by Jim Crumley
But suppose the swan is swimming ahead of you, and straight into the sun:
. . . only his upper surfaces are lit by sunlight, the rest of him being in shadow and appearing dark violet against the bright water; in fact, but for the light on his back and the top of his head he appears as a dark silhouette in relation to the high tone of the water.
Snow changes everything:
Now you can see how yellow his neck is, and to a lesser extent, the rest of his upper plumage. Note also the reflected snow light on his undersides which makes them look almost the same tone as, or even lighter than, his top surfaces . . .
The best wildlife artists are the best observers of wildlife (and most of them are also masters of stillness). If you want to see the full range of possibilities in the repertoire of that “white” hen harrier on the fence post, look up the archive of Donald Watson, who was – and remains a dozen years after his death – arguably the greatest observer of hen harriers, for he studied them throughout his life and he painted the results of his studies. One of the paintings that comes to mind shows a male bird flying very low over a snowy hillside in low mid-afternoon midwinter sunlight, and the bird is blue, for it has absorbed colour from both sky and snow (and the snow too has borrowed from the sky); and just as Tunnicliffe noted, the underside is lighter than the top surfaces.
It would be another hour before the Insh Marshes harrier flew, and what galvanised him was the arrival of the ringtail, the female harrier, a bird so different in plumage, so inconspicuously brown that it looks like a different species, until, that is, you see them flying in tandem. And she brought with her a retinue of small birds, a cloud of finches, siskins and tits all twittering their displeasure and dicing with death to make their point. They looked like blown leaves in a November gale as they bowled across the marshes. For the next half hour the harriers came and went in and out of my vision, but they were rarely out of it for long and I judged that stillness would serve me best. Watching two harriers at work, hunting as a pair, demonstrating such mastery of the art of ultra-slow, low-level flight (only golden eagles do it better), tormenting the small birds of the marshes, striking down two within half an hour, sharing the meagre spoils, then taking to the air again, the ringtail like a mobile fragment of the winter landscape, the male a wizard of flickering colour change, while in the background, a pageant of the country’s finest mountain massif drifts by in soft focus . . . watching all that is to be transported to a more rarefied realm than the one I was occupying an hour ago.
It remains then, the grimmest of paradoxes that these birds are public enemy number one in the eyes of the grouse moor fraternity, that their beauty and their uncompromising and stylish wildness are of no account, simply because they are judged inconvenient for the most grotesque of all the human rituals Scotland has inflicted on its own landscape. The industry has grown tetchily defensive in response to mounting and sustained criticism of the toll it takes on Scotland’s hen harrier population. Representatives of both landowners and gamekeepers have loudly and repeatedly condemned illegal killings, but they still happen, and the hen harrier remains an absentee from much of the landscape where it should thrive.
The longer the nights, the more precious the daylight. Winter is the nadir for all our most vulnerable wildlife communities, the dark days for the weak and the ill-starred. Unless we find a new way to look after the land, we may be living through a hen harrier winter beyond which there is no second spring.
* * *
Suddenly in early February, winter appeared to have found its voice. The mountain rescue teams were at work on Ben Nevis, on Mount Keen, and in the Garbh Choire of Bràigh Riabhach. One of the Cairngorms rescue team spoke of “full-on winter”. On Mount Keen, the rescued climbers had been “woefully ill-prepared . . . it’s winter folks, don’t believe the hype”. But there were only three weeks of meteorological winter left and the first daffodils were out, and some climbers had got careless because even in the mountains, winter had hardly bothered to show up. One of the main Highland ski centres hadn’t opened until February. A week later I took advantage of an encouragingly wintry forecast and headed back to the Insh Marshes, hoping against hope for the bonus of a snowy day in Rothiemurchus or Abernethy.
I awoke in a Speyside hotel room at 3a.m. I opened the curtains on a sky stuffed with stars, the Cairngorms basking in moonlight and barely a shred of snow in sight. At 7a.m. there was ice on my car and fog shrouded the land. Talking to the hotel staff at breakfast, it turned out that full-on winter had lasted three days. I was at the Marshes by 8.30, the sun was making next to no impression on the fog. The descent from the footpath to the Invertromie hide was a carefully negotiated, ice-encrusted, frost-bound transition down through primeval-looking woodland. Sunlight had not penetrated down there for, oh, weeks probably. If it had not been for the all-pervasive pallor of the frost, the depth of shadow could have intimidated susceptible mortals. The hide itself is right down at marsh level and right in the outermost edge of the trees, a place on the cusp of two landscapes. At the door, it has a subterranean feeling. If you turn round, the wooded hillside you have just descended rears steeply above and shuts out all other sights and sounds of the overworld. The fact that it was bewitched by that ghostly off-white ermine of frost did not endear me to the job in hand.
Inside the hide, it seemed to be colder than outside, although that could just as easily have been a symptom of my aversion to hides. I discovered how much colder it was about to get when I opened the window slots that face out over the Marshes and a breeze drifted in bearing greetings from what’s left of the Arctic sea ice. The window opened on a startling and panoramic sprawl of the Insh Marshes, the mountains beyond and the raw wildness of Strathspey at its most unfettered. The only problem was that I could see none of it because the fog had the place by the throat and appeared to have wrung the life out of it. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound, at least nothing wild made a sound. The A9 made a sound, a distant and incongruous bass grumble, which at that moment in that situation was as a voice from another world. An hour frittered itself away into the blue-grey oblivion. My coffee flask, which was supposed to sustain me through elevenses and lunch, became my one defence against the nothingness of that hour. Then quite suddenly, and piece by piece, the nothing began to crack open, and a new Earth was born right in front of my eyes.
Mallards appeared, swimming. I have never been so pleased to see mallards, ever. Their pool appeared, then grew and grew until it became an acre of open water. I heard greylag goose voices (but saw no geese), a lapwing sighed (but I saw no lapwing). Then sunlight burst apart the mist to the north and revealed two roe deer a hundred yards apart between tall banks of reeds which dwarfed them. They looked grey in their winter garb, white scarves at their throats.
One pond after another, the intrinsic character of the Marshes began to reveal itself, and most ponds wore skins of ice. But the pace of the unveiling was surreally slow. It is in such situations that you realise how the idea of the slow-motion film was born. Then far above the Marshes a mountaintop appeared . . . a mountaintop without a mountain to support it in the sky. It would take another half hour before the entire mountain had coloured itself in. It began to feel as if anything could happen.
Then one of the ponds loudly emptied itself of all its mallards, most of which I had not seen until that moment when twenty of them hurtled into the air, their flight unnaturally fast and their alarm cries unnaturally loud in the slow, soft context of the morning. Back on the water, something long and dark and blunt-nosed trailed a vee-shaped wake. It edged ashore, shook itself and stood in the sun watching the retreating, curving flight of the mallards. It was a big dog otter, and my guess was that it had been stalking the ducks and that the mist had cloaked its presence. I had never considered the possibility before of an otter using a ground mist to conceal itself as it hunted.
Sunlight had now reached to within about thirty yards of the hide, although the shadow of the hill behind would keep i
t from warming up the hide itself. Just beyond the edge of the shadow, a screen of reddish-looking scrubby birches was partially hiding another roe deer. It caught my eye only when it turned its back and the white blaze of its rump struck a jarring note, which blew its cover. It turned its head to look back along its spine and gave the hide a long, hard stare. I daresay the hide produced a lot of human noise from time to time, but this morning there had just been me, and making human noise is something I take pains to avoid when I’m alone in a situation like this. Then it stared hard left and its ears went forward. I looked where it was looking and there were two more roe deer, and these advanced soundlessly to where it stood, and for a moment all three had gathered in a tight bunch, the red of the birches in front of them and the sunlight full on them, and from their different angles they all turned their heads towards the hide, and presented me with one of my better roe deer photographs (“damned with faint praise” is the phrase you are looking for here). The smallest of the three, last year’s young, was a markedly different shade of grey-brown from the others, a kind of olive shade. Olive, the other roe deer . . .
For a long while they became the entire focus of my attention. It was clear they were feeding, but not at all clear what they were eating. The vegetation had that fag-end-of-winter look that promised no nutrition whatever, and the land where they stood was as much water and peaty mud as it was solid ground. Yet they fed constantly, but whatever they were eating was hidden from me by the long, pale, straw-coloured grass. Finally they emerged into a more open spot, and I realised how deep they were digging with forefeet and with muzzles, and that there was a great deal of tugging to free their food source. Roots. That’s where there was new growth and nourishment, underground. It was turning into a surprising morning. I looked at my watch. It had been four hours.
I retraced my steps back up through the woods, the lower part of which was quite unaffected by sunlight. But as I climbed I could feel the air warm and the trees began to glitter and drip, hundreds of trees at a time, an extraordinary percussive symphony.
Back at the top of the wood, the sun suddenly poured through, and after my long shift in the frigid zone I stepped out into something that was properly warm. I guessed that the temperature had got a dozen degrees warmer in those few hundred uphill yards.
* * *
It occurs to me as this exploration of winter advances that buzzards keep cropping up. There are good reasons why that should be so, not the least of which is their new- found abundance. One of the consequences of that is that many more people who are not instinctively drawn towards nature think they are seeing eagles, which brings the following conversation to mind.
So I met this man in a bar and he said:
“I know you. You’re the nature guy.”
I’ve been called worse. I nodded.
“Just saw a thing: it was a golden eagle sitting on a fence post.”
And my head groaned inside itself and I thought, “Why me, God?” but I smiled instead and said:
“You sure? Buzzard, maybe?”
He shook his head.
“Eagle. It was huge.”
And it was warm and comfortable in the bar and the fire was on and I had been reading the paper, so I really hadn’t wanted conversation right then, right there, and I particularly didn’t want the over-familiar buzzard-on-a-fence-post conversation. But I didn’t want to appear rude either so I laid aside the paper, fixed the stranger with a tell-me-about-it kind of look and said:
“Tell me about it.”
“Tell you what about it?”
“Where was your fence post?”
“At the side of the main road, a mile back.”
“Now tell me what you saw.”
His beer arrived. He drank the top third without pausing, sighed theatrically and nodded his appreciation.
“Long drive,” he explained, then: “What did I see? It came up out of the grass verge as I drove past, almost hit the windscreen; carrying something furry in its legs – they were hanging down. And there was something white I couldn’t see properly at first. But the road was empty so I pulled over on the verge and had a good look back. The furry thing had blood on it. It was under the eagle’s feet.”
Another swallow accounted for the second third of his pint. I said:
“Three things: one, did it perch upright or with its tail horizontal? Two, were its legs yellow or feathered? Three, was the white thing by any chance a plastic wing-tag?”
“Okay then. One, it perched upright. Two, the legs were bright yellow. Three, aye, it was a white disc stuck to one of the wings with a big . . . ”
“With a big letter C on it?”
“Aye. How’d you know?”
“Okay, you saw a buzzard, and a buzzard in your windscreen IS huge!”
“Ach, is that all? I thought it was an eagle.”
“Don’t be disappointed. You saw an almost-eagle. A buzzard is a fabulous bird. After all, yours was impressive enough to make you think you’d seen an eagle. Don’t think any less of it just because it wasn’t what you thought, or wasn’t what you wanted it to be. And that particular buzzard, with the white wing-tag with the big letter C on it, spends half its life walking about in the fields pretty much where you saw it, and most of the rest in the woods across the road.”
“Why does it have the wing-tag? What’s the C for?”
“Good questions. And I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does. I also don’t know why anyone would want to tag a buzzard. But then I don’t much care for wing-tagging birds at all. It’s a device to satisfy the nosiness of people, and if you were to ask the bird, it would tell you it would rather not have wing-tags. No one has ever convinced me that the powers of flight of a bird with wing-tags are not hampered. The design of birds’ wings has evolved for a few million years now and they’ve always used feathers. The addition of plastic makes a perfect design imperfect. And no one has ever convinced me that birds have not been killed when a tag snagged on a tree or a fence, or . . . ”
He hadn’t bargained for this stuff and he had already lost interest. He downed the rest of his drink, announced his departure and his last words were these:
“Ah well, maybe you’re right. I still think it was an eagle.”
I mention the story because the buzzard must be the most misidentified bird in the Highlands, especially among people who are new to the Highlands or very occasional visitors and the one thing they want to see before they leave is a golden eagle, and the notion must have come into my mind at least partly because I was back in the Insh Marshes, and there are few better places in the land to put the two species into some kind of perspective. My simple rule of thumb is this: if you are in any doubt, it’s not a golden eagle. But that is of limited use to someone who is in no doubt at all because they don’t know what an eagle looks like in relation to a buzzard, or what a buzzard looks like in relation to an eagle. You can refine that idea by considering the bird’s environment. You don’t get golden eagles sitting at the side of the B970, so the chances are that if you see something eagle-shaped and magnified by an early morning fog sitting on a telegraph pole at the roadside and watching you as you drive slowly past, with the best will in the world that’s not a golden eagle, that’s a buzzard. On the other hand, you don’t get buzzards at 5,000 feet and still climbing. So if you see what looks like a small golden eagle high overhead when you’re on the Cairngorms plateau and you think it’s small enough to be a buzzard, it’s just that the scale of the place has defeated your eyes and it’s an eagle a thousand feet higher and still climbing. And on yet another hand, the Insh Marshes some 3,000 feet lower than the plateau, and a landscape flat enough to command the River Spey to dawdle in the western lee of the Cairngorms for a few miles . . . that is buzzard territory par excellence, and buzzard territory par excellence sometimes produces extraordinary results.
When I am not refrigerating myself in one of the RSPB’s hides at the Marshes, my favourite viewpoint there is a blunt
headland of heather and rock and birch trees. It shoulders out from the mountain massif to invade the edge of the Marshes, a low outpost with miles-wide views. I go often in autumn, winter and earliest spring, mostly to prospect for whooper swans, but also for all the swans’ fellow travellers that find reason to linger there, and for the place itself, for its hard-nosed mountain landscape setting. The word “landscape” is slightly misleading, for mostly, and especially in winter, it’s more water than land, and it’s that combination of shallow water lying over grass that endears it to the swans, to all wildfowl and to the nature writer. There was a day when I washed up there a few winters ago and the swans were half a mile away and scattered widely, and I wouldn’t be able get any closer to them without getting back into the car and driving all the way round, and I was done with driving for the moment. I filed the idea away as a possibility for the end of the day if they were still there, but as it was, there were geese and lapwings in a field of grudgingly rough grazing on the very mountain edge of the marshes. The sharp, querulous staccatos of the greylags were shrapnel for the ears, flung by a north wind with an unforgiving edge, whereas the thin, woozy sighs of the lapwings rather drifted up on it, a sound that bathed the landscape like a gentle wave of newly melted ice. Yet there was a satisfyingly yin-yang-ish harmonious aspect to the resulting blend, which somehow amounted to rather more than the sum of its parts.
Enter from directly overhead that old familiar contralto downcurve, that bluesy minor-third, that haunted voice, and I leaned back and looked up to forage among the purple tracery of winter birch branches until, in a clear patch of cold blue, I found the thickly patterned spreadeagle of buzzard wings. The bird was moving sideways into the wind as if it were being towed along by the primary feathers of its starboard wing. For all my determined stillness, I was being watched, assessed, dismissed, and the bird cruised on towards the lapwing field, still going sideways . . . and followed at once by its own mirror image crossing the same patch of sky, and it too was flying sideways against the wind but leading with the port wing. Because I was looking at the underside of the second bird’s wings from below and behind, as opposed to below and in front with the first bird, I saw their rich patterns in a quite different light. And the patterns themselves differed from bird to bird, because, as I have suggested elsewhere, there is no standard buzzard uniform.