After the summer’s cacophony of greens, the broadleafs among the Scots pines are turning – the larches to green-yellow and bronze, the birches to a warmer yellow, but turning to bronze and copper too. I’m walking along a path with a line of larches and mostly pines behind. Storm Amy has made its presence felt, and a number of trees are windthrown.
Through new gaps I see a couple of gnarly “granny” pines I’d not noticed before, so I head in towards them, crackling over fallen twigs and branches festooned with lichens. This area is for the most part plantation, so the trees are quite uniform in age, spacing and girth, with some granny outliers that speak to an earlier time. I find a storm path of sorts, diagonal lines where trees have dominoed, or where one has partially fallen and is resting on another. Each points north-east to a fault.
I scramble over casualties of previous storms that are now moss-covered hillocks with their own micro-habitats. Those trees have changed the ecosystem, and these newly fallen ones will change it again. As they gradually senesce, beetles, ants, hoverflies and fungi – some quite rare and dependent on deadwood – will find a home, and they in turn will change in the different stages of decay. More daylight will filter in, changing the understorey. Pioneer species like birch and rowan might gain a foothold, juniper too.
The root plates of the fallen trees are my height or taller, and the grit at their base is perfect for capercaillies to dust-bathe, should any be in the vicinity. The holes they create may turn into small pools, attracting aquatic and semi‑aquatic plants, amphibians and insects, including dragonflies and their larvae. Remaining trees will have more space to bulk out.
The wind strengthens. This cancels out any last vestiges of the coal tit and crestie calls I’ve been hearing, and the squeak of trunk against trunk. There’s something uniquely vulnerable about being among trees when it starts to blow a hoolie: the upper branches start to whip and a frenzy of birch leaves showers down, bright in the last of the afternoon sun. I reckon it’s time to head home.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
