Animal Tracking in the Snow of the Scottish Highlands

"Now I would think," murmured Duncan Macdonald, nose to the faint paw prints dinting the snow on the banks of the River Findhorn, ‘that’s a brown hare. See how the front paws are quite far apart in their stride, while the back ones are close together?’ Duncan circled a gloved finger round the footfalls. ‘Quite a big fellow, I’d say – too big to be a mountain hare. There’s half a metre, maybe, between the leading and the trailing paws, so he was – well, cantering, that would be the right word. Now I wonder what spooked him?’

Going out tracking in the snowy Monadhliath mountains of the central Scottish Highlands with Duncan Macdonald, you can’t help but think of Sherlock Holmes. Where the untutored visitor to these wild hills might spot no more than the occasional red deer, Duncan can read the runes scratched in snow, mud, heather sprig and pine bark by the birds and animals that for whom these harsh surroundings are home. A countryside ranger with Highland Council, Duncan lends his tracking talents and general wildlife expertise to the Speyside Wildlife tour company from time to time. I was lucky he’d found the time to come out with me today, in the coldest and snowiest winter the Highlands had seen for a decade, to explore the hillside and valleys of Coignafearn, a wildlife-friendly estate far up the strath of the River Findhorn.

The Findhorn snaked black and swift through the flat meadows that floored the valley. Ice crusted the margins of the river and trailed from midwater boulders in lacy sheets of wonderful intricacy. Beyond rose the round shoulders of the mountains, blanketed white with snow and scabbed by dark rock outcrops hung with shark’s-tooth icicles. Snow clouds were gathering up there in the western sky, an uneasy swirl of heavy grey vapour tinged with yellow. ‘There’ll be more big falls this winter,’ prophesied Duncan, ‘and huge floods down here in spring when it all melts.’

We followed the hare tracks along the river bank, noting where they had been crossed by the twin slots of a red deer’s hooves, and then by the round cat-like prints of another brown hare. Duncan studied the tracks, inferring from their depth and rate of thaw how the two hares had circled and assessed each other, then gone on their separate ways. Meanwhile, down low along the river and out of sight of the hares, an otter had crept stealthily along under the overhang of the bank, leaving its webbed track with a faint groove where its rudder had dragged in the snow. Other, smaller prints might have been those of mink or of stoats in their winter coats of black-tipped ermine. ‘Too blurred by the melt yesterday to be sure,’ said Duncan.

Now the tracker’s eyes, sweeping the white landscape, picked up a small, continuous drift of movement along the mountainside half a mile off. ‘Deer, a lot of ‘em,’ was his laconic call to attention. A great herd of red deer, perhaps eighty strong and led by a stag with splendidly branched antlers, was flowing across the snow slope with a graceful economy of motion. ‘Odd,’ murmured Duncan to himself, eye to telescope. ‘Usually the stags and hinds won’t associate in winter, but there’s a real mix of the sexes in there. Too much snow on the ground to be picky about territory, perhaps?’

Fox and weasel, ermine stoat and feral goat, pine marten, red squirrel and red deer, otter and mountain hare: these are just some of the animals that find their winter food and shelter in the Monadhliath mountains. Golden eagle, peregrine, raven and buzzard quarter the sky. There are wild salmon in the rivers and wild cat in the rocks. ‘People go all over the world to see wildlife,’ said Duncan as we turned up into a side glen, ‘but Scotland has so much. Take the red deer: you come here in October and these hills will be just roaring with stags. Unforgettable – it’ll live with you for the rest of your life.’

A fierce wind came whistling suddenly, driving scuds of snow before it. We took shelter in a pine plantation where deer had whittled the lower branches to antler-like points in their greed for the nutritious bark. Duncan picked up fragments of chewed pine cone. ‘Decorticated by red squirrels – that’s the technical term for this close nibbling. Great word for Scrabble, eh?’

It looked as though the worsening weather had grounded the golden eagles of Coignafearn. A burst of snow buntings, some forty of them, went shooting overhead with tiny, needly squeaks. Then Duncan’s gaze fell on a set of paw prints that led away from the trees, up the slope towards the mountain. We scanned the patchy snow, and soon made out a pair of mountain hares crouching in the lee of a couple of heather clumps.

Close up in the eye of the telescope, these were magnificent creatures, their short black-tipped ears tucked hard back into the white fur of their flanks, black eyes fixed on us, the only perceptible motion a ceaseless twitching of their cream-coloured noses. ‘Saving energy,’ Duncan whispered in my ear. ‘They spend all day just sitting and digesting, nibbling whatever green stuff they can find, then sitting and digesting again.’

We belly-crawled to within fifty yards of the hares. When they decided we had tried their patience far enough, they sprang up and sprinted off, their lithe bodies a pale, electric blue against the snow – two lords of the winter mountainside, utterly at home in their sparse white realm.