The Nature of Spring

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

Apair of great northern divers hove to a hundred yards to starboard, at ease on the quiet sea until the wake of the ferry found them and they rode its bright crests and its shadowed troughs, so that when they rose to each new wave the sun lit them from stem to stern. Hebridean seas embrace no more exotic presence, nothing more blessed by wild finery, nothing more luxuriously bejewelled than great northern divers resplendent in breeding plumage. I live these days in the middle of the country where Highlands and Lowlands collide, and just about as far as you can get from the sea in Scotland, as far as you can get from the realm of migrating divers, but that island thirst to which I am prey ensures that we are far from passing strangers.

These Argyll waters are vital to the great northerns. At its peak, the wintering population here can reach a thousand birds, one fifth of the total European population. At this time of year, the numbers probably include north-making birds from France, Portugal and Spain, and they stop off here because there are so many others of their kind scattered across these waters. And as one who feels a constant magnetic pull towards the northern places of our planet, it does not diminish their standing in my eyes to know that journey’s end for the breeding adults within this fluctuating population is Iceland, or Greenland, or just possibly Canada. I watched that pair dwindle into the evening distance in the wake of the Colonsay ferry, and I wondered what far shore awaited them at the end of their voyage. Then I turned away to watch Colonsay take shape and draw near.