Secret lives among the conifers

Annandale, Dumfries and Galloway We inhabit the same earth, the coal tits and I, but live in different worlds. I can fly at liberty around mine but cannot hope to enter theirs. Looking at their lives is like peering down at a country where I cannot land.

The sky is overcast and the air smells softly of smoke in the still, snow-muffled high reaches of Annandale above Moffat. From within a dark stand of conifers comes a chirping as soft as grasshoppers. The source is a band of coal tits, their subtle winter-coloured plumage a match for the surrounding environment.

These birds are biologically distinct in part because of their adaptations to life in coniferous woodland, with a more slender beak than blue or great tits. Tiny tufts of snow sit precariously on the sprigs of the branches but somehow stay in place as the birds rummage within the needles for insect food, so delicate is their fidgety but precise work.