Don MacCaskill

This much-respected naturalist and retired forester, who had been in ill-health, went for a walk with his dogs last Wednesday in the woods near his Strathyre home and suffered a massive heart attack which killed him instantly.

When he did not return home his wife and outdoor partner, Bridget, went looking for him and found their dogs still sitting beside his body. Don was 80 and left the world a better place because of his presence.

With Bridget, he forged a partnership which produced several outdoor books packed with useful information gained the hard way, from hours and days of walking, exploring, sitting quietly in hides, and listening to all the sounds of the outdoors and watching the by-play of an often hidden world. They shared the observation and the experiences. Bridget wrote the book texts and Don added the outstanding wildlife photography. Don's name on a poster as a forthcoming lecturer would fill any hall. They particularly loved otters and their joint books,

Wild Endeavour (Blackie, 1975), On The Swirl of the Tide (Jonathan Cape, 1992), and The Blood Is Wild (Jonathan Cape, 1995) all sold well. They also made films for television, mainly about otters, and these were also very successful.

Don was persuaded to write his biography and last year Listen To The Trees (Luath Press) was given an appropriate launch at the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, near Aberfoyle, where Don served on the park's environmental panel.

Surrounded by friends and admirers, he was his usual unassuming, humorous, sometimes self-deprecating self, as a queue of people whom he had worked with or who had sought information from him (always readily given) queued to congratulate him and to buy his book.

They included Dr Philip Ratcliffe, who was once an assistant forester to Don in Argyll, and who became head of the European Community's environment branch and who is now an internationally known ecological consultant, and who wrote an epilogue in Don's book. Dr Ratcliffe also produced an anecdote that when Don in past times was ordered by his superiors to cut down some oak woods on Loch Awe-side he prevaricated and delayed. He was outraged by the thought and felt they should be protected. His attitude amounted to a refusal. He won in the end and the oak trees were saved.

Wiser attitudes later prevailed in the Forestry Commission and in Forest Enterprise, and Don played an influential part in scenic and ecological planting where commercial plantations were fringed by deciduous trees or had clumps of mixed species inserted in suitable spots and where the needs of wildlife were taken into account.

Don was born in Kilmartin, in Argyll, that lovely, under-visited area sprinkled with the standing stones and other memorials of past races, and where his parents ran the post office. He traced the start of his love of nature to two episodes: one when a sparrow hawk flew into his classroom and the head teacher, a strict and belting disciplinarian, could not tell Don what it was, and the other when he and his father heard a loud shrieking and yowling and found a huge wildcat caught in a gin trap. His father threw a coat over it and they set it free.

Don was clever academically and won a bursary to secondary school, but his life changed when he caught rheumatic fever. He tried two or three jobs and was rejected for the Armed Forces.

Gradually his health improved and he was accepted for the Forestry Commission and the two main loves (other than Bridget) of his life evolved: trees and the rest of the outdoors. He gained diplomas in forestry in 1946 from the Forestry Commission and the Royal English Forestry Society.

He rose to being a forest ''boss'' and was popular with the working squads of men and women. His biography tells of characters of

a kind fast going from the

countryside. His life was peppered with rewarding incidents involving watching eagles, ravens, seals, otters, badgers, buzzards, and peregrines, and also the insect life of the trees and the

forest floor. He loved all trees and to walk through a birch wood in particular delighted him.

He was a prominent member of the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Central Scotland Raptor Group. Not long before his death he toiled up a hillside in defiance of doctor's orders to help the BBC make a film which he felt would do good in the campaign to protect the golden eagle from egg thieves.

Only serious things made Don MacCaskill angry, although he had a core of steel: wanton destruction of beauty, the killing of wildlife without due cause, countryside planning which lacked soul and foresight. He only just escaped with his life when he encountered some cattle that had gone wild in Argyll;

they included a bull jammed between stones and which would have drowned when the tide came in. Don managed to free it and the maddened bull went for

him. He only just managed to escape by swinging Tarzan-like from a tree branch.

He was latterly chief forester in Strathyre, where he and Bridget had their home, and he retired from that post 15 years ago, concentrating instead on wildlife

protection, photography, and producing books with Bridget.

Some friends of Don plan to plant trees in his memory, and

that is appropriate. Don always liked the motto of the Royal Scottish Forestry Society which is taken from the Laird of Dumbiedyke's advice to his son in Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Heart of Midlothian: ''Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be

aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping.'' The sympathy of Don's

many friends go to courageous Bridget and know that such a

good man could not do other but sleep in peace.