January

For those of us who don’t see the first of January through a foggy, alcoholic mist and are interested in nature, this is an exciting day in the calendar and the start for some of the annual bird list. We simply note down all the birds seen on New Year’s Day and the succeeding days throughout the year and so have an annual list. This idea is certainly recommended for interested families as all the family become involved. Parents can start children on a worthwhile lifetime interest that has great carry-over effects.

We got the idea initially from “M.F.M.M.”, Maury Meiklejohn, the week-end nature writer in the “Glasgow Herald”, of some years ago, and late professor of Italian at Glasgow University. He traveled a lot throughout Britain and as well as a general list, he had a ‘City list’ and a ‘birds seen from the train’ list and possibly others. He traveled to the Western Isles, particularly to Islay to see choughs, to sand pits in Hertfordshire, to Norfolk and Suffolk and in the spring to Sardinia to see the first migratory swallows. He did not drive a car, so many of his journeys were accomplished on public transport and he often got lifts from locals with whom he had made friends on previous visits. He frequented country and village pubs and had some fine stories to tell about them and of the people he met there. All this plus a detailed knowledge about birds ordinary and rare, written about in his so individual style, this made reading of his column a great pleasure. He was over many years to the keen birdwatcher what Henry Longhurst’s column on the back of the “Sunday Times” was to the golfer, simply an inspiration.

What better example to follow then. Often our list started in an ordinary way with wood pigeon, starling, bluetit, greattit, house sparrow, chaffinch, herring gull, rook and robin. Each year on the first of January one looked at these ordinary birds afresh and marked them down on the list. The next day one recorded any additional sightings and so on. Our average count for the first day of the year seems to be about the twenty mark. A lot depends on the weather. On a fine day you and the birds are out and about and one has a bigger bag. One of the first birds seen on a particular 1st January was, unusually, a kestrel. It was hunting, perched on electricity wires over the road in front of our house. I watched it through the binoculars for some time.

While it had been perching, it had been standing nearly vertically on the wires. As the hunt became more interesting it gradually leant forwards towards the horizontal until it over-balanced and swooped down into the long grass beside an abandoned pig house. After about ten seconds it rose carrying what I presumed to be a mouse in its talons and it flew away to have a late breakfast. One can often look for a long time without being in at the kill and see the kestrel swooping down. I was lucky on this first day of the year.

While looking out later in the day to add to my new list, I saw a flash of white across the plough. After a moment or two of “now you see it and now you don’t,” I was able to identify a stoat in his splendid white ermine coat and it was the contrast of this against the dark earth which first attracted my attention. It disappeared into the ivy in front of our house and five minutes later I thought I was seeing things when I saw its mate appear on the plough and follow exactly the same route, up the old road, over the pigs park and into the ivy.

l should explain that I have been writing weekly “Nature Notes” for the “Banffshire Journal ,” for more than sixteen years now and many of the writings in this book were taken from the notes which I have accumulated over that time.

They started almost accidentally like many writings. Mr. John Morrison, the late editor of another north-east weekly, the “Turriff Advertiser, ” was then a reporter with the “Banffshire Journal”, and after I had sent him a note about seeing long-tailed tits near where we stay, he asked me if I could contribute weekly nature notes to the paper and without many interruptions they have continued since January, 1971. It is a very interesting minor discipline having to meet a weekly deadline and it does keep one’s mind ticking over getting the topics for the week ahead. Very often sitting down to actually start writing is the most difficult job, as once one is really writing thing’s seem to flow. I suppose this is the same for most writers.

One first of January by mid-morning our count had reached fourteen when proceedings became heady and ludicrous almost, and coincidence was stretched. On going to the window I said, “With luck about this time we should see a tree creeper on the sycamore tree, ” and lo and behold not one but two, male and female, appeared on the tree, going up the trunk searching for insects. A flock of fieldfares flew over and it was thought that redwings might be with them, and sure enough, so they were – and they were added to the list. It was then suggested that my daughter put on a dark jacket and flap about outside pretending to be a sparrow hawk (another regular) and as this was being mooted, a sparrow hawk flew over. By this time we were all a bit weak-kneed wondering what was going to appear next.

Some years before this I had planted some fir trees as a windbreak at the side of the garden. They have been thinned out and even the tops were used for Christmas trees. Blackbirds have nested in them. We know that different birds in the garden are attracted by different kinds of trees.
One day my wife and daughter were delighted to see a pair of Britain’s smallest birds in the fir trees, goldcrests. They are smaller and slimmer than the wrens which are often thought to be the smallest birds in these islands. Here was reward, then, for the planting of the fir trees. The male actually has a gold crest with black stripes on either side and the female’s crest is more yellow.

We, fortunately, are surrounded by natural ‘aviaries’, near and distant. We live below a ‘Piccadilly Circus’ of the skies. Hundreds of rooks fly north in the morning from Europe’s largest rookery at Hatton near Turriff, hundreds of gulls, from the coast at Banff, nine miles to the north, fly south to feed on the surrounding farm land, and hundreds of pigeons fly west from the near-by Forglen fir woods. As evening approaches all these flight movements are reversed.

In the morning in particular there can be a crossing of flight paths between the rooks, the wood pigeons and the gulls, mostly herring and common gulls. In the evening the skies are not so congested, the pigeons often making their way home in pairs. The rooks in the autumn and winter like to make their way home in company, well spread out but still in contact with one another. In early spring one can frequently hear them ‘talking’ to each other and sometimes there is quite a lot of conversation coming from the sky. If the weather is fine and there is not too much wind, the gulls often fly home in skeins and sometimes they are quite high up in the sky as they head northward to the coast. They fly silently.

I have seen them arrive at Banff and one can have quite a spectacular half hour or so watching the gulls break formation and fly down to alight on the sea at the estuary of the River Deveron. Their descent is spectacular, diving from hundreds of feet with wings closed, spilling out air, then opening the wings to glide and alight on the water or the sandy beach if the tide is out. Sometimes when it is stormy and very windy and a gale blowing, the gulls congregate in great circles on the fairways of the Duff House Royal golf course at Banff, just over the road from the sea. This ‘free’ fertilisation of the golf course is, as far as I know, never referred to by the Duff House Royal committee, but one frequently finds lumps of semi-digested grains of barley on the course.

Summer in the north-east of Scotland is a bit of a mis-nomer because one gets a warm day here and there with temperatures, naturally, a bit lower than they are in the south of Scotland or England. But in the winter time, we in the north often come into our own when the rest of the country is fog-bound. We can afford to boast a bit about our beautiful sunny Banffshire weather and we can extol the virtues of our coast as a place for winter holidays, even winter golf. Once in dense fog in Glasgow, I remember walking on the pavement with my hand on the front mudguard of a very slow-moving, double-decker, corporation bus. I was calling directions to the driver. We could not see each other. Even the large, very bright street lights over the road were invisible.

1974

In contrast to this we should sing the praises of Banff as a winter resort for ornithologists. On the first Sunday of the year,1974, we rendezvoused with our Turriff lady ornithologist friend, Miss Mary Murray, at the gas works, not a very romantic-sounding start. There we saw two or three pairs of rock pipits. They are small sparrow-sized birds and they are quite common around Banff harbour. They like to feed on the seaweed and other debris on the shore about the high water mark or above. They are to the shore line what the dunnock is to the garden. Going about their business unobtrusively, in a quiet way. They are slightly slimmer and longer than the dunnock, with a speckled breast and a brown back with a slight tinge of green.

Then we moved along towards the police station and stopped at the rocks beside the sewage pipe, an even less romantic spot. Though the sun was shining, a very cold wind was blowing. We stood enthralled at the number and variety of waders that were to be seen very close by, busy feeding around the rock pools.
Probably turnstones were there in the largest numbers, dark on top and white underneath, with a black bib, and as they flew about one could see their very striking’ upper-wing pattern, two flashes of white with a rich dark brown part between. Purple sandpipers were there too. almost invisible around the rock pools, On the back they were a dark grey colour, not really purple, but one could see why they get their name.

It anyone were to ask me where in Britain I would go to see purple sandpipers then I would direct them to these rocks in Banff in the winter time. The smallest of the three look-alike waders were the dunlins, similar in shape to the purple sandpipers, but lighter in colour with a slightly downward curved bill. Oystercatchers and seagulls added to the rich bird scene and I suspected, had the cold not driven us away, we might have found a rarity. However, we needed dual warmth and we hied to that fine modern hostelry, the Banff Springs Hotel for a dram and a buffet lunch (as much as one can tuck away! )

Out at sea we saw goldeneye duck displaying and rafts of white and grey, male and female eider ducks. In a north-sloping field beside the ‘Springs’ was a flock of lapwings. Here, also, quite large flocks of fast-flying grey plovers winter. Without any doubt the Banff Springs Hotel could add to their brochure adverts, “Winter resort for ornithologists.”

1975

In January, 1975 I penned the following “The other evening, just at dusk, we were privileged in being able to witness one of nature’s phenomena surpassing most of naturalist David Attenborough’s scenes in the “spectacular Britain” T. V. programme.”

At Slackadale Farm not far from the Banff-Turriff road starlings come nightly to roost, not in their hundreds, thousands or ten thousands, but in thelr millions, filling the sky, with the flock stretching say six average fields long and four fields across and I try not to exaggerate. It was a tremendous sight, indeed awe-inspiring and spectacular, as the starlings darkened the sky like a gigantic swarm of bees,. For a period of ten or fifteen minutes they are joined by other large flocks which presumably have been scattered, feeding all over Buchan. The flocks unite and then come in to roost in fir trees in a howe or hollow below the farm house.

While the flock is circling it is noiseless apart from the rustling of wings. One gets an unreal, topsy-turvy feeling as they go over that up above among them is solidity and one is standing below on a waving carpet, a feeling I’ve never experienced before. Remarkable, as thousands join tens of thousands, there is never a crash.

Once the birds have landed on the young fir trees they start to chatter and quite a din is set up. The son of the farmer, who was good enough to ask us along to see this wonderful sight was pleased to see that we were wearing hats. They are necessary he said and he was so right as my wife and daughter were the lucky or unlucky recipients of starling droppings. After many of the birds had settled they rose ten or twenty feet with a tremendous woosh and then settled again.

This is the first time that the starlings mostly from Europe, one supposes, have wintered in this favourable place. One feels there are many aspects of this spectacle that merit closer ornithological study.”

1979

The third of January, 1979 was the first day in five that we were able to see out of the upstairs bedroom windows, On the preceding days the window panes had been covered in interesting frosty patterns. On three mornings we had more than 10 degrees of frost, our minimum being 17 degrees F.
When it is as cold as this then the birds suffer mainly from lack of food. If one starts to feed the small birds, then one must try to keep on feeding them, at least until the cold spell is past. As the sun came up it was a fresh, cold, sparkling, invigorating day. The birds were very busy at the bird table in the apple tree. Blue tit, great tit, house sparrow, dunnock, coal tit, robin, of course, and chaffinch of the smaller birds, and starlings and blackbirds, all trying to get food.

I had read that in cold weather a man had successfully tamed a robin so that after three days it was coming to eat out of his hand. Now there is something particularly fascinating about getting to within twelve inches of the robin or blue tit. They are then not merely birds, but they begin to get a bit like relatives that you know really well. The other morning I thought I was getting on fine with my taming process, especially as it was very cold and the birds were starving. I had shut the solid, high garden gate and left the cat out of the garden. However, as I was busy filling the small trough which is attached to the bird table roof, I felt something brush over my welly boots and there was the cat having completed a circumnavigation of the house through the deep snow saying, “Amn’t I clever, I’m here” The robin and the blue tit didn’t think so. Neither did I. At this rate it is going to take a lot longer than three days to hand train the robin!

Our nearest nature reserve is at the Loch of Strathbeg, near Crimond, of Psalm 23 tune fame, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds with warden, Jim Dunbar in attendance, it has, I notice since 1973, been the subject of a certain amount of controversy. Then the North Sea gas was coming ashore and Crimond airfield, near the Loch of Strathbeg, was thought to be a suitable site to build the on-shore site. Fortunately for the naturalists in the north east, good sense prevailed and the gas terminal was built at St. Fergus, nearer Peterhead.

As with many of these things, it is a matter of striking a balance. As I write interested parties in the north-east are waiting on the results of an enquiry about the shooting of wildfowl at the Loch of Strathbeg and there is a call for more legislation to suit wildfowlers, conservationists and farmers.

The loch is the largest dune slack lake in Great Britain. Almost a quarter of the world’s population of pink-footed geese migrate to Strathbeg in autumn, with growing numbers remaining for the winter. The loch is also a major staging-post for migrating wildfowl.

It has been my good fortune to go to the Loch of Strathbeg in the autumn, in late October when there are thousands of geese about and many other different varieties of wildfowl. The whooper swans are particularly spectacular at this time and from the fen hide on one particular day we witnessed the tremendous bugling and calling from the whoopers as they carried out their pairing rituals. Pairs of birds raised themselves out of the water and poked their heads forward past one another. One has seen pictures on T.V. of great crested grebes carrying out the same ritual. The noise from the trumpeting is tremendous and Jim Dunbar suggested that someone had said that Scottish bagpipe music was descended from the noise made from the bugling of the whooper swans. As they feed they do bottoms up, stirring up the mud and silt and so there is food also for numerous pochard duck feeding in among the whoopers.

The famous Loch of Strathbeg flamingo lived for nine years at the loch and I was fortunate enough to see it on numerous occasions.

The pink flamingo had presumably escaped from a game park somewhere in Britain and eventually arrived at the loch and had so liked the situation that it stayed for years and was a famous attraction for visiting ornithologists. My wife and I saw it on one occasion in a field on the old road between Turriff and Banff. It had flown there with a flock of whooper swans to feed on the stubble field and as we had been alerted to its presence by the local farmer, we journeyed there one lunch time and were delighted to see it feeding with the whooper swans. It was much taller on its long stilt like legs than the swans and it was strikingly pink at close quarters. For a number of years it flew around Buchan in the winter time with the whooper swans and eventually this attachment to the whoopers proved fatal to the poor pink flamingo. Two springs ago it took off with the whoopers and accompanied them on their spring migration to lceland. There, a native saw this very strange bird with the whooper swans and shot it. What can one say about man in such circumstances! One could write a book about his hunting activities from the beginning of time until now, defending the shooter. One could also attack such ignorance and foIly which ended up in the killing of this wonderful bird.

Winters in the north-east of Scotland can certainly vary a great deal as we have noticed over the past twenty five years. We can have mild ones with hardly any frost or snow and severe ones with thick snow lying for weeks on end and no one saying very much about it and if there is an inch or two in the London area then naturally all the world hears about it. Sometimes we have noticed that winter does not start until the end of January. It
can be mild until then and after that one can get snow and severe frost.

Our indicators for the coming of spring are often the flora and fauna. Aconites and snowdrops get the message if it is mild. The aconites on the sheltered south side of our house may poke their pale green backs through the soil and then yellow heads turn up to greet the New Year. They are buttercup yellow in colour, but coming out at the opposite end of the year and keeping very close to the ground where it is warmer. A week or so after the aconites come out the first of the snowdrops appear. We have a particularly early variety that appear on the north side of a sycamore tree on the lawn and then these wonderful flowers may disappear under snow for weeks on end to appear again when the thaw comes, and they will last on well into March.

0n one wild windy morning during a week when it was mild in January we saw four whooper swans on a local stretch of water, the Lochy, or to give it its proper name Earl’s Loch. Whooper swans are about the same size as the more common mute swan, but are more afraid of humans and they are noisy. Another distinguishing feature is that when they are on the water the head is carried more erect than the mute’s head. The mute’s bill is orange with a black tip and that of the whooper is yellow with a black tip. The whooper were in transit using the water as a staging post, because when we looked for them in the evening, they were gone.

On another mild evening we stopped by the lochy and had a fine view of some goldeneye duck displaying, obviously feeling a breath of spring. The drake puts his head back and points his beak to the sky and he bobs up and down in the water. It is very interesting to see. As we were looking at the goldeneye, a flight of five or six more came in to alight on the water and the person using the binoculars actually ducked, thinking it was a low-flying jet, so sudden and loud was the swish and whistle of their wings.

At the end of January we went for a tour of Buchan and a quick young eye spotted a magpie on a wall at Peterhead. We stopped on the way out of Peterhead on the Fraserburgh road and had an interesting view of numerous waders which were feeding on playing fields beside the road. There were oystercatchers, redshanks, a few turnstones and tiny waders, little stints. These are the smallest waders and they moved like mice over the ground. They are like miniature dunlins with a white breast and positively black legs. To me they appeared Like the gnomes of the bird family with their heads slightly too large in proportion to the rest of their bodies. From the distance a flock of large birds could be seen approaching and they turned out to be oystercatchers. They were very smart as if in newly washed border tartan. Something disturbed the waders and they all flew up, landed, then ran together in a compact group with their necks stretched, looking somehow like regiments of soldiers on quick marching exercises on the parade ground.

The waders, the bigger birds that come inland to nest beside us during the summer return to the coast to winter, particularly the oystercatchers, curlews and lapwings. Sometimes one is inclined to forget the quite large flocks of small birds that winter at the coast too. One winter in my early bird-watching days I was puzzled by quite a large flock of small birds on the outskirts of Macduff that I could not recognise. They turned out to be greenfinches and as in the first instance they were in the telephone wires against the sky, identification was difficult. When they conveniently alighted on a pile of builder’s earth and sand it was much easier to recognise them. When they were on the wires, had I known enough about bird calls I would have been able to identify them as they were making very distinctive twitterings. In their yellow-green plumage they are more easily identified. The yellow in the wings and particularly the tail of some male birds can be really outstanding. A pair or pairs breed in our garden during the summer and it is one of the pleasant sounds of summer to hear coming from the top of a tree the dozy ‘dzhwee’ call of the greenfinch on a warm summer’s day.

Often the realisation of an event does not live up to the expectation or anticipation of it. Before seeing the winter phenomenon of the ‘snowflakes’ in relation to the flying of the snow buntings I must have read about it, but seeing the birds flying one day east of Macduff, I was delighted to see this wonderful event taking place. The snow buntings were feeding in a stubble field and they took off and flew up into the sunlight, circled round a number of times, and then alighted in dribs and drabs onto the stubble again and as the sun shone it looked for all the world as if it were snowing. The black and white colouring of the male snow bunting and the brown and white of the female help to give this effect and it is one of the sights of nature and I have only seen it on two occasions in the last twenty five years.

In our early years living in our house and working the garden, we had often in time of, deep snow, to put up sections of wire round the shrubs in the bottom garden to keep the hares from eating the bark and destroying the shrubs. The sweet bark of the apple trees and prunus would soon get stripped off if there was little other food available. We have seen a hare in its snow shielded form in the garden and it did not move away if we did not go too close to lt. Naturally the children were very interested in seeing a reasonable close-up of the hare.

In recent years it does not seem to have been so cold for so long with the land covered in snow and another bigger factor is that there are not nearly so many brown hares about. A biology teacher friend, and an authority on and ringer of birds, John Hardie, who used to teach in Turriff, said that the hares being scarce was a result of these things running in cycles, some years a lot of them about and other years not many at all. I think that many of the sprays used on the land have a great deal to do with the scarcity of that fine animal the brown hare. Another big factor will be the making of silage by farmers.

At the bottom of our garden there is an old stone hut or house built into the boundary dyke and covered in ivy. What its origins are we do not know, but it may be in some way connected with the flax workers who used to work in the area. Some day we may institute a dig to see what treasures can be found. Many people have found interesting things, and gruesome things, when digging in their gardens.

The waxwings were on the T.V. aerial. After surveying us, for a while they upped and flew away, maybe not much liking what they saw. My class and I we walking from Macduff to Tarlalr on an ornithological outing and as a bonus at the start of our walk, almost unbelievably, these rarities, the waxwings presented themselves.

Some years in the north-east of Scotland there are considerable invasions of waxwings and if the winter is reasonably mild some waxwings will stay in our area all winter. If it is cold, frosty and snowy, when they arrive here, they often move on to the south-west of Britain where it is milder. They come from Scandinavia and are often the last winter migrants to arrive at the end of November or the beginning of December.

Waxwings fly very like starlings, and are about the same size. They are not so timid and one can often get quite near to them before they fly away. They like rotten apples and cotoneaster berries and one can see them in a cotoneaster shrub and then realise one is seeing the waxwing. We were so close that we could see the quite prominent quizzical-looking crest on the tops of their heads, but not close enough to see the red spot of colour on their side from which they get their name. The ends of the primary wing feathers and the tail have an interesting mix of white, black and yellow.

On our walk lasting about two hours we saw twenty four different kinds of birds. In the bay at Tarlair we saw some eider ducks. The difference in the plumage between the male, the only white-backed duck of the region, and the brown, dowdy female, always amazes me. The seven of them all dived under the water together and surfaced together.

On the shore were turnstones and the occasional redshank and purple sandpiper. Beside the road at the bottom of the hill into Tarlair, we found four golf balls among the long grass. Some storm damage was evident around the pool at Tarlair.
One interesting thing was that among the stones and boulders tossed up by the storm there was one boulder weighing, by the look of it, more than a quarter of a ton. This had been lifted up by the sea and tossed twenty yards across the corner of the main pool onto a concrete surround. To us an interesting example of the mighty power of the sea.

As we returned from our walk we noticed that the waxwings were back on the T.V. aerial. The roof below where they sat was spattered a bright pink from the skins of the cotoneaster berries they were taking up and eating from the garden hedge.

Are you good at skulking? I suppose I am above average. My most recent try at it happened on the day after we flushed the duck out of the old quarry pond at Forglen. There must have been between forty and fifty of them and they flew quickly and in formation, not unlike the way redshank fly. That brief sighting of them was not enough for me to establish their identity, so the next day when the weather was dry and cool with a strong wind blowing from the north, I approached the pond upwind from the south and had no difficulty in getting close to the overhang of the pond among
some whins.

I bent double and edged closer, keeping some tall firs, which were at my back, between me and the sky. I knelt on the front of my old coat, pushed open the whins with my binoculars and saw first a pair of mallard duck. Then I saw some smaller duck. The drake appeared to have a black head and a light coloured breast. One of them conveniently stretched, flapped its wings once or twice and raised itself three-quarters out of the water before settling back. It had a white flash along its side and cream on the side of its tail. All these indicators were good enough proof that it was a flock of teal that I had discovered. Teal are the smallest duck of the region and fly fast and wader-like in a compact flock. It is much nicer stalking with binoculars than with a gun.

There was considerable excitement among interested bird watchers in the Banff area at the sighting of a grey phalarope in the harbour at Whitehills. This was thought to be the first Banffshire sighting of recent years. They are certainly more common along the west coast of Britain in wintertime.

Swaysland, writing more than a hundred years ago, said that as many as a dozen were shot in the vicinity of Brighton on one day when the weather was very rough. Audubon stated that during winter he found them in large flocks on the Ohio River in the U.S.A. Kumlien mentions that off the coast of Labrador, it was known as the whale bird from its habit of following the whales and approaching closely when they blow to eat the plankton etc., that is disturbed. In spite of visiting the harbour at Whitehills, I have not been among the lucky ones who have seen the grey phalarope. Its true home is near the Arctic Circle and on the shores of Iceland and Greenland. It is not as large as a redshank, more the size of a sandpiper. Unusually for a small wader it swims on the surface of the water and even skillfully spins itself around in shallow water to stir up mud and silt for food. Its feet are not webbed, but there are lobe-shaped membranes on either side of its toes, resembling those of the coot.

There is a remarkable striking metamorphosis, change of plumage, in the grey phalarope from winter to summer. In winter the bird is dark grey above, broken by white or pearl or ash grey on the back of the neck and back. The entire under surface is pure white. In summer the back is darker and the under surface changes to a reddish-chestnut colour. The black winter beak changes to yellow in summer.

There is a Wilson’s phalarope discovered by a distant relative, I suppose. It has a longer beak and a low grunting call.

In an imaginary story entitled “ How to find the Old Man in the Mountain”, which I used to tell our children when they were quite young, the tree was the third oldest object. We asked maybe the frog, mouse, blackbird, the wise old owl, the cunning fox and Mr Badger, the tree, the river and the mountain for directions and the repetitive answer was “He’s been alive much longer than I have, ask him, he’ll maybe know the way.”
All this came to mind the other day when I counted the rings on a felled beech tree which had been standing by the side of a field for over ninety years. In just over three minutes the “buzz” power saw had lain it low from its high and lofty stance. How are the mighty fallen. A wedge is cut out of the side on which the forester wants the tree to fall and then he just cuts round the trunk. Felling can be dangerous if frost is too hard into the timber. It can get difficult too if the wind is strong in the opposite direction to felling. Who knows what a tree is ‘thinking’ and what thoughts it has accumulated over ninety years and in such a short time all is gone and the tree is down.

The mistle thrush was added to my annual list of birds seen or heard in 1980 in Magdala Crescent, Edinburgh, on a Saturday, just about 8a.m., when I was out for my morning paper. At this time I would have been a member of the Council of the Educational Institute of Scotland and a member of its Education Committee and one would attend meetings on Friday evening and Saturday mornings. The Clans Hotel in Magdala Crescent was convenient for us and so one bed and breakfasted there. That was how I came to be hearing the mistle thrush in, for me, unusual surroundings.

The bird was calling away vigorously from the top of a high tree. The mistle thrush (old spelling missel) likes a lofty perch and in rough, wild weather it will carry on singing when all the other birds have been silenced. For this dauntless and defiant song it gets its name ‘storm cock’. In cold weather the birds assemble in flocks of various sizes and when they alight they commence hopping about with great nimbleness and activity. They display considerable wariness and when feeding one or more of the party are usually on the look-out for danger. They are like wild geese in this respect.

Our sightings of birds in this area are then very much governed by the weather. One day we may wake up to blocked roads and wreaths of snow on
them four feet and higher in some instances. But we can get an equally quick thaw afterwards and all the snow has disappeared. The influence of
the gulf stream in bringing warmer seas and therefore, milder air, is a tremendous factor in making our living what it is.

I am glad that we do not see red on our thermometer. According to Alistair Cook’s ‘Letter from America,’ their thermometers show indoor and
outdoor readings. Seventy degrees was normal for all inside rooms, blue was for readings between 32 degrees and zero outside; and below zero it showed red. There would not be much active bird-life in our parts if we had temperatures that were in the red as they were in New England.

At the beginning of last week when we took our first lunch of the New Year at Scotstoun, Banff, our New Year list got a considerable boost. We saw nine different species. Curlews were winging their way westward, low over the waves as we parked the car. We made a new discovery. Did you know that turnstones ate skirlie? Skirlie is a mixture of oatmeal, fat and onions, a kind of Scottish stuffing. As it was nearly twelfth night Christmas trees were out for collection by the refuse men, and a lady threw out of a door what looked like the last of the skirlie. The gulls descended, but on the whole the mixture was too fine for their beaks and four beautifully plumaged turnstones, dark above and white below, darted and trotted among the gulls’ feet and picked up what the gulls could not manage. It was interesting to see turnstones in this new role of scavenger. Redshanks, rock doves and cormorants flew past, a rock pipit bobbed up beside the car and out beyond the breakers we could see a raft of eider ducks and scoter.

Radio, Press and T. V, were reporting over Christmas that a brown bear was loose on the Hackney marshes near London and T. V. was showing footprints in the snow. I think it was a false alarm and there was not another Hercules on the prowl. In the snow one has a good opportunity to observe the busy by-ways which animals and birds use. Looking for game one has come to be able to pick out the tracks of hares and pheasants.
The hare’s back legs land fairly close together and the front paws come one after the other. With the pheasant, one follows, in the snow, an approximate arrowhead, but in the wrong direction, against the way the arrowhead is pointing. Rabbit tracks are smaller, rounder and closer together than the hare’s and likewise wood pigeons are similar but a good deal smaller than the pheasant’s. As we walked along a country road the other day we saw a brown weasel (the stoat is ermine white just now) cross over the road in front of us. We looked at its tracks in the snow and they were interesting. The front and rear paws come down together in the snow making a large print for a relatively small animal. A slight thaw can distort tracks out of all proportion and the prints of the yeti, the abominable snowman, which are usually shown on T.V. are, I think, of something quite ordinary after a few days’ thaw.

Twice recently during this mild winter we have seen ‘naked’ stoats in their winter ermine coats. On one occasion my friend and I were following the wee white ball, playing golf, going up the 8th fairway at Duff House Royal Golf Course, Banff. Keeping pace with us, moving up the farm road across the Deveron, was a very obvious flash of white. From the sinuous movements and fuller view later on, even seeing the prominent black tip to its white tail, we saw that it was a stoat. In the mild winter, such as we are having just now, the stoat is very easily seen and he must have some difficulty in procuring his food. To say the least this compulsory change of coat in a winter of no snow must be rather awkward.

Stoats are naturally curious animals and one can very often get a better view if one makes a high pitched squeaking noise by sucking one’s breath in with puckered lips. Usually the stoat will sit up on his hind legs to see where the noise is coming from. A hare which is startled from its form will often run away some distance and then sit up in the same way as the stoat to see if it is being pursued.

Towards the end of last year I had fun watching on the east side of Macduff a flock of starlings attacking or pretending to attack a kestrel and until I saw this encounter I had forgotten that most birds can’t hover. When the kestrel stopped and hovered, the starlings flew past it and when they swung back the kestrel moved on and so one observed a see-sawing aerial action with the kestrel being easily able to avoid these nuisances of starlings disturbing his hunting.

The world master at the hovering technique is the humming blrd found in the Americas. This helicopter of the bird world is in fact the only bird able to fly backwards. It is often seen swinging back and forth in the air as if on an invisible trapeze. It is a small bird with its wings beating a fantastic 55 times a second and producing a whir or hum that gives it its name. It must surely be the bee of the bird world as well as the helicopter. The humming bird information was extracted from a leaflet accompanying a “Viewmaster” Christmas present. I sometimes feel that we do not make enough use of these good modern aids which help in the identification of birds.

There is always something interesting happening in nature if one has eyes to see and ears to hear. If the weather varies from the norm then there is a greater chance of something out of the ordinary happening. The week commencing January 10 started with three exceptionally mild days and one could therefore expect unusual happenings.

A friend reported a hedgehog on the move and on one of those mild evening my wife reported that a bat was flitting about in the garden in the gloaming. In ordinary winter circumstances these denizens would be in deep hibernation. Certainly last winter at this time, this would have been the case. As well as aconites out, we have a group of very early snowdrops up and standing three inches high with full heads. I noticed the white arabis standing out particularly well in the flower border and this has been a good winter for the winter flowering viburnum bodnantense. It gives off a most beautiful fragrance from its many tiny florets.

1983

The land generally, and particularly the valley of the Deveron, is greener than usual this year, 1983, with fields of winter barley which were planted last autumn. They are starting to pick up their heads as on so many days recently the temperature has been above the minimum growing one of 43 degrees F.

Two interesting additions to the annual bird list were dipper and grey wagtail. I disturbed the dipper twice as I was crossing the burn at the third hole on Turriff Golf Course. On the second occasion as it flew round a corner in the burn I put up a grey wagtail. It is quite exciting to see grey wagtails in our part of the country at this time of year. It means that they have not migrated. They are beautiful, long-tailed, elegant, slim birds, blue-grey on top and yellow underneath. They stick to watery haunts more than the ordinary pied wagtail.

The dipper is a smaIl, chubby black bird with a smart white bib. It flies with a very direct flight and a quick wing beat. Most of its food is got in or around rivers or burns and it actually has the unusual habit of walking on the bottom of the burn, under the water, to get its food which consists almost exclusively of aquatic insects, especially beetles and their larvae.

The dipper’s toes are long and flexible and are admirably adapted for clinging to any inequalities on the bottom. Its feathers must provide fantastic insulation against the cold. In late January or February it sings a very attractive song about the coming of spring.

1984

After the New Year in January, 1984 the weather was murky in the extreme, three days of mist, cold, damp and fog, and so a brief blink of sunshine was very welcome. We still hold to our theory that after the shortest day, the 21st December, one can somehow detect a change in the quality of the light, showing that we are by the solstice, and of course by the time January comes there is quite a bit of extra light, night and morning. About this time a local farmer took me into his byre to show me his cattle and calves.

One is immediately struck by the smell and the warmth of the byre. This is a warm, cosy place on a cold day. All the animals in the byre were tied individually, the small calves quite happy with themselves, the large bullocks inquisitively looking round with big eyes and an old thinner cow nearly putting her neck out, licking the forward upper part of her back.

After visiting the farm I walked down by the mill pond and there, in the gloaming, I identified my first water rail. I may have seen a water rail before without realising what it was. It is like a small moorhen, some two inches smaller, with a long red bill, a brown back and light and dark grey barred flanks. I stood still by the water’s edge while this one fed close by, sometimes walking and sometimes running, and darting over thicker vegetation. They are rather secretive and one usually gets a rear view of the water rail as it disappears into whatever cover may be available.

Back to winter proper in January 1984. On most occasions one can foretell the winter weather emanating from the north-west. When it is cold, then the hailstones can accumulate in drifts two feet high at our north-facing front door, all quite predictable.

January 3 was the exception with most unexpected gale force winds with blinding wet snow from the north-west which came onto the electricity wires and conductors.

There were a few warning flickers when one should have looked for the candles and dldn’t. Then ‘bingo’ and off went the lights. By good maintenance and good fortune our lights were only off for five hours. Many other people in rural areas were not so fortunate and lost their electricity for days.

We were on our way to Spey Bay for our annual winter golf outing. Between Aberchirder and Blacklaw there is a clump of firs on the left hand side of the road and as we approached I saw a magpie, the first of the year, fly into the trees. The moorish land on the left, between Blacklaw and the Banff-Keith road often reveals interesting birds and as sometimes happens I saw small fluttering birds ahead, and at the moment of positively identifying the snow buntings, a sparrow hawk flew across our front.

Obviously one can drive a car and see and identify birds, but when the things happen simultaneously, then it can get a bit tricky. The only further addition to my list was a small flock of lapwings seen in the distance from the main coast road, inland from Buckie.

At Spey Bay golf course one of my playing companions asked what were the black and white birds he had seen flying along the beach. We came level
with them again at the 13th hole and as we climbed onto the shingle bank we put up a flock of about 20 oystercatchers. With them was a greater black- backed gull and a small flock of redshanks. A solitary tufted duck was diving in the swell just off the shore. In former years we have usually seen a stonechat on a fence post on the left as one plays the short, tricky, eighth hole.

Today there was no sign of the stone chat. They winter in Britain and the whinchats migrate, However, as we played the 17th hole, I saw what looked like a stonechat, but I thought it was too near the greenkeeper’s tractor. On diverting slightly I was delighted to see a female stonechat perched on
top of the whins. She had a dark head and a beautiful ruddy breast, but not the white collar and very black head of the male bird.

I did not play very well, but what a delight it was to combine my two hobbies of bird-watching and golf at the beginning of the year with good golfing companions on a fine day and in such delightful surroundings.

Often we take our picnic lunch at Banff Harbour between the fence on the east side of the former gasometer site and Banff Sailing Hut. It may not sound a very romantic spot, but it wasn’t crowded and most of the birds that are passing in Banff Bay are there and there is bird movement practically all the time. The most obvious birds were groups of either duck, the brown dun-coloured female contrasting with the white-backed male. When feeding they dive constantly, frequently flipping under the surface before the great breaking white combers engulf them. Very often a herring gull will dance attendance, hoping to steal a choice morsel off the eiders when they surface. We also saw tufted duck identifying them particularly when they flew away by the white on their wings.

There were a few curlews and oystercatchers to be seen occasionally changing their feeding places on the rocks. Sometimes a turnstone would fly past fairly close to our car so that we could see the delightful colour pattern on the upper wing. Now and then the smallest bird see, the rock pipit, would come quite unconcernedly up to the face on the lookout for food. The rock pipits are perky little birds, about the size of a sparrow, but much neater and slimmer. At Banff, they are very common on the shore, feeding among the seaweed above and below the high water mark.

Writing about mid-January, 1984, winter had come with a vengeance. We had to dig ourselves out a couple of times on the morning of January 17th. On this occasions we were probably what the locals call ‘hung-up’ for the first time in all our years of traveling from Forglen to Banff by the Pole of Itlaw road. When you get hung-up the car rides up onto several inches of snow until the wheels are no longer touching the snow or the road and so the car is hanging, not touching anything and so unable to be moved. One has to then get out and dig and of course to accomplish this one has to have a shovel in the boot and a bit more besides, sacks, maybe some sand, old coats, wellingtons, a bit of rope, etc.

On this particular morning the level fall of snow was more than seven inches. Strangely after the fall the wind did not blow and the trees were burdened with a beautiful heavy coating of snow which for two days bent them into unusual shapes. Cruel beauty because this covering denied many birds their food. That evening we found a small mite dead on the doorstep, a jenny wren. One can cope with the snow not so badly, but when it snows and blows then that is when the local services get into difficulties trying to keep the roads open, even the main roads, so the minor roads just have wait their turn for the snowplough, and of course if there are electricity cuts as well, due to cable faults or snow on the conductors, then basic home services such as fires and candles and boiling pans of water on the fire have to be started and then it is more of a matter of survival in our neck of the woods.

1985

My first sighting of a bird in 1985 was, appropriately enough, a robin, which I saw in the garden. Not long afterwards, I spotted a great tit, herring gull, blue tit, rook, blackbird, wood pigeon, feral pigeon and a house sparrow. It was January 12th before any of us saw a dunnock or a hedge sparrow. The late Matt Burns of Banff, keen golfer and naturalist, used to refer to the dunnock as the grey robin, a rather nice name.

On my first walk of the year on New Year’s Day, I noted jackdaw and common gull. I saw a pheasant flying off open land to disappear into a field of turnips, where the leaves were still remarkably green and fresh because of the open winter we have had so far.

The local oil-seed rape is well through, but it has not grown quite high enough yet to hide the partridges, so a quite a strong covey of more than a dozen birds took off from the rape as I approached. The next field of winter barley contained quite a large flock of redwings and fieldfares so they were added to my list. With the additional of chaffinch, carrion crow and coal tit, the New Year’s Day list came to 18, one shore of last year’s total.

On January 21st, I added bullfinch and greenfinch, seen in the garden, and from the Turriff golf course, greater black-backed gull, black headed gull, heron, starling (remarkably not seen on January 1st), goldeneye duck and tree creeper. On January 7th at Banff Harbour I saw turnstone, redshank, rock pipit, eider duck, oystercatcher, cormorant and collared dove. January 10th brought mute swan, January 12th wren and whooper swan, bringing the total to 36 so far.

1986

As I write on January 29th, 1986, I hold in my hand a piece of ornithological history of north-east Scotland, a jay (Garralus glandarius). Of almost twenty-five years of birdwatching in the nore-east, I have never seen a jay and suddenly one arrives on my doorstep for identification. Mr Charles Barron, holiday home manager at Forglen Estate, found the jay in Forglen woods.

A turriff woman birdwatcher of my acquaintance suggested to me that she may have seen a jay in the Forglen area last summer and now dead proof of that lies before me. Jays have been seen in the past at Methlick and Newmachar and some have been seen on Deeside. Prior to these sightings the furthest north they had come to us was in Perthshire and Angus.

One can only presume that they are on the increase because there are far fewer keepered estates now-a-days than there were in the past. Because they eat the eggs of other birds, particularly game birds, they were shot on sight.

The bird in my hand is a beautiful specimen with black and white feathers on the crown of its head which it can erect as a crest. It has a black moustache and tan to chestnut neck and breast feathers. The most striking feature of the bird’s plumage are the beautiful, black barred, blue feathers which it has on its wings. It is sometimes called a blue jay. Its white rump can be distinctly seen when it is flying away.

It is strange to think that this is possibly the only time in my life that I will hold such an unusual bird, for the north -east of Scotland at least, in my hand.

Since the advent of the frost, the nut trade has been steady and the great tit, blue tit and coal tit were the first birds on my 1987 list. They never become tame, but do get used to coming to the nut basket, just a foot away from the kitchen window to the north side, so one can feast one’s eyes on them as they peck at the nuts.

I suppose the male great tit, with the broader band of black down his front, is the most spectacular. He has a black neck and collar; white cheeks and a yellow breast. His back is a delicate shade of green mixed with blue and darker colours, and chevron striped at the lower end towards the back of his wings and tail. All three tits have special clinging ability. They can hold on in acrobatic style where there doesn’t appear to be a hold on the smooth sandstone around the window.

_{The illustrations in this book are the original creations of Sheila Chapman and she retains the copyright in them (Reproduced here under licence). More information about the artist can be found at http://www.sheilachapmanart.com}