A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  In most respects, this reflects what was hoped might happen. In many parts of the world, the bird’s close relative, the black kite, is a fixture of man-made landscapes, including city centres, where they act as flying waste disposal units that feed on carrion, food waste, and the general detritus of human day-to-day life – not for nothing were they known, in British India, as ‘shite-hawks’.

  Literature suggests that the red kite filled much the same niche in Britain in the not too distant past. Shakespeare makes more than one reference to the species, using its name as an insult in King Lear (presumably because of the negative associations of its carrion-eating), and making reference in The Winter’s Tale to the bird’s curious habit of collecting unusual items, including clothing, for its nest. Both strongly suggest that it was a familiar sight for the mainly urban audience the Bard was writing for.

  So, while generations of Britons, including my own, had grown up thinking of the red kite as a bird of one of the wildest, emptiest parts of Britain, in fact, all things being equal, it prefers a gentler, rather less bleak landscape. If that means living cheek by jowl with mankind, then so be it.

  The extent to which the kites have embraced that landscape, and the new breeding opportunities afforded to them by a lack of persecution, are brought home to me on the way back from the Tate. I’d normally have taken the train to London, but I need to be at a poetry reading in Birmingham in the evening, and the logistics of getting the train back from there to Leicester late at night are just too daunting. So, after a surprisingly easy escape from the capital and the ever-circling wall of steel that is the M25, I head in my car along the M40 towards the second city.

  What happens next shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve read about it several times, and the RSPB and others are rightly keen to make a big noise about it. Nevertheless, I’m totally unprepared for what an immense emotional punch a now-familiar bird can deliver.

  Just where the motorway goes through a cutting around Stokenchurch, a couple of drizzly clouds disappear away to the north, and blue skies and late afternoon sunshine bathe the Chiltern vista. Within a minute the unmistakable shape of a red kite – long wings held crooked at the ‘elbow’, and long forked tail used as a rudder – appears above the six lanes, and then another, and another, and another, until I can count a dozen without having to take my eyes off the road. As the road starts to descend slightly, and the countryside opens out on either side, I can see that these are just a fraction of the local population – perhaps three times as many are in view in total, soaring and wheeling on the thermals, flapping with a leisurely assurance, and occasionally swooping down to take a closer look at a piece of roadkill, or a rubbish tip, or a discarded takeaway.

  What’s interesting is that the towns and villages beneath them, their gardens and car parks, their roads and verges and shopping centres, have clearly become every bit as much a part of these birds’ natural habitat as any remote Welsh valley. For the kites the former are a vast, ever-replenishing larder, just as the Chilterns escarpment acts as a huge thermally powered elevator that sends them high into the sky with minimum effort, and the spinneys and hangers that dot its slopes are convenient homes and dormitories.

  To see this bird, which only a few years ago was emblematic of rarity and remoteness and the fragile state of an entire eco-system, thriving so visibly just a few miles outside one of the world’s great cities, was enough to bring a tear to the eye. Of course, not all birds can so readily adapt to the changing circumstances that man forces upon them, but in some cases at least, we’re brought up short against the realisation that we really don’t know the natural world anything like as well as we think we do.

  I end up pulling over at the next service area and spending half an hour watching the kites going about their business. Sometimes in life, you do get exactly what you want. Birdwatching has a pleasant habit of reminding you of that fact.

  So it was with peregrines. At some point in the years when I’d left birdwatching (but birdwatching hadn’t entirely left me), I read a newspaper article about them nesting in the middle of New York City, with the skyscraper-lined canyons perfectly mimicking their natural habitat. I was entirely out of touch with developments in British ornithology, but I remember wondering whether such things might also happen here, eventually. I rather assumed I’d be an old man before they did.

  I was wrong. Before long, there were reports of the birds from a number of British cities, with cathedrals often favoured as nest sites. The spread has continued, and so I find myself in York, at the invitation of Bird Watching contributor and friend Paul Brook, to look for the pair that have taken up residence on the famous Minster.

  As I meet Paul at the front of the ancient building, a strong, cold wind whips up, and we wonder if we’re going to be out of luck. We walk round the corner to the little green, preparing ourselves for disappointment, but have to wait less than a minute to find our target.

  The word ‘iconic’ gets bandied about a lot these days, too often used to describe things that are anything but. On this occasion, however, it’s wholly appropriate. Our first sight of the peregrine is of it perched like some heraldic beast on one of the carved stone pinnacles, unmoving as any gargoyle. It’s as if the bird is intent on reminding the public of its former status as a bird of kings and noblemen.

  Curiously, the nearby pigeons show no fear of their archenemy, perching almost close enough to touch the raptor. These peregrines are relative newcomers, so perhaps the pigeons simply don’t know the peril they’re in yet; or perhaps they’re wiser than we think, and know that however deadly a peregrine is in its element of choice – air – perched it is no threat. Neither is it likely to grab another perched bird, in the manner of a goshawk or an eagle owl.

  A couple of minutes later, as some of the pigeons are undertaking one of their periodic circular flights around the little park, there’s a sudden scattering of the flock, as something dashes through the middle of them at high speed. It makes two or three passes, with enough conviction to induce panic among the pigeons, but without ever seeming to actually want to catch one. When it starts calling to the first, statuesque falcon, we conclude that it’s a male, showing off to the icily unimpressed female.

  He circles a few times and then heads off across the city, and as he does so I realise that the shape of a peregrine in flight and its style of flying were burned into my memory from a very early age. At primary school we used to watch a programme called Look and Read, which showed an ongoing serial. One of the earliest I saw was called Skyhunter, and featured children trying to protect a peregrine’s nest from egg thieves. At that time, my interest in birds was slowly evolving out of my previous obsession with dinosaurs (appropriately enough, given that scientists now generally agree that birds are, effectively, living dinosaurs), while another keen interest was in planes, sparked by making model kits of Lancaster bombers and Spitfires. In fact, most of what I knew about planes was derived from the huge Airfix catalogue I had. Swing-wing jets were cutting-edge technology, and I remember wondering why none of them were named after the peregrine: to me, its structure and flying style, with the ‘arm’ seeming to remain still and the ‘hand’ doing all the work, combined with that blistering speed, of course, were reminiscent of nothing so much as an F-14 or a Tornado.

  Back in the present, the male is gone, and the female continues her stony-faced vigil up on the medieval masonry. We’re both aware that we’ve just enjoyed one of those slices of serendipity that sometimes makes birdwatching seem an implausible melange of luck and coincidence. In fact it involves both, but the more you practise it, the luckier you get (to paraphrase the golfer Gary Player), and just as with playing golf or any other sport, a lot of its appeal lies in the fact that as your abilities and knowledge develop, you notice your own efforts less and less. It’s like performing a conjuring trick on yourself, and being taken in every time.

  By the time I’ve driven home, Paul has messaged me on Twitter to say that the peregrines
have been seen mating, a first for York, adding the site to a list of locations including Chichester, Derby and Worcester, where the cathedrals have gained new, living statues.

  Nests have been protected and monitored (with some projects showing that the raptors take an extraordinary range of prey, even hunting by night with the help of the churches’ floodlights), and watch points have been set up at locations such as Tate Modern to give the public a new stake in conserving these remarkable birds.

  In the days when I became a birder again in earnest, I restricted most of my watching to a couple of sites near home, both of which were essentially gently rolling countryside. When peregrines crossed my thoughts, which was often, they were shadows darkening the rock walls of half-remembered Welsh mountains, or arrows sent arcing across the skies above distant coastal saltmarshes. During a rare trip to one of the latter, at Titchwell in Norfolk, one did wing its way out of my daydreams and into the real world, flashing high over the pools and reed beds and lifting thousands of geese, ducks and waders in panic as it did so.

  I wasn’t, at the time, a member of any of the local birding or wildlife groups; nor was I signed up to any of the bird news services that had emerged and which used pagers to send birdwatchers scurrying from one end of Britain to the other in pursuit of their quarry. I wasn’t even particularly Internet-savvy. So rumours reached me the way they always had, through conversations in hides, or huddled on the side of drab, grey reservoirs. And from them, I learned that the hard facts of geology had delivered what I’d wanted to witness as a birder ever since I was a child.

  Charnwood Forest is an irregular triangle of woods, heathland and high sheep pasture which sits between my house and Leicester on a bed of ancient granite, some of the oldest rocks in Britain. Much in demand as roadstone, the granite has brought a scattering of quarries across the north-west corner of the county, from the vast hole that has consumed half of Bardon Hill, Leicestershire’s highest point, to smaller, older workings.

  And peregrines had found these quarries, I was told. Their sharp, sheer walls were exactly what the falcons were looking for as they wandered in search of new nest sites. In the case of working quarries, the high security round them meant the birds could raise their young free from the attentions of egg-collectors, photographers and overzealous birdwatchers.

  Soon I’d seen my first local peregrine, one of a pair that bred close to a favourite waterside birdwatching spot. Had seen the pair, in fact, sitting on a prominent bare tree on the skyline, surveying their domain with its ample supplies of woodpigeons, ducks and crows. Peregrines, it should be noted, spend a huge amount of time sitting still, both because the large size of their prey makes for a meal that lasts them all day, and because the high-velocity explosion of their hunting routine is not something that can be performed without the right rest and preparation. They are the Usain Bolts of the bird world, finely tuned athletes built for a few seconds of intense activity every few hours.

  One summer’s evening, they were sitting in the same spot, while a little way beyond them three more falcons tilted and lunged at the swirling swallows and martins. At first, I took these falcons for hobbies, another raptor species that has expanded its range in recent years and which has a predilection for hirundines. But as I looked closer I could see they had the peregrine’s powerful build, rather than the rakish elegance of the smaller bird, and realised that their lack of size was down to age. These were the newly fledged young of the pair on the tree, testing their flying skills – unsuccessfully, I should add – against plentiful targets.

  In the years that followed, I’d see similar scenes at three other local quarries, including one that I can walk to from home, but the thrill never diminished. If anything, seeing the falcons become part of the place where I’d lived most of my life made the experience even more exciting: every encounter with them was like a brief journey into a parallel existence, a world like our own in almost every respect, but infinitely more thrilling.

  The two worlds merge, sometimes. Today, I’m sitting high up behind the goal in the King Power Stadium, home ground of Leicester City. The team has been the object of my affection and obsession for nearly as long as birds have, but have caused me infinitely more disappointment, so my attendance has dwindled to almost nothing in recent years. But I’m with two friends, one of whom is over from his new home in California and is desperate to take advantage of this rare opportunity to see the national game, and it’s a bright, sunny day and the visitors are Nottingham Forest, the bitterest of local rivals.

  It’s a good game, end to end, and we’re well into the second half before I notice that there’s something sat on the edge of the stand away to the right. I curse the fact that I haven’t got any binoculars with me, and the object is so unmoving that I start to wonder whether it’s one of the hawk decoys put on buildings to ward off pigeons.

  Then it flies. Nothing spectacular, just steady, muscular wingbeats taking it up and beyond the far goalmouth, before it swings round in a wide curve. And every pigeon and black-headed gull within five hundred yards sees it for what it is, and lifts into the air and makes haste to depart the scene, just as 30,000 people jump to their feet to applaud Leicester’s well-deserved equaliser. And I leap up too, but I’m not sure whether my roar of joy is directed at the team in blue below me, or the slate-blue assassin that has flown out of a lifetime’s dreams into the spring sky above.

  8 The World in a Field

  I notice them first as I make my way from the bus. Individuals and pairs, walking purposefully in the same direction as me, or pausing on corners for brief, animated discussions which, when overheard, add up to a veritable babel of tongues. It’s not long after seven in the morning, and the sun-bathed city streets are still quiet, so their presence and movements are as obvious as those of the pigeons that flock and scatter, flock and scatter, ahead of every car or street-sweeper.

  Once I reach the railway station they’re everywhere. The ones and twos have agglomerated into larger, noisier groups that wheel and drift across the concourse and the first platform, with a feeling of pent-up energy about to be released. There are cries of recognition. Greetings. Necks are craned, looking for the arrival of the train from Birmingham. When it turns up, a couple of minutes late, I take a seat in the first carriage and continue to watch and listen. English is being spoken in every conceivable accent, from West African to Australian and everything between, but there’s Spanish too, Castilian, Latin American and other varieties I don’t immediately recognise. Two men in the seat ahead of me chat in what I take to be Dutch. Another voice, a little further away, is unmistakably Scandinavian.

  It’s when we finally pull to a halt in Oakham and spill onto the little station that the grand scale of this migration is revealed. Perhaps two hundred people clad in a bewildering variety of branded polo shirts and baseball caps, photographers’ waistcoats and walking trousers, and carrying everything from expensive DSLR cameras to shooting sticks and umbrellas, spill out of what would, normally, be a quiet commuter train, and join a scattering of similarly attired folk who arrived on the earlier service. Outside, a handful of taxi drivers are striking deals and loading up baggage, while a minibus pulls in and starts embarking a patient queue of passengers. This is Britain, so even though it’s August, nearly everyone local is compelled to comment with surprise on the blue skies and hot sunshine above us.

  I’m in no hurry, so I walk. If you asked any of the new arrivals for their idea of a typical English town, then the ironstone centre of Oakham, with its market square, castle and dreaming spire, is probably close to what they’d have in mind; and the gently rolling countryside beyond, farmland punctuated by hedges and spinneys, would very likely meet their expectations of the English countryside, too. But the roundabout on the edge of town is the first hint that everything is not exactly as it seems, crowned as it is by the figure of an osprey, wings outstretched, carved from a single piece of wood with a chainsaw. The swirling gulls in the middle distance are a
nother clue.

  I turn off the main road, and walk alongside a rapidly growing line of traffic, then turn again onto a narrow lane that’s also busy with its fair share of vehicles. The cries of gulls and the unmistakable detuned radio bleeping and whirring of lapwings comes from away to the left, where shallow lagoons are hidden behind an earth bank; but for once bird calls fade into the background of my thoughts, and the distant but resonant booming of a loudspeaker takes their place.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the twenty-fifth British Birdwatching Fair is now open.’

  I have a confession to make. Even though I’ve spent the great bulk of my life living no more than thirty miles from the place, it took me the best part of thirty years to fully cotton on to what an amazing spot Rutland Water is. Worse than that, I harboured a largely irrational prejudice against it for part of that time.

  When I was around seven years old, my parents took me and my sisters to visit family friends in Peterborough, the city where I now work. It was a wintry day, and thinking back it may also have been the day I saw my first league football match (Peterborough versus Grimsby, with the home side winning 3–1). But whatever the case, on the way, I remember my dad pointing out the huge new reservoir that had been created in this corner of the East Midlands.