I took a woodland stroll, on one of those rare sunny, early Autumn days in the Highlands, heading to the RSPB’s reserve at Loch Garten, on the edge of Abernethy Forest. Red Admirals basked on a mini digger in the car park, enjoying the warming sunshine ahead of their migration. I take the path past the new buildings, under the dappled shade. Although Garten is a pine woodland, it still takes on autumnal colours, as the birch understory turns to yellow, and the few scattered Rowans take on vivid shades of orange before the leaves drop.
Today was the first day the Visitor’s Centre is closed, and I am not alone, a few tourists wander bewildered in frustrated hope of coffee, and the bird feeders still hang, full of peanuts, against the red pine trunks, among the big plantation trees fringing the paths through the wet bog woodland. Chaffinches and coal tits are in attendance, making use of the provided bounty of peanuts, but there are scarcer, less familiar birds here. I eat my lunch and settle on one of the carved wooden benches.
The crested tit is heard before it is seen. They are vocal little birds and their call is distinctive, a high, surprisingly loud, slightly confrontational sounding trill. Then it emerges from the small pine sapling and pecks at the peanuts, confiding as a Robin, and as at home on the feeders as a Blue Tit in a suburban garden. A tiny bird, only a little bigger than a coal tit, grey and prominently crested, a delicate pattern of black markings picking out the facial features, and distinctly warm, red brown coloured eyes catching the Autumn sunshine.
In the British Isles, Crested Tits are confined to the Cairngorms region, tied closely to the Caledonian pine woods there. They are reputed to be shy; though these individuals seemed as bold as any garden bird, happily making use of the peanuts provided for them. They are found throughout Europe, and are not even closely confined to pine woods across much of their range, leading to speculation the Scottish birds may be genetically distinct. Relatively sedentary birds, there cannot be a great deal of gene flow between this population and those separated by the length of Great Britain or the broad North Sea. So they cling on in relative isolation, doing their thing as they have done since the ice age. While in Autumn and Winter they can be drawn down to feeders in the woods, in Spring and Summer, during the breeding season, they are almost undetectable, remaining concealed in the high canopy, frustrating the summer birders who come looking for them, unless they are lucky enough to spot one or more dropping down to a puddle for water.
My feeder and two crestie companions draw a small circle of admirers, I am not the only birder with a camera who has noticed the light is good today. And something of a show of woodland wildlife is unfolding, as the low blaeberry shrubs rustle and part, and a young Red Squirrel gingerly approaches. He clambers up the log from which my feeder hangs, dappled sunlight catching his deep russet fur. He knows we are here, and still approaches, nevertheless his approach is far more cautious than that of a park Grey Squirrel with which readers in England are more familiar. He is notably more cautious than his continental cousins, which, somewhat counterintuitively, remain the common parkland squirrel from Paris to Krakow to Korea. He watches the crestie on the feeder, and then, surprisingly, seems to wait his turn on it. I manage to capture a few photos of these two icons of the Scottish pine woods, with the two in the same frame. The Red Squirrel’s story in the UK and its decline, first due to persecution and then to competition with greys, and the squirrel pox introduced with them, is well known, but here in the highlands, though never in the densities that Greys reach in deciduous woodlands down South, they do quite well.
They’re not uncommon elsewhere in Europe, where they remain the only squirrel species, and in some places can be found in urban parks, living a similar lifestyle to the greys in English cities. But here among the tall pines they still feel wild, native and exciting. And exceedingly beautiful. The pine woods here are not welcoming to the Greys, failing to offer nutrition in sufficient densities to support these bulkier, lazier arboreal beasts, but there is enough food here to allow the reds, which are by no means a pinewood specialist, the chance to survive and, justabout, for now, to thrive.
