James MacKenzie
The price of getting too close
There is a particular kind of Highland morning when everything works. You are tucked behind a boulder on a hillside in Sutherland, the wind is in your face, and forty metres below you a pair of ptarmigan are feeding quietly among the quartzite. They have no idea you exist. That encounter is worth ten rushed photographs, and it happens because you did the boring things properly.
The alternative is easy to picture too. Every season, birds are flushed from nests, deer are pushed off their grazing, and hares are sent sprinting across a corrie by walkers who simply did not realise they were the cause. The cost is real: a flushed golden eagle burns energy it cannot easily replace, a disturbed capercaillie hen may lose her brood, and mountain hares shifted in hard weather can struggle to recover the calories. Disturbance is cumulative, and popular glens and summits see a great deal of it.
The good news is that the difference between a memorable sighting and a damaging one is usually measured in metres, wind direction and a bit of patience.
Fieldcraft before optics
You will see more wildlife by walking well than by owning expensive glass. Animals detect three things: scent, movement and shape. Deal with those and the Highlands opens up.
- Work into the wind. Approaching upwind is the single biggest advantage you can give yourself. Check the breeze on your cheek or with a few blades of grass, and plan your route around it.
- Stay off the skyline. Nothing draws attention like a human silhouette against the sky. Move along contours, use gullies, boulder fields and the edges of pinewoods.
- Break up your outline with muted, non-shiny clothing, and avoid the rustle of crisp waterproofs where you plan to sit still.
- Stop often. Most species scan for movement, not for people. Freeze, count to thirty, and look properly before moving on.
- Sit down. A seated walker becomes part of the landscape within minutes. An hour of stillness beats three hours of walking.
Using binoculars and a scope well
A pair of 8x42 or 10x42 binoculars will cover almost everything in the hills, and they should be on a strap round your neck rather than buried in your rucksack. A spotting scope on a tripod earns its weight for distant crags, sea cliffs, lochs and open moorland.
The skill is in the scanning. Break a hillside into blocks and work across each one slowly, looking for shape and tone rather than movement. Hides are less useful than a good sitting spot, but a lightweight bag hide helps in open country where there is no cover at all. Dawn and the two hours before dusk remain the most productive windows, and the shoulder months of April, May, September and October are sheer reward for anyone hillwalking in Scotland.
Dogs in the hills
Dogs cause more disturbance in the Highlands than any other single factor, usually with the best intentions. Under the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, you are asked to keep your dog under close control – which in practice means within sight, responding to your voice, and on a short lead around livestock, ground-nesting birds and deer.
During the breeding season, from roughly March to July, ground-nesting species such as curlew, dotterel, golden plover and greenshank are sitting on eggs or brooding chicks across exactly the terrain you want to walk. Keep dogs on a lead through these areas, and turn back rather than press on if you see a bird calling or running distractedly in front of you. If a bird or a deer reacts to your presence at all, you are already closer than you should be.
Nests, young and feeding
Never approach a nest, and never linger near one. Disturbing certain Schedule 1 species – golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, osprey, hen harrier, peregrine among them – is a criminal offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and it is an offence for good reason. Avoid known lek sites for capercaillie and black grouse in spring, and never use recorded calls or playback to pull a bird closer.
Do not feed wild animals. Handouts create dependency, draw animals towards roads and people, and spread disease at feeding stations. That applies to red deer on the hill, ducks at the lochside, pine martens round a bothy and the gulls eyeing your sandwich on Skye. Leave no food scraps behind either; a tidy lunch stops a fox or a hooded crow learning that rucksacks mean easy pickings.
Photography that leaves things as it found them
Long lenses and patience do the same job that creeping closer would do badly. A 300mm to 400mm on a crop-sensor body, a beanbag on a wall or boulder, and an hour of stillness will beat any amount of scrambling uphill with a camera bag. Turn off flash for nocturnal species, keep the tripod off fragile moss and lichen, and leave every stone and dead log where you found it.
Be careful with what you share, too. Precise locations and geotags for rare breeding birds can send a crowd to a nest site within days. A photograph of a golden eagle over an unnamed glen is still a wonderful photograph, and the bird gets to keep its hillside. That quiet contract – look, enjoy, take nothing, disturb nothing – is what keeps the Highlands wild for the next walker with binoculars and an early alarm.
