by Jim Crumley
Snow buntings are among the boldest of small birds, so I took a chance and simply sat down on the top of the bank a dozen yards away and watched. Once again, not one reacted to my presence. They were nearly all males, which is the norm for a winter mountain flock. Science thinks they are better insulated than the females and first-year birds, which tend to winter in Scotland around the coasts, and it seems as likely an explanation as any.
Eight red deer and thirty snow buntings. If anything else at all moved on that mountainside in the four hours I was out there, they left neither sight nor sound of their passage. The most compelling characteristic of the day was its utter quietness, a few soft mutterings from the deer, the thin havers of the birds, a half-hearted wind, a soft-voiced burn; not so much as a raven croak to disturb the equilibrium of late afternoon. The buntings were still there when I stood and left, still swinging and swaying with the wind and the tall grass.
In the night it snowed hard on the mountain. Eight red deer, thirty snow buntings and a rowan tree rooted in rock all tholed a night such as you and I can barely imagine; the deer and the birds finding shelter of a kind, the rowan leaning out from the rock into the storm like the bowsprit of the Discovery in her Arctic-going prime. The snow buntings would fly on and head for lower ground if things became too rough on the mountain. But the long winter of the red deer had only just begun.
* * *
One watershed to the south of the rowan tree’s buttress, the River Balvaig eases itself gently through the mouth of Balquhidder Glen, performs a right turn, and heads south for Loch Lubnaig. The Gaelic word Lub means a “bend”, and Loch Lubnaig is roughly boomerang-shaped, or at least the particular fold in the hills where it lies is boomerang-shaped. The popular tourist-fodder derivation of the name is the “crooked” loch, but I don’t buy into tourism fodder too eagerly. There are any number of curved or bent or kinked or otherwise misshapen lochs all over Scotland, and none of them has a name that approximates to crooked loch, and Loch Lubnaig’s gentle curve is too unexceptional to explain the name. On the other hand, its most distinguishing feature occurs where the Balvaig thrusts an exuberant entrance into its northern shore, creating a kind of watery avenue by virtue of an extravagant extension of its tree-lined banks well out into the loch. The effect is to create two distinctive bays, and one of the Gaelic words for a bay is Luib. Hence Lubnaig. That at least is what makes sense to me.
I have known this loch now for forty years. If that tract of Highland Edge country I think of as my nature writer’s territory were a single living organism, Loch Lubnaig would be its beating heart. For ten of those forty years I lived within two miles of it, at the mouth of Balquhidder Glen, but even before I moved my writing life there I knew the loch intimately, for I had long been accustomed to travelling there from Stirling on a regular basis. I placed a high value on the creative energy I drew from crossing that landscape frontier, that Highland Edge, from the last of the fields through the foothills and into the first of the mountains. That sense of frontier was most tellingly articulated in winter. First snow on the mountains while Stirling still lazed in its own mild micro-climate acted on me like a summons. So did second snow, for that matter, and third, all the way through to the last snows of early spring. I remember the first time as vividly as I remember the most recent. The sense of being inhaled by the mountains has never left me. Likewise the sense of Ben Ledi as a kind of lynchpin, or a fulcrum, of all Scotland. I like to think that the earliest settlers in the flat-bottomed Carse of Stirling would treat its defining presence on their northern skyline as something sacred, a fit abode for the mountain gods to which they adhered. It is a cold soul who is indifferent to such surroundings.
Into the swamp of mild, dark grey days that heaped up one on top of the other as December of 2016 sauntered towards the solstice, nature suddenly whipped up a hard frost and a gentle but ice-tinged wind. I am not sure what it says about my character, but I could have skipped with gratitude. That same morning, the waxwings arrived and clustered in the topmost bare branches of a conspicuous birch not far from my house. Year after year – if they come at all – they end up sooner or later on that tree, either forgetful of or indifferent to the fact that every year the neighbourhood sparrowhawks have been waiting and watching for them. Walking between the front door of the house and the car about ten yards away, I saw them reintroduce themselves to each other in the time-honoured fashion – the hawk’s low-level sprint up the grown-over course of a hidden burn then the soaring, thrilling power-climb up through the branches of the tree, followed by a cloudburst of waxwings.
The hawk dived hard left and the denouement was hidden from view by shrubbery. At least one of winter’s characteristic rituals had slipped into place. I drove cheerfully north for the loch, hoping against hope that frost and the resumption of hawk-waxwing hostilities amounted to a good omen. Sometimes, the nature-writing life tiptoes into some of the mind’s stranger backwaters.
The journey crept under Ben Ledi through the Pass of Leny (the first and last thoroughfare of the Highlands for millions of travellers over thousands of years), its dark, tumbling waters shaded by rearing, forested hillsides. Long before the A84 threaded its tight turns, it must have been the kind of place to give travellers pause for thought. Lowlanders straying this way for the first time must have feared for their lives. It is still one of the most dramatic landscape transformations in the country because one side is Lowland and the other instant and full-on Highland. It still comes as something of a shock to the system for first-time travellers from the south, following the gentle course of the A84 between Stirling and Callander, and then the sudden realisation in Callander that there is a mountain apparently at the end of the main street.
The quiet west side of Loch Lubnaig is tucked right in under that very mountain, just yards from the hem of Ben Ledi’s skirts. I paused to look for signs of beavers along the River Leny. There have already been a couple of expeditionary sallies this way, and there is the beginning of what should prove to be a more settled presence a little further north. These are the explorers from the Tayside population. They crossed a single watershed from Loch Earn, probably by way of Glen Ample under the joined-at-the-hip mountains of Stuc a’ Chroin and Ben Vorlich, and that was enough to bring them into the upper reaches of the Forth river system, with hundreds of miles of new beaver territory to colonise. The wonderfully wooded Trossachs area awaits their arrival with longing, their return after an absence of rather more than 300 years.
Deep and dark grey cloud hung about the mountains’ waists on both sides of the loch. The unseen summits and ridges somehow contrived to insinuate themselves as a presence. But none had quite the aura of Ben Ledi itself, whose height was utterly unguessable from the depths of its frosted shadow. The lowest slopes wore a crust of dark, bare oaks, some of them of great age, a hint of how the land might have looked before all this became the fiefdom of the Forestry Commission’s Strathyre Forest. Above and beyond the oaks, reaching into the clouds, a cloak of the Commission’s default species, Sitka spruce, smouldered and shivered. Patches of birch and swathes of larch lightened the mountain’s tree burden, and across the loch, there were outcrops of Scots pine. I do not share the widespread conservation view that the Sitka spruce is public enemy number one. It is not the tree’s fault that it fell into the hands of monoculturalists. It bears repeating that it is a handsome tree that suits the Highland landscape well enough, and demonstrably it thrives here. A little more enlightenment in how the forestry industry deploys it would go a long way towards improving the ecology and biodiversity of the Highlands. I am fortunate to have been to Sitka, in south-east Alaska, and seen the temperate rainforest there, where the spruces are the basis of a phenomenal wild forest in the company of hemlock, aspen, birch, willow, and all that sustains wolf packs, bears, wolverines, beavers, bald eagle nests every half mile or so, and a great deal more besides. Should we be doing more to expand, enhance, recreate and restore native woodland cover? Yes, of course we s
hould. Should we also accept the Sitka spruce as part of the mix, given that it has been with us since David Douglas, the son of a Perthshire stonemason, brought it back from North America the better part of 200 years ago? Yes, of course we should.
Right here, right now, the best of the spruce-dominated forests also accommodate larch and Scots pine, aspen, alder, willow, rowan and a great deal of birch; and these give homes to red squirrels, red and roe deer, red fox, pine martens, beavers, otters and a mix of birds ranging in size from goldcrests and wrens to ospreys and sea eagles.
In the deep stillness of that frosted morning, the voice of a raven rebounded off the rocks of the pass, so that it responded to its own echo, mixing up the calls from its impressive vocabulary in a kind of vocal perpetual motion. I wondered whether it had fooled itself into thinking it was addressing another bird, or whether it understood the concept of an echo completely and had a favourite rock where it was accustomed to perch and sing to the mountain, which answered it back with its echo, just like Sparky. I tend towards some version of the latter, because ravens are smart and work things out. Ravens are a constant four-season presence in this landscape, but they seem to have evolved a much more successful strategy for surviving a Highland winter’s lean times than many of their wild fellow travellers.
The voice stopped. The echo stopped. There was a creaking rasp of wings. The raven flew directly over my head, looking down, drawn it would seem towards the only moving creature that shared its portion of the morning. It circled twice, the blackest of black birds, darkened still further by the mountain massed behind it. Then it banked and flew away low across the surface of the loch’s south end, where its reflection glided upside-down through the still water, matching the bird’s downstroke with an upstroke, and vice-versa, a vaguely hypnotic progress.
Just where the loch gave way to the river, just where an alder branch bowed low towards the instantly white and turbulent water before it curved back upwards a yard into the air . . . just at the lowest dip of the branch and inches above the spray, there emerged a new and weirdly out-of-season sound: birdsong at the winter solstice. Weirdly out-of-season, that is, if you don’t know about dippers. There is no season of the year, no intensity of cold, no lash of wind or weight of downpour, no blizzard, no fog, nor dazzle of midwinter sun . . . none of these things can stifle the male dipper’s desire to sing.
Tiny icicles hung from the very branch where he stood and sang, icicles formed from the splashed spray of the river. The dark browns of the bird, relieved by the tiny white patch of his breast feathers, and the massed greys of the trees and the bank behind him, the greys and browns and white froth of the river, all conspired to set off the silver brilliance of his thin scatter of notes. It would hardly have surprised me to see them freeze in mid-air and drop into the river with minute silver splashes. Instead, the singing stopped abruptly, and the dipper tipped forward into a six-inch dive and vanished underwater. He appeared a few seconds later over by the far bank, swam a yard through shallow water, stepped onto a rock and proceeded to bash the living daylights out of a tiny silver fish by hitting its head against the rock. Kingfishers use the same technique, but they don’t introduce the killing with song. The dipper re-crossed the river towards a conspicuously pyramid-shaped rock. He hit the water a yard from the rock then travelled towards it more or less by walking on water, which is neither as difficult nor as unusual as it sounds if you have the dipper’s more or less limitless repertoire of amphibious techniques at your disposal. I watched him fish. The immersions often seemed longer than can possibly be good for him. After a dozen forays into the river, he suddenly changed tack, flew from the rock in a tight circle to where a natural bankside canal slightly higher than the mainstream ended in a tiny waterfall which, until moments before, had been behind the dipper’s back whenever it perched on the rock. What changed? Was he mysteriously alerted to the presence of prey there (sound? eyes in the back of his head?), or is the bird’s knowledge of its territory so intimate that he knew the small ledge above and behind the pyramid rock was always worth exploring? Whatever the reason, he caught and despatched several tiny fish within a few minutes.
Further up the loch, the north wind picked up and added its chill factor to the morning. Out in the middle of the middle, where I imagine the wind was flourishing at the peak of its powers, a single cormorant was flying head-on to the blast and just above the small waves which had mustered there. It landed abruptly, executed something like a forward roll that took it clear of the water in a curve, then dived deep. Nature, I decided, deals differently with the cold than I do. After two more miles of lochside, I turned uphill and into the forest for a respite from the wind and for lunch. It was like stepping into a hobbit-hole, and as you know, that means comfort.
The wind was instantly snuffed out, there was no frost, I was in a tiny clearing among oaks, the oaks themselves encircled on three sides by spruces. The fourth side was the steep bank I had just climbed, and so close were the oaks at the top of it that there was no view out to the loch or the sky at all. I sat on a small level ledge, sumptuously padded with moss. Closer inspection revealed that it was part of a fallen tree trunk. The gathering of oaks was defined to north and south by two tiny burns, whose voices added to the aura of comfort and something suspiciously like warmth.
Every woodland has these secret places, although in truth they are only “secret” to travellers like you and me, for they are frequented daily by many a forest dweller. Bullfinch, jay, wren, chaffinch and red squirrel all visited during the hour I spent there, sitting still and looking round, eating a sandwich and drinking hot tea. By one of the burns I could see where both badger and roe deer had paused to drink and dig.
I also puzzled over an oak tree with seven trunks, for no other reason than that it was the most conspicuous object in my line of sight without turning round. One trunk was straight and erect and much thicker (a girth of about five feet) than the rest. The others all leaned away from it at various angles and in every direction. I reconstructed the tree’s life in my mind as follows:
The single trunk prospered in a mild corner of the forest, shielded from every wind, its soil drained by the two burns and enriched by leaf-litter and moss. When it produced its acorns, these simply fell below its own canopy because there was no wind to scatter them. Jay and squirrel buried some where they fell. The moss that gathers in deep, dense, lime green cushions around the base of such an oak tree also absorbed some and these rooted eventually in the same soil as the parent tree. As these developed as new trunks, the naturally expanding girth of their parent tree fed new layers of bark to embrace them and bind them all together at the base. Thus, the original trunk now emerged from a rather gruesome-looking swelling several times as wide, for it now accommodated all seven trunks, plus two more which had broken off in infancy and were going nowhere.
I was unsure where I was going next with this contemplative reconstruction of an oak tree, but my concentration was broken by the realisation that a neighbouring oak a little to my left had mysteriously grafted a red squirrel onto its trunk about five feet off the ground, and that it was staring at me from a limbs-akimbo posture with its tail facing straight up the tree, and its head facing down. It looked for all the world as if the owner of the hobbit-hole had had it skinned and mounted as a hunting trophy, except that if memory serves, hobbits are good guys and above such things. Perhaps the squirrel read my mind, for even as the notion settled there, it raced to the ground, cleared the burn in a single bound and vanished among the tall edges of the nearest spruces.
When I finally stepped out of the hobbit-hole it was to find the over-world in a state of transformation. The wind had faded away, the frost had all but vanished, the sun had emerged pallid and bleary-eyed, and the mountains across the loch had begun to materialise as the clouds rose and frayed and whitened and yellowed. My mood rose too with the mood of the day, with the mood of nature. I have been asked more than once whether I know any tricks of the trade to
counter nature in its most introverted moods, ruses to lighten the burden of the gloomy days. I don’t. My way is to become nature myself to the best of my ability, to become landscape myself, to blend in, to immerse, whatever the mood of the hour. When nature comes across as dark and introverted, I go dark and introverted myself. And the converse is also true. I don’t flick switches to meet nature’s changing moods, it simply happens with no obvious effort on my part. My purpose in nature’s company is to write it down, all of it, all of its colours and colourlessness, all of its states of mind and of mindlessness. It seems to me that I am at my most effective from that point of view when I fit in.
Whenever I walk here in conditions clear enough to see the skyline ridges across the loch, I scan them and sweep their skies with binoculars, looking for eagles. Golden eagles nest not far away and to the east, the west and the north of the loch, and I see them regularly working that far skyline, or soaring a thousand feet above it. Several times, too, I have seen them cross the loch high up and from east to west, which suggests at the very least that the loch is not necessarily a territorial boundary. There again, in autumn and early winter, golden eagles tend to relax territorial boundaries, and occasionally families – or a family and a wandering immature bird – will team up and fly together, making unforgettable spectacle for the earthbound nature writer. Once, and only once, when I lived in Glen Dochart and there were two golden eagle territories in the hills behind my rented cottage, and another a couple of miles further north, I saw six golden eagles in the sky together. The gathering appeared to be completely amicable, the birds simply soared and circled. They were together for about half an hour, then, as if some consensus had been reached, they scattered in pairs across the sky and the thing was done. A month later, early in the New Year, birds at all three nesting territories were displaying vigorously.