With its feeling of openness and its regularly spaced trunks, this place makes me think of Winnie the Pooh’s “enchanted place on the top of the forest”. Scots pines, thinned out some years back, have furrowed boles that are bare and straight. They turn ruddy brown towards the crowns from which swoop graceful dark branches. Sunlight filters between the trees, flecking the mossy woodland floor and turning it yellow-green. There are waist-high fronds of male fern and the ground is spongy with needles.
I pick up the remnants of a pine cone. It has been efficiently deconstructed, the scales chewed apart to extract the seeds, a sign of feeding squirrels. These female cones start tightly closed and emerald green. They take two to three years to develop until dispersal stage, when their ripe contents fall to the ground. Take a cone indoors and the warmth of the house will make it expand so the winged seeds can be tapped out.
The sound of my footsteps is absorbed by the springy mass of needles so I can move quietly through the wood. I hear the high-pitched calls of goldcrests though I can’t spot them. They move restlessly through the treetops, using their thin beaks to pick insects out from between the pairs of pine needles. There’s the sudden clatter of distress calls, with an answering sharp “kee-wick”, as small birds mob a tawny owl. A screech of jays, a woodpecker call, but so far no red squirrels.
Domes of fly agaric, scarlet with flaky white spots, have been scraped by teeth marks. Though these storybook fungi are toxic to humans, red squirrels are able to eat them, often leaving them to dry on a high branch before adding to their winter stash. A scratching sound makes me look up and, there they are, two squirrels chasing helter-skelter around a nearby trunk, auburn fur glowing in a patch of light. Fluid, lithe, there’s an exuberance to their movements as they spiral up and down, oblivious to my presence in the energy of the moment. Their hold here may be fragile, but it’s a thrill knowing that it’s still possible to see red squirrels in Allendale.
