Wild About Scotland

It seemed unlikely that a night-time walk in Stirling might be accompanied by one of nature’s most beautiful soundtracks – the song of the nightingale

A 60-year-old newspaper clipping inspires nature expert Jim Crumley to investigate nightingale sightings in Stirling

ITURNED the page wondering “whatever next?” and read a newspaper headline that must have had people checking if it was dated for the first of April. “Nightingale In Scotland” it read, “Song Recorded at Stirling Castle”. Given that Stirling Castle is on my skyline most days, the headline seemed surreal. It wasn’t an April Fools, as the article was helpfully dated June 2, 1952. What was I reading? Good question. A scrapbook of newspaper cuttings.

Some of you of will remember the huge contribution Tom Weir made to this magazine, in which case, you might also remember his great friend Pat Sandeman. As it happens, Pat was also a friend of mine, and late in his long life we shared birdwatching walks and glasses of wine and whisky, for along with piping and Gaelic, these were his passions.

His company was enthralling, and it was my great fortune as a writer to hear him talk about the pioneering era of ornithologists and other naturalists on which he left his own mark.

It was through people like Pat, Tom, Don and Bridget Maccaskill – who also served this magazine well – and Andrew Currie, the Nature Conservancy Council’s man on Skye, and through their connections to other trailblazers like George Waterston and Seton Gordon, I had privileged access to a body of knowledge on Scotland’s nature spanning the 20th century.

Both Pat and Andy Currie knew Seton Gordon well and shared their stories with me. Tom’s book, Tom Weir’s Scotland, recounted a long interview with him on natural Scotland. Such are the footsteps in which it has been my privilege to walk.

So, the scrapbook. Pat’s daughter, singer Mary Sandeman, had been having a clear-out and wondered if I would be interested in two scrapbooks that Pat had put together between the 1930s and mid-1950s. Almost every cutting is about wildlife or wild landscape, and most of these concern birds. Both Seton Gordon and George Waterston feature frequently.

Waterston was not just Pat’s friend, but also a cousin and co-conspirator in the development of Scottish ornithology. The Isle of May bird observatory, the Fair Isle bird observatory, the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, and the RSPB’S Scottish operation were all initiatives that thrived under his visionary leadership.

He persuaded the RSPB to go public with the return of ospreys to Speyside in the 1950s, and Pat Sandeman was part of the group who kept watch at Loch Garten.

Pat’s old scrapbooks took me to an era in which nature made headlines almost daily. The news was diverse: ospreys and wild cats, Britain’s first national nature reserve at Beinn Eighe and the purchase of Ben Lawers by the National Trust were cheek by jowl with sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, a £5 fine for stealing the fulmar eggs, and an estimate of a quarter of a million birds killed by oil at sea.

I turned the page and there was the nightingale at Stirling Castle in the summer of 1952. The report was by George Waterston.

“The breeding range of the nightingale in this country extends as far north as Yorkshire,” he wrote, “so any reports of the occurrence of this species singing in Scotland have been viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. At this time of year, I often get reports of

Out of the stillness of the woods came a song” burst of varied chuckling

nightingales in song, but in every case the singer has until now turned out to be a blackbird or a garden warbler.”

He describes reading a letter in the newspaper with “pardonable doubts” when it claimed to hear a nightingale in full song just above the Back Walk below Stirling Castle. He decided to investigate with other ornithologists, waited for an hour… and heard nothing.

“Then, suddenly, at 11.30 pm, out of the stillness of the woods came a burst of varied chuckling song. To those of us who were familiar with the song of the nightingale there could be no mistake. The bird sang spasmodically in short bursts with long intervals.

“After midnight, when the wind had died down, the bird took heart and treated us to outbursts of wonderful song, going through the whole gamut of its repertory. Before we left, we stopped opposite the castle and heard it singing clearly at a range of about 300 yards – the castle crags acted as a ‘sounding board’ to its song.”

End of story? Oh no. Mr Waterston had friends in high places. “The following night I visited Stirling, taking with me the BBC recording van…by running out about 200 yards of cable, I crept up to the hawthorn tree in which I had last heard the nightingale and fixed the microphone in its branches. Apart from the quavering call of a tawny owl, all was silent. For three-quarters of an hour I sat there motionless; and then to my delight the nightingale started to warble only 10 yards away.

“I crept back to the recording van… I had just reached it when the bird resumed singing and I heard the sound coming through perfectly on the machine.”

Nightingales do crop up in Scotland today, but as passing migrants. My first port of call to check out things