The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons Read online

  My progress was slow. Klarinka, a semi-pro with a paddle, kept looking back over her shoulder to see why I wasn’t keeping up. Then I twigged that Klarinka had the impression that I was a lot more experienced in a kayak than I am. She waited twenty minutes before asking how long it had been since I had kayaked. I told her that it had been seven years, but really it was closer to ten, in the same way that I am closer to forty years old than to thirty.

  Three days was going to be a long time if I got too hung up about my inadequacies, so I settled into a pleasant, if glacial, rhythm. Being a Sunday morning in June, the waters of Loch Lomond around Luss were littered with powerboats towing water skiers, but we slowly pulled away from the noise and confusion and entered quieter waters.

  As we approached Inchconnachan, I was surprised by how big it was. On my ordnance survey map, it was shorter than a paper clip, but it took us a considerable period to paddle around it as we looked for the best place to set up camp. In various spots around the island, several big cruisers lay at anchor, their occupants drinking fancy beverages with ice cubes. We gave them a wide berth.

  At the far southern tip of the island, we found an idyllic little stretch of beach for the kayaks and a wide green verge for our tents. Midges made themselves known the moment we stepped on shore. These tiny biting flies are known by the scientific name Culicoides impunctatus, which translates from Latin as “countless punctures.” Giving the little devils the diminutive name “midgies” was probably the local way of making them seem less irritating, but the word, strange enough in a Scottish accent, was even odder in a Hungarian accent, “madge ease.” Klarinka, an old hand at the Scottish outdoors, had brought midge veils for both of us, and although they looked silly, they were a lot better than a thousand insect bites on my face.

  I can erect my own tent in about thirty seconds, but no one can throw up an unfamiliar tent rapidly on their first go. It didn’t help that a young boy had arrived in a small horsepower tin boat to chat with me while I struggled. Klarinka had her tent up long before I had figured out mine. “Just let me know if you need help.” After coffee, Klarinka set out to do some more paddling; she was in training for a two-week kayaking trip to Finland. I went in search of wallabies.

  SOME OF THE ISLANDS in Loch Lomond have no end of fascinating recorded history and claim many famous visitors. Inchconnachan isn’t one of them. It has been called Inchconnachan, or some variation of it (probably a corruption of the name of its owners, the Colquhouns), since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Residents of Luss may have made whisky on the island in centuries past, but that was about it. For an island just one kilometre from north to south, it has an impressive range of different habitats. Significant mixed coniferous and deciduous woodlands feature in places, although the soil is thin, as evidenced by large fallen trees with shallow root balls. In the swampier lowlands, ferns grow to chest height, and bracket fungi, white and orange, grow from dead tree trunks.

  After about an hour of tramping, I began to wonder if I was a victim of a hoax. How do you hide forty wallabies? But then, on trails about halfway to the summit on the island’s north side, I discovered poop that by its shape and size (rather squarish; it made me wonder how it got out) couldn’t be from anything else. As I was ascending the peak, forty metres away I spied something that I wasn’t expecting. It was a small, old, hunched Chinese man peeping at me through the undergrowth. Well, perhaps not so much an old man as a wallaby.

  Big enough to be a male, he was greyish-brown on the back and pale grey below and had a neck that would be described as “red” only by someone with colour-blindness. He was woollier than I might have guessed. He shook his head vigorously, probably to dislodge a few midges, and then hopped away. Some trick of the soil meant that he made a thump-thump noise as he moved.

  Most people think of wallabies as small kangaroos, although wallabies themselves claim that kangaroos are oversized wallabies. The family includes such oddities as rock-wallabies, nailtail wallabies, and hare-wallabies, but if you are looking for a good old down-and-dirty garden-variety wallaby you could do worse than to look at the red-necked wallaby. With wimpy arms and powerful jumping hind legs, they stand the better part of eighty centimetres, with an equally long tail. Males clock in at around twenty kilograms, and females at a slender fourteen kilograms. They are found along the eastern coast of Australia as far south as Tasmania, where they are also called Bennett’s wallaby. Those in Tasmania are considered a different subspecies than those on the mainland. The Tasmanian ones have thicker and longer fur, and they are the likely source of wallabies on Inchconnachan. Red-necked wallabies rest in shrubbery or long grass during the day, emerging at night to eat grasses and herbs and sometimes browse on shrubs. For most of the year they are solitary, but sometimes gather in pubs in winter.

  As with everything else in Australia, red-necked wallaby sex is odd. Males have a two-part penis, attached behind the testes, not in front. Not to be outdone, females have two uteruses and two vaginas. When a female becomes sexually receptive, she is followed by a group of enthusiastic, hopeful males, but when she is at her most fertile, a single dominant male chases all the other suitors away. Unlike the situation in placental mammals, the embryo doesn’t dig its way into the wall of the uterus. About a month after conception, a tiny joey climbs from its uterus and into its mother’s pouch, where it stays for about seven months before getting the courage to climb out for a hop around. The joey will continue to pester its mother for as long as six more months. If a female lives to a ripe old age, she will give birth to about nine young. In the warmer parts of Australia, red-necked wallabies breed throughout the year, but in Tasmania, cooler weather makes reproduction a summertime thing.

  Red-necked wallabies are protected from persecution in Australia, unless they become pests, in which case they can be killed with a licence. Red-necked wallabies are hunted in Tasmania, where their meat is a delicacy. A non-commercial licence costs $25.60, and the season runs from February 23 of one year to February 22 of the next. Wallabies in Tasmania are a nervous lot.

  When Klarinka returned from her paddle, we had a meal of pasta, cheese, and vegetables cooked over a propane flame. We couldn’t get a fire started because all the wood we had gathered was too wet. In the fading light, I took a walk with Klarinka to try to find wallabies. After a tramp through some marshy bits and up a slight rise, Klarinka called out, “There’s one.” At first I couldn’t see it, but said that I could. I figured that she might be seeing a wallaby-shaped bush in the diminishing light. Then the bush hopped onto the trail. As we peered at it, and it peered at us in return, it occurred to me that a Scottish wallaby was a sight that most people will never get to see. Introductions of red-necked wallabies have been attempted in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and the Ukraine, all without success in establishing breeding populations. A small number of red-necked wallabies were introduced to the south island of New Zealand from Tasmania in 1870 and 1874, and they went on to become a forestry nuisance. Between 1950 and 1960, 5,000 to 6,000 wallabies a year were destroyed there.

  Back at camp, we had one more try at a campfire, but either the wood was too wet or neither of us was as woodsy as we claimed to be. Instead we used the camp stove to make hot chocolate and retired to our tents. I tucked myself into the borrowed nylon sleeping bag using its nylon bag liner. It is much easier to launder a liner than a whole sleeping bag after you have loaned out your bag. But this created a problem. The liner was slippery, the bag was slippery, and the inflated sleeping pad was slippery. The situation is probably like trying to be smoochy with someone in silk pajamas, while wearing silk pajamas, lying on silk sheets. I changed into my running tights and a T-shirt, deflated the mattress, and tossed the bag liner to one corner of the tent. It took me a very long time to fall asleep, but insomnia is not nearly so bad a thing while camping. I woke very early to the songs of Chaffinches.

  UNLIKE MOSQUITOES, which are mainly nocturnal, midges are perfectly happy to rise early and ha
ve a little nibble. Therefore, Klarinka and I had our breakfast of muesli, powdered milk, and hot water while walking briskly up and down the beach. We returned to the campsite periodically to have sips of sweet, black coffee. Western Scotland would be an unbearable place in summer if it weren’t that midges are comparatively wimpy. They don’t seem to like bright sunshine, and they don’t seem able to cope with even a modest breeze, rain, loud noises, or an unfavourable stock market report. Unfortunately, what they lack in tenaciousness they make up for in number, and I discovered just how painful tickling could be when a midge flew up my nose.

  Then it was time for a paddle. The water was mirror-calm, and all of the Sunday boaters had gone back to their weekday lives. By paddling three times to the left for every two strokes to the right, I managed to keep my kayak in nearly a straight line. Klarinka was clearly disappointed in me.

  First we coasted by a “floating island” in the channel south of Inchconnachan. When the loch’s water levels are low, I gather there is an exposed gravel bank on this spot, but when the waters rise, the vegetation is left to float eerily. Even though it isn’t much of an island, written references to it date back more than 400 years, and legends claim that the island literally floated about the loch. On we paddled, past the sandy beaches of Inchmoan, which, like Inchconnachan, has been owned for centuries by the Colquhoun clan. The island is almost a kilometre and a half long, but low-lying and boggy, and it is said that the inhabitants of Luss had visited it for centuries to harvest and dry peat in summer for use as fuel in winter.

  Loch Lomond must have 10,000 stories waiting to be investigated more thoroughly. The story behind Inchgalbraith Castle must be one of the better ones. As an islet, Inchgalbraith is likely a crannog, a forty-metre-long artificial island built as a defensive retreat in the Iron Age or earlier. Above a pile of boulders, brought from the mainland on rafts, and wooden poles driven deep into the loch’s bed, a wooden roundhouse would have been constructed. A secret, submerged, and twisting causeway would have led to the nearest island, defeating potential invaders who didn’t know the route. In medieval times, the Galbraith family found the crannog sufficiently robust to construct a castle that covered all of the tiny islet. Although the castle has been in ruins for at least 300 years, the walls still rise up from the loch, hidden by trees and shrubs, and serve as home to a family of Canada Geese.

  As we curled back past Inchmoan, it became clear that whoever had been using the kayak before me had much longer legs. The foot rests were nowhere useful to me. As a result, my back and upper legs were growing tired quickly. We beached on Inchcruin to allow me to adjust my foot rests. It is hard to believe that the name Inchcruin is taken from the Gaelic word for “round island,” since its outline looks more like a missing jigsaw puzzle piece. Some attribute the name to a Gaelic expression for “he is not sane” on the basis of an eighteenth-century insane asylum on it.

  On we travelled to Bucinch, whose name may be, but probably isn’t, based on feral goats that may have, but probably didn’t, roam the island in centuries past. Rising more sharply from the loch than its neighbours, Bucinch is a beautifully domed and wooded island. A short dash brought us to the tiny islet of Ceardach, or Tinkers Island, named for the remains of an Iron Age smelting furnace. The islet is sometimes called Gerbil Island because of the release of two gerbils in the 1960s. It must have been just the two gerbils, because there isn’t room on the islet for any more. Klarinka got out for a quick tramp around; I stayed in my kayak, since I could see every inch of Ceardach from where I sat. I saw no gerbils.

  After a lunch of coffee, tomatoes, cheese, and rice cakes at camp, Klarinka set off for more paddling as training for her upcoming expedition, while I went off in search of more wallabies. I took along my camera and a small bag of carrots, having read that these are the all-time favoured food of red-necked wallabies. At several likely looking spots, I left behind ten slices of carrot. Then, if some of the slices were missing on a subsequent trip, I could tell if any had been taken. Unless they had all been taken, or I couldn’t find the spot again.

  I headed uphill toward the highest point on the island. I spotted a wallaby, but it was clear that he had long since spotted me. As soon as I raised my camera, he was away. He was much smaller than the one I had seen the day before, but his feet still made a tremendous thumping noise as he jumped. I followed him uphill, but he darted every time I got close. Wallabies have no difficulty moving uphill.

  Toward the top, I spied one resting between a pair of trees. There was no point in sneaking up, as she had obviously seen me. Sitting upright, she posed in a three-quarter profile. I raised my camera and started playing with the shutter speed and F-stop. As I speculated about whether I could compose the shot a little better, it occurred to me that my time was probably short. I snapped off a shot, and as I stepped out from cover to try for a better one, she bounded a short distance away to hide by standing in front of a wallaby-coloured tree, which is all of them.

  I returned to camp to find that Klarinka was still paddling, and so I rediscovered the sublime joy of dozing on an air mattress on a quiet, shady beach. Drifting in and out of sleep, I pondered who would be crazy enough to want to be responsible for Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. Even though it was Scotland’s first national park, it was only three years old. For the folks at—to pick an example—Death Valley National Park in California and Nevada, life is a doddle. Two hours away from the nearest big city, Las Vegas, the park has fully 13,650 square kilometres to accommodate visitors. In contrast, visitors to Loch Lomond & The Trossachs have just 1,865 square kilometres at their disposal. To make things worse, 70 percent of all the people in Scotland live less than an hour from the park, and 15,600 people live within the park itself. Management is particularly tricky because portions of the park are privately owned. Folks at Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park are justifiably proud of their huge red deer and roe deer populations, but it probably gets up their noses that they sometimes have to cull animals to keep the population down.

  In most nations, national parks make it easy on themselves by making conservation issues the first priority and prohibiting the extraction or exploitation of natural resources. You can hike around Death Valley National Park, but you had better not be carrying a fishing rod. The planners of the park at Loch Lomond & The Trossachs made their lives much more complex by establishing two of its four statutory aims to “promote sustainable use of natural resources of the area” and to “promote sustainable economic and social development of the area’s communities.” Farming? Why not? Forestry? Let’s talk about it. Fishing? Go ahead. Indeed, Loch Lomond is home to nineteen types of fish, making it one of the most important sites for freshwater fish in Britain. Regrettably, four of those species are introduced.

  When Klarinka got back from her sojourn, I told her about my limited luck in finding wallabies. She responded by saying “Oh, yes. I saw five drinking from the water’s edge just around the corner.” Some folks are just luckier than others, I suppose. We managed a fire, but it required a lot of blowing to keep it lit. Our supper was garlic with pasta. A bottle of whisky that I had brought along was a big hit.

  As night began to fall, we went for another paddle, this time a circuit of Inchconnachan. Klarinka spotted a wallaby on the beach of the first embayment. She has good night vision, resolving shadows and shapes that I couldn’t. A little further north, she spotted a second wallaby. At the top end of the island, in the last of the day’s light, we came across a wonderful assemblage of small bats foraging for insects. I leaned as far back in the boat as I could, and watched them zoom overhead, skimming down to the water, a metre or two from my head. Back at our campsite, we found three more wallabies rooting around, and I suspect that they were eating campfire ashes.

  In the middle of the night, I woke to the loud, harsh cries of birds, and managed to convince myself that they were Capercaillie, the world’s largest game bird, native to Scotland but very rare. They had been hunted
to extirpation in Scotland in 1785 and reintroduced from Sweden in 1837; they were now in peril of becoming extinct again. The name Capercaillie is derived from Gaelic for “horse of the woods.” In all likelihood the calls came from insomniac shorebirds, not Capercaillie.

  FOR OUR LAST DAY on Loch Lomond, Klarinka and I had planned a paddle to Inchmurrin. It was an obvious destination. The largest inland island in Britain at two and a half kilometres long, it has a lovely walkway running from the northern peninsula through oak and birch woodlands and along a grassy ridge, and down to the pier at the south end. If I squinted, I could probably ignore the vast thickets of introduced rhododendrons. Inchmurrin was named after St. Mirren, a sixth-century Irish-born priest. Mirren is patron saint of the Scottish town of Paisley, and of football clubs with three or fewer premiership cup titles. The island has reportedly been visited by Robert the Bruce (after an inglorious defeat in battle); King James VI of Scotland (a.k.a. James I of England); Mary, Queen of Scots; and Isabella, Countess of Albany, exiled after witnessing the execution of her father, husband, and two sons. Sir John Colquhoun was probably even less impressed with the island than Isabella, having been murdered there in 1440. Klarinka and I could take the opportunity to see the ruins of Lennox Castle, where the Earl of Lennox brought his family to escape the plague in the fourteenth century. If we weren’t careful, we might stumble across the Scottish Outdoor Club, a naturist group entrenched on Inchmurrin since the late 1940s. The winds had come up overnight and the waves looked a bit tricky, but I was game for anything.