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Mini-beasts to the max


Down in the pinewoods, something stirs. Small creatures by the million are warming to the season. As you walk a forest track among broadly spaced conifers, look and listen for the signs: a mound of old pine needles, rising to perhaps a metre from the ground; a faint rustle if you listen, very closely; an aroma like vinegar if you sniff at a mound. Wood ants. Scotland is a great place for them,


especially in the old Caledonian pinewoods that are now thriving again across large parts of the Highlands and Aberdeenshire. There are three kinds of mound-building ants you might encounter. The narrow-headed ant – scarcest of these – makes quite small nests and is largely confined to Strathspey. Scottish wood ants and hairy wood ants construct larger nests. Telling these species apart can be tricky. But you don’t


need to be an expert to appreciate their building skills, or to marvel at how piles of dull, dead needles are transformed by the movement of a mass of tiny bodies.


Web tip: www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/fcin090.pdf/$FILE/fcin090.pdf


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Wood ants regularly make the largest nests of any British insect. Each colony can be home to perhaps 100,000 or more of these hard-working creatures.


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Glen Roy NNR is a great place for learning to ‘read’ evidence of landscape changes since the Ice Age, revealed in features such as shorelines, terraces and channels.


Parallel lines


Some people reckoned they were the work of giants. Charles Darwin thought they showed where ancient shores had been left, high and dry, when the ocean retreated (and he was almost correct). It took a Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, and a Scottish geologist, Thomas Jamieson, to work out the answer. The beauty of it is that you can walk the tracks of the


stories and the theories, and see the evidence writ large along the slopes of one of Scotland’s more unusual national nature reserves. Glen Roy, not far from Roybridge, is where three parallel straight lines stretch far along the hillsides. It’s hard not to see them as the work of people. But


these ‘parallel roads’ are quite natural. Together, they hold the best evidence in Britain of how a series of ice-dammed lakes formed and then suddenly drained here at the end of the last Ice Age. After each glacier burst, the mark of the old lake shoreline remained to show the former water’s edge. It’s enough to give these ‘roads’ international importance. Enjoy the tidemarks.


Web tip: www.nnr-scotland.org.uk/reserve.asp?NNRId=23


6 The Nature of Scotland 4


It’s not all sweetness in the light of a spring woodland floor. Ramsons (with white flowers) give a healthy, garlic-rich reek to clear the nostrils as you walk.


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