The autumnal air had an earthy aroma, a natural perfume of moss, decaying wood and damp soil that aroused the senses in a way that only nature can. As I crossed the Red Bridge over the River Devon and headed towards old Tillicoultry coal mine, my mind had drifted into melancholic harmony with the environment.

Once past the disused colliery, I found a mossy tree stump to rest upon and observe, a time to bond with wildness itself. Of course, nature isn’t just about the birds and the bees and other creatures that move, but it is the plants and the trees, and the fungi, lichens and mosses too. A small fern clung to the low bough of a tree, water gurgled in the burn below and a jay screeched from somewhere within the forest tangle.

A fluttering caught the corner of my eye. It was a treecreeper, a wee mouse of a bird that had appeared from nowhere and was rapidly crawling up the narrow trunk of a nearby birch.

On reaching the top, it flitted down to the base of the next tree and then spiralled jerkily up that one too. In some ways it was behaving a bit like a woodpecker, but rather than hammering at a trunk to dig out invertebrates, the treecreeper is more subtle, using its long curved slender bill to nimbly pick out tiny creatures from crevices in the bark.

Precision is everything, and I recall once seeing treecreeper extract a miniscule spider from a crack in an apple tree, using its bill like a pair of tweezers and deftly removing it with all the sureness of a surgeon.

I watched the treecreeper undulate across to another tree, but it was soon gone from view and everything was quiet once more, save for the sway of the branches in the gentle breeze.

I rose to my feet and continued further into the wood, where on an old birch nestled a cluster of tinder bracket fungi, and on another nearby tree, there was very similar looking birch polypore fungi. They are forest recyclers, returning the dead wood back into the forest soil, and ensuring the continuation of the circle of life.

I struck down towards the River Devon, where in the shallow water of a pool I discovered the body of salmon that had most probably succumbed after spawning. Salmon in the Devon are late runners, usually not first appearing in the river until September before moving quickly up to the higher reaches and the lower parts of the tributary burns and spawning in November and December.

Most salmon die after spawning, their bodies spent from the effort of running the river and breeding, but I wonder whether survival rates are better than average on the Devon, as the home-run back downstream to the sea is relatively short.

Salmon across Scotland are in decline, and there are a variety of factors behind this fall, but changes in the ocean ecosystem on their marine feeding grounds off Greenland and the Faroes is thought to be one of the main causes, most probably caused by climate change.

Some Scottish fish travel as far as the Davis Strait between the western coast of Greenland and Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and it is a true miracle how they find their way back to their river of birth.