DID YOU KNOW?
The Nightingale’s one-bird concert is just one of Stirling Castle’s many musical accolades. It has been host to sell out concerts from Runrig, R.E.M. and Bob Dylan.
like this is the two-volume The Birds of Scotland. The average is three or four birds a year since 1980, most of them on Fair Isle, Shetland, or “well-known east coast migration points”. But then there is this, “Exceptionally, a bird established territory in a thicket of hawthorns on the Back Walk of Stirling Castle and was in song from 14 May to 22nd July, 1952.” Then the book quotes the authority for the report – “Waterston, 1952”.
If you have ever wondered about immortality, that’s what it looks like.
These scrapbooks are a window into the thought processes and experiences of those who laid the foundations of modern ornithology and nature writing.
At the beginning of the first book, there are a few pages of cuttings from the 1930s before the war intervened. One of those, written by Seton Gordon in 1934 – by which time he was a serious authority – is a wide-ranging article about ospreys. And bearing in the mind the date, how about this for an interesting piece of lateral thinking on the subject of species reintroduction.
“Although I am convinced that the osprey can never be reintroduced into the British Isles as a nesting species by the importing of young birds from overseas, it might be possible, I believe, to establish the species once more in the Highlands of Scotland in the following way.
“Several clutches of eggs might be brought by messenger from Scandinavia, and might be set under buzzards nesting in the Highlands. I believe that of our remaining British raptors the buzzard would be most likely to rear young ospreys, and once reared the young birds would be likely (if they escaped the gunner on their migration) to return each spring, and to nest when fully mature in the district where they were reared.”
As far as I know, the idea was never acted upon. But little could Seton Gordon have known that the better part of 90 years later, a Scottish nature writer would be scratching his head over the newspaper article in which he advanced his theory.
And little did Pat Sandeman imagine that his two notebooks full of newspaper cuttings from the 1950s would end up in my bookshelves and their contents would spill out into the pages of The Scots Magazine.
The moral of the story is that if you think you hear a nightingale, write to the papers about it, or The Scots Magazine. For that way lies immortality.
“The buzzard would be most ospreys” likely to rear young