Smoke

A view of moorland fires burning across the Southern Uplands, complete with curlews and ring ousels in a fold of shimmering smoke.

Curlews returned in the darkness, falling like down to the meadows and crying still at the memory of last year’s failures. I could put a satellite tag on these birds and know where they’ve been since I last saw them in August, but I reckon it’s better to have that knowledge withheld by the limits of my own eyesight. I don’t want to know - but wherever they’ve been, it’s wasn’t far enough to erase the confusion and loss of another busted summer, and chicks which never warmed into anything more than a pattern of veins in a shell. I hope they’ll do better this year - and I’ll go one better than hope by doing all that I can to protect them.

The following day drove me to Lanarkshire, where I felt stronger and more optimistic as different birds laid out their territories in fine abundance around the roots of Tinto hill. Curlews are doing better in this part of the Southern Uplands, where from the high ground you can see bits of Glasgow in the milky distance, and more wind turbines than you’d ever imagine existed.

Hardly half an hour passed without curlews calling from some point or other in the rough-cut grass and the slipstreams of scree. This weather’s been grand for drying these hills - and with a decent view, blue ribbons of heather smoke rolled out of the hills from Muirkirk to the Moorfoots. The distant fires trailed away in parallel lines like steamer chimneys, suggesting that Scotland itself was sailing steadily southward. I love to see the spring fires ripping on a day like this, worrying into the old grass and revealing the chance of something better.

What’s more, at the foot of every fire is a person engaged in the humdrum fare of working, and it’s only by accident that this task marks them out for miles around. Their three hundred and sixty four other days leave no discernible trace on the landscape; these people live hidden in camouflage jackets or the cabs of pickup trucks - and tomorrow when the rain comes, they’ll vanish again. So mark them well in the sunshine, drizzling smoke just as spiders fill the summer night with threads of gossamer; it’s their emergence too, compelled by the best use of a suitable moment.

Then later when the fires came closer to hand, the sap hissed like dew from a wet kettle heating. The curlews kept up their calling, and out from the crumbling dyke a ring ousel flew with the hill tumbling beneath him in a stack of tightly banked contours. It’s likely that this bird had only been in Scotland for a matter of hours; the last folk he’d seen were Frenchmen or Moroccans. It sets my head spinning to imagine the miracle of migration, but it’s even stranger that I should be more at ease with the thought of myself flying to winter in the Mediterranean than a bird with two wings and a mind of its own.

I’ve seen it myself that when you burn heather, you get ring ousels. When you stop, they go. So it made sense to see this first bird of the year on a scorching day in the churn of smoke, with land making sense of itself on the scale of a continent.

Heading back from the heather, curlews called on and more palls of smoke poured from the slopes like the haze of day, warm and homely in the sunlit moss with the lights of a fire engine blinking in the distance, and a recollection that not everybody finds so much to love in the sight of a freshening flame.

First published Bog Myrtle and Peat - March 2022