The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  An hour later I was very cold, but still, I reassured myself, I was in the right place, and the right time would be along any minute now . . .

  Another hour, still facing south, still scanning the sky, and trying to suppress the memory from one old spring not far from this rock of sitting watching a perched golden eagle do nothing at all for four hours. And then suddenly he appeared far in the south, very high and very small. I had found him by chance with a slow sweep of my binoculars across the sky, perhaps the 20th such slow sweep. And yet, it wasn’t chance that led me here, it wasn’t chance that commanded me to sit, it wasn’t chance that imposed stillness and patience on the sitting and the waiting, and it wasn’t chance that finally fulfilled my expectation of seeing him there, sooner or later. I write about what happens, of course, not about the hundreds of blank hours over thirty-something years when nothing at all happens except the slow seepage of awareness, experience, and acceptance between the mountain and the watcher.

  “This way,” I muttered aloud to no one at all, “this way.”

  I saw the eagle tilt, change direction, and vanish going that way, checked my watch, decided on a time limit. One more hour sitting still on this hill shoulder in this hazy grey weather and its persistent north wind would be quite enough. I don’t know why I do that, because events inevitably determine the timespan of the vigil. Almost certainly, I will not notice the moment when fifty-nine minutes tick over to sixty. The passage of time will have nothing to do with it. I look at my watch when there is nothing going on. When things are happening, who knows where the time goes?

  So the trick then is to find a way to renew the commitment to the watching. You have to intensify the scrutiny. An old eagle man I used to know once told me that when you are looking for golden eagles “you must learn to scan the middle distance”. It’s a tall order sometimes, and it is never as easy as it sounds, not least because there is often nothing in your middle distance to focus on. You must explore the three-dimensional space between you and the next piece of land. But you get the hang of it with practice. So I set about devouring the middle distance of the space between me and the limit of what I suspect might be the eagle’s territory, and I tried it with and without the binoculars . . . the narrow view and the wide view. If I was right, if I was still in the right place, one more cold hour (or whatever it took) would be a small price to pay.

  A hint of brightness stole over the sky in the south-west. A single stag came and stood on a corner of a skyline buttress. I watched it for a while with binoculars and then without, putting it into the context of its colossal landscape. Then I rebuked myself, for I was watching a fixed point of land, not scrutinising the middle distance. Settle again, readjust everything that can be readjusted – the mat I was sitting on, the position of my back against the rock, the zip of my jacket, the cuffs of the jacket so that they embrace my gloves more snugly, my state of mind (become landscape rather than a man in a jacket with binoculars; stop fussing with the binoculars; be still, or at least as still as humanly possible – if you must move, make small movements and make them slowly).

  The middle distance became the centre of the world. There came a point in the passage of time when I started to see that space as a thing of its own, with colours of its own, a three-dimensional object as tangible as a mountain. Somewhere deep inside myself I smiled. Better.

  A new wind came, curving round the rock at my back, exploring my right cheek, a light gust that danced on almost at once, but leaving its mark on my cheek for a while. I heard a crow, then a raven, then both together. I sought them both out because of that ancient symbiosis by which golden eagle and mountain corvids are forever bound, and which has offered countless scraps of encouragement over several decades to this watcher of eagles. But these two appeared to be shouting at each other, the crow perched, the raven adrift close to the stag’s buttress. Either that or I was missing something. It occurred to me then as my binoculars briefly followed the raven that the stag had gone and I had not seen it go, because it had not been part of the middle distance.

  Then there was a sudden movement, a movement so sudden that its very suddenness startled me. It was a movement not of a golden eagle but of my own head, turning to the right. Suddenly.

  Why turn at that moment?

  There had been no sound, nothing lodged in the corner of my eye, not even that playful wind. Instead, there was . . . a shift, a waft of awareness, a stirring of that other indefinable sense that grafts itself onto you over the years like lichen on an Ardgour oak tree, so imperceptibly that you were unaware of its presence until suddenly you put it to use.

  And there was the eagle.

  Falling.

  Falling as nothing on Earth falls, and nothing in Earth’s sky.

  Falling as a state of grace.

  Falling as an art form, with beauty and purpose.

  The shape of a falling golden eagle is an abstraction, almost a diamond, but a diamond tampered with by nature’s take on the science of aerodynamics, and squared off at the top and curved to a point at the base. In its falling, the eagle looked as dark as mahogany, except that the new brightness that had begun to infuse the sky also infused the nape of the eagle, that mercurially light-sensitive hood of feathers, that “golden”. In different lights it can catch your eye as anything between tawny and auburn, and in almost no light at all it transforms again: an extraordinary photograph by my friend Laurie Campbell, and published in my book, The Eagle’s Way, shows a golden eagle on the island of Harris asleep on a ledge near its eyrie at midsummer midnight, and that same mercurial hood is somewhere between ash grey and white. But on this falling eagle excavating an eagle-shaped shaft through the middle distance of mountain air somewhere above Balquhidder Glen in the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, that new light in the sky glanced upon the nape in such a way that it shone, it truly shone. The same light smote the base of the eagle’s bill with a vivid note of a deep daffodil yellow. Mahogany, pale gold and deep yellow . . . but of course the thing was happening at a barely credible airspeed, so that from the moment it came into sight, high and to my right, until the moment it pulled out perhaps twenty feet above the hill shoulder where I sat, and well over to my left, no more than five seconds could have passed. Five seconds, but somewhere in their midst, that falling eagle breenged through the precise moment at the precise angle that cause the nape of its neck to flare with a pale gold sheen, and for what may have been no more than a second, no diamond ever shone with a finer lustre than that one.

  Then it was ascending again in spirals, scratching its name on the blue-grey void of the northern sky, then it was holding up against the wind at the top of its climb, then it fell again but this time the flight took the form of a roller-coastering parade the whole length of the hill shoulder, a sequence of short wing-folded dives and towering climbs, and all of it in and out of sunlight, and all of it spilling air with brutal power and sustained elegance in perfectly equal measure. At such a moment, my sense of the world shrinks and my state of mind is one of helplessness, helpless admiration, helpless thraldom in nature’s cause, helpless anguish that there are out there and not more than a couple of watersheds distant, examples of my own species who would rather poison such a bird than sit and watch it in silent wonder. It is a lot to take on, one cold afternoon of late January.

  Amid the more or less limitless glories of natural flight, there are two examples of the art which astound me beyond rational thought so that they become the preserve not just of the mind but also of the heart. Both of them are at their most luminous in midwinter. One of them is this golden eagle festival by which it celebrates its own idea of a New Year, the beginning of one more long haul to establish one more new generation of its tribe; the symbolism is as irresistible as the performance to any nature writer worth the name. The other could scarcely be more different, either in the execution or in the purpose, but both have in common that they deal in grand gestures and that they are events of extraordinary power and bea
uty and grace. The eagle flies to proclaim its place on the map of the world, its spectacle is solitary and silent. The whooper swan is a thousand miles from home, it moves from one wintering ground to another in low and level skeins, a restless, nomadic procession from the Northern Isles or the Western Isles to Slimbridge or the Fens and back again, then when it is satisfied that winter is done, back up the northern ocean to Iceland. The conversation of these flights is a constant exchange of snatches of muted brass. The glory of them is in low sunlight, which January and February assist, so that the white plumage of their wings takes on a variety of shades from blue to orange, depending on the strength of the light and the nature of the terrain where it is flying, for there is nothing like swan plumage to absorb the shade of its surroundings. A skein of whooper swans flying into a sunset is a constant rhythmic progress of flashing lights: overwings and underwings rise and fall and respond in a four-in-the-bar jazzy way to the impact of the light source.

  With the eagle gone from my sky, these were the thoughts that rummaged around in the vacuum it left behind. Eagle and swan rarely coincide, and when they do, at least in a Scottish context, it will usually be out in the Hebrides where golden eagles nest much lower than they do in the Highland heartland mountains, and where whooper swans both migrate and linger on favourite lochs and lochans. On the rare occasions when whooper swans venture into the mountains, it will be perhaps because prevailing weather conditions persuaded them to cross a mountain pass rather than fly round the mountain, and there is no doubt that some will follow the course of major glens on migration.

  Once, and only once, I watched a solitary whooper swan battle against a real Hebridean gale and apparently try to cross the ridge of the Skye Cuillin at upwards of 2,000 feet. The incident is as inexplicable to me now as it was then, about twenty winters ago. An eagle can fly into a healthy headwind, half-fold its wings, and pick up speed. A swan in the same wind struggles to make headway and usually goes low and tries to fly under it.

  I was still sitting with my back to the same rock on the same mountain shoulder, and had been setting my mind’s eye to times and places where I had seen swan and eagle share the same airspace, and thinking how their different flight techniques suited their lifestyles – and how both appealed so much to my lifestyle – and all that came to mind were the south of Skye, the west coast of Mull, the great east-west trough of Loch Tay and Glen Dochart in Highland Perthshire, and the north-south funnel of Gleann Einich in the Cairngorms. And then I realised that the eagle was back.

  It flew so low and slow above the ground at that moment that I wondered if it had just risen from a perch, and if so, where had it perched and how long had it been there, and had it been watching me? You see what happens when you switch off and stop scrutinising the middle distance? The next moment I had at least some circumstantial evidence to back up that hunch. At no more than about fifty feet above the shoulder, the eagle held up in the wind again, and like a preposterously inflated kestrel, it hung there, working wingtips and tail feathers, and I am as sure as I can be that the object at the far end of its gaze for a few moments was myself. This has happened to me three times before, and each time I had been very still for a long time, sitting against a rock that was deliberately chosen because I knew it was a landmark in a golden eagle territory. The feeling engendered by each occasion was one of profound respect, of being in the presence of one of nature’s ambassadors, of briefly keeping the company of true, undiluted wildness. To a nature writer, these are scraps of gold dust. They are among the most precious souvenirs that persuaded me many years ago now to dismiss the idea of a climbing a mountain to pronounce it climbed, and to find a new way of my own in the mountain midst where I might meet and linger in the company of the natives.

  The eagle banked away, leaned out into the void beyond the mountainside and began to climb, not in lazy spirals this time but straight up at an angle remarkably close to vertical, an ascent powered by a surge of huge wingbeats, hundreds of feet in a handful of seconds. At first, there was an audible pulse with each wingbeat, the sound diminishing as it climbed. Then from almost directly overhead, it began again. The eagle appeared to lean forward in the air so that its tail was almost directly above its head, then it folded its wings so that the tips were held close to the end of the tail, and in a mighty burst of speed it was falling again. The dive levelled out and curved upwards again without pause and in precisely the opposite of the position in which the dive had begun, the head now almost directly above the tail, the tail pointing back at the earth, at my rock, at me. This time the climb soared on and on, maybe a thousand feet, maybe 2,000, for the eagle was quite alone in that portion of the sky and any idea of its final altitude was far beyond reliable guesswork. Then it boarded the wind and raced south away from me.

  So high up and far away a golden eagle began to sky-dance its way into my heart. It travelled a mile-long mountainside in a free-flowing sequence of power-climbs and free-falls, dismissing a thousand feet of air from its wings, ripping open the sky, climbing again, flipping over, diving down, the whole thing as rhythmic as waves, as seamless as winds. It reached the slope that dipped towards my rock. It was suddenly so close that I became more aware of the blurring hillside as I tried to keep the binoculars focussed on the bird, so I lowered them to watch with my eyes instead. Sometimes you see more clearly without binoculars. In this case, that simple action liberated everything. In particular, it restored the glorious perspective of the bird and its native heath, the mountains and all their intervening spaces and their overarching skies. I remembered a snatch of Gavin Maxwell’s Raven Seek Thy Brother (Longman, 1968):

  . . . with the cold so bitter that I was conscious of my own shivering, I felt an actual buoyancy, an uplift of spirit. This was my world, the cradle of my species, shared with the wild creatures; it was the only world I wanted . . .

  The eagle crossed the level ground where I sat, dipped a wing once more and fell from my sight. In the past two hours, the planet we inhabit had spun on its axis in such a way that it had drawn a little closer to the sun.

  * * *

  The winter of 2017 brought encouraging news about the state of Scotland’s golden eagle population, with the publication by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) of the results of the 2015 national golden eagle survey, the first since 2003. It revealed an increase from 442 pairs in 2003 to 508 pairs in 2015. What intrigued me particularly was this sentence:

  The North Highlands and the central spine of the country between the Great Glen and Stirlingshire saw the greatest increase in eagle numbers.

  The reference to Stirlingshire meant these very mountains, the heart of my working territory, and confirmed what I had been thinking and seeing over the previous three or four years, which seems to me to be when the recovery started to gather pace. I have been watching golden eagles here for about thirty-five years, and there are at least seven territories that have held breeding birds for at least some of that time. To my certain knowledge, four of the seven have been unoccupied for shorter or longer periods. But now I am seeing more birds more often on more of the territories.

  All that suggests that something fundamental has changed, and whatever that may be, it is working to the golden eagles’ advantage. It is tempting to think of a combination of factors as the most likely explanation: there is more food for them, there is less disturbance at some of the eyries, the land is being less intensively worked, or even that landowners and their gamekeepers have had a fit of conscience and have finally recognised that eagles have more of a right to the odd grouse or deer calf than their well-heeled, gun-totin’ clients. No, I don’t believe that one either.

  There is, however, one other significant factor, one rapidly evolving circumstance which has begun to make an impact on many of nature’s tribes in both Highland and Lowland landscapes. It began on the west coast, then on the east, and such is the way of these things, it has begun to make its presence felt in the mountainous heartlands. That SNH report had also noted th
at in 2015 Scotland had 106 breeding pairs of sea eagles. It also indulged in some uncharacteristic crystal-ball gazing and predicted numbers rising to 221 pairs by 2025 and then an explosive expansion to between 890 and 1,005 pairs by 2040.

  If SNH’s numbers are anything like accurate, this means that somewhere around 2030, the sea eagle will start to outnumber the golden eagle in Scotland, a proposition I first advance in The Eagle’s Way. That book showed how a two-way coast-to-coast eagle highway had begun to evolve, a broad swathe of land roughly between the Tay estuary and the Isle of Mull. I wrote of all the ecological riches that are bound to flow back and forth from coast-to-coast travel and settlement, riches we can only guess at yet, in much the same way that no one anticipated the benevolent extent of wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone when that project began.

  . . . The scale may be different, and Scotland is, alas, still some distance away from putting wolves back into Rannoch, but the principle of repairing a systematically raided ecosystem by installing new native blood at the top of the food chain is one that cannot fail. That, and the restoration and expansion of every native habitat is all the help nature needs to recreate something of an older, wilder order.

  The first thing we will learn is that the golden eagle will not be impoverished if and when – almost certainly “when” – it is outnumbered by the sea eagle . . . Mostly the two eagle tribes co-exist amicably enough. In occasional one-to-one skirmishes, usually a territorial dispute, I never seen and never heard of a sea eagle prevailing. The golden eagle is the supreme flier as well as the supreme predator of our skies, and that alone will be enough to guarantee the stability of Scotland’s golden eagle presence. Inferior numbers will not change that.