Thursday's dawn

Rabbit rabbit roe deer roe deer red deer: these ran from the road as I drove after three to my site.

Mountain hare mountain hare common gull common gull curlew: these and many more were in the dawn this Thursday.

But no cat.

In Caledon

Caledon

After seven cold hours in the field last night and this morning, and with talks to give tonight and tomorrow, after breakfast today I slept for four blissful hours. I woke in the middle of the day and the sun was shining, so I hopped in my car and drove the short distance to Loch Garten.

It must be twenty-five years since I was last here, when, on a family holiday, my parents brought me to see my first osprey. I was spellbound, not just by the osprey, at the same nest as is used today, but by the forest of gnarled, Middle Earth pines with its floor of bright green blaeberry. This was a Britain I had never before seen, an old, wild Britain in which I knew I belonged.

So today's visit was a journey back to a teen self who had yet to see the wide world, who had no idea that he ever would. For whom these returning ospreys and their gnarled forest were a new thrill.

Today they thrill me still. He is there still that wide-eyed teen, enchanted by nature. He has seen more of it than he ever believed possible, but he is still just as thrilled by the world's most watched ospreys and the blush-trunked pines of Abernethy.

Caledonian pine forest at Loch Garten

The closest I came to a capercaillie

RSPB

I won't hear a word said against the RSPB. Having worked for years with Norfolk Wildlife Trust, The Wildlife Trusts and the Hawk and Owl Trust, I have at times uttered my own words against the RSPB and its occasional moments of bigbrotherishness. But I won't hear a word said against it.

As a huge organisation which affects the lives of millions, it is easy to take a swipe at the RSPB. Two common criticisms levelled are (by birders) that RSPB reserves and facilities are too much aimed at the broader public, and (by other land use stakeholders, including some farmers, some gamekeepers and some readers of the Telegraph) that the RSPB is an over-zealous organisation with a loony, deep green agenda.

The first swipe gets on my crested tits. No one way of relating to nature and wild places has any more validity than any other. There is no parsifalesque chalice of pure understanding bestowed on you because you can identify Caspian gulls in first winter plumage or because you have seen more than 450 species of bird in the UK. You have no greater right to sit in a hide if you've seen a black lark in the UK than if you wouldn't know a black lark if it nested in your petunias.

Nature belongs to, and is belonged to, in equal measure by everyone. And the more of us who love it, who feel an investment in it, whatever form that takes, the greater the chance we have of protecting it. Astonishingly there are those in the birding community who have no great interest in the protection of nature (I recall a recent conversation with a man about the plight of the wildcat in the UK and the only thing which interested him in the slightest was whether he could tick the one he himself had seen as pure), though happily such voices are few. Most realise that without nature reserves there are no birds. No common ones, but also no rare ones. Thinking of the recent spate of rarities in Norfolk, the citril finch enjoyed by hundreds was in Holkham Dunes (protected for its native fauna and flora for many years by Natural England on behalf of the Holkham Estate and now by the estate itself) and the Moltoni's warbler was on Blakeney Point (likewise protected for a century by the National Trust). Without habitat there are no birds, common or rare. And without the support, moral and financial, of millions of people, birders and lay-folk alike, there are no NGOs or statutory organisations to protect habitat. Facilities for exploring such habitat should be open to all in the community, all who love wildlife, connoisseurs of Caspian gulls or otherwise.

Taking school groups into hides at Cley while I worked for NWT I would expect a chorus of tutting and the disgruntled rustle of Goretex. I would always brightly announce to those present that I was training future birders, and the rustling would cease.

The second criticism is worse by far, for it implies that the RSPB and NGOs like it are somehow trying to take something away from our society. In fact the polar opposite is true. The RSPB and its allies are fighting tooth and nail to preserve something incomparably precious which we have all but destroyed. If you are one of the farmers or land managers who believes that nature conservation in some way offends you or harms your interests, conduct a simple thought experiment next time you get in your car, on a bus or on a train. Ask yourself how much of the landscape that you see is natural. Be aware of the difference between what is actually natural and what you take to be natural. You can't allow yourself fields of grass as these would cheerfully become woodland in fifty years if we stopped cutting and grazing them for our economic ends. You can't allow yourself moorland as precisely the same is true here. You can't allow yourself gardens as these are entirely people-centric and really very few of our native species can survive in them.

The truth is that, whichever way you look at it, almost none of our island is natural or is hospitable to most species. The overwhelming majority of the landscape has for millennia been given over to agriculture, to livestock farming, to shooting, to human leisure activities, to housing and to industry. It is certainly the case that some wildlife has managed to adapt to our domination of the landscape and some few species even benefit from it. But nature has quite evidently, if we have the humility to notice, been thrashed, slain, beaten and ruined by thousands of years of traditional land management.

This is not to imply that traditional land managers are bad people or that they actively wish nature any harm. I'm simply pointing out that in this equation the power lies enormously with traditional land management, with nature - truly natural nature - allowed almost no space in the UK landscape at all. What the RSPB and other NGOs devote their time, their pennies and their ceaseless energy to is protecting a few small places - perfectly tiny in the context of the British landscape - where some natural processes pertain; is fighting for the needs of nature (and the human need for nature) in government and in the courts, when almost all of our societal priorities are economic; and is promoting a healthier landscape for us all. In the context of all that we have done to diminish nature's hold over the staggering majority of our country, to argue that the RSPB has a rabid green agenda, that it is too powerful, or that it is trying to take something away from us, is grossly ill informed, if not disingenuous.


Industrial espionage

Last spring I spent three happy months helping the Hawk and Owl Trust to coordinate its team of volunteers at the Norwich Cathedral Peregrine Watchpoint. It therefore greatly interests me to hear how teams doing similar things go about their work. I was amused to listen to the Loch Garten osprey team explaining the lives and conservation of these wonderful birds, in just the same way as our team presents peregrines at the cathedral. It is very hard to listen to oneself critically and salutary to listen to others doing a very good job, and to reflect on whether one does such a good job oneself.

I learned from the excellent outreach team at Loch Garten that this year the male of the pair, Odin, took a break for a few days and left his incubating female, EJ, unfed. During this time an intruding male, dubbed Fenrir, enticed EJ off her nest with a fish and destroyed two of the eggs, causing EJ to abandon the third. Happily, for osprey conservation in the UK this is now a minor tragedy (for the ospreys, the RSPB and others have between them done a magnificent job in recent decades).

The drama continues and while I was there I saw two intruding birds together seen off by Odin (now back on territorial form) while EJ sat placidly on her perch. Odin twice brought sticks to the nest and the pair has recently been seen mating so it is not impossible that EJ will lay late eggs and they will attempt to breed again this year.

The view from the osprey centre:
the nest is at the back to the left.

It's amazing what you can achieve with an iPhone.

Live images of Odin the male osprey on the nest
and EJ the female on a perch by it

Nuts

I spent a siskin-and-great-spotted-woodpecker-filled hour in the osprey centre hoping to see a crested tit at the feeding station here. I then spent a second hour at the reserve reception, watching coal tits, great tits, blue tits, mallards and dozens of chaffinches at the feeders there. Again no crested tits.


Tits

The young woman in the reception, a naturally skilled communicator with just the right blend of information and interest in what her visitors have to say themselves, suggested that I walk along the shore of Loch Garten, as every time she has done this walk she has seen crested tits. So this I did and I loved these twisted, lichenous pines by the tea-stained loch. Coal tits and chaffinches were everwhere during the hour and more that I walked, and once or twice I heard a wren or a robin. Stopping for the strident, lovely song of a tree pipit I heard to my right a contented trill I have not heard in twenty years, since I lived as a student in sourthern France: the contented trill of a crested tit. I saw neither the pipit nor the tit as I would not bash through the blaeberry undergrowth, disturbing its nesting birds and other wildlife, for the sake of seeing a bird; but I smiled a big smile to know that these lovely birds were there.

Reaching the car park I again heard the trill, in pines right by the road. This time a birding couple was there, so I asked whether they too had heard it. High above their heads they were watching a crested tit pair feeding their newly fledged young. I looked up and at the end of a long day I smiled some more.

This evening I have given a talk at the Grant Arms on Ecuador, so I have had no time to look for cats tonight. The search begins again tomorrow at three.

A different dawn

This morning's dawn at my first wildcat site was not at all like yesterday's. It was light even as I left the Grant Arms at quarter past three, a full fat moon shining from an all-clear sky. As I reached the valley red hinds clattered into the pines and mountain hares bolted ahead of my car.

It was cold though, as I walked beside the river, colder even than last night by the loch. Common gulls yelped overhead, displeased at my presence at night's end along their cold river. A female goosander flew from the stony shallows and the valley was full of the wistful talk of curlews.

There was plenty here for a cat to eat. With the curlews in the river's grassy meadows were lapwings, mistle thrushes, oystercatchers and - to my delight - a pair of blackcocks so possessed by their testosteroned tussle that a cat could have walked right up to them. Needless to say the cat did not.

Yet dawn in this valley was of ancient beauty, the gilt light pouring past the scant clouds in the east to touch the trunks of pines and warm the stones along the braided river after an arctic-seeming night.

Last year in September I spent two weeks in northwest British Columbia, watching wolves and both bears on just such rivers, materialising from just such cloaking woods of needletrees, and crossing just such grassy river meadows. This precious place where my wildcat is, but today is not, has that same unearthly wildness (unearthly meaning - the irony - just what our earth should be). A place where bear and wolf belong and where it is possible to imagine seeing a cat.

Unable to withstand any longer the cold along the river, I took my icy bones onto the moor above and watched a buzzard and two crows bring a young golden eagle to the ground with their harrying. The wildcat I shall not see, but the looking has brought me to know its wild, here in the Scottish Highlands. And for this, in the painful cold and the dawn light, I am grateful.

Vigil

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura... Vigil, you idiot, not Virgil.

For three-and-a-half hours tonight, from seven until gone ten-thirty, I sat (shivering) in the grass at the second of Pete Cairns' sites for wildcats. He had warned me that it didn't look much like a good site, just a patch of rough grass between a small loch and a railway line, far less evocative than the moorland and river valley at the first site. I had not realised, however, until I arrived, just how tiny and inauspicious-looking the patch of observable grass would be.

All the same I followed Pete's instructions, went as far east as the fences would allow and plonked myself down to scan the cattle fields around me. In no time this inauspicious-looking spot had me bewitched. On the loch almost the first bird I saw was a Slavonian grebe, not the cold black and white of the one I saw in Holkham Bay last November, but the lustrous, velvety chestnut and gold of a bird in breeding plumage. With the grebe were two female goldeneye, a drake tufted duck, a mother mallard with two well-grown ducklings, a flighty pair of teal and a single wigeon drake, whistling disconsolately to himself.

The grass all around the loch was busy with the breathy plaints of lapwings, with the upright trotting of the adults and the pitter-patter of many chicks. Greylags were here too, their chicks already round and fat on Speyside grass. As the dusk fell, much later, the geese were joined by rabbits of all sizes, taking their tithe of the grass and in turn passing its protein to the unseen cats.

There was never not sound in the sky. Oystercatchers strafed the loch, piping persistently; willow warblers fluted from the birchwoods; and all the while a common sandpiper filled my ears with his tireless territorial twittering.

I did not see a cat, of course, but I felt that the cat was there. I left only when the adult greylags ceased their grazing with the last light and flapped to the safety of the loch, when Venus was already bright in the heavens, when a woodcock called over birches to the east, and when I could no longer feel my toes for cold.

I have said it before, I do not mind I have not seen a cat. I am loving looking.

A little loch where wildcats live

Collar Wali and family

On 17th March this year my scrawny neck was saved by a tigress. After days of difficulty searching for tigers in Tadoba, on our first safari in Pench an elderly female tiger called Collar Wali strolled along the road ahead of all of my jeeps; and for most of my clients she was their first tiger. A first tiger is an emotional moment, especially after a spell of bad luck, and sharing my clients' first tiger with them is always emotional for me too.

Graham Nuthall's photograph, taken in Pench in March,
of Collar Wali, the first tiger he and his wife Tina had ever seen

Collar Wali was visibly very pregnant and in my last post from Asia, three weeks ago, I speculated that she must by then have cubs of several weeks of age. I learned this morning, in a text from my sister, that she has. My sister's friend Dharma Giri, originally from Nepal, is a naturalist at the Jungle Home Resort and Spa in Pench. Today he sent her this very recent video (reproduced here with his permission) in which Collar Wali may be seen with her three healthy, mischievous, tail-stalking and utterly endearing cubs.

High and wild

On Sunday I visited Doug Richardson of the Highland Wildlife Park to talk cats and their conservation. Two blog posts arising from our lengthy discussions will be published here soon. While there, I naturally also spent time with the fascinating animals held at the park. The originality of this collection is that all of the animals kept hail from taiga, tundra or moorland habitats, be they latitudinally cold or altitudinally. Put simply, the animals at the Highland Wildlife Park look at home in this patch of Cairngorm wet grass and plantation. Doug also makes the important point that the park's carbon footprint must be among the lowest of European zoos': most of the animals require only field shelters as they are inherently adapted to the bleak winter of the Scottish Highlands.

Personally I was happy to see old friends from the wild cold places I visit: arctic foxes which I have seen in Greenland, Svalbard and Siberia; polar bears and barnacle geese from Svalbard; southern vicuñas from the Reserva Eduardo Avaroa where I used to ring flamingos with Omar Rocha and his team in southern Bolivia; and yaks from the high Himalayas of Ladakh. At their feet were plants familiar to me from Norfolk - heath dog violets, wood anemones and others - but in a remarkably different environment.

Heath dog violet at the Highland Wildlife Park

Wood anemone

Turkmenian markhor

Przewalski's horse

European bison

White-lipped deer

Southern vicuña, looking much as I used to see them in the days
when I ringed James's flamingos in southern Bolivia

Domestic yak, looking convincingly wild

My friend Denzel, in the Rumbak Valley, Ladakh,
not looking remotely wild

Mishmi takin, late of the parish, on Doug Richardson's
office wall

Also, tellingly, on Doug's wall

Blue sky

The sky beams blue above Grantown on Spey this morning; the siskins call contentedly in the street; and this makes me seethe.

This morning I was up at half-past-two, a little earlier than the past two days but not much, and by three I was leaving the Grant Arms bound for a wildcat site. The day before yesterday it was my privilege to speak at length to Chris Bremner and yesterday to Pete Cairns, both local naturalists, knowers of the wildcat, and proponents of its conservation. From them I gleaned many facets of cat lore, and learned of sites in which - with extraordinary good fortune - wildcats might be seen in Speyside.

So it was that this morning I was out at three, driving to a site as light rain began to fall. I reached the remote road's end recommended by Pete as dawn mustered its forces; but dawn today was defeated by the low, grey, sulking clouds which capped the valley. Pete's suggested strategy was to walk from here across the wild moor, scanning for cats. When I arrived it was still too dark to see anything by walking, so I sat watching the wind-bullied grass in the valley from a promontory. Wildcats are known to hunt this grassy valley too.

As I sat in my car, searching the grass in the gloom, the World Service keeping me quiet company, the rain grew heavier. It was no longer the dilettante rain of my drive here; rather now it was fat wet rain, breaking on my windscreen in persistent patter. I sat longer, my window half open, filling my lungs with the song of wrens and curlews, with the distant chime of a cuckoo and with bright highland air. And the rain grew heavier still.

Finally, I knew that, even should dawn come, a walk on the moor in the thrashing rain would be futile. So I drove to the Grant Arms and to my bed.

I woke two hours later with the sky a cheerful blue outside, siskins calling, and a wild walk on a moor lost to the treacherous Speyside weather.

Tonight I try a different site. Tomorrow again the moor. I shall not see a wildcat, but I shall enjoy failing.