orgiastic climax to it all, the great churning and croaking congregation of toads in the loch, pushing and shoving, thronging, clasping, ovulating, ejaculating and, with fixed amphibian grins, coldly revelling in it all. And it would be quite wrong to suggest that at these latitudes (north of Moscow) nothing at all happens in March and April. Day on day the temperature has been rising, teasing upwards, two steps forward one step back, and all tantalisingly slowly. But even if the toads and the birds do know what’s happening, the weather is confused and uncertain. Between bursts of over-optimistic sunshine snow piles in and angry rain and sleet squalls seem to chase us right back to February. But what the capricious weather patterns can’t interfere with is the sun.
The great god Sol is creeping up on us, each dawn a fraction higher, stretching every day longer and longer, reaching out for grander ambitions. By the end of April we are enjoying fourteen hours of daylight, against the meagre ten we had back at the beginning of March. The season’s tug is winning a nuclear war. The land is soaking up solar energy like dew in a desert. It is being absorbed, sucked in and relished by the plant world’s chlorophyll, kick-starting the rush of leaves into violent action once again. May gives us first fresh leaf and it gives us green. That is why I don’t allow myself to get excited about spring until the first of May, when all that leaf is sudden, sudden, sudden – all change. One minute the world is a tracery studded with buds, the next time you look a viridescent pastel haze has suffused the land in every direction. It’s a bad moment to go away. When you come back you’re in a different land.
Across the other side of the loch, in the marsh, mallard are chasing their own destiny through the shallows. I can hear them and see them – at least, I can hear frantic quacking and see the flurrying among the rushes. Every now and again a skirmish of wings rises a few feet into the air and drops down again, out of sight. I feel sorry for the females. It is a duck’s lot to be hounded by two or three drakes at once. If I were to creep up, as one easily could – so intent are they upon this pressing affair that I could get very close – I would see the poor duck ignominiously shoved below the surface by each swain who grips the feathers on the back of her neck in his bill and treads her back with his bright orange webs while his frantic tail spreads to a broad white fan. In his passion he entirely smothers her. No sooner is he spent than another ardent drake leaps on with all the subtlety of a playground bully and roughly shoves her under all over again. Ducks have been known to drown this way.
I have come to the loch today to write my journal precisely because it is such an uplifting morning. I don’t normally. My routine is to take rough notes as it pleases me and return to my desk after a walk and write it up at some idle moment of the day when pressing things are done. But after the long winter there are forces inside desperate to get out when the day is seductive and anodyne like today. Winter walks have been fine – good, bracing, ear-tingling sorties, often more to do with gloves and scarves and steaming breath than with observation of wildlife and any focused attempt to feel at one with the natural world. Back then the feel-good factor came afterwards, a ‘well-I-did-it’ glow of achievement only experienced when I was back at the fireside, quite different from this ‘what-a-hell-of-a-place-to-sit-and-work’ sensation that’s overwhelming me today.
There are other reasons for being here right now. Some years the Highland spring can last for only a few days. May is still capable of snow showers, although they won’t stay – ‘lambing storms’, my crofter neighbours call them, with that terse and comprehending cynicism that so often defines their byre and baler-twine brand of wisdom, garnered over centuries of hard-won pragmatism – sending everything scurrying for cover again for as long as they last. And then June can suddenly soar to lofty temperatures on static anti-cyclonic highs that dawdle through long days of mackerel-feathered, cirro-stratus blue. Searing through thin, dry air the UV is merciless, bringing a first ruddy blush to the pallid cheeks of winter. Before we know it, summer is firing in.
These bug-free early days must be grabbed. The Highland midge, that scourge of humid days to come, is as yet still a maggoty little larva hiding in its millions in the peaty ooze of the marsh. But the earth is absorbent; the warmth of the sun is piercing and probing deep into the soil and the damp, winter-killed vegetation. The great reawakening, silent and invisible, is mustering its armies twenty-four hours a day. Soon the insect harvest will erupt in all its rampant, multifarious forms, from the exquisitely refined, like the first speckled wood butterflies that any day now will delicately lift from the path beneath my feet, to the execrable great diving beetle, the scourge of the loch’s edge, whose calliper-mandibled larva lurks among the rotting stems of last year’s water lilies, waiting for what must be its high point of the season. When the toad and frog tadpoles fatten and wiggle free from their natal plasma, this dragon of the murky shallows embarks upon a feeding frenzy, seizing tadpole after tadpole in ferocious, hypodermic jaws, injecting them with a cocktail of pernicious digestive acids which, in the space of a few minutes, without ever letting go, dissolve the tadpoles’ insides to a protein soup so that the larva can suck them dry.
From the peaty sludge in the loch’s deeps, from the soggy sedge blanket of the marsh, in the root-caves of trees, beneath the rufous bark flakes of pines, deep within dead logs and decaying fence posts, snug inside soft moss cushions and the surface inches of the soil, under rocks and stones, a horde of creeping, flying, crawling and slithering wildlife is fingering the solar pulse. Armoured legs are creaking, suckers are opening and closing, wing veins are pumping up, jaws are hungrily flexing and twitching antennae are tentatively reaching out, probing the possibilities of the future.
These are precious days of warmth and excitement, days a naturalist cannot afford to miss. If I have to go away I can’t wait to get home again, hurrying up the loch path to check out the incalculable, unsleeping and effervescent metamorphosis of spring. Dawns cry out for attendance, dusks are just as alluring. I struggle to know which to exploit, often giving in to both. To sit quietly beside the loch at either end of these rapturous spring days delivers a soul-exalting equanimity I have never achieved anywhere else in the world.
Deep underground, milk-full badger cubs, as blind as moles, are curled up in their mother’s long belly-fur. At sunset she will emerge to stretch and scratch and when she comes to find the peanuts I have put out for her I shall be able to see her hollow sides and her full udders touching the ground. The bitch otter is suckling four cubs in a cavernous holt under alder roots down by the river. Back in February this year at the far end of the loch I watched her sinuous play-fighting with a powerful pale-throated dog otter, rolling and diving and chasing each other across the marsh in the frantic build-up to receptivity. The hedgehogs, too, have produced their soft-spined litter in rocky dens. Roe does have tiptoed into thickets of dense gorse and broom and dropped their twin fawns in the long grass, where they will lie, scentless and motionless, for the first week of life utterly dependent upon their flecked camouflage like almonds sprinkled on a cake. Their mother will return to suckle perhaps only twice or three times a day, desperate not to give their presence away to prowling foxes that would make short work of new-born fawns. The proud weasel has whelped in her mossy nest deep inside the stone wall and on the wooded hill above the loch the vixen is thinking of bringing her rowdy cubs above ground.
In the top of an old pine not half a mile from the loch the ospreys have laid eggs – all I can see is the glaring amber eye set in the mocha-crested head of the incubating female. On the cliff at the gorge the peregrine falcon is hunkered down on her eggs so tight that I can barely make her out. We know from local archives that peregrines have nested at this site for close on two hundred years, but because the vertical face is so perfect for peregrines it is a reasonable assumption that it has been occupied for many millennia, stretching back to the post-glacial age before man first topped the ridge and saw this glen stretching before him like the promised land. I like to think back down those centuries and of all the thousands of peregrine falcons that have hatched on these rock ledges. It is an ancient dissonance: nature’s long perspectives set against man’s frantic,
