In Knoydart today the sun rose at 9am and will set at 3.42pm giving us just six hours, forty-two minutes of daylight. Of course, those times are for when the sun actually rises above the horizon, assuming the horizon is unobstructed. We’ve got lots of hills here in Knoydart so the sun doesn’t actually appear above Beinn Buidhe to the south-east of me until about 10am. It then slouches its way across the southern skyline, lighting up our day for a few hours in a kind of can’t-be-bothered-getting-out-of-bed-today kind of way, and then slumps behind a rocky hill around 2.30pm: four and a half hours when we can actually see the sun – if it’s a clear day.

I hesitated back there to call this “daylight”; right now I’m looking out of the window at a grey sky. Even the limp wet grass is a sickly green and the skeletal branches of the ash trees, caught in the mist, look like wiry ghosts lost in fog. Last year we had snow and blue skies <!–more–> and all was sparkly and white. There’s still plenty of time for snow this winter but I’m getting impatient so I’ve been looking back on some of my photos of Knoydart last year when we had one of the coldest and snowiest winters for a long time. I thought I’d share some of my favourites to mark the winter solstice.

So forget for a moment the stress of Christmas shopping in out-of-town retail parks, leaning on the steering wheel staring at brake lights in yuletide traffic jams and worrying about how to pay off your credit card bill in the new year and think instead of crunching through the snow, hoar frost twinkling on the birch trees, stamping the snow off your boots at the end of the day and enjoying a large glass of mulled wine by a roaring log fire. And if the reality is dampness, darkness and rain console yourself in the knowledge that today is the winter solstice and from now on we get a little bit of extra daylight every day (and there’s still time for some proper snow to come our way).

Postscipt: I’ve just done a bit of research into the winter solstice and discovered that the precise moment of the winter solstice – when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky – varies from year to year. This year it happens at 5.30am on the 22nd – so I’m a whole day early with this spiel about the days getting longer. Sorry folks, but we still have until 5.30am tomorrow before the sun starts to climb higher into the sky. Bah-Humbug.

They said it would be windy and it was. Technically speaking the storm that hit us on 8th December wasn’t a hurricane – that name only applies to the mega-depressions that blossom in the mid-Atlantic – but the winds were hurricane force. Here are some exciting stats for you: highest recorded windspeed was 165mph on Cairngorm summit. At lower levels the strongest gust was 105mph at Tulloch Bridge and in my garden my anemometer peaked at 73mph. This might sound a paltry figure compared to the other two but bear in mind my garden is on a sheltered bay in Loch Nevis and 73mph is still hurricane force (just).

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Thanks to the power of social networking sites the storm soon became known as “Hurricane Bawbag”, crude Scottish slang for part of the male anatomy. If you want a more specific definition, google it. Why it was given this name is a mystery to me. (As a Sassunach who has lived in Scotland for the best part of 15 years you’d think I would get Scottish humour by now.) The prudish among you may prefer the official name of this Atlantic depression: “Friedhelm” (according to Wikipedia). But my favourite term is that used by meteorologists who – for a bunch of level-headed scientists – came up with an unexpectedly sensationalist phrase : ”weather bomb”.

The storm peaked around mid-afternoon so I sensibly put my wellies and jacket on and headed down to the beach to film the weather bombing. I gave up using a tripod: it was impossible to keep the camera still so I just lay on the pebbles and held it as steady as I could. I’ve never seen our sheltered loch look so menacing. The wind sounded like the screams of a banshee and the squalls tore the water from the surface. The open sea to the west of us must have been heaving.

I’d have liked to have filmed a bit more but a combination of factors: salt spray hitting the camera, feet losing contact with the ground and trees being blown over, persuaded me to indulge in the comfort of a hot cup of tea and a Tunnocks teacake in my living room. As darkness fell, the slates blew off the roof and the hen house began to rock from its foundations. It was going to be a tough night for our chicken. Next day I headed out to help with the clean up in the village. Electricity and phones were off (phones are still off as I write this five days later) and the school was closed. In the pub that evening an argument raged about which storm was worse: this one or the one in 2005.

So, here’s the geeky bit where I compare the two storms. The tide was much higher in ’05 and the storm surge washed parts of our road away but this recent storm felled more trees. As for wind speeds, the strongest gust on the summit of Cairngorm in 2011 (165mph) beats that of 2005 (139mph) but at low levels the competition is closer. In ’05 a wind speed of 134mph was recorded on the island of North Rona compared with 105mph at Tulloch Bridge in 2011. But the Isle of Rona is a tiny exposed island on the edge of the Atlantic so you’d expect the wind to be stronger there. Tulloch Bridge is some way inland so a more favourable comparison would use the strongest inland gust and that was 96mph in 2005 at Loch Glascarnoch. The argument as to which storm was worse rages on, as does the wind…it’s blowing a gale out there again as I write.

I watched BBC Autumnwatch’s report on the annual deer cull last night. Liz Bonin gave an excellent insight into this – as they put it – “controversial” subject.  The use of this word was my only gripe with the BBC’s approach.

The deer cull is only controversial to those who don’t understand it. Michaela Strachan was spot on, however, when she said “you’ve got to have an informed opinion”. When I moved to Knoydart six years ago to work as a countryside ranger I will admit I didn’t fully understand the complex matter of deer culling. This soon changed as I learned from the Knoydart Foundation’s professional stalkers why it is necessary.

When I ran guided walks in Knoydart I met a lot of meat-eating tourists who were very uncomfortable about the fact that my employers took out an annual deer cull. At least a few of them were outraged. I tried to impart on them some of the knowledge I had gained on the subject and now I’m going to try again in this blog. Bear in mind this is coming from someone who loves wildlife and has no desire to kill anything (except for houseflies and midges).

Deer fence – no deer browsing on the left, plenty on the right

Highland estates have different approaches to deer stalking. Many operate purely as sport shooting estates where paying “guests” dressed in tweeds pay handsome sums to bag a majestic stag. This is not the kind of deer stalking I’m talking about. The Glen Feshie estate featured on BBC Autumnwatch has a similar approach to that of Knoydart Foundation: reduce deer numbers to reduce browsing pressure on moorland and woodland. It’s a conservation ethic, not a “sporting” one. The key point here is that humans have upset the ecological balance by eradicating top predators from the food chain, namely the wolf and the lynx.

The result? A population explosion in red deer – heavy browsing of moorland plants and tree seedlings which leads to degenerating habitats. This is most noticable in the lack of forest cover and the lack of an understorey layer in existing woodland leaving the mature trees as the last men standing. The knock on effect is a loss in biodiversity – less wildlife. The Autumnwatch programme highlighted some of the species that rely on a healthy woodland ecosystem: capercaillie, crested tit and red squirrels. We have none of these native species in Knoydart, largely due to heavy browsing by deer. And I haven’t even mentioned how the deer themselves suffer through over-population: they are more prone to disease and suffer greatly in harsh winters due to the lack of shelter caused by their own over-browsing of the woodland ecosystem.

So, while I don’t like to see deer being shot, it has to be done if we want to correct the subtle balance of nature that we have upset. In my eyes, the deer stalker is playing the part of the wolf. And just as the wolf would have eaten the meat, so too do we. The venison is sold to a game dealer and some of it is sold locally within Knoydart. As a carnivore myself I feel much more comfortable eating the meat of a wild animal that has lived a free life on the hills than I am eating a mass-produced piece of chicken or pig that has been intensively farmed. I made this point to the meat eaters on my guided walks who felt uncomfortable about deer stalking. Invariably they went away with a different opinion about the deer cull – an informed opinion.

I used to get asked this question a lot when I was one of the Knoydart rangers. The truth is, it isn’t usually snowy as it is today. A typical winter involves weeks of rain, gales and grey mist. In a word, winter is “dreich”.

But the last two winters, like much of the UK, we have had much colder weather with a lot of snow. Even so, Knoydart still doesn’t get as much snow as most of the Highlands, even when we get a cold one. Why is this? The main reason – and the one you’ll always hear – is that the Gulf Stream – warm waters from the Caribbean – keep the western coastal strip of Scotland a few degrees warmer than further inland. In fact the whole of the UK is much milder than land at the same latitude: Knoydart is at the same latitude as Hudson Bay in Canada, where the sea freezes and polar bears amble across the tundra.

But there’s another reason why we don’t get as much snow as elsewhere in the Highlands and that’s our sheltered position. Cold air floods across Scotland when we get either an easterly or a northerly wind. With an easterly most of the snow showers that come in off the North Sea fall down the east side of Scotland – great news for the Cairngorm ski industry. When we get a northerly the snow hits the north Highlands and sweeps down the west coast. Sometimes this snow gets as far as Knoydart but invariably it peters out before it reaches us.

So Knoydart often misses out on the really heavy snowfalls which is fantastic if you’re a snow-hater but annoying in the extreme if, like me, you crave a ‘proper’ winter. Today, I’m pretty happy; we’ve got a north-westerly which means a lot of the snow showers sweeping across the North Atlantic do make it through to Knoydart. The Isle of Skye kind of gets in the way a bit but at least some of the snow reaches us. And when it does I make the most of it, so this morning I got out and got some photographic evidence of snow in Knoydart. How anyone can grumble about snow is beyond me. I’d rather tramp about in a sparkly blanket of snow than battle through the wind and drizzle.

I’ve been taking advantage of some rare sunny weather to try to get some shots of the birds visiting my peanut feeders: chaffinches, great tits, blue tits, coal tits and a few goldfinches. I wanted to get the birds to perch on this spade handle so I set the feeder up just alongside it.

Yellow on blue looks pretty striking so I set the camera up on a tripod with a remote release and angled the camera up to get a different viewpoint and make the most of that fantastic blue sky. The great tit provided the splash of yellow.

This is an old photo of mine but I thought I’d show it again as it has a bit of a story behind it. I saw this stag from a distance and could tell there was something wrong. Its antlers looked huge and the beast was walking with its head tilted to one side.

As I got closer I could see the lobster creels tangled in the antlers. The poor animal was struggling to move under the weight of them. If you look carefully you can just see a second lobster creel hanging by the deer’s legs. I had no idea how long he’d been in this predicament but judging by the way the rope was twisted all around the tines he’d clearly been trying to thrash the darned things off for quite a while.

How had this stag ended up like this? Red deer are often seen on the shore where they lick the salt from rocks and graze on the rich grassland just above the foreshore. This stag just got too close to these washed up creels.

So what happened to the deer? It was clearly suffering and there was no way the creels were going to come loose. There was only one option: I had to tell the local deer stalker. The next morning he found the stag in the same spot and put it out of its misery. The upside of this story? More venison for the freezer.