At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
to a broad white fan. In his passion he entirely smothers her. No sooner is he spent than another ardent drake leaps on with all the subtlety of a playground bully and roughly shoves her under all over again. Ducks have been known to drown this way.
I have come to the loch today to write my journal precisely because it is such an uplifting morning. I don’t normally. My routine is to take rough notes as it pleases me and return to my desk after a walk and write it up at some idle moment of the day when pressing things are done. But after the long winter there are forces inside desperate to get out when the day is seductive and anodyne like today. Winter walks have been fine – good, bracing, ear-tingling sorties, often more to do with gloves and scarves and steaming breath than with observation of wildlife and any focused attempt to feel at one with the natural world. Back then the feel-good factor came afterwards, a ‘well-I-did-it’ glow of achievement only experienced when I was back at the fireside, quite different from this ‘what-a-hell-of-a-place-to-sit-and-work’ sensation that’s overwhelming me today.
There are other reasons for being here right now. Some years the Highland spring can last for only a few days. May is still capable of snow showers, although they won’t stay – ‘lambing storms’, my crofter neighbours call them, with that terse and comprehending cynicism that so often defines their byre and baler-twine brand of wisdom, garnered over centuries of hard-won pragmatism – sending everything scurrying for cover again for as long as they last. And then June can suddenly soar to lofty temperatures on static anti-cyclonic highs that dawdle through long days of mackerel-feathered, cirro-stratus blue. Searing through thin, dry air the UV is merciless, bringing a first ruddy blush to the pallid cheeks of winter. Before we know it, summer is firing in.
These bug-free early days must be grabbed. The Highland midge, that scourge of humid days to come, is as yet still a maggoty little larva hiding in its millions in the peaty ooze of the marsh. But the earth is absorbent; the warmth of the sun is piercing and probing deep into the soil and the damp, winter-killed vegetation. The great reawakening, silent and invisible, is mustering its armies twenty-four hours a day. Soon the insect harvest will erupt in all its rampant, multifarious forms, from the exquisitely refined, like the first speckled wood butterflies that any day now will delicately lift from the path beneath my feet, to the execrable great diving beetle, the scourge of the loch’s edge, whose calliper-mandibled larva lurks among the rotting stems of last year’s water lilies, waiting for what must be its high point of the season. When the toad and frog tadpoles fatten and wiggle free from their natal plasma, this dragon of the murky shallows embarks upon a feeding frenzy, seizing tadpole after tadpole in ferocious, hypodermic jaws, injecting them with a cocktail of pernicious digestive acids which, in the space of a few minutes, without ever letting go, dissolve the tadpoles’ insides to a protein soup so that the larva can suck them dry.
From the peaty sludge in the loch’s deeps, from the soggy sedge blanket of the marsh, in the root-caves of trees, beneath the rufous bark flakes of pines, deep within dead logs and decaying fence posts, snug inside soft moss cushions and the surface inches of the soil, under rocks and stones, a horde of creeping, flying, crawling and slithering wildlife is fingering the solar pulse. Armoured legs are creaking, suckers are opening and closing, wing veins are pumping up, jaws are hungrily flexing and twitching antennae are tentatively reaching out, probing the possibilities of the future.
These are precious days of warmth and excitement, days a naturalist cannot afford to miss. If I have to go away I can’t wait to get home again, hurrying up the loch path to check out the incalculable, unsleeping and effervescent metamorphosis of spring. Dawns cry out for attendance, dusks are just as alluring. I struggle to know which to exploit, often giving in to both. To sit quietly beside the loch at either end of these rapturous spring days delivers a soul-exalting equanimity I have never achieved anywhere else in the world.
Deep underground, milk-full badger cubs, as blind as moles, are curled up in their mother’s long belly-fur. At sunset she will emerge to stretch and scratch and when she comes to find the peanuts I have put out for her I shall be able to see her hollow sides and her full udders touching the ground. The bitch otter is suckling four cubs in a cavernous holt under alder roots down by the river. Back in February this year at the far end of the loch I watched her sinuous play-fighting with a powerful pale-throated dog otter, rolling and diving and chasing each other across the marsh in the frantic build-up to receptivity. The hedgehogs, too, have produced their soft-spined litter in rocky dens. Roe does have tiptoed into thickets of dense gorse and broom and dropped their twin fawns in the long grass, where they will lie, scentless and motionless, for the first week of life utterly dependent upon their flecked camouflage like almonds sprinkled on a cake. Their mother will return to suckle perhaps only twice or three times a day, desperate not to give their presence away to prowling foxes that would make short work of new-born fawns. The proud weasel has whelped in her mossy nest deep inside the stone wall and on the wooded hill above the loch the vixen is thinking of bringing her rowdy cubs above ground.
In the top of an old pine not half a mile from the loch the ospreys have laid eggs – all I can see is the glaring amber eye set in the mocha-crested head of the incubating female. On the cliff at the gorge the peregrine falcon is hunkered down on her eggs so tight that I can barely make her out. We know from local archives that peregrines have nested at this site for close on two hundred years, but because the vertical face is so perfect for peregrines it is a reasonable assumption that it has been occupied for many millennia, stretching back to the post-glacial age before man first topped the ridge and saw this glen stretching before him like the promised land. I like to think back down those centuries and of all the thousands of peregrine falcons that have hatched on these rock ledges. It is an ancient dissonance: nature’s long perspectives set against man’s frantic, short-term bleatings. Visiting the eyrie in spring is a time-eliding experience that brings me down to earth with a bump. A little patience will reward me with the sight of the tiercel flashing in the sun, bringing in a kill, the metallic screams of his approach lifting the falcon off her eggs and rising effortlessly on flicking wings to accept his offering in mid-air.
As rough-hewn as the rocks of the cliff, a pair of ravens lurking just round the corner have two troll-like chicks: fat, noisy and appropriately satanic. In the disused quarry below the loch, with wings as silent as snow, the barn owls have a nest in a crevice once used by rowdy jackdaws, who have now moved out and taken up residence in the dark caverns of a boulder field high above the quarry’s rim, from where their merry, bickering chatter echoes across the valley like women at a jumble sale. And down at the house a pair of pied wagtails have loyally returned to nest in the garage roof, every move warily impaled on the jet, unblinking eye of a mistle thrush who has engineered her muddy cup into the fork of a Douglas fir.
Many of these events are predictable; the same or similar sites used year upon year, decade upon decade. After so many years of familiarity the season’s scenes and sequences seem to repeat like floral patterns on wallpaper, warm and comforting so that I am relieved to see them back again after the long winter. If our peregrines miss a year I worry, wondering what mishap has kept them away. Instinctively I find myself checking out all the well-used sites on my walk, and in the process I always find a few others, like the robin that I discovered this morning in a ridiculously exposed position in an old yew stump only two feet above the ground, the hen so smoothed into her moss and horse-hair cup that only the glint in her eye gave her away. It will be a miracle if the pine martens don’t find her.
My page is crowded with notes. Just now there is no time to think of purpose or meaning, to ponder the creation or the unfathomable web of interdependence that somehow manages to hold it all together. There are long winter days for all that. For now I must be out and seeing, jotting and scribbling, hoarding gems for later delight. I am just happy that spring is here at last.
3
Dreams in a Jar
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
– T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars