wildlife

Peals of Geese

| kirsteenbellblog

Dusk’s gentle quiet is often split by resonating peals of geese, calling each other to roost, big sociable rafts cooried in to the sheltered waters of Loch Eil. Long black necks of Canada geese group alongside bright orange beaks and rippled brown feathers of greylags, both ploutering in amongst the seaweed-strewn shoreline. Sunlight, when it comes, reflects off the bright white chests of the Canada geese, and the pale undersides of the greylag. On clear days, the whooping seesaws of their calls mingle and carry across the water.

Greylag are so called as they migrate later than other species – lagging behind. The greylags here however are residents. When Icelandic populations were migrating back to colder climates in spring, the Lochaber birds would have begun sitting on eggs. Goslings fledge then in only eight or nine weeks, growing from a distinct soft yellow-grey to become quickly indistinguishable from the older birds in the gaggles. I love the greylag’s scientific name, Anser Anser. Their sharp persistent calls echo and do seem to demand an answer.

The Canada geese reply with a lower, slower honk. They can also be a migratory species, though again UK populations stay throughout the year. I stumbled upon a thread on the internet that claimed their North American origins were a misnomer, that the bird was actually named from an ornithologist called John Canada, but further digging indicates that to be a modern myth. The millions of Branta Canadensis Canadensis present in Canada bear out their title.

For all that the rafts of geese floating at the head of Loch Eil appear huge to my eyes, in fact there are probably only around a hundred or so. This is a tiny fraction of the hoards that descend elsewhere, such as in the Hebrides where they have become a huge problem for crofters.

Over centuries, crofting agriculture has found a balance between human and land in which both thrive. Hebridean machair has long been a biodiverse habitat that supports multiple species of birds, flowers and insects, as well as human and beast, but the geese threaten that with their voracious numbers.

Both Canada and greylag are successful breeders, each laying clutches of around 5-7 eggs. Good feeding grounds and lack of predators have allowed their populations to prosper. Since the 1980s their numbers have gradually increased into the thousands, along with other species such as barnacle geese. Geese eat grass, roots, seeds, and grain; a field just ready to harvest can be destroyed in a matter of hours.

There have been attempts from NatureScot to help manage the geese numbers, although these seem to be localised now to key areas under threat. It may well be that the numbers on Loch Eil will eventually become a problem. For now, on shores that have been silenced by the loss of lapwings and curlew, the geese are at least a sign of life.

Spring: BaTS

| kirsteenbellblog

There are buds and new leaves burgeoning on the trees, there are daffodils and daisies and coltsfoot, there are cuckoo flowers and cuckoos to come  – and then there are bats. Of all the signs of spring, it is the quiet, almost imperceptible, re-emergence of the last in that list that I love the most.

Swinging open my door this evening to let the dog out, three small bird-like shapes whisk across my eyeline and up into the twilight. Pipistrelles, soprano pipistrelles I think, their dancing around the gutters of our house silhouetted against the half-light of dusk. 

If the air is still enough, as it is tonight, it is possible to hear a faint leathery flittering of wings, but that’s all. My youngest son has been learning about echolocation in school and watches with me. We are unable to hear the clicks and squeaks that bounce off the bats’ surroundings and back to them, telling them where the house is, where we are, where the flies are that they seek. The sounds that bats emit are so high-pitched they are invisible to us, just as the bats themselves fade into the night as it deepens.

I would love to know where they spent the winter, what wee cool nook they found sheltered enough to hibernate in. Their fur is dark and brown enough that they could disappear into any small cleft in the woods, blending into woodpecker holes, or the hollows left by broken branches. Or they could have found some quiet spot in the eaves of the workshed, or even the house.

Over and over again I think of the word ‘synanthrope’: from Greek syn, ‘together with’, and anthropos, ‘man’ – creatures that are wild, yet whose ongoing survival benefits from sharing space with humans.

As with many species, the natural habitats of bats have declined as human habitats have expanded. And so bats have adapted to us, learnt to make our homes theirs too. Despite that adaptation, The Bat Conservation Trust highlights that numbers have declined over the last hundred years. Bat roosts are now protected by law in the UK, which means that if I were to find that the roost is in our house, there it would stay.

Even if I wasn’t already naturally fond of these creatures who have clung on, the Trust’s website is reassuring that they pose little risk. Unlike mice, bats don’t chew pipe-lagging or wires, and their droppings harbour no known health risks and will simply crumble to dust. Their presence generally has no direct impact on our lives.

In fact, silent as they are to us, if I wasn’t outside this evening I might not have noticed them at all.

Sighting wild boar

| kirsteenbellblog

Anyone who drives the roads around Lochaber at night will have caught glimpses of wildlife in the verge: headlights glancing off the gold line of a woodcock’s beak, or the twin green reflections of a pine marten’s eyes – not to mention those glimpses of antlers or a soft brown back that send your foot to the brake pedal in anticipation of a stag or roe deer running out.  Driving home late last week though, just before Invergarry where the forest grows close to the road, my foot hit the pedal. Not at something running towards me, but at an unfamiliar long dark shape climbing the bank away from me.

I reversed back up the stretch of empty road, window opening to the night, trying to sharpen my eyes into the shadows to confirm what I had seen. The movement had been too low to be a deer, too black, and the way its weight shifted against the slope reminded me of pigs we’ve kept on the croft. Boar.

A growing population of wild boar call the woods of the Great Glen their home, but I have never seen one.  Huge they may be – an adult can be almost a metre tall at its shoulders, with immense strength behind their elongated snouts and short tusks – they are known to be secretive beasts.

Once a keystone species in woodland habitat, boar had dropped out of our collective consciousness for centuries. They can be integral to healthy and balanced woodland regeneration, disturbing undergrowth to allow new trees to take root, and creating space for wildflowers like bluebells to reach through to the light. However, they are not wholly welcome in the human landscape.

Sightings have been recorded in the south at Leanachan Forest, on trail cameras in Glen Loy and Loch Arkaig, and north by farmland and estates near Drumnadrochit. Each time I drive the road between Fort William and Inverness my peripheral vision keeps an awareness in the trees, hoping out the corner of my eye to snag on a heavier presence in amongst the scrubby understory of birch and oak, or the quiet emptiness of the conifers. I never really expected to see the wild pigs so close to the road though.

The numbers of wild boar in the Great Glen have reportedly been increasing in recent years, with more anecdotal evidence of sightings from walkers on the Great Glen Way, particularly on the approach into Inverness.  The messages on Facebook walking boards are mostly of warning, and many farmers and crofters see them as nothing short of a nuisance, as they can dig up land used for grazing.

Like so much wildlife in the Scottish Highlands, there are multiple ways in which we can interpret the boars’ presence, for good or bad. I gave up staring into the dark forest and resumed my journey home, knowing the boar had far more patience with which to outwait me. It will carry on trying to live its life and we will carry on our trying to live ours. Whether we can find a happy medium that allows both human and boar to co-exist remains to be seen.

Storming of the woods

| kirsteenbellblog

These trees are normally quiet. We might hear the occasional blackbird song, or finches, or the alarm calls of tits and wrens, or the steady voice of ravens from above, the odd carrion crow. But this morning I walk up the hill to a raucous melee. I’m not even close to the woods before I hear a roiling mass of squeaks and curls, chortles and chips, a soundtrack sped up then run backwards and layered over itself again and again. So loud and persistent is the noise that it even swells briefly over the metallic hammering of a rockbreaker from the nearby landfill. If dictionaries had audio descriptions, clustered around the word ‘cacophony’ would be the calls of winter thrushes on the hunt for fruit.

I’ve been away for almost a fortnight and thought I might have missed this storming of the woods. We get only a fraction of the thousands of fieldfare and redwing that migrate to the north of Scotland from their breeding grounds in Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and western Russia. They come every year though, a burst of life when the Highland hills are giving up their green.

When I left for my trip in the last week of October, the rowans were still heavy with berries. Now they are finally bare.

The birds come for our autumn fruit and milder winters. Flocks flutter in like leaves lifted from branches by wind, breezing through this small belt of woodland in a brief, noisy, gathering, before moving on, leaving the rowan exhausted of their fruit. A few dried berries are left dotted on the branches here and there, and a scattering in amongst the leaf litter looks like the debris at the end of a party.

I always thought our visitors were fieldfare, but my newly downloaded Merlin Bird ID app tells me it hears redwings too. I sit by the scope in the garden, waiting for some to stray into the trees by the house so I can watch them more closely. They throng to and fro across the leafless birch, and the oaks still crinkling with brown leaves, searching for any rowan that they might have missed on the last pass. These, I am sure, are fieldfare: grey-blue blurs in the air, their undersides flashing white in the low morning sun. Then I spot two wee ones in the trailing upper branches of a silver birch – they stay long enough for me to train the glass on their perches, and even before I have increased the magnification I can see the rust glow on the side of their breast, the distinct creamy-white line above their eye. Little redwings, in amongst the fieldfare. Birds of a not-quite-the-same-feather flocking together, both drawn to the Highlands’ rowan red bounty.