The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Birds – and bare buttocks
Clocks went forward an hour last Sunday. As the Doyenne pointed out, that’s an hour less we have to worry about coronavirus. She has been reporting lots of goose activity when she takes Inka for his morning walk, with large packs flying high and northwards.
“. . . lang, lang skeins o’ beatin’ wings, wi’ their heids towards the sea”.
They are likely heading for the Loch of Strathbeg between Peterhead and Fraserburgh to meet up with geese from other parts.
They know it is time to answer the irresistible call to fly more than a thousand miles north, following immemorial flight lines back to their summer breeding grounds in Greenland, Iceland and Spitsbergen. They’ll wait for a favourable wind under their tails to speed them on their way and they’ll be off.
Their nests are simple scrapes in the ground lined with grasses and moss and warm down plucked from their breasts, and five to seven eggs are laid in May and June. Incubation is 28 days and the goslings fly at about eight weeks. Incredibly, in just six months this year’s broods will have fledged and be strong enough to join their parents for the long journey south to overwinter in our more benign climate.
Regular readers know of my love affair with the grey geese. They bind me into the elemental rhythms of the natural world. I shall miss their
“. . .cryin’ voices trailed ahint them on the air” but around the middle of September I’ll be looking out for their straggling chevrons beating down the Howe of Strathmore and listening for their bleak windswept cries.
In more auspicious times I would be jumping into my car and driving round to see what’s new in some of the out-of-the-way places I haven’t visited since last autumn. The countryside is looking brown; farmers are ploughing the last of last year’s stubble fields and preparing the land for spring sowing.
In the 18th Century when farmers wanted to know if the ground was warm enough to start the spring ploughing they dropped their breeks and tested the temperature of the earth with their bare doup – a grand old Scottish word – or buttocks. In the face of science and supposed progress the practice seems to have gone out of fashion but could it be that the old ways might still be the best?
We are lucky, living right on the edge of our village. We shut the front door, cross the road and are walking in the fields and woods we look out on from our living room window.
I heard the throbbing music of great wings and knew what it was before five mute swans, in line astern, flew over the house in the direction of Fasque Lake. Their steady, powerful, metronomic wing beats displace a large volume of air and their speed is deceptively fast. In a moment they were just specks.
It was all I needed to call Inka, grab my stick and head that way myself. It was quieter than I expected but there will be pairs of the resident mallard already sitting on eggs. The drakes, in full mating dress, are looking their best with glossy, bottle-green heads, white collar and purple-brown breast.
I disturbed a pair of tufted duck tucked into the lee of the bank. The drakes are snappy dressers with white flanks contrasting sharply with the rest of their dark brown plumage. Their douce mates are dark brown all over.
A high-pitched creaky call told me a coot was hidden out of sight in the reeds on the far bank. The white wattle on their beak and forehead gives rise to the expression “bald as a coot”.
Plumes of smoke drifted across the brae faces of the entrance to Glenesk. It was controlled muirburn and the season will finish on April 15.
After that, grouse and other ground nesting birds are pairing up to nest and lay their eggs. Strips of old heather are burned to encourage new growth which is the grouse’s sole diet.
A heron flew across the water with lazy powerful wing beats. They look awkward on the ground with their long neck and skinny legs but they have a measured grace when in flight.
It was proof that sitting and looking and listening means when I get home I can write about what I’ve seen and heard.
“Readers will know of my love affair with grey geese. They bind me into the elemental rhythms of the natural world