As we walk down to the lochside, the warm afternoon sun is muted by growing towers of cloud. Arriving from the south, they mass on the far side of the loch above the Feshie hills, where a faint mantle of light still shines. The air cools. A high-pitched repeated note carries from an island of trees, ringing like a piccolo. It is the osprey chick, hidden in the nest that sits precariously at the top of a ragged larch.
This year, we have seen only one. When we get to the water’s edge, a soft rain begins and we shelter under a spread of oaks. Their layered canopy keeps us dry as the shower swells, casting a veil over loch, shore and forest.
In the nest, a head rises and turns. Nearby, a parent bird sits on a favoured spike of dead tree, watching. Then the chick makes an ungainly stand and begins to flex its wings, flapping on the spot, over and over again. It is preparing to fledge, strengthening and practising, but it looks for all the world as if it is beating off the rain.
The fall gets heavier and the chick hunkers back down. There is now a percussion on the thousands of leaves above us and an occasional drop lands on my notebook, blurring the pencil marks. Nature writing takes on new meaning.
Slowly, the rain softens to a speckling on the water and the occasional tree-drip. Small birds flit low over the loch and a duck quacks. Two swimmers laugh in the shallows. The hills are hidden now as the walls of cloud have closed in, everything vanished but this place. The rain stops. Everything is slick with wet: the Scots pines in their deep hunter green, the emerald rushes, the ferny fronds of bracken, neon bright, and the carpet of paler blaeberry leaves.
A breeze sends a shudder through the oaks, setting off a shower of droplets. The birches tremble, their cascading leaves touched with early gold, as insects rise from the grass into air still laden with damp. The chick’s high whistling resumes while the parent watches, all this time motionless and silent.
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
