The first beast in "Scottish beasts" isn't an animal at all. It is the wind, "tapping & tugging / at the side of the tent", nosing at the canvas like something that wants to be let in. The trick sets the poem's method. The title promises a field guide, but the eleven short sections keep sliding sideways, so that sculptures, tourists, a man's name and a hillside of boulders all end up in the same menagerie. The central idea seems to be that the line between wild and tame, living and inert, human and animal is much blurrier than a checklist of wildlife suggests.
The form suits that looseness. There are eleven unrhymed three-line sections with no fixed metre, close in spirit to haiku or senryu, though they don't count syllables. Each is a single glimpse, mostly unpunctuated, with the line breaks doing the work of commas. Those breaks are often where the joke or the surprise lives. In "around the headland / from the seal sculpture / this one moves", the last line lands with a small jolt: we realise the seal is real and alive, and "moves" quietly sets it against the bronze or stone one. The oystercatcher stanza stretches one wingbeat across a line and puts the "yelp" on the next, so the break works like the bird's repeated cry.
Sound is used lightly but well. "Tapping & tugging" has the stutter of fabric being plucked. "A black guillemot totters / on its big red feet" is made of blunt, stressed words, and the soft, wobbling "totters" matches the comic walk of a bird that looks so much more graceful on the water. Even the parallel construction of "rock pipit on the beach / meadow pipit on the moor" acts out the point, since two places and two near-identical birds are joined by "that same restless tail".
Much of the humour comes from deflated expectations. At the Osprey Center, a crowd gathers "to watch / squirrels on the feeder". The poem doesn't say what they came for, but the building's name makes it easy to guess. The stag with "no does to herd" is "solitary" and "haunts" a caravan park, a word that turns a wild animal into a ghost drifting among holiday homes. The sunset is "blood-red", and the speaker lifts the midge net "to take a nip". That plays on the biting insects outside and, I'd guess, a drink inside. The midge net is the only moment where the speaker is at the centre of a stanza, and he is joking at his own expense.
The stanza that stands out most is the bare "Phil Bennison / Dry Stone Walling / Mole Control". It reads like text lifted from a sign or van door. That is my inference, since the poem gives no explanation, but it fits how the section looks and sounds. A tradesman's name and services sit among the wildlife, and they are the human side of the countryside: walls built, moles managed. In a poem about beasts, even the tidy, practical way people shape the land becomes one more thing to observe.
The last two sections turn people into animals and animals into scenery. The hill-walkers, with "their lurid greens & yellows!", get the poem's only exclamation mark, and the punchline is a pair of creatures, "lizard, tiger beetle". Their bright waterproofs make them as conspicuous as the most gaudy insect. Then the closing image reverses the trick: "white boulders have infiltrated / a herd of sheep". "Infiltrated" is a spy's or soldier's word. It makes the stones sound like they are sneaking in to pass as livestock, or perhaps the sheep are the ones passing as rock. At a distance, on a far hill, the eye cannot tell, and the poem ends on that uncertainty.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It is a travel notebook that doesn't gush about landscape. It pays attention in a way that is funny, humble and slightly mischievous, and it is willing to be wrong or fooled. By the end, the real "Scottish beasts" include the weather, the walkers, the crowd at the feeder and the speaker himself, all noticed with the same dry affection.