Nature shares its wondrous mystery as a golden eagle sends mighty stags scurrying
Enjoying the silence of a wooded wilderness reaps rewards as drama and mischief suddenly erupt
You enter the pine wood by a bridge across a steep and lively mountain burn where aspens gather along the bank.
In this of all woodlands I feel recognised, acknowledged by the wood itself. I have known it for 40 years, but for five of those years I was its near neighbour and it was then that I began to connect with it in a quite different way.
The change was born out of a growing sense of intimacy. This wood is a northern outpost in what I think of as my writer’s territory, the home range of much of my field work, corresponding roughly to the district of Stirling and extending from the Carse of the upper Forth in the south to Glen Dochart and Strath Fillan in the north.
Intimacy with any landscape, if you are willing to put in the hours, is a two-way process, so that the landscape repays your long stillnesses with glimpses of its store of mystery and you sense the natural wisdom that underpins every aspect of life there. There is order, discipline, a rhythm, and it is all nature’s doing.
None of this dawned on me quickly. There was no bolt of lightning. Rather it accumulated slowly and in layers, like moss, over years of going back again and again, working and reworking what I thought at first was the same set of circumstances, only to find the details changing all the time. Nature is endlessly restless.
At first, I thought that I was not nature enough for nature, but that proved to be nothing more than a misconception of a human mind, and I settled eventually into an acceptance that our species is every bit as much nature as everything else in the wood, and the perceived problem was nothing more than distance, the distance that our species has opened up between ourselves and nature. At its worst – and its worst is widespread – it takes the form of a belief that we are above nature and have the right to control it. We aren’t and we don’t. A wood like this one teaches you that.
Nothing in nature knows all nature. But ours is the only species that fights it and insists on that ideological distance between us and nature. Reducing that distance is my self-imposed job description, and the most effective way appears to be working within a territory, becoming intimate with a handful of places, to try to understand as much as nature is prepared to offer, and to value the mysteries.
In addition to the pine wood, I could also tell you about a singular mountain, about an alpine-like glen where golden eagles nest and ring ousels sing, about a reed bed at the head of a loch where swans nest, and about a stretch of slow, alder-lined, otter-patrolled river and its floodplain. And you could draw a single line connecting all these places on a map and it would not be longer than 20 miles.
There is also this: the things nature teaches you, the sense of a kind of order, patterns that repeat and slowly evolve, the aloof mysteries… all that knowledge is transferable. You can carry it with you wherever you travel in the wild world, and then you find that the same things apply. You can sit by a river in, say, Alaska, watching beavers at work on a cottonwood grove under a 15,000ft mountain and become suddenly aware of nature’s acknowledgment that you first felt in your own home territory 4,000 miles away. So I greeted the aspens, crossed the bridge and felt the pines gather round. There is a narrow ridge that rises above the middle of the wood, and I climbed there just to watch the rise and fall of the trees. It is also where natural regeneration is most vigorous. Scots pines like dry, well-drained soils, and the lower, wetter ground is the terrain of bog, moss, bog myrtle, alder, willow, birch, and aspen that mostly cling to the banks of river and burn. As the slope rises, the regeneration is more marked, a
self-evident truth to any thoughtful reader of landscape that points up the misconceived decision that planted a commercial spruce wood above the pine wood, thereby holding the pines in check several hundred feet below what would be the natural treeline.
Slowly then, faced with the constraints placed on the Strath Fillan wood, you acquire a sense of the possibilities of a really big pine wood, one that disappears around the next hill shoulder, and the next and the next, hills robed to the waist in big, domed pines like these, the highest slopes opening out with fewer and slenderer trees. But in this country such a sight does not exist and almost every pinewood is isolated from the next. I think particularly of the Cairngorms, where once the mountain massif was surrounded by a continuous pine wood. Now it’s the other way round – the mountains hem in the individual woods.
I have seen what a landscape of apparently infinite pine-clad hills looks like in Norway, rolling away from a high mountain summit in green waves, and it took my breath away. There are wolves within those pines, and brown bear, lynx, moose, beaver. We talk loosely about the Great Wood of Caledon, but any northern hemisphere pine wood needs these creatures to be great, and it needs unbroken distance, so that a walking mortal might enter it at dawn and walk all day and still not emerge from the far side before nightfall.
A wide, heathery slope inclines gently upwards from the heart of the Strath Fillan wood up to its western flank. Trees line both edges of the slope but none grows out on the slope so it looks like nature has made a kind of parade ground for itself. Low sunlight poured straight down the slope out of the west. I leaned against a birch and soaked up the moment.
Time stalled. The mood altered when a red deer stag stepped from the trees, walked out into the middle of the slope, turned at right angles and headed uphill to the skyline. A second stag appeared, followed, made the same turn at the same place…then the third, then one at a time and a few seconds apart there came 15 more. They walked in single file, a quiet and measured pace. The first stag stopped just below the skyline. The others walked up to it and they all stopped, but now in a tightly bunched group that was suddenly nervous. The muffled thud of restless feet on hard, dry ground was punctuated by the occasional rasp of antlers touching.
Then, in the gap in the trees and directly over the stags’ heads, the silhouette of a golden eagle appeared. It circled once then came in low. The stags scattered and ran.
The eagle charged down the slope not six feet above the ground then abruptly soared vertically for two or three hundred feet, banked high above the trees and headed west. Not one stag showed on the open ground. “And what was that all about?” I muttered to the birch tree where I leaned.
I have heard of eagles driving deer over a cliff, but there is no cliff in the Strath Fillan wood.
And these were all mature stags and far beyond the scope of an eagle as living prey. But the eagle knew that. It also knew that safety for the stags was no more than 20 yards away, left or right over easy ground. So was it making mischief? Was it making a point? Was it play?
Every good wood is the stage set for moments of wild theatre like that. Mostly, only the trees bear witness. But intimacy with any landscape, if you have taken the time and trouble to win it, is sometimes a two-way process.