he told me about ravens. He said a colleague had studied a group of them for many years and concluded that they have the widest vocabulary in all nature after human beings. He also found that every bird had one unique call that no other bird used. But when one bird died, all the others flew around for days using the unique call of the missing bird, as if they were looking for it, like a search party.

  Armed with this knowledge, I often wonder when I talk back to ravens whether they have any idea what I’m saying. Obviously I have no idea what I’m saying. The raven on the dead tree flew suddenly, disappeared behind a screen of spruces. I turned back to my lunch, but seconds later I heard the rasp of wingbeats behind my back and spun round to see the raven swerve away from a flightpath that would have come very low over my head. Then it perched again on the top of a bare larch, this time about 150 yards away. The conversation resumed, and this time the raven’s vocabulary was notably more varied. But it was suddenly restless and flew again, to a branch on a larch, which had been blown over but had snagged among its neighbours at an angle of about sixty degrees. It was now no more than fifty yards away, and once again the conversation resumed. How long all this might have lasted I will never know, because suddenly the far-off voice of a second raven sounded and everything changed. It arrived in a two-way chorus of non-stop raven voices and perched in a nearby larch. But the first raven flew again, and my guess is that this time it perched where it could watch us both at once.

  I have no idea, of course, whether both ravens were including me in the conversation (for I continued to call). I do know that they were holding a conversation and I was not. I left them to it. As I passed close to the first raven’s tree I waved an arm and called loudly, a gesture that said, “Until the next time, and thanks for your company.” I’m pretty sure it got the message.

  * * *

  Two days later, back in the forest, following the path where I had chatted with the raven, the day too warm for early winter, for any kind of winter day, the mountain snow all too predictably reduced to streaks and patches. The only coldness was in the deep shadows of the spruces thrown by low sun. The path led to a new forest road that climbed to a high and heathery plateau well planted with young spruce and Scots pine. A wiser and more sensitive forestry design would have let the pines have their head here, so that its open character would be preserved. Heroic Scots pine would grow here, given the space which spruce plantation forestry routinely denies to anything else with slower-growing ambition. They would frame views to the mountains and create a wildlife habitat of exceptional richness, so typical of the right kind of Highland Edge landscapes which beckon to the tribes of both Highland and Lowland and invite them to co-exist. As it is, the nearest mountain (Ben Ledi at its most pyramidally striking) rose out of a dead-straight horizontal of spruce tops, and only two small copses of foreground Scots pines offered anything in the way of curves at all to soften the prospect.

  A skinny little trail no wider than one of my boots led through heather towards a rocky knoll. On three bare patches, each of no more than a few square inches, I found the distinctive droppings of pine marten. At this moment in time, with the new woodland planting still in its infancy, give or take a handful of older pines (a sign of the old natural order before the foresters moved in), the spaciousness and the heather and the remnant scraps of the natural vegetation, the pine martens are thriving. But too much of it all will be lost to financial considerations which determine a preponderance of fast-growing spruces, and as these grow tall and bulk up into a dense and darkening overkill, the constituent elements of biodiversity simply move out or die off. There is a fine old Scots pine nearby, not tall but enthroned on space and broad-crowned. Twice in a previous spring I saw ospreys exploring here and alighting in the tree. It would seem to me to be a perfect osprey tree in a part of the country that sustains at least a dozen pairs (and a first principle of sound nature conservation is to safeguard strongholds and expand them wherever possible); then forestry operations began and the ospreys moved on.

  * * *

  Flanders Moss, a raised bog and a National Nature Reserve, in the last of the light. Ben Ledi had tugged a skullcap of flimsy brownish cloud across its summit. It looked perilously poised and several sizes too big, and leaned from east to west as though it had made an imperfect landing there. Every mountain in sight – Ben Vorlich, Stuc a’ Chroin, Beinn Each, Ben Venue and Ben Lomond – was identically garbed in ill-fitting skullcaps and the ragged-edged look that comes from the too-fast melting of mountain snows into scattered patches that diminish by the hour. Tonight, what’s left will freeze, and tomorrow, when the temperature rises and one more weak front of wet winds scuds in from the west, the rest will go. Welcome to the redefined nature of winter.

  A string of five grazing roe deer inched slowly eastwards through the tall bleached-out grass immediately to the north of the Moss. There is a new high seat there for shooters; there are three now, each one more hideous than the others. The deer graze contemptuously close. I imagine they can tell when its empty. The National Nature Reserve has an observation tower back against the birch wood that acts as a buffer between the south edge of the Moss and the flat fields of the Carse beyond. The observation platform on top is at treetop height, and to north, east and west, the view over the Moss is all-embracing, and terminates in that uncompromising arc of mountains. I spent some time studying fence posts and low trees in the binoculars, looking for hen harriers
. There was a time when this was a nationally important winter roost site for harriers, but such has been their lurch towards extinction at the hands of so-called “sporting” estates, that nowhere can be judged nationally important now. Here, as in other traditional roosting sites, they just about cling on. If the bird on the fence post in the glasses is a gull-coloured male, he is easy enough to spot. If, however, it’s a fence post-coloured female and she happens to be perched erect, what she looks like from a distance and in low light is a bit of fence post.

  A flock of small birds sped through the glasses, and I refocused to follow them, a bouncing flock of tadpoles with straight tails. They flew past the top of the tower at eye level, and as they drew level with me they were side-on so that their wings “disappeared” against the silhouettes of their bodies, thus indulging the tadpole illusion. They were long-tailed tits, of course, and I expected them to settle into the tops of the birches, but they flew right through the topmost twigs and buds and carried on south. Did they know where they were going? It would be dark in half an hour and cold. Their long tails that so endear them to birdwatchers everywhere are a liability in winter, because they greatly extend the birds’ surface areas and therefore their capacity to grow cold. They attempt to thwart the problem by roosting in a closely packed line along a branch, constantly changing places so that no bird is on the end of the line for too long. If winter continues to redefine itself along its chaotically warming path, the long-tailed tits at least might benefit.