From my desk I can see the sky in widescreen. Filtering in through three windows, its saltire-blue stretches of cloud free space fade to white at the edges, by the Wallace monument and the fingers of the strand of still bare trees.
From my desk I can also see my laptop, Microsoft word and a half started, disheartening essay.

Discipline cracked. Not that it takes much anymore.

Over the rugby pitches in a swarm of Sand Martins, fluttered a Swallow. Only one.
Spring had arrived.

The raucous Chiffchaffs agree.

***
The hedge sprouted plastic bags, flowered crushed lager cans and blossomed with bleached prophylactics. Twisted rusting metal lay in the undergrowth, the broken beaten body of a nearby fence co-opted as a lurking tetanus trap for the next unleashed dog gambolling the perimeter hedgerows. And there’s a lot of them about. Discarded tabloids flutter as suburban tumbleweed in this lifeless desert of litter, rusting goal posts slump and burn in the harsh sunlight, whilst a lone Goldeneye floats, perfectly still, on a Boating pond for several minutes, meditating with the bobbing waves on the unbearableness of being a Bucephala. And being here. Meadow Pipits orbit galaxies of tiny blue plants, shot through with asteroids of daises and supernovae of dandelions on the short-cropped grass as I passed, pursued by canine hordes after the remains of my bacon sandwich.

It’s a collision. A car crash of worlds, with nature festering away in the shadow of post-industrial Scotland.

It seems contrarian to the prevailing narrative of tacky tartan and golf-course-defiled wilderness that despite the huge swathes of this country left as the great British wilderness, the best site we can do for birding is this scrap of land and sea, nestled three-way between Leith, Musselburgh (‘the honest toun’), and Cockenzie’s power station. That at least would explain why, for a bustling urban nature reserve by the biggest town in East Lothian and capital satellite, there are approximately three notice boards. Top marks for existing but a fail for the worthy environmental evangelism we’re reminded permanently to be a part of.

And yet a Hail Mary pass of the scope over the sea revealed quite why Musselburgh has the reputation it has. The Firth was coated in Velvet Scoter, surfing the black waves from here to Fife’s Forth coast; black ducks anchored like buoys over the shallow beds of mussels - though apparently any mollusc will do - periodically rearing up to flash those curious white secondaries in their wings. But you don’t need to see that to identify them, they’re close enough that the white guyliner or industrial strength bill in regulatory high-viz orange will suffice. And it’s not just them. Standing under a procession of passage Sand Martins and Swallows; two Long-tailed Ducks float offshore with raffish Red-breasted Mergansers and a handful of Eider. It turns out that despite everything, this place aint half bad at all.




***

Slipped into hypnogogia, she lay in an alcove, in the lee of the wind and stretched out on a flat rock in felineesque felicity. I took my time. Perched on a higher rock and buffeted by the Berwick wind, I combed with the scope over the stretch of sand, seaweed and sea. Late afternoon bought respite from the harsh sunlight of midday, and with the temperature in the low-teens; it too was tempting to drift away… White and black. Shaking myself to, Eider, Gannet, gulls dotted the scenery in minimalist colours. Oystercatchers too, piercing calls reverberating off the rocks. Bass Rock in the distant haze seems snow capped with the naked eye, guano capped at 20x and crawling with an ant-like mass of Gannets at 60. Blimey there’s Gannets. From the Fife bank and back, left to right, the sky and sea is covered in the shearing and elegant marvels of evolutionary insanity. It’s not just the five-foot wing span, though that’s impressive in itself. It’s the death cheating, high velocity diving action; plummeting from-
The Oystercatchers erupted. Shot in low, a silver-grey raptor flushed them into a cloud of fluttering wings and piping calls. Too slow on the offensive; it pulls up and lands on the offshore island. A Sparrowhawk, strangely, one of the biggest females I’ve seen, expanding its diet beyond the town’s population of its namesake.

As the afternoon slipped into evening, I woke her up and showed her a Ringed Plover. She giggled, enjoying its clockwork toy running motion. I postulate that they look diligent and humble; she bats it back as intelligent and that it’s her favourite bird of the day. Anti-spectacle too, could a birdwatcher have been born?

North Berwick is the bourgeoisie wildlife experience: the Scottish home of the fluffy Puffin key ring, overpriced fish and chips on the beach and the self-important pink polo-shirted dog walker. It exists, so it seems, through the rose tints of the twee upper-class tourist, wildlife at its most mediated, paid for and predictable. At least Musselburgh contained the element of surprise and, if not in its most spectacular surroundings, one of natures more surprising locales.

***

Perthshire does different surprises. The road snakes through rolling green countryside, Lapwings career across hedges in the throes of passion and bubbling Curlews cant down to the dale-bottom burn. Then the car crests the apex of the valley and drops down into a miniature Glencoe of claustrophobic, vertiginous Gneiss walls, and carpets of heather studded with grouse topped boulders. The car window frames it, a shelterbelt blocks it. The road dog-legs round and the view reappears as a pink rolling sea of heather. Surfing the nearest wave to the verge, a round-winged, black tipped, Short-eared Owl, appears and disappears as its sulphuric eyes clock the car.

Two days prior earlier and the first summer worthy weather of the year had hidden the hills in a veneer of haze. Three flicks of Dave’s sweepnet and the peace was obliterated with Bloody hell, it’s a Capniidae. He’d have hours of fun with this. Sweeping a net back and through the boggy margins, netting countless mayflies, hoppers, craneflies and, most importantly, stoneflies. I was concentrating in not slipping off a mossy hummock and filling a boot full of the fresh Scottish mountain loch water that people pay to drink from bottles. Pipits on the fences were distracting me until I looked up and Dave, DAVE, Osprey.

I’d forgotten how big they are, all six foot of those wings, gently drooping at the tips and sharply drawn at the rear, giving that characteristic languid glide. Despite appearing out of nowhere it was almost above me when I clocked it, and it flew right over my head. The subconscious screamed Osprey, but I dragged out the process, enjoying every second of being reunited with a glamour species away from the visitor centre mediated experience.

Upon a high Tayside moor, amidst a collage of greens, browns, crags and grey skies; tumbling Lapwings and shrill Redshanks, chattering Swallows and flashing Wheatears, and the exposed ears of a (non-mountain) hare receding into a depression. Surprisingly lush, not the expected ascetic experience of being high up above the tree line. Caught in the sweeping movement of my binoculars, a distant flash of grey grazed the grass of the moor. Catching up to it, I expected a Wheatear and found a male Merlin, scything through the Swallows, before vanishing off to the distance. Merlins, masters of the five-second fly-through, remain, to me at least, the most enigmatic of British breeding falcons; it’s a classic falcon, yet like no other falcon to be found. They fly flat, fast and low and haunt these bleak lands, and for 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 55 seconds, of a year remain exist in complete invisibility

I headed off the hill in happiness.

But my absolute favourite place in Perthshire is the little visited SWT reserve Balnaguard Glen. Juniper, an inept conifer that resembles Broom and Gorse, proliferates here, on a stream addled formerly grazed hillside. Pristine is the Scottish landscape cliché, and a misleading one too, but here if you ignore the history and focus instead on the glacial scars, the landslip exposed boulder clay, the tiny path winding down the steep slope to the burn bending its way through riparian woodland and the juniper, matted and enmeshed into a piecemeal spiky carpet covering the boggy upper-slopes that you have to fight your way through; it feels pristine. It feels that it gets a dog walker per week. You can feel alone, sat in an island of grass, surrounded by juniper, and an orchestra of Willow Warblers, one in every bush, whilst admiring Violet, coltsfoot, Cuckooflower and its erratic attendant, the Orangetip. And it wasn’t amazing for birds, as a Pheasant slowly dying under a log rather explicitly pointed out, but that’s not the point. The point is in the pugnacious Green Hairstreaks, the botany, the bumblebees, and the juxtaposition of such life, with the ‘partridge and gulls’ agri-desert downslope. The reason for the vibrant life was shown when Dave changed the alcohol bottle on his malaise trap. Insect soup he said.

(A stonefly, the Latin name of which I have forgotten).
***

And despite my best efforts, occasionally the real-birders birds get in my way. At the blustery Esk mouth, as the mud crawled with Godwits, Turnstone, Dunlins etc, each a copy of the repetitions of the congener that preceded it, a Crow caught my eye as it drifted down to the rocks. I clocked it as a hoody, a glint of grey as it came across the light. The scope revealed what was ostensibly a Hooded Crow: clean cut grey back and black gorget extending in the right shape to the upper breast. But, those cursed black under-tail coverts. 80% is the estimate of others.
At a car park on the River Tay by Dunkeld, one Carrion Crow caught my eye, for in the correct light having a very dark grey upper back and upper breast, with a clearly demarcated black line on its upper-breast where the glossy black gorget lay. 90% Carrion? How far back in this Corvus’s genetic history did its corone become diluted with cornix? Complicating the issue are the amount of hybrids that get seen in Lothian in winter, and the apparent southward spread of Hooded Crow this year. I was without binoculars at the time but I’m fairly sure there was a pure cornix, or at the very least, purer than the Musselburgh bird, present in fields near Balnaguard, where they disappeared a decade ago (I’m told, I’ve also been told they’ve spread further into Speyside this year).

(Musselburgh)
***

Desecrated Daffodils lay dead in the woodland. Bluebells and flowering wild garlic took over the florae flooring of the campus woods. Commas flitted from the bushes in which Blackcaps sang of summer. Still a single male Goosander kicks back with the Mallards on the grass bank of the loch, waiting for the Warburtons, whilst Scotland sizzles under 15 degrees Celsius.
I guess this is Scotland’s week of summer then. To celebrate? The second batch of essays please…


(Nocturne Swans)