Preface
In all its incalculable ramifications and contradictions, nature is my love, and its study and interpretation – natural history – have been my life and my work for half a century. How many people, I often wonder, can indulge their private passion in their everyday job? I don’t have to be told how lucky I am. But it doesn’t end there. For more than forty years I have lived and worked surrounded by mountain scenery that can still stop me in my tracks, and by some of the most highly specialised wildlife to grace Britain’s wild places. How many people in Britain today ever get to see a golden eagle?
In 1976 I set up a field studies centre here at Aigas, an ancient site in a glen in the northern central Highlands – it was Scotland’s first. It is a place cradled by the hills above Strathglass, an eyrie looking out over the narrow floodplain of the Beauly River. Aigas is also my home. We are blessed with an exceptionally diverse landscape of rivers, marshes and wet meadows, hill grazings, forests and birch woods, high moors and lochs, all set against the often snow-capped four-thousand-foot Affric Mountains to the west. Golden eagles drift high overhead, the petulant shrieks of peregrines echo from the rock walls of the Aigas gorge, ospreys hover and crash into the loch, levering themselves out again with a trout squirming in their talons’ fearsome grip. Red squirrels peek round the scaly, rufous trunks of Scots pines, and, given a sliver of a chance, pine martens would cause mayhem in the hen run. At night roe deer tiptoe through the gardens, and in autumn red deer stags surround us, belling their guttural challenges to the hills. Yes, we count our blessings to be able to live and work in such an elating and inspiring corner of Britain’s crowded isle.
Yet, for me, the real joy and sometimes the pain of living in the same place for all these decades is that I have come to know it at a level of intimacy few can achieve, and as a result the Aigas place has infiltrated my soul. Of course, in that time I have witnessed disasters as well as triumphs. We have lived through insensitive developments and land-use practices that have been profoundly damaging to the essential wildness of the glen and its wildlife. But we have also witnessed the return of the osprey and the red kite, and the pine martens have recovered from being one of Britain’s rarest mammals when I first moved here to being locally common and a regular feature of our lives.
Birds have been at the heart of my work and my life. So much more visible than most mammals, they are my gods of the morning, lifting our days with song and character. But they have also been important thermometers of environmental health and change – not always a happy story. Like so many other places, we have lost our moorland waders: curlew, lapwing, greenshank and redshank all nested on our moors and rough pasture thirty years ago – none now – and the quartering hen harriers and short-eared owls have vanished with them. Even the oystercatchers, whose exuberant pipings used to be the harbingers of spring, have gone from the river.
Whether these dramatic shifts in wildlife fortune have been brought about by climate change alone, or whether the various seismic shifts in agriculture and forestry policy we have lived through have changed the nature of the land, or whether some more insidious cause lies hidden is very hard to guess at, far less to know. It could be, of course, that, as is so often the case in ecology, the combined impact of several factors colliding at once has made survival so unpredictable for so many species.
I am wary of blaming climate change for everything. In my opinion it has become a touch too glib an explanation for too many aberrations in long-established wildlife patterns, such as the arrival and departure of migratory birds; a convenient get-out for those who are not prepared to admit that relentless human pressure on the globe and its natural resources has always brought about the extinction of species and the destruction of their habitats. That is what humankind has always done. But I cannot deny that in the last few years it would appear that the pace of climate change has accelerated and we have entered a period of total weather unpredictability.
We have no idea from one year to the next whether the summer will be hot and dry or dismally cold and wet; whether winters will be absurdly mild or gripped by snow and ice, or what extremes of heat or chill we can expect. We can no longer predict how successful our common breeding birds will be – the swallows didn’t bother to nest in 2012 – and we aren’t the only ones kept guessing and bewildered. Some wildlife can adapt quickly; others fail and disappear, with us at one minute and gone the next.
This is a book of encounters, observations and speculations based on what I have witnessed around me in my time. It attempts to explore how some of those changes have affected our common and not-so-common birds, their breeding successes and failures, their migratory arrivals and departures, their interactions with us and their populations around us. In the way that they respond quickly to shifts in climate and human behaviour, birds are also important and visible monitors of the success and failure of other wildlife, especially invertebrates. We dismiss or ignore