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| White-tailed Eagle and Merlin - pastel sketch on paper |
A day of battling with the cold, July wind and a day when the David of the falcon world took on the Goliath of the eagle world. I love the summertime hills and glens of Angus but Scottish weather always has the upper hand to turn love into purple rage and chill discomfort. Gloves were on this morning and a gale driven shiver shrunk old bones into the anorak hibernating in my rucksack. Nature has had a start-stop sort of year so far, with, for example, snakes warmly appearing then coldly disappearing as the months advanced.
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| Adder |
A female Adder, all bright in fresh fashion, braves the cold to bask its curly coils in the ever shifting light, and, nearby, new Common Frogs guddle gangly legs through Spearwort stems then plop deeply into the murky bottoms of the moorland ponds to hide. The snake and the frog are under the eagle eye of a young Golden Eagle that sits patiently on the eyrie above and its nest bound sentence is soon to be exchanged for the freedom of the skies because feathers have replaced chick down and hunger bites at the belly for an escape into the big, bad world.
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| Young Golden Eagle - zoom range 700 m |
A world where survival is elemental and, to ensure that, risks are taken. A tiny, hen Merlin cracks the moorland air open with banshee screeches as a huge, ginormous White-tailed Eagle sails across the hill horizon to have a nosy look at her fledgling chicks that sit and mope in a girning wait for food. She bravely wallops the eagle's tail and nips the scraggy, wing primaries until the giant moves to a move. The eagle flips a guarding wing up at the falcon that arrows an attack and all is truly biblical under nature's terms of survival. The fledglings look unconcerned and in all innocence are content to fluff a beakful of preened out baby down onto the jagged, heather undergrowth.
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| Young Merlin no 1 |
Against peppered blue skies, the immature White-tailed Eagle turns back to soar above us, in characteristic curiosity, on a flighty pilgrimage to find a mate and a home; a lonely planet pioneer in some senses. Unusually, the bird does not have a satellite transmitter or identifying wing flags fitted, so for a young white-tail it is as real as it gets and I wonder where it has sprouted from because most of east Scotland's known eagles are tagged with some item of 'flying with baggage' branding from the RSPB Sea Eagle reintroduction project to help identify an individual bird's movements.
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| Immature White-tailed Eagle |
Remoteness opens a door on the soul. There are those who respond to that call of the wild and develop an empathy for wilderness nature. Their dimensional soul grows in a response to spiritual experiences derived from nature's complicity in subliminal change. To seek the 'drug' that nourishes the soul is why I am here on the hills of Scotland and its flavour is as rare as whisky stilled from the highland burns that flow around me; it cannot be touched, nor can it be taken away for it exists as Scotland's wild spirit.
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| Young Merlin no 2 |
My excuse to sample this elusive spirit is with me in pastel and paper as I sketch the land while savouring the flora and fauna all around; privilege is thus created for my soul and it goes beyond materialistically copying a photograph of the land or ticking a twitch for a bird or flower; it becomes a spirituality, almost a religion without script that should be as close to the innocence of creation that exists in the wild bird or animal. To be at one with nature, is that too much to ask of our human race.
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| Young Merlin no 3 |
The ugliness of nature casts out another contentious hand as we find a Mountain Hare carcass riddled with blood sucking Ticks and this recently dead buck has been caught between two seasons. Winter and summer pelages are fused together on this beast in a state of aspic and, in my opinion, this indicates a sickly animal without the bodily resources to complete the normal pelage change. Literally hundreds of Tick, at all stages, are gorging on the neck, ears and head; oddly there are no obvious signs that it has been predated by the local eagles or scavenged by corvids or foxes.
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| Mountain Hare carcass, at this time of year hare should have brown fur |
Back to the living; one of my favourite flowers is Water Avens and it is a prime example of how beauty can easily be overlooked in the mountains. The colouration is pastel tinted with subdued seduction, and the drooping bell of the flower is tantalising enigmatic, therefore resistance is futile, and, like a small boy peeking at petticoats, peering into the shyly hidden organs of this secretive flower feels immoral. I have found it most often when scrambling in mountain gullies growing beside a trickle of scree water or where the 'rock of ages' brings forth other infinite beauties like Purple Saxifrage or Mountain Avens.
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| Mountain Hare and Ticks |
There is to be found a ubiquitous and holistic beauty to nature if the soul opens the doors of welcome to it. Take the Common Blue or Small Pearl-bordered butterfly as an example; what colour, what a wonder of intricacy in pattern and form, but with such strength to endure the gibes of foul weather found in Scotland. I do not need an explanation of their life cycles or a description of their preferred larval food plants to admire their beauty as sentient forms. They share the land and air as I do, and without them we are all at a loss.
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| Mountain Hare and Ticks |
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| Common Blue |
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| Common Frog |
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| Honeysuckle |
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| Pearl-bordered Fritillary |
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| Water Avens |
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| Yellow Saxifrage |
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| Wood Cranesbill |
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| Stonechat |
Notes;........article in progress............
All text, photographs and sketches done on the 6 July 2019 and subject to copyright - no reproduction.
My new book 'Wildsketch' is available from Blurb bookshop
Income from book sales will form a donation to CABS (Committee Against Bird Slaughter)
If you are inspired to go out into the hills and glens of Scotland please leave it as you find it, respect the environment, do not litter or discard so called 'biodegradable' fruit and especially if you are a dog walker keep your beast on a lead and do not bag up its waste then chuck it by the wayside. I recently came across one black poo bag neatly hung on a tree branch for someone else to take home and also a bright blue one thrown in the moorland verge....why?
Moorland birds like Golden Plover, Dunlin, Dotterel, Ptarmigan and many raptors nest on the ground, it is advisable to keep dogs at heel or preferably on leads when walking on the high plateaux of the Cairngorms during summer months.
Please be aware that it is illegal to disturb nesting eagles or other raptors and you may do so inadvertently in your journeys into the highlands. Observe protected species at a respectful distance usually from about 1000 metres and for short periods of time only.
No wildlife was unduly or knowingly disturbed by my presence or for the purposes of this web page other than what would be expected on a normal hill walk. Many geographic names and location recognizable photos have been omitted to prevent persecution or ringing-monitoring disturbance to named species.
Canon camera 200D with optical zoom lens EFS 55-250mm used; please note that the zoom range distance if given is calculated by OS map from subject location to camera