CALL OF THE WILD

Whether it’s the Big Smoke or the Scottish countryside, nature has a way of adapting to its surroundings, says Fiona Armstrong Illustration Bob Dewar.

Fiona Armstrong on nature's surprising ability to adapt

My aunt comes to stay and remarks how fresh the air is. I agree, but I have to confess that I take little heed of the atmosphere around Armstrong MacGregor Towers. Which is wrong. We should treasure what we have. But my aunt lives in the south, in a leafy London suburb. Hers is a pretty semi-detached house sitting in a maze of clipped hedges and trimmed trees. It is a world away from our untamed Borderlands.

Hers is a world often fogged by diesel fumes and heating systems. At times it must be unbearable. No wonder she likes our wholesome Scottish spaces.

Yet no matter how polluted a place is, nature will find a way of coping. My aunt might admire our pheasants and red squirrels, but back home she has her own colourful creatures. All round her house are colonies of colourful birds. Bright green with coral beaks, they are natives of Africa and Asia that have settled in suburbia and adapted to British climes. They are parakeets. Posh pigeons that add a touch of the exotic to an otherwise ordinary street.

But how did they get there? Was it an audacious escape from a pet shop? Or is there a more romantic explanation? One perhaps involving the following story about how a pair of small parrots escaped from a local film studios during the 1950s filming of The African Queen and began to breed. Such a story may have some credence, but it does not explain the similar birds now found in a park near Glasgow…

Over tea and crumpets, we share photos and compare notes. Then my aunt relates another wildlife tale. She is on her hands and knees in her garden and doing a spot of winter weeding. Further along the path is her bag which contains her gloves and house keys, because while you can weed in winter in the English capital, you certainly cannot leave your front door unlocked when you are out the back.

Anyhow, she is going great guns with the creeping buttercup when the bag suddenly starts to move. It is a fox, tempted perhaps by the smell of the suede gloves. Whatever the attraction, Foxy Loxie is now pulling the bag along the gravel with his teeth.

Now my relative is in her late seventies. She is not that nifty on her feet, so she does the only thing a septuagenarian can. She raises herself up to her full five foot nothing and puts on her sternest voice. ‘Just you bring that back!’

And blow me down, bushy old red tail duly obliges. He drops the bag and scuttles off into the undergrowth.

Back in Scotland, meanwhile, and the chief is also missing something. As you know, ‘where’s my…?’ is a common complaint among the male population. On this occasion, though, it is something that is rather hard to mislay.

The MacGregor comes into the kitchen and asks where we keep the vacuum. It is an odd request, and what he wants it for I do not know. But I think you ladies might agree that it does say something if, after two decades, my husband still does not know where the hoover lives. Perhaps it is a blessing. For him, that is. To live all those years in blissful ignorance of mundane household things.

Then of course, it can work both ways. Because, as we all know, knowledge is power. And knowing where a vital cleaning appliance lives must surely make me indispensable.

Like the wildlife around us, we find our own ways of living…

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Foxy Loxie is now pulling the bag along the gravel with his teeth