A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  I’d come across birds of prey in a rather mundane source. One Saturday morning, I was with my mother, walking through Leicester on a shopping expedition. It was early, the shops were just opening up, and we were in the quiet streets behind the market that, in those days, held countless banks and insurance companies, but which nowadays are home to umpteen near-identical bars. The identity of different financial institutions meant nothing to me, so when I saw five huge eagle posters in a window, I stopped and took a closer look. Only two of them were species I’d heard of, and I tried to create a mental picture of the other three for future reference before Mum dragged me off to Gallowtree Gate and Marks & Spencer.

  As I stood in front of the window, a man in suit and tie came out of the office in question, and asked: ‘Do you like them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I imagine my slightly embarrassed mum offered him a few words of explanation about the reasons for my interest.

  ‘Wait here a moment.’ He dashed back into the shop, re-emerging moments later with five rolled-up posters. We thanked him profusely, and I clung on to the posters with almost unbearable anticipation until we got home, when I could unroll them and get my dad to Blu-Tack them onto the wall. Golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, harpy eagle, bald eagle and bateleur. The fact that the lower quarter of each of them carried the words Eagle Star Insurance, along with a slogan and a certain amount of sales bumf, mattered not a jot. For the next ten years or so, I would fall asleep each night beneath the piercing and pitiless gaze of some of the world’s largest raptors, and that nurtured my undying fascination with them. When, on a recent trip to South Africa, I finally saw the bizarrely tail-less, front-heavy outline of a bateleur over the Kruger National Park, I felt like I knew it as well as any back-garden robin, so constant a companion had it been throughout my teenage years.

  There’s a word that, I think, sums up the appeal of these birds. Glamour. Not in the modern sense – in which glamour has become the debased currency of film, TV and pop stars, the glittering trappings of lavish lifestyles and sexual allure – but the original meaning, signifying a sort of enchantment which made the subject see things in a different way. Even further back, the word was a variant of ‘grammar’, and meant any sort of scholarship, particularly occult.

  So, when confronted with a bird of prey, most of us, whether birdwatcher or ‘civilian’, tend to react with a slightly awed reverence. I’ve seen it all around me at falconry displays. Such reverence is a completely natural reaction to the spectacle of an eagle owl, say, or a golden eagle, where the size of the bird in general, and especially the bill and talons, inspires respect in anyone with enough imagination to picture being at the receiving end of either. Or a peregrine, simply because it’s the fastest creature on earth.

  But I’ve also watched as people – from young children through to pensioners – have treated kestrels and barn owls in exactly the same way, with similar levels of awe. Perhaps, with these birds, the reason is because their abilities seem to take on a hint of the supernatural. They’re neither huge, nor powerful, yet they’re efficient killing machines. Consider the way a kestrel can judge its position, flying into the wind so perfectly that its head remains absolutely motionless, which enables its eyes to pick out the movements of tiny mammals and insects below, often by using its ultraviolet vision to look for traces of their urine. Or the way a barn owl’s offset ears are used to triangulate any sounds and pinpoint prey while the bird floats effortlessly over the ground. Add to that the way that all raptors and owls seem to have the same air of grave, detached superiority that cats also affect (with the possible exception of the little owl, which just looks comically ill-tempered), and the fact that they’re pretty much the only natural predators we see in Britain, and it’s easy to understand why they continue to cast their spell.

  But, and maybe this is a bit of a stretch, I wonder whether this also helps explain the persecution that these birds have so often faced. Yes, various raptors do undoubtedly take young game birds. Yes, golden and white-tailed eagles have preyed on lambs, although usually sickly ones that would soon die anyway. Yes, ospreys do take fish from farms and well-stocked fishing lakes. What’s difficult to understand is the scale of the depredations attributed to them as justification for large-scale culling. Raptors and owls are talked about as though they’re omnipresent and unnaturally hungry, even in the case of smaller birds of prey such as sparrowhawks, which are routinely blamed for the decline of all sorts of small birds. In fact, because they take such a range of prey, from blue tit up to woodpigeon, raptors have next to no impact on populations, except at a very local level. If they did wipe out the small birds in any given area, they’d soon die themselves, for lack of food.

  And so, back at Parkgate, where my momentary flirtation with solidarity for prey, rather than predator, comes to an end. It is difficult to watch, at times, and you can still feel the appropriate sympathy for those unfortunate creatures destined to die, but it’s also an absolutely natural phenomenon.

  If too many voles, for example, evade both drowning in the deluge and the claws of their many predators, they might subsequently face a slow, agonising death from hunger – the same death, incidentally, that faces all those predators themselves if they don’t take ruthless advantage of this gift of nature.

  Only two days after my trip to Parkgate, for example, I find the body of a barn owl on a bridleway near home. It’s unmarked, and although barn owls have a habit of hunting along road verges, in this particular instance the bird couldn’t have fallen victim to the nemesis of so many of its kind: the motor vehicle. Given its rather emaciated look, it seems to have starved to death. It’s not been a cold winter, but perhaps competition for prey locally has been particularly fierce; and a recent spell of wet weather won’t have helped, as barn owls have particularly poor waterproofing on their feathers.

  In fact, a variety of potential deaths from natural causes is built into the equations that underpin the breeding cycles of all creatures. For the most part, relatively few young of any small bird or animal survive their first year of life, but as long as the number is enough to replace losses in the population, there’s no need to worry. The problems only arise when some other factor, not included in nature’s calculations, intervenes on one side or another. That other factor, more often than not, is a two-legged, upright creature that tends to forget it’s part of a much wider whole.

  5 A Bridge Between Two Worlds

  Their pristine whiteness is the first thing that strikes me. On an overcast morning at the beginning of May, each high-speed flypast is like an eraser drawn across a scene sketched in the heaviest of pencil tones.

  They scissor and slice their way through the slightly damp air, mixing long, elegant glides with light, buoyant flapping, occasionally descending right down to the level of the murky water, before sweeping up and around again. The sooty triangles on each wingtip look like an accumulation of the everyday world’s grime and dirt on beings belonging to a more ethereal plane, and the birds’ attitude to what’s around them only reinforces that impression.

  If they’re aware that they’re right in the middle of a prime example of twenty-first-century urban regeneration, and not on some wind-lashed stack of North Atlantic rock, they give absolutely no indication. Their behaviour is exactly the same as the hundreds of thousands of other members of their species who do frequent the coasts and islands of the British Isles. We city-dwellers might as well not be here. A cliff is a cliff is a six-storey office development with attached parking.

  I’m not carrying binoculars, so I have to wait until two birds come in to one of many ledges on a solid, four-square Victorian building that must once have been a shipping merchant’s office but is now, inevitably, a restaurant. Then, at close range as they sit on their moss-lined nest, I can see the short, black legs, the neat yellow bill and the ‘kind’ expression of the eye and forehead, compared with the rather baleful glare of most gulls.

  But in truth, and even though gull
s generally give me more ID headaches than any other family of birds, I don’t need to check. For one thing, every one of the hundred or so birds that are within my frame of vision at any one time has been screaming its name at me throughout: ‘K-wake, k-wake, ktiti-wa-a-k. Kittiwake!’

  This, the most numerous of Britain’s common gull species, is also paradoxically the least typical, the least known (even by birdwatchers), and the least understood in its very particular habits and requirements. Normally, unlike most of its relatives, it wouldn’t be seen anywhere near the centre of a modern city, much less raising its young there. This is a truly unique colony.

  For another thing, these sleek white apparitions carry with them not only the salt tang of the wide, wild oceans, and the thrill that goes with seeing any genuinely globetrotting bird, but a long trail of memories. They’re the ghosts of another spring morning twenty-something years previously, when I first experienced their ability to transport the unwitting observer through space and time, and as I stand and watch I’m gone again …

  If there’s one family of birds that divides birdwatchers from the great, rational mass of the population, it’s gulls. That they also divide birdwatchers themselves is another story, and one that we’ll come to in due course.

  Let’s start with the name. You can always identify a birdwatcher in any conversation or pub quiz by the way they sigh, tut-tut and give an exasperated look towards the ceiling when a civilian refers to a ‘seagull’. There’s no such thing, they’ll tell you if you give them half a chance (and I’d advise you to start making for the exit the moment they give the first indication of their irritation).

  They do have a point, though. By far the most familiar representative of the family in Britain is the black-headed gull, which has the distinction of being inappropriately named by those who really should know better – birders – as well as the general public. For a start, for the majority of the year it has a largely white head, marked with dark smudges that could, given its proclivity for rooting around in garbage, easily be taken for dirt. For another, the smart hood that it develops in late winter and sports throughout the breeding season is actually a dark-chocolate brown.

  More importantly for our purposes here, it’s a bird whose habitat is far from restricted to coastlines. You’ll see them on farmland, either probing away in sheep pastures or following tractors to gobble up insects thrown up by the plough. You’ll find them at landfill tips and recycling depots, rooting through mountains of household refuse for tasty morsels. They hang around sewage works, too, where they eat the insects attracted by another kind of human waste. They splash around reservoirs, lakes, rivers and even the smallest ponds and pools, returning to the larger bodies of water at night to roost. And they glide and flap around town centres and retail parks, in patient anticipation of the rich harvest to be reaped from human visitors and their penchant for fast food. At times, it’s almost a surprise when you do come across one on a beach or harbour wall.

  The same is true, to varying extents, of most of our other gull species. Common gulls turn up on the top of mountains, as well as sharing the black-headed’s liking for modern farming methods. Lesser black-backeds and herring gulls can be found loafing on reservoirs as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in Britain (and admittedly that’s not far for a creature capable of flight), as well as picking their way through rubbish tips, where they’re joined by the bullying bruiser that is the great black-backed. Little gulls are as happy in inland wetlands as in a more maritime habitat, although we see them only as they migrate through these islands, when they often cut across country rather than follow the coast.

  Britain also plays host to a certain amount of gull visitors from much further afield, and it’s usually a mark of a truly dedicated, expert birdwatcher that he or she is willing to spend hours standing in the freezing winter cold at some bleak inland reservoir or landfill to pick out the likes of Mediterranean, yellow-legged, Caspian, Iceland and glaucous gulls from the great mass of more familiar species. Even many who would describe themselves as dyed-in-the-wool birdwatchers balk at the thought of the time, endurance and detailed feather-by-feather analysis needed to identify some of these species. And yes, I count myself among that lily-livered group.

  But the one British gull species that genuinely does deserve the name ‘seagull’ is the kittiwake. They share the same basic look as the rest of the family – white body, largely grey wings, webbed feet, long wings – and so are perhaps unlikely to turn the head of the non-birdwatcher any more than their relatives, but they really do deserve your attention.

  Their ease in the air, with a buoyant flying style that sometimes recalls those swallows of the sea the terns, combined with that serene facial expression, immediately start to dismiss the negative preconceptions that so many of us bring to gulls. The job is completed by their liking for genuinely marine habitats – they’re most often seen gliding effortlessly over sea-cliffs or skimming the waves, and they lack the predilection for easy pickings shared by all those individuals of the above-mentioned species who do make their homes by the sea. Not for them the sort of carefully planned and ruthlessly executed heist carried out by a herring gull against my then girlfriend one summer’s day fifteen years ago, when it snatched half a large piece of cod out of her hands within thirty seconds of us leaving the chip shop in Llandudno. We’d probably have considered the cackling calls of the gull’s mates, as they applauded his audacity and demanded a share of the spoils, a final withering insult, but in truth we were already pretty withered by the price of the fish and chips.

  At all times, and in all locations, kittiwakes seem not so much shy of humankind as completely oblivious to us, making them less familiar than the rest of their family even to many regular birdwatchers, and also giving them that air of genuine wildness. A few are seen inland as they migrate back to their breeding sites, or are blown off course by gales, but for the most part they’re strictly maritime birds. Pelagic birds, in fact, to use the correct term for creatures that spend large parts of their lives wandering the seas.

  But that seeming aloofness doesn’t give entirely the right impression. In their own way, they’ve been every bit as willing to interact with humans, to their own benefit, as their bolder, louder and more visible relatives; and in turn have been exploited by us to a sometimes horrifying extent. They’ll follow fishing boats, for example, to scavenge discards and offal, while as late as the 1950s large numbers of their eggs were harvested for eating. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, as many as five hundred a day per person were shot for ‘sport’ by Victorian holidaymakers, and worst of all their wings were also used in hats, often being cut off while the birds were still alive.

  Perhaps the fact that they no longer have any perceived monetary or culinary value to us is what has allowed them to slip beneath the radar in recent decades, but there’s a downside to that relative anonymity, too – one that their entire history in Newcastle encapsulates.

  My own fascination with kittiwakes started a long time ago. A modern-day student would probably be horrified at just how un-savvy I was about courses and career options, but back in the late 1980s I based my choice of university on three rather spurious criteria – the social life on offer, the proximity to open country and the birds that would go with it, and the fact that one of the student residences, Leazes Terrace, looked directly into Newcastle United’s St James’s Park ground.

  When I was invited up to Newcastle for a university open day, I discovered there was a lot more to the city than news reports on the decline of shipbuilding and other heavy industry, and repeats of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? had hitherto revealed. Even a cursory wander through the streets revealed Roman walls, magnificent Georgian terraces sweeping down to the river, the iconic Tyne and High Level Bridges, and below them a bustling quayside dominated on the Gateshead side by the great square bulk of the old Baltic Flour Mills. Being a landlubber born and bred, that merest hint of the ocean ten miles away, and
beyond that the bleak but romantic Baltic, was enough to make my mind up. I worked hard to get the necessary grades, and by October was heading up the Great North Road.

  I loved Newcastle from the start, but in truth I rarely got as far as the Quayside during my first year. All the inevitable distractions of student life, of which academic work was generally the least, conspired to keep me at the other end of town, around the university itself and the halls at Castle Leazes, which did have the great attraction for a birdwatcher of being surrounded by the rough grassland of Leazes Moor. I didn’t let on to any of my friends at the time, of course, but seeing a wheatear standing atop a cowpat there one March morning was one of the highlights of that year (I’m not sure if that reveals just what a staid and uneventful student life I actually led, but try not to judge me).

  When I did get down to the Quayside, it was always after dark, usually to visit The Cooperage and its Friday-night disco. Occasionally, there was a Monday-night expedition to the North Sea ferry that had been moored on the Gateshead bank and converted into a nightclub called Tuxedo Junction (imaginatively known as The Boat by all and sundry). But that was it.

  Then, one weekend in May, I found myself at a loose end. All my friends, even the most casual drinking acquaintances, had gone home to revise or were locked in their rooms, refusing to be distracted from their work. My own exams were almost over, and I’d had as much of Gregory of Tours as I could stand for one day, so I set out walking under heavy overcast skies. It was Sunday morning, so all the usual stops in town – HMV, Windows music store and the like – were out of the question, and eventually I made my way down one of the steep stairways near the castle.