walkhighlands



Tawny Twits and Tawny Twoos

Winter nights are rather quiet affairs, but I’d forgotten just how quiet they were until a familiar sound pierced one of them last week while I was out for a torchlit stroll. Huuuuu……..Huh….Huhuhuhuuuuuu. It sailed through the chill night air, clear and sharp, from somewhere within the dark recesses of a granny pine. I stopped in my tracks and waited for a repeat, which duly came after 10 seconds or so. Huuuuu….. I waited, listening for the familiar response. A short moment later a fainter, more distant sound, high pitched and squawky, called out. Kewick!…….Kewick! Tawny owls. The walls of

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature

Brown Hares – My Companion Animals

I’ve had my trail camera out at home recently. Now it’s getting colder, I’ve been investigating what creatures are milling about outside the house, in search of warmth or food. Last winter there were various rodents and shrews sneaking under the porch door, so I rather expected to see something similar this time. Maybe a red squirrel foraging nearby. Tawny owls on the fence posts. Or, given they have left conspicuous scat on the road, pine martens. But no. After the first night, I looked through the new videos and they all showed one of two brown hares, nibbling grass

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature

What’s your favourite coire in Scotland?

“We need a couple of volunteers next week to walk into Garbh Choire”, said our conservation manager. My ears pricked up. It would doubtless be a tiring day, as we’d be retrieving some 1t bags, wooden stakes and rolls of wire netting. But I jumped at the chance because, for some reason, I’d never actually visited An Garbh Choire. To my considerable shame, I might add, given its reputation as a grand and wild place, the home of the Sphinx (Scotland’s most famous snow patch), and it simply being the gnarliest, farthest flung corner of my office. Sandwiched between Braeriach

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Posted in Features, Magazine

Deadwood: When are you going to tidy up?

“All those trees that were blown over. Are you going to do anything with them?” It’s a question I occasionally get asked by visitors to the ranger hut. Storm Arwen did for quite a few big old trees along the Dee, and almost two years later they still lie where they fell. Folk are always really nice about it, enquiring politely and sincerely, but you know what they’re essentially asking is: “When are you going to tidy up?” I do understand how, from a conventional aesthetic point of view, dead trees might look a bit jarring in an otherwise ‘ordered’,

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Posted in Features, Magazine

The Cuckoo: a wonderful summer madness

Have you ever tried to creep up on a cuckoo? I’ve tried repeatedly over the years but it’s nigh on impossible. I suspect even the SAS would struggle. Cuckoos are impossibly flighty, and somehow also evade being precisely pinpointed by your ear. A vague direction can be discerned, but when you think you’re getting close, the call suddenly seems to come from another direction entirely. It could be another cuckoo of course, but more often than not, your target cuckoo has simply taken flight and moved to a new location. You didn’t see it move because….well….what would that even look

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature

I’m recruiting for Team Toad

Frogs or toads? A simple choice, one that I put to Twitter last week to gauge people’s feelings towards these two amphibians. I was motivated partly by the fact that the spring amphibian emergence is underway and I very much welcome their return, but mainly I was motivated by a desire to see to what proportion of people shared my preference. Just for the record, I do of course acknowledge that this is an absurdly reductionist way of looking at these two wonderful creatures. But yes, I hereby declare I am a fully paid up member of Team Toad. I

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature

18 months of mildness – erm, is this normal?!

December. Oh thank goodness for December to end 2022!! Cold and icy, it offered up a truly memorable snowshoe excursion up Glen Derry and over Beinn Bhreac. -17C, alpenglow, sparkling hoar frost and not a breath of wind. Yep, December was marvellous. Okay, so the pipes in our house froze, but December’s icy breath was a welcome return to something approaching vaguely normal. By ‘normal’ in this sense I mean the traditional weather patterns of old, where we’d get colder than average months as well as warmer than average months. It seems incredible, even now, but if you’d told me

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Posted in Features, Magazine

The Fife Coastal Path – it only took me 12 years!

It’s funny how moving homes motivates you to visit the things you thought you always would, but somehow never did. Those famous local places that you assumed would always be on your doorstep, but then one morning you wake up to find you have a completely new doorstep, and those hitherto local places…..aren’t. Earlier this year, after 12 years in Fife, I moved to Braemar. Obviously, I love my new doorstep. It’s the Cairngorms for goodness sake! But it’s also about as far from the coast as you can get, and I do miss having the sea close by. True,

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Posted in Features, Magazine

How Mar Lodge very nearly became a ski resort

I recently had the good fortune to be working in Glen Quoich on three consecutive days. And on each of those occasions I took time to sit quietly among the veteran pines, with my coffee and lunch, and take-in the atmosphere of regenerating Caledonian woodland. It’s one of the most restful places I know. Indeed when we were released from our local authority lockdown limits during the Covid pandemic, this is the first place I visited. Now managed by the National Trust for Scotland, where better to be restored than the very place where restoration hangs in the air? Given

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature

Midges and Keds, Clegs and Ticks. Oh my!

As the summer progresses and my skin plays host to various biting beasties, I find myself pondering which of them is the most infuriating. Which of them is most likely to sabotage my outdoors enjoyment? I have my own personal torments, but I’m curious what other people think about our wee beasties. Time therefore, for a famously unscientific poll to see how you, the outdoorsy folk, feel about them. I asked…. Which of these lovely wee critters traumatises you the most when you’re trying to enjoy Scotland’s great outdoors? There are of course a whole host of annoyances out there,

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Posted in Features, Magazine, Nature


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You should always carry a backup means of navigation and not rely on a single phone, app or map. Walking can be dangerous and is done entirely at your own risk. Information is provided free of charge; it is every walker's responsibility to check it and to navigate safely.