A homecoming in colour

I came home today through colour. By all the roads from Edinburgh to Norfolk, the single uniting shade, except the many joyous greens of early summer, was the blousy white of oxeye daisies in the banks. In the north of my journey, for four hours perhaps, the daisies flowered beside the irresponsible pink of red campion, great wind-billowed stands of it, lining verges and shrieking from the edges of woods. Most startling of all - enough to raise the down on my neck - the campions grew under the shocking flowers of broom: yolk gold and lipstick pink sparring in the wondrous way of nature. One bank, drier, sandier I imagine, blazed with the Van Gogh blue of viper's bugloss and all through the hedges, in the north, were the creamy flowers of may.

In East Anglia, and the Midlands, the may had finished with its month, red campion was over and the burning flowers of gorse and broom extinguished. Here in the south the hedges sang the delicate song of dog rose, eglantine and briar. White campion, a summer sunshine flower, was here and reaching home I saw the shy blooms of bladder campion in the verge.

In my own garden this evening, what else but oxeye daisies? These are the offspring of flowers from my childhood dog-walks in a North Norfolk village and now they recklessly seed all through my little patch of Norfolk by a chalky river. Here too the monkey flower, cranesbills, valerian and lofty spikes of parsnip. For five months now I have travelled, I have watched, I have seen, I have smiled. Now I am home for thee months, in my flower-filled garden near a river. Candide, I rather think, was right.

Old friends and new

I met Kelvin on the deck of a three-masted schooner off the west coast of Greenland. We were looking for bowhead whales (quite my favourite of all the great whales I have seen). We had a hoot for a week, with our witty Danish friend Kasper, leading a delightful trip. All the same, because of Kelvin's bipolar life, spending winters in Antarctica and summers in Svalbard, and my own hobo existence, it has been hard for us to spend time together in the real world. We'd therefore agreed that on my way home from Speyside I would stay with Kelvin and his lovely family in Edinburgh. We laughed quite as hard this weekend as we did while surrounded by bergs and bowheads in Disko Bay.

Yesterday morning I went with Kelvin and Clea and their spark of a two-year-old son to Edinburgh Zoo, to stretch our legs in the sun, to share experiences of wildlife, and, in my case, to set eyes (albeit not in the wild) on my fourth tiger subspecies of the year.

From the standpoint (flypoint or swimpoint) of our native wildlife, a good zoo is a patch of open country, with trees, bushes, water, flowers, and maybe even food to be appropriated. It was good, therefore, to see as much wild wildlife in the zoo as exotic. Herring gulls circled the king, gentoo and northern rockhopper penguins; jackdaws high-stepped around snacking children, knowing that sooner or later some of the snacks would be theirs; dunnocks and goldfinches sang from the trees and shrubs; a moorhen staked its claim to one of the great white pelicans' leafy pools; magpies scavenged the leftovers of a Sumatran tiger's meal; and rabbits calmly nibbled the lawns along the street outside.

My own focus yesterday was seeing the Sumatran tigers. In February I saw thirteen wild tigers in India. In April I saw Malayan tigers in captivity at Lok Kawi in Sabah, Borneo. Last week I saw Amur tigers at RZSS's Highland Wildlife Park. And yesterday I saw my fourth subspecies at Edinburgh Zoo. I have a terrible confession to make and feel sure that many of you will think me a bad person: Sumatran tigers, as fascinating and wonderful as they are, and as dearly as I long for their preservation in their rainforest home, don't really float my aesthetic boat. Their faces, with powerful eyes and those long, silky cheek tufts, are dramatic. Their coats, with the boldest black stripes of any tiger and a background the colour of my mother's marmalade, are striking in the extreme. But they're a funny shape. Dare I say it? A piggy shape. Compared to the slender elegance of the Indian tigers I've watched in the wild for the past decade, compared the the vast, solid power of the Amur tiger who photobombed me at the Highland Wildlife Park last week, Sumatrans are just a bit piggy.

Photobombed by an Amur tiger

I didn't manage a Sumatran selfie yesterday;
but here's a photo my sister took of me at Thrigby Hall last year.
I'm on the right.

In truth I was enthralled to spend time in the company of Edinburgh Zoo's magnificent male Sumatran tiger (and, in case any of you are poised to unfollow me on Twitter, I was just joking about the piggy thing). I was also happy to see the zoo's Asiatic lions, close relatives of the animals I saw in Gir just three months ago (this is guaranteed given that the world population fell to a dozen a century ago). It was good to see a wildcat too, since so much of my recent energy has been devoted to seeing the species (or, as it turned out, some of the species' genes) in the wild.

Distant Asiatic lioness

Wood-carved Sumatran tiger

In the rest of the collection there were many beautiful animals attractively housed. Some, like greater one-horned rhinos, ring-tailed and red-bellied lemurs, brown capuchins and Azara's agoutis, I have seen many times in the wild; others I hope one day to see. The showstoppers at Edinburgh Zoo, of course, are the placid giant pandas. I had not seen pandas, I think, in twenty years, since I worked for a summer with Mike Lubbock, formerly of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, in North Carolina and paid a visit to a colleague at the National Zoo in Washington. I was delighted to see them again yesterday and, for their own good and the good of their species, I wish them a black-and-white baby very soon.

Malayan tapirs, a mother and her well-grown youngster

African wild dog

From the zoo, I went with Clea and Kelvin to meet their charming friends James and Daniel, over whose two Bengal cats I cooed quite uncontrollably. Bengal cats, and other such hybrids, however, are another story. Yesterday, was a lovely day in the company of fine people and fine cats. It's just that some of them are a little, well, piggy.

Gandalf

Merlin

Ruby eyes

The deer are there this morning and the hares; but an ice-pick wind hacks at me along the valley and a brutish rain comes. So I retreat. The rain falls heavier and I start to run back to my car. Reaching my lonely parking place, still before light, I see, for the fourth time this week, an owl on slim bowed wings. Each time I have seen this owl, in this same place, it has been for a naked-eye moment in the dark. Each time I have been unable to judge the length of its ears. Yet each time something in my heart has told me that they were long.

This time I see the owl, in the still dark, dive into junipers towards my car and as it does I hear from a sentinel cypress above me, by an abandoned cottage where once a keeper lived, the rusty creak of an owl chick. A long-eared owl chick. The cypress is too dense, too dark, too big for me to see the chick, so I walk to where the adult flew and searing into me from its cryptic face are ruby eyes as angry as last night's cat's.

I move and my long-eared owl is gone. The rain falls and the ugly wind blows and there is no sign of my hybrid cat at its dump, so I drive home through the wondrous Abernethy woods, hoping to find a capercaillie on the road. I find instead two hairy Highland residents outside Grantown on Spey and in the bank of the road into town sweet cicely in flower. No cat, no capercaillie, but wonders everywhere, this wind-harried early day on Speyside,

Hybrid

This evening did not at all go as I had planned.

No sooner had I settled into the grass on my mound overlooking the loch than I was approached by a white-haired man with the tanned skin of those who live outdoors and Leica binoculars around his neck. He was friendliness itself but, as the warden of the loch and the owner of its fishing, he wanted to check a mistake on my car parking pass and, affably, he wanted to point out that I should be in the hide overlooking the loch, not crouched in the grass by the railway line.

We hit it off, speaking of Slavonian and little grebes and the nesting of wigeon and greylags. His was a lovely sense of humour and when I asked whether an osprey fished the loch he replied, 'Yes, and he doesn't have a permit either.'

I chanced a comment that, as interested as I was in birds, I was looking for cats. My new friend became yet more affable and open, recounting tales of wildcats he has seen in his 72 years, where, when and how. He agreed that the railway line by which I was sitting was good, and tore through so many other very local sites in which he has seen cats that I quite lost track.

Friends appeared and he sent them to their beats on the loch's shore for the night's fishing. It was clear to me now that I would not see a wildcat here tonight. But he had mentioned another site, just a few hundred metres along the railway, where cats lived wild in a dump, some of them hybrids, yes, but some of them wildcats.

We bade a friendly farewell and I drove the short distance to his site. It took me a while to find it, as several unmade roads led to places of abandonment and dereliction. As ugly and contaminated as the place was, as far from the pristine river at which I've been spending my dawns, it felt right. It was heavy with rabbits and a roe deer grazed at the edge of a wasted patch of ground. I have seen wild creatures in so many unprepossessing places that I have long since given up trying to project onto them my own judgement on how they ought to behave.

As I reached the right grubby place, a cat bolted from the track in front of me. A tabby, that was all I could see before it was gone. It fled in the manner of something wild, something that fears and loathes humanity. I parked my car, facing the pile of waste in which my fisherman friend said the cats lived, and I twiddled my thumbs. I twiddled my thumbs some more, and tried squeaking through my partly open window (certain success with ocelots). I became aware that from the waste pile a face was staring at me. A wild face, a tabby face.

It stared. And I stared. And I squeaked. And after a while, this tabby face became a cat and this cat crossed the messy grass towards me and reached the open ground by my car. Despite the wildness of its face, this tabby - a well grown kitten - had far more domestic genes than wild. The features of wildcats, in shape, and coat, were diluted so far as to be almost lost. My heart sank.

The tabby retreated to its pile of waste. I twiddled my thumbs still more until I saw that the tabby was staring fixedly into the birch-scrubby grass to my right. Staring back from here - at me - was a perfect wildcat face with ice green eyes and hatred of humans in its being. My heart beat double time. It slipped into the birches, this cat, and my heart beat faster still on seeing its tail: blunt, bushy and banded in black.

From the birches the big-tailed, band-tailed cat crossed the track to join the tabby kitten in the waste-pile. As it went up the pile I saw on its nape the classic wildcat sign of strong black lengthways bars, nothing like the pencilled stripes of housecats. But its tail: as thick and black-tipped as it was, between its bands ran a hint from the rump of a black stripe. A hybrid sign.

Then my cat turned to look at me and for all the wildcat perfection of its face, for all the difference between this cat and its tabby kitten, the tiny half-suggested cirrus of white on its chest betrayed it. Phenotypically my cat was quite as much wildcat as not. But it was not.

The truth is that no wildcat in Scotland is, most likely, a pure wildcat. As will soon be discussed in a blog post emerging from a conversation last week with Doug Richardson of the Highland Wildlife Park, extensive trapping and genetic testing have found not a single pure cat here. Some though are purer than others. And, as aesthetic a judgement as it is, some look purer than others. My cat had many features of a good wildcat, but was clearly also a hybrid.

I am elated though. I have, for all my work this week, seen some wildcat genes expressed in an animal which hated me. I have learned much too. And in three hours I get up again to try one last time to see a cat at my first site by a cold, stony river, where the deer graze and the grouse bow their black heads.

A dump under the Cairngorms: a fitting place to
see a wildcat hybrid

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1

An iPhone in Anagach

I'm not, at all, a photographer. These days I'm barely a British naturalist. I'm not sure what I am. A mog-worrying word-monger is probably the truth of it. All the same, six months ago I was dragged into the digital age and my iPhone, and its camera, now never leave my side.

Waking at two this afternoon I took my iPhone to the lovely Anagach Woods on the edge of Grantown. Leopard's-bane beamed in the car park, a plant to which I was introduced by Tony Leech in North Norfolk almost thirty years ago, and which I don't think I have seen since (the Doronicum, not Tony, who remains a firm friend). In the woods there were many small joys in flower and fruit: bugle, juniper, broom, blaeberry and European gorse.

There were birds too and mammals: a crested tit, three spotted flycatchers (more than I expect to see in a whole summer in Norfolk now), the calls of big-billed crossbills and small-billed siskins, a buzzard, roe (always bounding away, then turning to watch with their big black eyes) and a red squirrel.

Now I must leave again, after four hours walking the woods, for my second vigil by a little loch, where there are Slavonian grebes and, so I'm told, sometimes wildcats.

crapercaillie

Dawn comes in sound

Dawn comes to me in sound today. The stark staccato of an oystercatcher, then - its avian antithesis - the fluid freedom of a robin in the still dark. With the first of the gloomy light (I'm earlier today, up since half-past-two, and yesterday's moon is clad in plumbeous cloud) there come the sharp-winged shapes of common gulls above and the river's plain is peopled by the signal rumps of deer. Among them here and there the black-beyond-black of grouse and all the while and all the where the cry of curlews fills this lone place.

This morning I sit on a horizontal fallen pine, where a jutting stony beach gives a view upriver and down over grassy flats and heathery banks and, if there is one, I am sure to see my cat. So I wait. The deer do not see me and graze by, neither the oystercatchers which land close on the river's stones.

I wait. With each Swarovski scan something new. A mountain hare crouches in the grass, almost for a moment a cat. A grouse fans his petticoat, bowing his black head. A mistle thrush rattles from the pines to join him.

For two hours I scan and I scan and it is light. So I walk in the wet woods, wondering whether I will see a capercaillie. I do not. But I hear the joyful pebbly rattle of a redstart and the calls of crossbills. I am too southern to know by sound whether these are Scottish or parrot but I listened with care to the parrots which wintered eighteen months ago with our North Norfolk common crossbills and I know from their call that these are bigbills not small.

There are sand martins where the river has collapsed a headland and tree pipits feeding in my path. There are goldcrests piping tinily in the pines and deer, more deer, more deer.

Dawn comes to me in sound today. And joy. Lone damp joy by a highland river.

Seeing red

This morning there were four black grouse cocks at my wildcat site, three together displaying on the far side of the valley floor, and one just across the river stock still in the tussocky grass.

After breakfast I was still wide awake so I went the short distance to the moor above town on the road to Nairn, hoping to redress the balance of grouse by seeing some red, the UK's commonest species by far.

It was not the red I was hoping to see that leapt onto the road and under my tyres as I passed through the larchwoods by Grantown. This red was a squirrel and I was appalled at the thought of squelching it. I wasn't going fast but a truck was speeding behind me and I could do nothing but drive. With relief and amazement I looked in my mirror and saw no tiny tan corpse on the road. I had not squelched the squirrel.

This was enough but my day got better still. Not far from here I saw the red I sought: right by the road, with a curlew, a pair of grouse and their five rotund chicks some two weeks old.

I return to my bed a happy man. And greatly relieved.

Lousewort on the moor by the road to Nairn