Do you have a bucket list– a list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket? I’ve just taken one off my list as I saw a much-wanted species in Abernethy Forest earlier this week.
Timing is everything with wildlife isn’t it? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time clearly isn’t the recipe for success, but being in the right place at the wrong time is arguably even worse because it leads to more frustration.
On Tuesday morning I was in the right place at the right time. If I hadn’t chosen this week to come up to Scotland then things might have been different. And if I hadn’t woken just before 5am then things would have been different. If I hadn’t had a shower before I went to bed then perhaps I would have had one before leaving Inverness and things would have been different.
Farming Today was still on as I entered Abernethy Forest and turned off the car radio. I drove past the Loch Garten osprey site and stopped and looked and listened at various places in the pine forest. I had visited the famous ospreys the day before and spent some time in the forest with an ex-colleague from RSPB.
We’d talked about the awful recent weather and how it might have ruined the breeding season for capercaillie and black grouse,we had been bitten by midges as we sat and waited under the ancient Scots pines, we had seen red squirrels and tree pipits and lots of willow warblers.
Today I was on my own, slowly driving the quiet roads early in the morning and stopping, looking and listening. How was my timing?
I came across a red deer hind with a calf on the road. The deer had come from the right and on the left of the road was a fence hard against the roadside with a slope falling away to a stream. I stopped to give the mother and calf time to consider their options. The hind looked as though she wanted to jump the fence and continue their journey to the left of my route.
She kept looking at the fence and seemed to tense her muscles to leap over but always stopped. She moved away from me down the road and kept looking at the fence again. I got the impression that although she could jump over easily she maybe wasn’t confident of her calf’s jumping ability nor of the young animal’s sure-footedness on the sloping landing side. She seemed to be getting more nervous about her options as I sat quietly and waited to see what she would do.
After maybe 45 seconds the hind seemed to reach some sort of resolution in her head and headed back to the right where she jumped over another fence, perhaps one which she had passed over in the other direction a few moments before I appeared on the road near her. The calf hadn’t yet jumped the fence and I decided to move on and leave them to it as my presence was probably an unwanted distraction which was making the hind unnecessarily nervous.
I drove on wondering whether the calf jumped the fence to join its mother or whether the mother came back over again and the two carried on in their original direction when a pine marten ran across the road in front of me.
It lollopped across the road from left to right looking like a small otter with a bushy tail. Across the road and into the trees it went and I saw it make its way through the blaeberry and heather on the forest floor until it disappeared. And it did disappear suddenly and mysteriously. One moment it was there about 20 yards away and the next I couldn’t see it and didn’t relocate it.
But it was my first pine marten – and it was mine all mine! A shower, a longer or shorter stop to watch the roe deer earlier, a longer listen to the singing goldcrest or a more decisive red deer hind and I wouldn’t have been right there, right then, to see my first pine marten. Timing is everything.
I parked in the small car park near Loch Garten and took the path to Loch Mallachie. The forest was quite quiet – occasional chaffinches or wrens would sing. I thought of my pine marten and felt lucky.
I passed a large ant’s nest and stopped to look at it – no great need for perfect timing with that. This enormous nest was a couple of feet high and made of thousands of pine needles. Perhaps it had been standing here for decades and would remain so for decades more.
A little down the path the almost complete silence was broken by the sound of leathery wings, the occasional ‘chup chup’ and the sound of pine cones falling from the tree tops and bouncing off the lower branches as they fell to the soft carpet of pine needles on the forest floor. Crossbills feeding above my head!
I reached Loch Mallachie and all was calm. The view was curtailed by the early morning mist but the loch surface was barely moving and the trees on the far bank were almost perfectly reflected in the still water. Just the merest ripples differentiated the view from its reflection.
I recalled sitting at this spot on a June day 33 years earlier. I had had an interview in Aberdeen and had then, as my university term had ended, hitched over to Speyside and spent a couple of days walking the woods and a couple of nights sleeping rough in them. That time I had come to this spot on a warm sunny afternoon and dozed in the afternoon sun only to be woken by the sight of an osprey lifting from the lake in front of me with a fish in its talons. Its crash into the water had woken me up!
This time I found I had reception on my iPhone and clicked ‘publish ‘for the first comment of the day on this blog – from Jim Dixon commenting on Tom Oliver’s thoughts on great ‘new Elizabethan’ naturalists. That’s progress for you?
As I walked back to my car a crested tit was making its purring till, or is it a trilling purr, and I sought it out in the canopy above? I saw the black triangular bib before it turned to show its crested head, and Abernethy Forest had yielded up another of its characteristic species.
I sipped some water as I regained my car and noticed that there was more than half an hour of the Today programme to go with its news of domestic politics and euro crises. There’s a time for that and timing is everything. Today my timing seemed to be perfect although who knows what this tale would have told if I had been a minute, or five minutes, or half an hour earlier or later? Would the cast of characters have been different? Would capercaillie have figured in the tale, or otter or maybe goldeneye or goshawk?
Timing is everything. You can walk into The Louvre and be sure you will see the Mona Lisa, but if you walk into Abernethy Forest you can’t be sure that you will see a pine marten. I’ve been here many times before, and seen many wildlife sights, but now I have seen my first pine marten.
Nature is ‘unbiddable’ – we don’t command it, we sample it. Timing is everything – make sure you make some time for nature in your life.
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Mark, thank you! A very nice piece that was a joy to read and served to rekindle the memories and experiences of my own visits to the area. I’m sure a lot of other people will feel the same!
John.
“You can walk into The Louvre and be sure you will see the Mona Lisa”
Insert “fairly” between “be” and “sure”.
Abernethy is where i also had a great timing experience. Driving up the forest track at 11pm when doing my MSc project – met a capercaillie . Not waiting it to attack my shiny new car i got out and shooed it off the track!
Mark. Lovely thoughts in this piece. My hope is to stumble over my first wild otter. I did sit up the other day where a female polecat had been reported and had a black mustelid shape cross the road. On any other day I would have called it a mink. I will have to go back for that one.
Bob – go back and good luck!
Very good Mark,really enjoyed that,we had our own moment of being in the right place at the right time at Ham Wall yesterday morning as the Great White Egrets youngsters have just started flying and we sat all morning with them coming and going all the time in the reed beds.Who would have thought we would have the first breeding of these in this country.
How awful that they had to be guarded all 24/7 to protect them but it also shows the dedication of lots of bird lovers.
Dennis – that sounds great. I remember Ham Wall and Shapwick from my youth and I never imagined that there would be little egrets or bitterns there yet alone great whites, little bitterns and cattle egrets too.
Lovely Mark, such creatures-recommend the video link of a pine marten.
I had an experince with some mandarin ducks in the wilds, been trying to photograph them since last year. Up and down the river I walked, always out of focal range,always on the other side of the Severn, Always so flighty and shy, the hours and miles I’ve put in but they are or were always one step ahead of me.
So I gave up, literally the next day I decided to walk in the local forest, I was going to ride my bike but changed my mind, for no reason I recall. So thus I took a quieter route and decided to check out a small pebbly beach by the brook on the nose for Grey wagtails. And lo! 3 mandarins less than 10ft away. I even had a handy fallen tree to rest my zoom lens on! I got some decent shots to.
Funny old game-nature.
Oh And then a week later I got a photo of Mandarin ducklings being led across a reservoir!
Dom – nice story, thank you.
Really enjoyd reading that. Thanks for sharing. Glad you saw a Pinemartin! True with nature – timing! You can go to a certain place where you should see something and not see it. Went to Leighton Moss last year to see Starling murmuration. Didn’t get to see it but had a spectacular encounter with a tame robin and got some decent pics 🙂
Hi Mark
The walk along the side of Loch Garten to Loch Mallachie is a personal favourite. If anyone wants to see how lovely it is they can check out this picture I took last week of Loch Mallachie.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bullofthebog/7450482632/in/photostream
Steve – thank you! Timing is everything, I might have met you instead of the pine marten! Hope to see you sometime soon in a flatter land. best wishes
Great piece Mark, it is the very unpredictable nature of wildlife that keeps us all wanting more. I am also somewhat jealous as PM is one of those desirables on the bucket list I have yet to see. The love of a natural history is also clear in the other experiences quoted, it is that which ties us all together even though we will all disagree about some issues.
Sorry to come so late to this, Mark; I’m afraid that my recent marriage has proved to be something of a distraction from your site…
But what a charming piece – truly lyrical and evocative. I’ve always known that behind that robust facade there lies a sensitive soul.
I must say, though, that I’m a trifle surprised by your own apparent surprise at seeing a pine marten at Abernethy. After all, if I wanted to see one, that wonderful forest would probably be the very first place I would go to look. As you know, they have certainly been taking their toll on the caper population there, with the RSPB’s own research showing that they have been responsible for the loss of between 30 and 50% of clutches. Plus we know that since 1995 the pine marten’s distribution has expanded significantly and the mean abundance index has increased nearly four fold.
I note you didn’t see a caper on this visit to Abernethy (my own experience too on several enjoyable visits there). I am genuinely concerned that unless we address the issue of the impact of marten predation on caper as a matter of urgency we run the grave risk of losing once again one of Scotland’s most iconic species.
Lazywell – welcome back and congratulations to you. Sounds like capercaillie may have had a bad year this year, as last year (but unlike 2010) and that’s because of the appalling weather at the time they have young chicks. As you know, but may have forgotten, I can tell you have been distracted lately, there is a lot of science to back up the idea that weather, particularly rainfall, is a very strong factor in the capercaillie demise at Abernethy and most (all?) other localities.
Many thanks for your congratulations.
Of course I accept that bad weather in the spring can be a very strong factor in poor chick survival. But do you in turn accept the RSPB’s own science about the impact of an increasing population of pine martens?
It’s perhaps worth quoting from Ron Summers’ paper itself, just to remind you – you too seem to have been a trifle distracted of late, though in your case by the Walshaw case – how persistent and destructive this predator can be:
“At eight nests where all details could be observed, the pine martens removed the eggs one at a time in their mouths. The average interval between visits was 5.2 minutes and at all nests the pine marten returned to the empty nest for at least one further inspection. At one nest, the predation event was different from those described above. The pine marten took the first egg and, while still at the edge of the nest, the egg-shell broke in its mouth and a chick tumbled out. The chick clambered back into the nest. The pine marten proceeded to remove other eggs and at the fourth visit took the hatched chick, before removing the last eggs.”
Great pity we’re not going to be able to meet at the Game Fair now…
Lazywell – I will miss you too at the Game Fair. Will it be rained off? Do you recall the quote by Cormac McCarthy? thus:
The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just’s umbrellas
I don’t have the great Ron Summers’s work to hand but I trust you to have quoted it accurately. This does appear to be a description of the act of predation, which must look like something as we all know it happens, but the gory, or ungory, details don’t tell you anything about the population impact, do they?
I’m sure you know these lyrics (which I have always liked):
Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it … ah … out of sight.
Ya know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though, wears old MacHeath, babe
So there’s nevah, nevah a trace of red.
Now on the sidewalk … uuh, huh … whoo … sunny mornin’ … uuh, huh
Lies a body just oozin’ life … eeek!
And someone’s sneakin’ ‘round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?
A-there’s a tugboat … huh, huh, huh … down by the river don’tcha know
Where a cement bag’s just a’droopin’ on down
Oh, that cement is just, it’s there for the weight, dear
Five’ll get ya ten old Macky’s back in town.
Hardly evidence for a population level effect even if it is all true, eh? Yes, MacHeath may have been, pine marten-like, a persistent and destructive predator – but not the cause of a human population decline, methinks.
Wouldn’t it be odd if after all these thousands of years of living together as predator and prey, living and dying, eater and eaten, it was just now that the pine marten wiped out the capercaillie? Unless, perhaps, the lack of wolves and lynxes, or even, maybe, golden eagles and foxes due to human intervention had made the pine marten life so much easier that that had knock-on impacts on capercaillie? So after bumping off all the top predators we need to bump off all the middling predators do we? And then it’ll be the really really small predators I guess…. Didn’t the GWCT once say something about predator-release?
But – at the moment (although maybe I am out of date (well passed ‘best by’ date anyway)) it seems like all that awful rain got to the capercaillie.
For a conservationist, Mark, I’m surprised by your rather sanguine approach to the plight of the capercaillie; for a scientist, I’m surprised by your lack of curiosity about what appears to have become a significant factor in the species’ poor productivity.
Despite huge investment and much good work on habitat and in relation to fencing, the population remains desperately fragile, with its range contracting remorselessly. Yes, adult survival rates have improved somewhat. But in many areas it has been all too rare that the magic number of 0.6 chicks necessary to maintain even a stable population have successfully fledged. Much of that, as you say, is down to a succession of woeful springs. Incidentally, besides relentless rain at the wrong time, having a spell of unexpectedly good weather before reverting to cold and rain can have a deeply unsettling effect on the hens and their condition come hatching time.
Meanwhile marten numbers have increased significantly, and over a much broader range than used to be the case even 20 years ago. In other circumstances this would be regarded as a conservation triumph, but not, it would appear, from the point of view of the capercaillie. Correlation, possibly; but surely worth at least investigating further by way of a properly conceived trial. Yet for some reason the RSPB is strangely resistant to the idea, notwithstanding the evidence from its own reserve at Abernethy that up to 50 per cent of clutches are lost to predation by pine martens.
So this really isn’t, as you suggest, just a manifestation of thousands of years of dynamics between predator and prey: “so let’s hear it for the caper, and let’s hear it for the pine marten”. The ecological circumstances have changed to the extent that the current situation is far too grave for anything quite so glib or complacent.