Extract from the Diary's Introductory Essay
by author and forest consultant, Nigel Dudley

The lure of the natural

It will be months before the sun disappears again. I've walked through the night, too captivated by the solitude and the weird transition from dusk to dawn to notice the hours passing. Birch forest spills out of the valleys, lapping the edges of the uplands. Tundra stretches to the horizon and the wind from the north is bitterly cold. The terrain is generally easy; even in the forest the trees are spaced well apart and there is a thick layer of moss on the ground that is a delight to walk on. And I'm immersed in wildlife. Redwings and Siberian jays call in the trees above my head, angry that I'm passing so close to their nests. In the open, plovers watch from the skyline and dart away in stiff-winged flight whenever I get near; their cries accompany me for hours. Skuas dive at me, shrieking while I walk through their territory with a stick held above my head. Twice they attack an eagle - tiny against its huge bulk - the eagle flickering its wings to avoid their strikes. Redshanks chatter from rocks in small pools, warning me away from their nests. A herd of reindeer cross the skyline.

By five o'clock in the morning I am sitting on top of a low, domed mountain, the highest spot for a hundred miles or more, looking down on a sea of forest and tundra. I may well be the only person before the horizon. At six, on the flat again and heading south, the momentum that has kept me going suddenly runs out and exhaustion hits me; I unroll my sleeping bag and lay it in a tiny hollow that hides me from the worst of the wind, then sleep - dreamless oblivion - until I am ready to start walking again...

Despite having a low biodiversity, the springtime forests of Lapland offer one of the most intense wildlife experiences that I have experienced. During the fortnight after snowmelt, animals work through the twenty-four hour light to raise young before the cold returns. They are so intent that they barely acknowledge the presence of a solitary walker.

Perhaps for someone who has long been a lover of the "wilds" of Scotland, Lapland is particularly fascinating because at its best it resembles what Scotland used to be - and perhaps could be again. In the vast uplands like Sarek National Park in Sweden, forests fill all the valleys, petering out when the ground is high enough to be unwelcoming to trees, rather than being truncated abruptly by a fence or planting pattern. Thousand year old pines complete their lifecycle slowly and with dignity, providing nesting sites for generations of woodpeckers before returning to the soil. Dead wood in various stages of decay provides a fabulous range of habitats for fungi and insects. There may be few tree species, but they all got there through natural dispersal, whereas in Scotland the majority of the remaining "forest" consists of a single species, Sitka spruce, originally found in Alaska.

My enthusiasm is not unusual, but it is peculiarly modern: over the last century aesthetic and philosophical responses to natural forest have undergone a profound change, from general antipathy to "wilderness" to an increasingly strong appreciation and support for nature without constraints...

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