Reasons to be cheerful part two ...

Today it's hanging out the washing on a clear winter morning. The sheets tugging and snapping in the breeze; damp, clean laundry smells; warm hands but cold fingers fumbling with wooden pegs. Best of all, the sound of pink-footed geese passing overhead. Looking up to see hundreds (sometimes thousands) of them moving in constantly changing waves and curves across the sky.

They are mostly heading west in the mornings. That's because Ashfield sits in the middle of Strathallan. Just a few miles east of the village are the Carsebreck and Rhynd Lochs, part of the South Tayside Goose Roosts Special Protection Area (SPA). The strath is an avian motorway for the birds, heading west to feed on the stubble fields of the Carse of Stirling, or east to the wet pastures by the estuaries of the Tay and Forth.

Scotland holds over 50% of the world population of these dainty geese in the winter. Our geese are mostly from Iceland, though others breed in Greenland and Spitsbergen.There are now also significant numbers in England - especially in Lancashire and Norfolk. Though we call them pink-footed geese their scientific name, Anser brachyrynchus, actually means 'small-billed goose'. Since the very similar greylag goose (unhelpfully called Anser anser - goose goose) also has pink feet it's worth remembering that if you're trying to tell them apart. Greylags have big orange-pink conks, pink-foots dainty black and pink ones. If you listen carefully you can tell them apart from their flight calls too - pinkies have a vaguely two-syllable call 'wink-wink', greylags are more raucous and barky. I can tell you this with confidence because my other half, who's a far better birder than I am, says so - but I'm still never quite so sure which is which!

The geese are here from October to April. Numbers have increased eight-fold in the last sixty years thanks both to changes in the law in the 1970s banning the sale of wild geese, and their own adaptability. The birds have widened their diet, particularly in Norfolk, to make the most of new winter crops like sugar beet. So now there are many more places in the UK where hanging out the washing in winter can give you a reason to be cheerful!

Whatever gets you through the day

'The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more'
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Apologies for using a quote to start the blog two days in a row - I promise I won't make a habit of it. I'll explain why I've used it.

I started the day feeling very glum. A deep grey scum of cloud had seeped over the star-clear sky I'd gone to bed by. It was so dark that the street lights were still on at 9.30am. In defiance I dug the last of the parsnips out of our veg patch in the half-light, determined not to be cowed into staying indoors by the gloom, but it was dour work.

By dog-walking time the murk had lifted slightly, but the great tits that were singing so optimistically in yesterday's sun were still taking a rain check. I needed another prop to get me through the day - and give me something to write about. That's when I remembered reading the Emerson quote, and I went out to look at trees. Here's what I saw:

Tiny lavender-purple catkins on the birches - tight, smooth-scaled like reptile skin;

Pale, dove-grey, frondy lichens on the bare branches of the willows by the river;

Sooty-black buds on the ash tree above the old quarry, whose gnarled root looks like an elephant's trunk.

There was a lot of other stuff I usually take for granted that I noticed too -  crimson bramble shoots twining across the rotting bracken; wood sedge, water avens, and violet leaves still green and alive; new growth on the wild honeysuckle. Desperation definitely concentrates the mind! By the time I got home both the cloud, and my mood, had lifted significantly. So thanks, Ralph, for helping me get through the day.

Looking for Spring

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass
What we below could not - Winter pass.

Thaw, by Edward Thomas

Spring is coming. From now on I will be searching for it every time I step outside. Every morsel of spring I find helps to get me through what can sometimes be a slightly grim time up here in Scotland. At its darkest, the sun doesn't rise here until nearly 9am, and sets again soon after 3.30pm.Yes I know I ought to be able to appreciate every season, every weather - but short, dark days and long, cold nights can be hard to bear if you're desperate to get out and grow things.

When I was thinking about writing this I decided to look up the actual definition of Spring, only to find that there isn't one - or to be more precise, there are many,  and most are extremely vague. Meteorologically it's the three months between the three coldest and the three hottest months of the year. In the dictionary it's the time when plants start to grow again after their winter dormancy. But I'm with Edward Thomas - it's the time when at least some of our birds' fancies turn to thoughts of love.

Now we are past the winter solstice we gain a precious minute or two of light every day, more if it's sunny. As if to celebrate, great tits start establishing their breeding territories almost as soon as the days start to lengthen - although they won't begin egg laying until well into April. So now when I go out I listen for their clear, bright 'teacher-teacher' songs piping above me. The sound seems to carry much further than it does later in the year, through the bare branches of the birches and willows, or maybe it's just seems clearer because there aren't many other birds joining in yet.

Rooks, as Thomas observed, are even further ahead. Having paired up during the autumn they are already nest building, so that their young will be born in early spring, before the ground gets too dry for the parents to get at the soil invertebrates that form the chicks' staple diet. Every time I go into Dunblane now I'll be looking out for the first builders flying across the road to the rookery by the A9, beaks grasping impossibly large twigs and branches like overambitious weightlifters.

So I too will be watching winter pass. So far we have had a very mild time of it - though I can still see snow freckling the hills behind the village. But whatever the weather throws at us now there are some signs of spring that won't go away.

A brief winter hibernation

It's just a few days before Christmas, and you may have noticed that things are slowing down a bit on the blogging front here. I'm afraid the usual peri-festive preparations are taking their toll, so it's probably better for everyone if I admit now that I'm unlikely to be writing any more until the schools go back on 9 January 2012.

If you're reading this, or have been reading any of my bloggings (is that the right word?) over the last few months, my heartfelt thanks. I do hope you've enjoyed them, that they've provided some food for thought, and that you'll take another look after 9 January, when I will be putting virtual pen to virtual paper again. There seems to have been an awful lot of depressing news about the environment and biodiversity in 2011 - let's hope 2012 will be the year when the natural world gets the attention, and the action, that it so badly needs.

Here's to a green Christmas and a wild 2012!

A little light relief

It's a classic British winter's day here. Not one of those snow-bound, sapphire-domed, chocolate box days of last winter - they were an anomaly. But one of the leaden-skied, howling wind, driving-rained days of most of the winters I can ever remember. A day to hunker down somewhere warm and batten down the hatches. Except I had promised to walk a friend's dog.

Even the ubiquitous jackdaws and crows had gone to ground when I went out this afternoon - though Jack, the springer spaniel I was walking, managed to flush a couple of disgruntled male goosanders who had taken refuge in the lee of the river bank. The wind was so strong that it was pushing the water back upstream, and white-topped wavelets scudded along against the flow. The goosanders meanwhile fought against the wind in the other direction, struggling to get away despite their slim, streamlined bodies. I'd tugged my hood way down over my face to keep out the stinging rain, so never saw where they ended up.

It's on days like this that I'm grateful for the existence of gorse - for when gorse is not in flower kissing is not in season. In the past gorse was used for all sorts of utilitarian things - brooms, thatch, fires, dyes. Now it's a plant of scrub and waste places, unremarkable and unremarked. But walking back from Dunblane this morning I passed several scraggy grey-green bushes of the stuff - all illuminating the monochrome day with their golden-yellow, fairy-light flowers. No coconut smell this time of year of course - you need warmth and dry days for that - but still so welcome. A tonic in these, the darkest days of winter.

Nice weather for ducks

Rushy marshland now frames the river north of the village, where there are usually grazing meadows. Weeks of rain and snow, gales and floods have drowned the land. Every fresh downpour refills the usually temporary pools, and damp, deep-green flushes are now wide, rush-lined lochans.

It was, as they say, nice weather for ducks again this morning, with heavy overnight rain and lowering clouds stalling the dawn until nearly 9am. And the ducks have proved it by taking up residence, albeit temporarily, in one of the new ponds-that-used-to-be-field. Today I counted eight teal and four mallard, gleefully gliding about on the mirror-still water, whistling and quacking like a pack of noisy children on an icy pond. But the shy, dainty teal are masters of concealment, and as soon as they clocked me they gracefully danced for cover behind the clumps of soft rush that fringe the pools.

Before they melted into the tawny background I had a chance to look at them through my binoculars. They are tiny in comparison with the mallard - about half the size - and are our smallest duck. I was too far away (or too short-sighted) to make out their Zorro-like green eye mask, but the buttery yellow diamond at the base of their tails shone out unmistakeably in the low winter sunshine.

Most of the teal we see at this time of year are refugees from Iceland and northern Europe. In winter teal feed mostly on grass seeds, often in shallow pools and lakes, so it's not surprising that they move south to avoid the freezing weather that would lock up their food source. Some do stay here all year round, breeding in wild, undisturbed wetlands. Scotland is home to about 2000 pairs, at the last count. At present they're not doing too badly; though hotter, drier summers, predicted through climate change, and losses of wetland habitat through agricultural intensification, could jeopardise that. If  we want to hold on to these lovely, ballerina birds we need to make sure it continues to be nice weather for ducks.

Where the wild things are

We woke to -5C this morning. As soon as a pale line to the south, above the bulk of the Ochil Hills, made it light enough to see I went out to feed the hens. I took a bucket of steaming water with me - their drinkers would be frozen solid. I was bashing noisily at the inch-thick ice when I heard the sound of a fleet of toy bicycles coming towards me, the riders gleefully honking their rubber horns. I stopped and looked up in time to see a squadron of about thirty whooper swans flying low over the roofs of the village. They kept in perfect V formation, ice-white against the dawn-grey sky, though black tipped at beak and feet.

It was the perfect day to see these harbingers of Arctic weather. Yesterday's snow is still clinging to every branch and stem here. Sixteen thousand whooper swans arrive in the UK each autumn, most of them from Iceland - truly wild swans bringing a taste of the tundra in their wake. They head south when their summer lakes and pools begin to freeze over for the winter. Their numbers peak at about four thousand in Scotland in early winter, before some continue further south to feast on the rich arable pickings of East Anglia and the West Country. Since the 1940s they've developed a taste for sugar beet and stubble fields, and latterly oil seed rape, to supplement the sometimes scarcer aquatic vegetation they used to rely on.

Now I often see large flocks of whoopers grazing on the Carse of Stirling, wandering among the stubble like feathered sheep. It seems strange to see these icons of wilderness in such domestic settings as villages and fields. But isn't it good to think that here is where at least some of the wild things are.