Summer Wardens.

When Hanna and I arrived at Vane Farm we joined a well established team that took care of the visitors and the environmental education, which was the main focus of the site. John Norton was the caretaker reserve warden who was there to hand over the keys to us.

John was very enthusiastic about the birds, the wildlife and the plants; he was also hyper-energetic and heavily into cycling. Within our first half hour he had us down on the lochside looking at the wildflowers there. What he didn't know was that the flowers he was showing us were especially significant to me.

Grass of Parnassus is one of the most beautiful bog plants you could ever wish to see. I knew it from Cumberland but my grandmother once found it is Swaledale where she lived and would often tell us about it. In fact, I think it was the last thing she spoke to me about before she died. The other rare flower John showed us was a tiny buttercup called creeping spearwort (Ranunculus reptans) which I had only ever seen once before, near Swansea in South Wales.

Grass of Parnassus

Seeing those flowers made us realise that there was a lot more to Vane Farm than a nice view and a few ducks.

I don't remember what we did at Christmas, but I'll never forget Hogmanay. We had heard so much about the Scottish New Year and we were looking forward to a legendary party, so we dropped a lot of broad hints such as "What are you doing at Hogmanay?" It was stupid question because what most people do is gather at home with the family, unless they hate their family, are far from home, or haven't been invited to anyone's party.

"So. What are you doing for Hogmanay?" apparently translates as "How would you like to spend Hogmanay with us?"
"Oh thanks, we didn't really have any plans, we'd love to come."

And so it was that we spent our first New Year in Scotland with a bunch of misfits who had a taste for whisky and nowhere else to go. One couple actually went through their entire marriage breakdown and divorce during the course of the party. We had some great music and single malts though.

We spent our first winter getting to know our neighbours and the neighbourhood which stretched from Edinburgh to Perth. We delighted in the masses of pink-footed geese we could see and hear every day and the constantly changing play of light on the loch and the surrounding hills was a novelty after living on the flat coastal plain in Sussex.  We entertained a string of house guests from down south and became Scottish foodies, digging in to stews, broths, Scotch pies, lorne sausage meat, haggis and neeps, black pudding, Arbroath smokies, tatty scones, salmon and venison.

In the spring we prepared for the arrival of a new summer warden by cleaning up his bothy and we put on a massive full Scottish breakfast, comprising most of the above meaty products plus Scotch baps, vivid orange Scotch Cheddar cheese and Dundee marmalade. I drove to Waverley station to meet him off the London train but couldn't spot anyone who looked vaguely like they were coming to work on a nature reserve. I was expecting a barbour coat, backpack, walking boots and maybe a telescope. The platform soon cleared of people and there was just one young man left behind. He was wearing a battered tweed jacket and flat cap while pushing a bicycle that had a vintage cardboard suitcase tied to the crossbar. The overall (and intended) effect was of a lost evacuee from the second world war.

Matt May.

Matt May was from Essex and you could tell. It wasn't just his accent; there was also the bright red Mohican haircut that was hidden under his tweed cap. He was a really nice lad and keen as mustard. He was also starving and I knew he would love the feast we had waiting for him. Hanna piled the table high with food and offered him a starter of fish chowder made from smoked haddock with an Arbroath smokie on the side. The smokie made a bid for freedom, landing in Matt's coffee and that's when he told us that he was a vegetarian. He had a marmalade butty and we showed him his new home.

I can't remember how it all happened but we had a mass of house guests that year, so many that we had to park a caravan outside our kitchen to cope with the overflow. When you live only an hour out of Edinburgh, it's amazing how many people drop by during festival time.  Hanna's sister Susy came over from Chicago and actually landed a job in the Fringe office on the Royal Mile. This meant we got a lot of tickets and went to a huge number of shows that year.

One night we had a massive party that included friends from Sussex plus Susy, Matt and his lovely red-headed girlfriend from Lochgelly, some volunteers and two Dutch girls who were staying in the caravan. After an evening of partying, people were sleeping all over the place, but all was calm until about three a.m. when Hanna and I woke to find two bulky men at the foot of our bed, their stubbly faces lit by a torch from below.

"Is the warden in here?"
"I I I ththththink so" said Hanna, "I'll look."

I was in the bed next to her but I wasn't making any more sense than she was.

"We are with the Perth Constabulary and I'm afraid you have had a break in."

At first I wondered if they thought that all the various bodies distributed about the premises had just raided the place and turned it into an illegal squat but they took me outside to see how someone had cut their way through the shop door and stolen the float and some of the sales goods. I sobered up pretty quickly.

The police often used our car park and toilets at night and they would make a quick security check at the same time, so they found out about the robbery before we did. They had banged on every one of the doors leading off the yard and got no sensible response from anybody. When they tapped on the window of the caravan they met two beautiful girls in nighties who spoke to them in Dutch but pointed at our front door, which was eventually opened for them by our artist friend Richard Kemp who was unable to stand up straight and had lost his voice. He just pointed up the corridor in our direction.

The next summer was a bit calmer and we had an information warden called Jo Thomas who was a young lass from York. She was our ace recruiter, homing in on any new visitors to make sure they didn't leave without joining the RSPB. By strange co-incidence she now lives ten minutes away from me and runs her own wildlife travel business.

Other summer wardens included Mike Pollard who went on the become a Reserves Manager based in Banbury and Norwich. He did a great job of making interactive displays for the visitor centre. Alan Coles was next and he did a couple more seasons on Scottish Lochs before moving back to Cambridgeshire. I see him quite often still.

Mel Kemp and Sally came as a pair, which was nice for us, but the accommodation wasn't great for two and they rented a place in Kinross. Our last assistant was Dave Fairlamb, a gangly Geordie with a pony tail who was, and still is, a larger than life character. He's now the curator at the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in Arundel, where we used to work before moving to Scotland. It's a small world isn't it?

We had a young lass from Aberdeen way who was pretty homesick, but she went on to work with corncrakes in the Hebrides, which I'm sure she loved. One warden was mad enough to stay for two years. Gareth Morgan is now parliamentary officer at the the Lodge and still a good friend with a brain the size of a planet and heart to match.

So much happened during Gareth's stay that it's worth another chapter.

No children, pets and other animals.

We sold our little Victorian terraced house in Littlehampton before we moved to Kinross where the RSPB provided us with accommodation on the Reserve.

Vane Farm, our home.

The warden's house consisted of a long bungalow that formed the west side of the rectangular farm steadings. The RSPB took 17% of my salary to pay for our lodging, which seemed fair enough and as young "DINKs*" we lived quite well and enjoyed some spectacular holidays in Scotland, Europe and the USA. A more sensible couple would have put money into a holiday cottage that they could rent out, but we were too blissfully happy living in the present to plan a different future.

It was a great place to live and we loved it, blithely ignoring the high heating bills and the damp caused by long winters in the cold shadow of the Sleeping Giant that was Benarty. We ignored a lot of things.

Our lease contained dozens of clauses that I don't think we ever read, but one stood out and made us laugh. It said that "children, pets or other animals" were not allowed except by permission from the Society. Well, rules are made to be broken aren't they? Without ever planning to, we soon had chickens, goats and a cat. The baby would come later and then we would have the full set. If anyone came up from the Scottish HQ in Regent Terrace to see us, we would do our best to hide the beasties from view but we were eventually found out due to Buster the cat.

We didn't want a cat. We were bird people and could not see how a cat could fit in on a nature reserve, so when a ragged ginger tomcat started slinking around the outbuildings our plan was to trap it, shoot it or run it over. After a few attempts he seems to get the message and left of his own accord, or so I thought.

Buster opens his Christmas stocking.

By then, Hanna had a job as a countryside ranger at Lochore Meadows, which meant that she had to go away on ranger-training courses all over the Scotland in order to learn fire-fighting, first aid, malt whisky appreciation and that sort of thing. I was left alone to hold the fort, man the phone and sulk. It was on a stormy, dark night with rain streaming down the windows that Buster came back. I was in my pyjamas and dressing gown, lounging in our expensive sofa with a good book and with a roaring log fire on the go when Buster put his flat face against the pane and wailed and wailed for an hour or more. I let him in and he never left again.

If Buster wasn't in the house and we couldn't find him, it was because we never went looking. He took to going into the assistant warden's bothy or the volunteers' bunk-room and that was fine by us. He was in our bad books a lot of the time because he had shredded the sofa that we had bought from a very posh shop in Edinburgh. Princess Anne had one just like it, they said, producing a glossy photo from Hello Magazine. Her's might have had a few dog hairs on it; maybe a horse slept on it, but it looked in good nick. Buster made short work of ours.

Vane Farm was the nearest RSPB reserve to Edinburgh and therefore a handy place for staff to meet up to discuss everything relating to birds in Scotland. Our director, Frank Hamilton often popped in at weekends with his policeman son Rory for a bit of birdwatching and there were regular scottish staff meetings that brought in people from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Orkney and Shetland. It was an honour to play host to such an elite bunch of conservationists, all legends back then, and still today. Sometimes we would get a visitor from The Lodge (RSPBs HQ in Sandy, Bedfordshire).

Hanna and Buster.

Ian Prest (the Chief Exec) used to come up for the Scottish Members' Day and other big occasions and sometimes his wife would come too. One day, for some reason, Hanna and I ended up serving dinner in our bungalow to the Prests and the Hamiltons and it all went very well until Buster strolled in and dragged his bulky frame up onto Ian's lap.

"That's torn it!"  I said to Hanna in the kitchen, "Buster's going to shred Ian's pants!"

We looked around the door to see Mr and Mrs Prest cooing over Buster who gave us one of those looks that spoke volumes.

With us both working long hours and travelling a lot, we were quite often away. In summer, we would work for days or weeks on end without a break and then go off to the highlands for four days, visiting other staff or rangers. Buster would move into the Bothy. For a night out, Hanna and I would meet in the Balgedie Toll house once a fortnight to marry up our diaries, have a pint or two and eat burgers.

On one such night we returned to an empty house and proceeded to brew up and settle in when we heard a strange noise from the pantry, which was also our back door-way. We had put in a cat-flap so Buster could get in and out that way so I guessed he was messing about out there. I thought that he was probably stuck in the flap as he was very over-weight and not very bright. I turned on the light but there was no sign of him.

Hanna digging the garden. The white door led to our pantry.

Then came that noise again, a scratching and a sort of whining, almost human. This freaked us out and Hanna handed me a brass poker and made me look again. Still nothing... Then I was sure I heard a muffled voice say "Meow, this is Buster. Feed me. Feed me."

I don't believe in human ghosts and certainly not ghost cats, but I was pretty spooked and so was Hanna.

The sound was definitely coming from the pantry so I went back in and dragged out all the bottles, potatoes and other stuff we stored there. Still nothing. I brought out our wellies and shook them out....... and there was a walkie-talkie handset, hissing with static that almost, but not quite, covered the sound of young men choking themselves while trying not to laugh out loud.  One more victory to the bunk-room boys.

Buster's suicide.

At least once a year we would take a long trip to visit Hanna's folks in Chicago. One year we left Buster in the hands of Gareth, our assistant warden-cum-houseboy. When we got home, the first thing we saw was Buster sprawled flat on the carpet with a bloody knife and a suicide note that read something like. "I kannot take it no mor. He are krule to me and he do not fede me. Buster." 

Of course this was another prank, but this time the points went to Gareth.

Buster was a latecomer to the Vane Farm menagerie. By the time he arrived, we already had two goats and a lot of chickens that laid their eggs all over the yard and the garden.

One of the hens was called Stretch. She was particularly easy to catch and the bunk-room boys used to experiment on her. Someone had told them that you could hypnotise a chicken by making a mark on the ground and then holding her beak to it. I would never have believed it, but it worked. In fact, you could draw an imaginary line and that worked too. Stretch would stay there for ever and they could pick her up and walk around with her while she was in a trance. The goats were much more tricky.

Stewart Hamilton and the goats.

Nanny was a big, white, bad-tempered goat with a beard and crooked teeth, but thankfully no horns. She had been mistreated and her jaw had been broken at some point. She was never in great health, but, boy, was she strong? It took four of us to milk her. We soon gave up on that she dried off. We would take her up the hill on a lead and tether her to an iron stake in a place where we wanted to clear a bit of grass. The public would pat her and some started to bring food, and she got pretty good at mugging visitors for treats. We got quite a few complaints, not about the muggings but about Nanny's jaw which we were accused of causing. Some kind soul later brought Nanny a "friend" in the form of a tiny grey goat with horns. They lived together in a stone outhouse and never really got on. The little one often butted Nanny in the ribs, so we called her Zola Butt (after the olympic runner, Zola Budd).

Jon Wilson and Zola Butt.

Every day would start with getting the goats out, and end with putting them away. Sometimes we would forget, until either they called for us to come and get them, or they literally "upped stakes" and bolted for home.  We would sometimes send a rookie volunteer up the hill to walk them home and they would often come into the yard like Ben Hur, dragged along the ground behind a Roman chariot. The regulars would simply let them go and they would make their own way back.

The Press Officer from Edinburgh was David Mitchell. He would pop by quite often on his way to and from RSPB film shows and events around the Highlands. We quite often had a housefull and the regulars would play Trivial Pursuits, which Gordon the Warden always won, unless David was in town.  Well, no one likes a know-it-all do they? We sent David up the hill to get the goats and waited for the inevitable. And we waited. Eventually he came into the yard with both goats on leads, walking to heel!  We always called him the Lonely Goatherd after that.

It eventually became obvious that Hanna was pregnant and everyone was thrilled about this, especially us. Gareth made us a card that read. "Congratulations to you both. I hope the baby has his mother's good looks and his dad's easy-going personality.... Oh my God, Ive just had a terrible thought. G." 

* DINKs = Double Income, No Kids.

Pinkfeet and warm wellies at Vane Farm.

Dawn flight at Roy's Folly, with Reed Bower beyond.
 The photo was taken from Kirkgate Point
by Chris Gomersall. 

Pink-footed geese have always been the star turn at Loch Leven and we often had several thousand in the back field below the hill and even more on the shore-line. The evocative sound of Norfolk pinkfeet takes me right back to Loch Leven. The sound of one pink-foot is not hard to describe (they say "wack-wack") but the sound of 15 or 20 thousand of them is more challenging. I think it's like being stuck in a tunnel while the Flying Scotsman goes through at full steam, inches from your face. Mostly I encounter flocks of two to three thousand at a time and they sound more like an airborne commuter train passing low overhead.

Pinkfoot (on the left)
Gordon on the right.

Their pink legs are not the best identification feature as they are often hidden by grass or tucked up in flight, and anyway, other geese have pink legs too. What I look for is a smallish brown head on a slim brown neck that clearly ends in a pale breast. It looks like they have been upended in hot chocolate. Their wings are pale grey and their small bills are dark with a pink band, but you rarely get close enough to see that because these birds are very flighty, partly because they are regularly shot at, but also because there could be 20,000 pairs of eyes in a big flock, all looking out for trouble.

Goose-watching has its own vocabulary that comes largely from those who hunt them, with a bit of aeronautics thrown in. I suppose I picked up the jargon from Sir Peter Scott, who was a hunter, painter, skater, conservationist, siler and glider pilot. He understood wildfowl better than anyone I ever knew.

Geese landing on stubbles.

The word "flock" best describes geese on the ground when they behave like sheep with feathers on. Geese are, after all, grazing birds, like walking lawnmowers with feet placed in the middle for walking, rather than at the back for swimming. I think the word flock is appropriate when they are on the water too, but maybe "flotilla" would be better? Geese become much more visually interesting when they take to the air and then we need a richer vocabulary to describe what we see. They embody wildness and freedom. "Flock" just doesn't cover it because it sounds too domestic.

If geese are disturbed by people or another predator, they all rise in the air at once in a "pack". If they take off from water or an open field they soon start to form strings that we call "skeins". (A skein is a length of yarn or wool, usually stored in a loose knot and the term was borrowed to describe the stringy formations that geese make.) These skeins are most obvious when the birds are flying towards you or away from you. The birds try to fly in line abreast, possibly because their vision is best to sides rather than the front like us. If the skein stays airborne long enough, such as on migration, then "chevrons" start to form as individual birds become leaders.  One of my favourite sights is to see hundreds of knotted skeins of geese coming in off the sea or flying off the Loch with the blue hills behind.

Rear view. Gordon get's goosed.

I loved to watch the geese "whiffling in" to the island at dusk. In order to drop steeply into a small space they spill the air from under their wings by rocking from side to side, a ploy often used by pilots of old fashioned planes to prevent overshooting the runway. Just before touch-down geese drop their "undercarriage" and spread their webbed feet to act as air brakes. By this point they are going so slowly that they are in danger of stalling so they reconfigure their wings by sticking their thumb feathers (alulae) up to form a flap, just like a modern jet. The operation is very similar to a jet fighter landing on the short deck of a carrier.

I was honoured (and terrified)  to give a talk about the geese in Cleish to an audience of locals, many of whom were our neighbours and mostly involved in agriculture. It was an important talk for me so I prepared it really well. The first slide was black and the plan was to play a tape of the geese "flighting" from the loch at dawn. It would start quietly and build to a crescendo as I showed more and more slides of the skeins of geese rising on a grey morning that slowly got brighter. The lights went down, the black slide did its job and I groped for the tape player in the dark, knocking it onto the floor. I then pressed the fast-forward button and the play button at the same time which resulted in a cartoonish falsetto din. People fell about laughing and I never really regained control of the situation.

Front view.
Gordon with a greylag.

In my day we would look for the first arrivals from the Arctic in late September, but the big flocks would pile in during October so that there could be well over 20,000 roosting on St Serf's Island at night. We counted them at dawn as they flew out to feed on the surrounding farms. Gordon the Warden allocate us counting spots and we would do our best to estimate the numbers. My notebook looked like this: 1+22+52,+78+ c2000+ c3500 etc. So that was 5653! I always think an odd number sounds more convincing.

Dawn counts were better than evening counts because the birds would often drift in during the failing light or even after dark when we couldn't see them. At least, if birds were late in the morning you could see them, unless it was foggy.

I remember one morning we waited and waited for the fog to clear, sure that the birds were still on the island because we could hear them, but when the sun eventually broke through we saw them already on the fields. They had swum ashore under the fog, not willing to get airborne. On moonlit nights it was even more tricky because the birds often fed under the moon. Then you could be staring at an empty Loch as the sun rose, only to have them come home for a bath at 10 am.

The ringing team with Gordon Wright.

Ringing the geese was a spectacular and rather violent affair involving nets that were attached to projectiles like mortars that were fired from tubes stuck in the ground. This was called "cannon netting" and was considered better than rocket netting because it didn't produce masses of smoke and didn't fail quite as often. The birds would be encouraged to feed on the right spot for several days beforehand by spreading liberal amounts of grain or potatoes around, then the nets would be set in darkness, covered with loose straw and then all would be in place by dawn. The cannons were wired together and fired from a central control box, so hopefully they would all fire at once, carrying the nets over the feeding birds before they knew what was happening. Then the crew would run out from their hiding places to make sure no birds escaped and start gathering them into sacks for processing. The birds calm down if they are kept in a dark space. The rings were usually aluminium BTO rings with a number and a return address embossed on them but sometimes larger coloured rings were used that could be read through binoculars, assuming your birds were not swimming, or walking in long grass.

The results of the ringing programme revealed where the birds stopped off in Scotland and England and we now know that we had birds from Iceland and Greenland, but I'm guessing the Loch Leven birds are mostly Icelandic while the west coast birds might be from Greenland. Gordon once led an Earthwatch trip to Svalbard to ring some geese, but I think that those birds mostly winter in Denmark and Holland.

Chris Gomersall, the RSPB's photographer, and I, set out to get some stock footage of the geese for the Lodge. I fired off about three (expensive) films in the first session, but he didn't take any pictures! What he did was to stake out locations and gauge what the light might be like at certain times of day, then he put up a hide and got some crackers. Filming for the TV with Bill Oddie was a bit more of a one-shot chance, but I betted on a good view from near Kinross House and we did well. A young lass had entered a competition to win this day out with Bill and had chosen to come to Loch Leven. Bill was a great host and I'm sure she will never forget the day, and neither will I.

A twitch for an Arctic redpoll.

Another film crew came to film a documentary about the ruined castle that sits on on an island off Kinross. Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner there, and it's a bleak sort of place. This was all organised through Gordon, who was off somewhere at the time, so Hanna got the job of ferrying the crew out across the grey loch. It was well-paid work, so Hanna was really pleased to be able to buy herself an engagement ring from her earnings. (Don't say it, I know, but I am half Scots and the other half is Yorkshire so you wouldn't expect charity from me would you?)  The ring was later stolen during a party at our house on Mahe in the Seychelles. Our American friend Becky waved her huge diamond in my face and said, "Oh Jim, you have to buy her another one. Imagine how I would feel if I lost this!"  ................I thought about this for a moment then answered...."Weightless?"

I used to drive around the loch, spotting where the geese were feeding so that visitors would get a chance to see them. Even so, they could be hard to find. Grey and brown geese on a muddy field don't stand out very well and you could easily drive past a thousands of them without noticing. Hanna and I were on such a recce one day when we found a yellow neap-field full of corn marigolds. I had to stop and take photos and so we parked up and climbed the gate, only to spot that someone was there before us. An Indian gentleman in a city suit was standing in the middle of the flowers, surrounded by migratory silver Y moths. More amazingly we knew him! "Isn't that Prakash Gole?" said Hanna. And so it was. He was a leading and inspirational conservationist, the Indian Peter Scott, whom we had both met at a Wildfowl Trust Conference. Just like us, he was simply entranced by what was around him.

The Fife and Kinross bird-race teams.

We always had a good variety of wintering wildfowl below the Vane. At that time the RSPB didn't approve of feeding the birds, but I would sneak a bit of grain out when the weather was hard, sometimes skiing on the ice while pulling a sledge. We had packs of widgeon and teal close by and diving ducks out in the water. Highlights included the odd long-tailed duck, a snow goose or two, stray Greenland white-fronted geese and an American widgeon.  If we fancied a change of view, a quick trip to Largo Bay would produce rafts of eiders, scoters and scaup on the sea, so winter was never boring. Today you have a chance of a white tailed eagle over the house in winter, or an osprey in summer.

Apart from the wildfowl there was plenty of bird life to keep us interested  In spring the curlews, redshanks and lapwings returned to the shore while, on the hill, we had breeding redpolls and tree pipits. The Benarty crags were dominated by a pair of peregrines and several nesting fulmars, which may seem odd so far inland but the sea is closer than you might think. You can see across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and beyond to Bass Rock and North Berwick from the top of the hill.

The range of habitats at Vane Farm.

The BTO Breeding Bird Survey was carried out by two of us over the spring in six or more sessions, usually from dawn 'til 10 am, but we sometimes had to do do an hour at dusk if we hadn't got all the way round the site. My favourite dawn count started in the back yard when I heard a strange bird-song coming from the hill, just above the house. It turned out to be a beautifully lit red backed shrike, sitting on a fence. I also remember finding a bluethroat on spring migration in the Cleish Hills.

When should you visit? For me it has to be late autumn when the geese are streaming in and there's snow on the tops.

Farming for wildlife at Vane Farm.

The shoreline below the house.

Quentin Ballantyne was our neighbouring farmer at Benarty. His family occupied an imposing house that was tucked below the crags and so received even less winter sun than our house. At one time the Ballantynes farmed the Vane as well but sold it to the RSPB and then rented the flat bits back from us. Our relationship was always interesting, and sometimes quite tricky. He loved to wind us up, and really had it in for Gordon the Warden who lived between him and us, but he made some effort to get along with us as individuals while still remaining a thorn in the side of the Nature Conservancy and the RSPB.

Quentin would turn up at the kitchen door bearing gifts of vegetables and potatoes for planting by Hanna, and he could be really charming. He was quite distinguished looking with a twinkle in his eye, but he chose to play the yokel role by looking a bit like a tramp; unshaven with holes in his jumper, an old flat cap, and faded cords held up with a knotted RSPB tie. This look was very much a deliberate act, designed to wind us up. He was actually from a wealthy Borders clan that owned woolen mills (and salmon fishing) along the Tweed. I used to encounter him at the weekly cattle market in Perth where he dressed up to the nines and looked like the aristocratic farmer he really was.
It was a good ploy to look down-at-heel when negotiating with the RSPB. Quentin wanted his rent reduced and challenged the Society when we tried to raise it. John Hunt (our Reserves Manager) stood his ground so Quentin took us to a tribunal that was held at Vane Farm. We were confident that we would win and felt that having the meeting on our home turf would be an advantage. John represented the RSPB but Quentin brought in a cousin who was a lawyer. He plonked a tape recorder down on the table and took charge of the proceedings from the start. We lost.

Over time we slowly became more accepted by the farmers around the Loch. One factor was that we took part in community life and got to know people. The local ceilidhs were the social apex of the year and we eagerly anticipated them.  "The Whistling Postie," Tom Webster, was an absolute treasure and he used to hold forth at weekly dances in Kinross that were organised for the tourists, and he would get a VIP police escort home if he had too much to drink. But the farm ceilidhs were the real deal.

Ploughing

We never attended the Young Farmers doo as we were told that it usually got a bit out of hand. Maybe we missed out on a good night! The big Ceilidh at Kinnesswood wasn't exactly sedate either; it was a total blast from start to finish.  The venue was a huge empty barn with an array of straw bales. After your first visit and the resulting rash, you remembered to bring a thick blanket to sit on the next time. There was a sign on the wall that pointed to the Gents, but it just led to a field. The ladies had a caravan parked outside with just one tiny loo. You would sit on the upholstered benches in the caravan until it was your turn to take a pee. Meanwhile, a flask and a lot of gossip was passed around.

We soon knew all the dances. Hanna, with baby Nicholas on her hip, would be whirled around the room by Quentin, who cleaned up remarkably well, and I would dance with Mrs. Ballantyne, then we would get mixed up in the mayhem which only fell apart when the crooners got hold of the microphone at about midnight.

You might think that a tee-total ceilidh in the little church hall in Cliesh would be a bit of an anticlimax after the well-lubricated affair in Kinnesswood, but you would be wrong. Actually, I'm not convinced that there was no alcohol; a lot of people kept leaving the room to get a breath of fresh air in the pitch black outside and came back with rosier cheeks than before. Events like these were the glue that held the community together and we felt so lucky to be included.

Big equipment by Gordon's house.

Quentin grew crops in the field between Gordon's house and ours and, come October, we would be treated to the sound of a couple of thousand geese alighting outside our bedroom window to feed on the stubbles. Sometimes he would put Aberdeen Angus beef cattle into the field but the fencing was really poor and I often had to botch up a tangle of wire in the pouring rain when the cattle got out. It was worse down on the foreshore because the boundaries ended in the loch and the cattle would wade around the end of the fences if the water level dropped. We used to wade out up to our armpits in the loch carrying a bar stool, a roll of barbed wire, length of steel pole and a sledge hammer.  I had to stand on stool and reach up to the top of the post to bang it in. Sometimes we drove it in six feet, but it made no difference. The winter ice would carry the whole thing away as it broke up in spring.

Corn marigolds 

In our final year at the Vane, Quentin decided to retire. He had already sold his house and downsized to a modern, sunny house that had heating, and now he  decided to sell Benarty Farm. At one point Centre Parcs showed some interest, but eventually, he accepted an offer from the RSPB and we planned the way it more or less looks today. First though, we had to take two fields of oilseed rape to harvest and I didn't have a clue what to do with them. We must have been the only RSPB Reserve at the time with scarecrows and bangers in the fields. A neighbour harvested the crop with his combine and it was dried at another neighbours.

This interdependence with neighbouring farmers was another step forward for us and I was invited to speak to a farmer's gathering. I knew it would be a tricky one and I had about 80 slides ready in my projector but I didn't actually use any of them; I simply sat on the table and asked for questions. An hour later, I thought it had gone really quite well. They were good company and I was surprised how many of them I knew by this point.

The last crop of oilseed rape.

I got to sit up in the cab of the big combine harvester as one of our fields of rape was brought in and then popped home for lunch. On the table lay a brown envelope that contained the monthly RSPB wardens' newsletter, known at "The Bully". I loved reading what the other wardens wrote and it was like a letter from home. Various other bits and bobs fell out of the envelope and one was the yellow sheet that advertised upcoming vacancies with the Society. Usually, these were for seasonal wardens, cleaners and secretaries, but this one offered a posting to the Seychelles to assist BirdLife International there by training local staff. I asked Hanna if she fancied it and she said "Why not?"

Another episode of our lives was about to begin that would keep us away from Scotland for some years to come. It was a huge adventure, but that's a story for another time.

Education, education, edification.

Vane farm was originally bought as one of two RSPB reserves in Scotland's central belt that had environmental education as their raison d'etre,  the other one was Lochwinnoch, over in the west. I was employed by the Education Department, not Reserves division, but things gradually drifted towards the warden (me) reporting to our Reserves Department in Edinburgh and Fay Pascoe, our education officer, reporting to the Lodge down in England. Confused?

Pepper Boletus

I had a long background in Environmental Education myself, but all of it in the south. Fay introduced me to a whole set of educational activities that were appropriate to the site and the Scottish curriculum. In those days you were allowed to taste things; not just the obvious ones like blueberries off the hill but the odd fungus such as pepper boletus and plants like sheep's sorrel (like the one in your salad) and wood sorrel that is totally unrelated but tastes the same because they both contain oxalic acid.

The Vane was a popular destination for schools during the week, and for Young Ornithologists at week-ends. On the day before a school visit, we wrapped corrugated cardboard sheets around trees and put out pitfall traps to make sure we had a good selection of decomposers and predators among our mini-beasts. Years later, I used the very same tools on two teacher training courses in Tanzania; one on the coast in Dar es Salaam and one in the Uluguru Mountains above Morogoro where I worked with a fellow RSPB man, Zul Bhatia. Zul had left Insh Marshes to lead an EU funded project with me. He's just retired as the warden at Lochwinnoch.


I found that the Tanzanian teachers really didn't like handling the toads, beetles and such-like that we caught in our pitfall traps, and that there was often a good reason for that. I also learned that you don't go beating the trees for insects in hot countries. In Scotland it's usually so cold that the bugs just fall off the trees onto your sheet. In Africa they usually go berserk and sting you. It's also wise to look out for snakes and the odd leopard that might be up your tree. My pitfall traps succeeded brilliantly down on the coast but up in the montane forest they failed dismally. A troop of colobus monkeys watched us put the traps out at dusk and emptied them for us at dawn... but I digress.

Jim leading a YOC event.

Fay didn't do all the teaching on her own; she had a brilliant team of teacher naturalists from around the Loch. Margaret Crichton had a particular trick of memorising every child's name for the duration of the visit. Weeks later kids would test her when they encountered her out shopping and she would have to admit that her technique worked in the short term only. It was really impressive though. Bridget Grey (Biddy) was a great naturalist and very active in the local wildlife societies and then there was Quentin's sister-in-law, Jane Smith who obviously loved working with the children.

Fay was eventually promoted to be the RSPB's senior education person in Scotland and Jackie Youill took over from her at Vane Farm. We often worked together on events at Vane Farm and sometimes took a Young Ornithologists Road Show on a Scottish tour. I remember that the shows in Glasgow and Inverness were sold out, but Oban was a a bit of a shock; no-one came until an hour after the start. The Hebrides and the west coast really do live to the beat of a different drum.

Native Americans

We held quite a few special events for Young Ornithologists, including a Halloween trip at night to Castle Island using a flotilla of boats, each with a lantern in the bow. We held joint training days with the Scottish Countryside Rangers Association, hosting two famous educators from the USA, Steve Van Meter and Joseph Cornel, but I think the most fun was had playing "Red Indians" with Michael Caduto. I still have my costume and the rope burns from when the children tied me up and tried to scalp me during a reenactment of Custer's Last Stand at Little Bighorn.

On the informal side, we used to barnstorm the local village halls with slide shows and I would usually take someone along to help, often by running a sales table at the bigger events. In those days you could easily find five groups a week to talk to in the winter. I even used to go and talk to the mums in the coffee break at the local playgroup.

Dunfermline had its own RSPB members' group and we met in the Carnegie Hall, which was pretty palatial. I saw some really good speakers there and went to some good concerts too. Our top guest was Prof. David Bellamy who was a huge TV star at the time and hosted several great series.  His book on the ecology of the American West remains a classic. The problem with David was that he overbooked himself; said yes to everyone and was invariably late. We knew this, so I was geared up with a talk that I could give if he didnt turn up, or was delayed. I had a deal with the projectionist that he would put a sunset slide up if David was in the building, and I shared this secret with the audience. I got five minutes into my talk when the sunset went up on-screen and the audience went wild. It remains the best applause I have ever had at the end of a talk, and it was my shortest ever presentation.

Most talks were pretty close to home; Edinburgh, Perth, Dunfermline, St Andrews or Dundee; but I was happy to go further afield. One autumn night I spoke in a little hall by the Black Wood of Rannoch and then set off to drive home. It didn't seem windy but, as I rounded a bend on a narrow road my headlights picked up a mass of brown leaves blowing across the road, and the car skidded. I pulled up to check my tyres and saw that I was driving through a carpet of frogs. It took me ages to clear a way through.

On a similar night I was booked to speak in a classic corrugated iron village hall near Loch of the Lowes, above Dunkeld in the hamlet of Butterstone. The Scottish Womens' Rural Institutes (WRI) was a formidable institution and I spoke to many of their groups in the region. This one was celebrating it's anniversary with, not one, but two guest speakers and they had invited the girls from the local boarding school along. My fellow speaker was a specialist in flower arranging; so no sweat there, I thought.

Well, it was obvious from the start that I was the make-weight, and I was on second. Her talk was absolutely brilliant; mine less so. I have to say, it was a great evening out and the hospitality was wonderful.

I spoke to the Kinross WRI  more than once. The first visit was a disaster; not because my talk was bad; I never gave it. It was their AGM and halfway through the treasurer stormed off in a huff, taking half my audience with her. Then there was a lot of argument and and I was ushered back-stage with a cup of tea. My hosts apologised and said it would be best if I came back another time. I heartily agreed.

My most memorable talk was in another corrugated iron hut somewhere in deepest Perthshire where my talk went down especially well, but the best bit was outside in the car park. People helped me outside with my gear and we all stopped to stare in amazement at the full-on display of northern lights. After half an hour we dispersed and, in complete darkness,  I backed the car out of it's slot only to hear a nasty crunching sound. The projector, screen and stand had been left on the ground behind the car, rather than in the boot.

And finally......

With Hanna working more than full time as a Fife Ranger and me doing the same at the Vane, we had trouble keeping our diaries in synch, so, once a fortnight, we would have a diary meeting at the Balgedie Toll House where they did a good burger and served proper beer.

We were having an absolute ball, but it was a bit like running a hostel at home, with family and friends always visiting and the assistant warden and the bunkroom volunteers in and out the whole time. Then there was the phone that rang 24/7. That phone really started to get on our nerves and I was tempted to get an answering machine, but these were a luxury at the time.

Late one night, at about 3 am in fact, a man rang me from the docks at Rosyth and told me to get over there quick to rescue a penguin from the dry dock. When I told him that we don't get penguins north of the equator, he said "Are you telling me I don't know what a f*ing penguin looks like?"

I said "Well, it looks like a penguin but it's an auk. They can fly."

A lot of expletives followed, but the gist was that he knew a penguin when he saw one, and I didn't. It was going to die in the dry dock and it would be my fault. At the time we had a wreck of little auks all along the coast and we had received a mass of calls about them. They were doomed because they were starving. The tanks at the local SSPCA centre were full of them.

By way of contrast, we had a much more polite call about an auk from a lady in St Andrews and she totally accepted my explanation. Next day we had a huge cheque from the same lady and a message  saying that we were the only people who had answered her and shown any concern.

One Christmas, Hanna's parents came over from the USA to stay with us, so when the visitor centre closed for the holiday we moved the tv and the decorations down to our house. Then we carried the Christmas tree down the stairs but, due to the movement and the fact it was as dead as a doornail, all of its needles fell off. After hoovering up the mess, we decided to get another tree, only it was December 23rd. Armed with a torch and a bow-saw and dressed all in black, Hanna's dad and I put on knitted balaclavas, pulled them up over our faces and set off for the new forestry plantation on the Cleish Hills. When we got there we pulled well off the road and coasted to a halt with the lights off then picked our way through the chest-high trees in pitch blackness, more or less by touch. Our senses were wound up to eleven and our eyes steadily got used to the dark, then our ears began to pick up the sound of something pushing between the young trees ahead of us. Roe deer? There were lots of them on the hills. I picked out a Fife accent, and another. The plantation probably held about 1% of the male population of Dunfermline, all on the same mission.

Our triumphant return home with the trophy tree was celebrated with a dram or two and we set the poor wee thing up in the corner. It was the most crooked tree you ever saw with one long side branch that stuck way out into the room and threatened to topple the tree over. We cut it off and turned the stub towards the corner where it didn't show.

At the time there was a huge campaign against the planting up of the highlands with non-native conifers and the RSPB was particularly vocal about this, even though some of it's patrons such as Jean Balfour, had invested heavily in the schemes. So I didnt feel too bad about rewilding a bit of the uplands. However, it was still theft. I imagined the uproar if we had been caught.  "Vigilante RSPB Warden vandalizes Fountain Forestry plantation. Prison sentence expected."

We didn't mind being constantly in demand until we got the news that we were about to be parents. That changed everything.

Everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea of having a wee bairn around the place, but no-one more than Hanna and I. Our assistant warden, Gareth Morgan, was a bit worried; his card read:

"Congratulations! May the baby be born with  Hanna's good looks and Jim's personality."
"PS: I've just had a terrible thought!" 

Gareth was known as Garfie in the bunkroom, and we soon used that moniker too. We are still in touch with him and and he is just the same really. Garfie is a choral tenor and a cellist, so we bought him a tape of Stainer's Crucifixion for his birthday for which he sent a lovely thank-you card that read:

"Thanks for the birthday present: I don't know who Stainer was, but I now know why he was crucified."

We took a trip to Holland for a Kist family gathering when Hanna's sister Katy celebrated getting her PhD from Leiden. She is now a proper art historian and runs her own translation business in Amsterdam. We were all extremely proud of her. After a memorable party in an ice-cream parlour on the beach near Scheveningen, (don't try saying that with your mouth full), and without  saying anything in advance, we showed Hanna's family our photo album which included a print out of our ultrascan. It took a minute for the penny to drop, then "the room went wild", in a polite, restrained, dignified, sort of way.

By the run-up to the Christmas of 1988, Hanna looked a bit like she had a balloon up her jumper and we realised that this would be our last Christmas alone. We took the train to York for weekend of Christmas shopping and dining out, which was great fun, except for the food poisoning! I would tell you the name of the restaurant if I could remember it. We struggled home feeling very poorly, but recovered in time for a lovely Christmas at the Vane. Everyone else had gone home and the place was locked up for the holiday. Instead of having a big meal we dined all day on delicious snacks that we had bought from various foodie haunts in York and Edinburgh.

My birthday falls on March 17th, St Patrick's Day, so it's always an excuse for a party but in 1989 we held it on the 18th. Near midnight we were helping with the washing up when Hanna felt a bit strange. Perhaps she had over done it? By dawn, it was obvious that this was going to be the big day. We had made a few dummy runs to Perth Royal Infirmary. and had a suitcase ready to go. It took just a few minutes to load up the car and we parked out front and walked about on the grey, packed snow watching the sun come up over Bishop Hill. The geese lifted up off St Serf's Island and circled round and Hanna said, "We should go now." I suggested the scenic route over the hills to see the piglets at Glentarkie but Hanna grunted something about a helicopter. We whizzed up the M90 at some speed and so our son Nicholas was born into this world on March 19th with snow, sun and cherry blossom visible from the hospital window. One of his first trips out would be to see the new lambs in the Ochils at Glen Sherrup.

By the autumn Nicholas was getting used to the trials of being out with his dad . I always smelled of Barbour coats and was never seen without binoculars and I walked many miles with him in a papoose, even taking to skis when the chance came up. He thrived on it all. One day I got wind that there had been a "fall" of autumn migrants at Fife Ness, so we set out for a "keek".  A walled garden was absolutely heaving with tiny birds, including goldcrests, firecrests, Pallas's and yellow browed warblers. Little Nicky didn't seem impressed, in fact he was a asleep, but I credited him with the "ticks" anyway. He woke up for a crawl on the rocks later on while eider ducks cooed close by and rafts of scoters bobbed about on the sea beyond.  A grey seal popped up to say hello, and he really liked that, but then he got hungry. The problem was that he was still being breast fed, and he had already had all the milk I had brought along. Fish and chips was all I could manage. He wasn't complaining, but boy was I in trouble when we got home!

Nick used to sit in his high chair in the kitchen at the Vane and survey the courtyard in one direction and the road to kinross in the other. He couldn't talk yet but he made noises; bwerk! meant chicken and Arrrrrrrrrh meant tractor, both of which were common sightings. Hanna would say "Eat your chicken" and Nick would say "Bwerk?" When Hanna nodded, Nick would clench his lips and shake his head. Eventually he would say "Dakter-dakter" which meant tractor. I would have to draw tractors, buy toy tractors, make them out of Lego and talk about them all of the time. He would soon guide my drawings by demanding "maninit" or "diggerback".

About the time he spoke his first single words we took him to Costa Rica on the condition that we didn't move on to a new location every day and he was absolutely fine with that. We used a coffee plantation above San Jose as our base. Finca Rosa Blanca was run by Ruben the Cuban and his glamorous Californian wife and we all loved it there watching the bats and the birds.

Nick made up his first two sentences in Costa Rica. On the west coast he watched a fishing boat. "Boat, boat... white boat." he said. At Monteverde Rainforest Reserve he said "Bider, bider, big bider, poke poke." At this point a hairy spider as big as his face was rearing up at him while he prodded it with a stick.

It was also at Monteverde that he learned to annoy the howler monkeys by shaking  the branches and howling back at them. The males would edge out along the branches to poo on him, but they usually hit me.

Bringing up Nick at Vane Farm was a constant delight. When Hanna returned to work as a senior ranger we didn't have to look far for carers. Geri Wright from next door stepped up first, then Alyson Wilson from the Sluices helped out. He loved them both. Life continued much as before, but our priorities changed. We realised that if we were going to have any more adventures now was the time, before Nick started school.

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We arrived close to the equator on the Seychelles island of Mahe early in the morning. It was already extremely hot and humid in the airport where we were met off the plane by a Seychellois called John Collie. "I know you" said Hanna, "You were a seasonal ranger at Lochore Meadows." It is such a small world isn't it?

By the afternoon we had dragged our four suitcases, a tube full of fishing rods, a wartime typewriter   and a sewing machine to the end of the short runway on Praslin Island and there we sat on the pristine white beach and watched the sun set over the pattern of islands that dotted the horizon. We waited and waited...............eventually, as darkness fell, we heard the sound of an outboard motor and the boat approached that would take us to our new life on Cousin Island. But that's a story for another day.