Raptors

by James Macdonald Lockhart

  If you transplant something ingrained in a landscape to somewhere new, can the object still retain the semblance of itself? Or, once it has been removed, does it start to die a little in its new surroundings? When I was on the Moray Firth I did not feel I could gather up the stones I found along the shore because it seemed that to remove them would somehow have diminished them. There is an anecdote about Lord Leverhulme, that he took a liking to a wooden fireplace mantel in a public house on the Isle of Lewis. It was an ancient slab of oak and for generations families had carved their names in the wood. The owners of the inn would not part with it. So Leverhulme bought the entire building instead, extracted the mantel and shipped it down to his summer home at Rivington, where he had the mantel installed to support a fireplace alcove in the ballroom.

  The stone used to build this motorway tunnel was transplanted from the moor above the town. Thirteen feet of stone were skimmed from the hillside to lay the foundations for the motorway. And it’s almost as if I have not left the hill at all, that I’m still walking over the moor – or a memory of it – as I criss-cross the motorway. The stone removed from the moor was replaced with soil which washed off the hillside in the next heavy rain, pouring down the lanes and spilling over the main road in a thick black waterfall.

  Nothing is static: even a hill can suddenly burst and wash half its face away; a bog is always breathing, changing its shape in its sleep; a kestrel appears to be still as she hangs in the air but really she is moving, pushing against the wind.

  This is where I hope to find the kestrel and this instead is where I find the buzzard, flapping low over the scrubby no-man’s-land between the railway and motorway. And then, because buzzards will often do this – will often draw your eye to something else – I spot the kestrel, hovering above the junction roundabout. I get as close as I can to the motorway and prop myself under an oak tree overlooking the slip road and roundabout.

  The kestrel holds herself at a steep angle against the wind, tail spread to increase the lift, wings shivering. Her strikes come regularly: once, often twice, a minute. A staggered descent through the air, the angle almost vertical, checking her drop 5 feet above the ground, a slight adjustment to left or right, then a final plummet into a splash of grass. Those last seconds, when she pulls her wings up behind her before she hits the ground, I can see the pale white flash of her underwings and tail.

  When the kestrel leaves the roundabout she heads south-east along the motorway. I scramble after her and the last few hours of daylight are a rush along hedgerows, muddy underpasses, splashing across fields. There are snatched glimpses of the kestrel, often in the distance, hanging above the motorway. To catch up with her is just to push her out of reach again. Half a field away is as near as I get before she banks and arcs across to the adjacent field. In a farmyard I am slowed down by a herd of cattle, their breath smoking in the cool air. Curious and nervy, they bunch and heave around me, make sudden splattering retreats through the mud, remuster and hunker back towards me in a swaying huddle, heads low to the ground, huffing, yellow tags hanging from their ears like bright fruit.

  As the sun is going I am in a field above the motorway. Jackdaws and rooks are heading to roost in ragged flocks, the smaller jackdaws weaving amongst the rooks, the molecular structure of the flock. I am watching the kestrel perched in a hawthorn bush, her folded wings twitch and jerk above her long tail. The motorway is a streak of yellow light. The low sun has brought out the orangey reds of the kestrel’s back. She is surrounded by the darker, deeper reds of hawthorn berries. I stand behind her and watch her shape turn black.

  VIII

  Montagu’s Harrier

  The Fens

  One night, on route to London, MacGillivray dreams of flight:

  I dreamed the other night that I was winging through the air in a large area about three or four feet from the ground with great velocity, and I felt so very happy that I scarcely remember to have ever felt happier … the impression which this aerial tour made upon my mind was so strong that for some time after I could not prevail upon myself to believe that it did not actually happen and I can scarcely believe that it is not possible.

  All flight, dreamed or otherwise, falls short of the bird I am watching from this hedge. Montagu’s harrier: a bird given over to buoyancy and lightness of drift. Flying, like MacGillivray dreamed he did, 4 feet from the ground. An adult female, working her way down the purlieu of the hedge, coming towards me in lilting flight. All wing: there is nothing there but wing and nothing for the wings to do but stretch and glide. I have never seen such buoyancy, never known something so undeterred by gravity. That she does not stall, flying so low and slow above the ground, is a miracle of design. And there is no wind today, nothing to hold her up, just heat and a thick stillness clogging the day.

  I am on the edge of The Fens. It is the middle of July and the air is furrowed with heat. I have found a place inside the hedge which allows me to swivel easily and look out over the fields on either side. The hedge is tall and frayed, more like a loose phalanx of trees. There are deer gaps and fox gaps and some openings that are so wide they could be sluice gates left open to let the wind rush through unimpeded. The bulk is hawthorn and hawthorn’s companion, elder. There is also blackthorn with its darker, glossier leaves. And a dead oak, cloaked in ivy, standing up to its knees inside the hedge. The fields on either side are wheat and barley, the wheat greener, paler-looking, the barley crackling and popping in the dry air.

  When MacGillivray came down out of the north on his walk to London, he suffered a sort of vertigo – an inverse vertigo – or rather, a dry form of the bends, descending too quickly from the northern uplands. It left him homesick and irritable. His instinct, like a ptarmigan’s, was to cling to the high ground for as long as possible.

  In Keswick his Bank of England note is changed at last. He heads out of the town on the Borrowdale road and the rain comes on again. He stops to ask directions for the way to Ambleside but ignores the advice that he should return to Keswick to take the regular road as it goes against his determination to see the mountain. Because mountains will do that to him: pull him to them, not for the sake of climbing, but because he wants to see what is growing on their slopes, what alpine flora can survive up there. Sometimes it feels as if every plant – or the prospect of a plant he has not seen before – has this magnetic pull on him. And I cannot fathom, with every mile along the road an infinity of distractions, how he is able to walk to London as quickly as he does.

  So MacGillivray follows this new diversion and heads up on the footpath over the fell. On the outskirts of a village a dog rushes at him with such fury he has to yell at it to get back. The noise of its barking – and the sound of his shouting – is such a shock after so many miles of silence. And the dog’s sudden burst of fury is not unlike the London juggler, driving like fury at his squeaking fiddle, whom he sat beside in the Keswick inn, falling foul of his rum, trying to dry out in front of the fire after his shivering night in that hayloft outside Carlisle.

  Still raining as he enters the valley and he can see the rain on the mountain glistening on the face of the dark rocks. He feels himself being ballasted with tiredness. Sometimes he feels so tired he does not recognise himself, as if a part of him has travelled on ahead and knowledge of who he is, or that absent part of him, grows blurred and strained. He struggles, for instance, to remember his age, as if he had mislaid it, or mislaid a year. It plagues him for mile after mile, this dizzy insecurity, and he is only rid of it – this giddiness – when he grasps that what is really happening is that all this time alone on the road has left him, despite what he says, unsure of his own company, of who it is that is walking in him. He finds it hard to recall the person who left his house in Aberdeen a month ago. He would like to ask him, his distant self, what on earth it is he is doing scrambling up this mountain in the near-dark in Cumberland. At such moments he wants to abandon the walk, return to Scotland, cloak himself in study, become useful … But he has
walked so many miles over the years, back and forth from Harris to Aberdeen and all the digressions in between. So he knows too well that walking will do that to a person, that something in the friction of momentum, in the pounding of the road, unsettles the soul so that it becomes frayed and loose till it drifts up and away from the body like a kite. And it’s at that moment, when the soul hangs flapping above the body, that he loses sight of who he is and finds himself running through the checklist of himself, fumbling, struggling to reconcile himself and haul back in the errant soul.

  He reaches the summit of the mountain at dusk. The plants here: savin-leaved club-moss, prickly club-moss, common club-moss, fir club-moss and the starry saxifrage. He has, by now, lost the path completely. So he heads down the mountain through the closing dark, picking his way across the scree.

  A whitethroat scolds me when I arrive at the hedge. It keeps leaving and returning and each time sounds a little less agitated. The Montagu’s harrier’s nest is in the deep barley field in front of me. For much of the day the female harrier has been circling above the nest. Occasionally the sun catches and brightens the dim white colours in her wings. There is no sign of the male. He has another nest – another mate with young – a mile away in a dried reed bed. I would love to see him, the ash-coloured male. MacGillivray wrote that the male Montagu’s harrier was remarkable for its slender form and the great length of its wings. He is the lightest of all the harriers. He has the largest wings compared with body size of perhaps any bird of prey. Low body weight accentuated by long wing length: this is the ratio which gives the Montagu’s harrier its extraordinary buoyancy, its ability to keep on sailing out low over the ground for mile after mile. The birds are all wing and can easily spend half the day on the wing. At a steady 20 mph gliding over the land, the distance covered in a day by the Montagu’s harrier could be anywhere between 50 and 100 miles.

  He is not a static hunter. He is nothing like the kestrel who waits up inside the wind, or the patient goshawk who sits in ambush on its forest perch. The Montagu’s harrier hunts on the move, a low-level, long-distance forager, drifting out to scour the land. Like other harriers, Montagu’s hunt by sight and hearing, using the cupped disc shape of their face as an owl does, funnelling any noise they detect onto their ears. The Montagu’s harrier’s face is a listening device and, flying as low as they do, they can pinpoint a locust by the sound the insect makes feeding on the branch of a cotton bush.

  Lightness and lift: if he finds an updraught, the male Montagu’s settles into it, gives his light frame over to the rising current of air, so that he is carried up and away like pollen. In this way he is able to reach hunting grounds miles from the nest site. For such a large bird, if you picked him up, his pumice lightness would startle you. I heard a story of a male Montagu’s harrier found floating in The Wash one year after he collided with a wire. When the drowned bird was pulled out of the sea there was nothing to him: he was all feather.

  I am willing the male Montagu’s harrier into view. It is easy, when you are straining for a glimpse, to over-anticipate the bird, to try to make its outline fit onto a different bird. I have often tried to squeeze goshawks into buzzards, sparrowhawks, even, into fast-flying pigeons. Late in the morning a marsh harrier floated inland, a male, coming in across the barley field, and I missed a beat thinking it might be the male Montagu’s harrier returning to the nest, till the marsh harrier’s harlequin colours took hold, creams and blacks and reds. The marsh harrier flew close to the Montagu’s nest and I skipped another beat because the female Montagu’s was away from her nest and, in her absence, I wondered if the marsh harrier would swoop down and try to take her young. But the marsh harrier flapped on, following the line of a hedge, black wing tips against the yellow field.

  After the marsh harrier had gone, the female Montagu’s drifted back across the field. She stood in the air above the nest for a while, circling there. Then she turned, drifting quickly away. A glider, light as balsa, floating across the fields. The narrow line of her outstretched wings met and matched the line of the horizon, and as she moved further away from me her outline began to shimmer in the haze. There was a gold tint to the feathers on her underside. Then she disappeared in the heat and when I picked her up again she was beside a wood two fields away, her shape brought back into focus by the dark trees. She was climbing, and as she cleared the top of the wood a buzzard rose from under her, heavy and broad-winged and flapping to heave itself up. The harrier began to rise in a wide corkscrew pattern above the trees. The sky over the wood was very bright. As she circled there, the white bar of feathers joining her tail to her body seemed, against the backdrop of white sky, like a gap opening up across her middle. For a few seconds, her tail looked like it was chasing – trying to rejoin – her body.

  Montagu’s: after the English ornithologist, George Montagu (1753–1815), who was the first to accurately describe and identify the harrier as a different species from the hen harrier. His identification came after centuries of muddle and it can still be difficult to tell the two apart. The adult male Montagu’s harrier is a slightly darker, slightly dirtier grey. A black bar runs across the middle of his upper wings, one bar on each wing like a reflection of itself. Two parallel grey-black bars run along the underwings. His chest and the underside of his upper wings are flecked with a rusty patterning; the female Montagu’s also has this reddish-brown blotching on her feathers. The ruff (the wreath of feathers that circles the head) is less pronounced in both sexes of the Montagu’s than it is in the hen harrier. The male Montagu’s is a more intricately patterned bird, his underside daubed with reds and browns and blacks; the dots of red look like a street of distant lights. The male hen harrier, by comparison, has a clean white undercarriage, unpatterned, brightly lit.

  All of these variants are mostly undetectable, even through binoculars. It is easier to look to the bird’s shape and the feel of its flight. Look especially at the shape of the wings: the Montagu’s has longer, narrower wings with three long-fingered primaries; the hen harrier’s wings are broader, blunter at the ends. The difference in wing length is especially noticeable when the birds are perched: the Montagu’s long wings extend as far as the tip of its tail. Gravity, as well, works differently on the two species. The hen harrier, with its longer legs, stands taller. The Montagu’s harrier, at rest, has a lower centre of gravity, sits more squat to the ground; in flight, gravity seems to have no bearing at all on the Montagu’s harrier.

  In the early afternoon high cloud begins to collect, thin streaks finding then plaiting each other. There is a slight shift in the light as the day’s glare dims under the cloud. When the female Montagu’s harrier rises high above the field the backdrop of cloud articulates her outline beautifully. Her three long primaries are clearly visible, the first time I have been able to count them accurately. When she holds her wings out behind her, before she goes into a glide, the tips of the wings have a falcon’s sharpness.

  I spend the whole day not getting used to her. Each time she comes into view I am amazed by the length of her wings. She is so loose and willowy, so relaxed in her flight. And unlike any other raptor I have seen in the way she does not flex her speed and strength. She is more like a gull in this respect, languid, unhurried in her flight. She keeps her speed in check: an adverse wind specialist, flying into the wind to slow herself down so she can scan the ground. Until the moment she spots her prey and you see how in fact she is primed with speed, is capable of a sudden shock of speed and will often carry on past her prey then turn rapidly around, backtrack, and use the wind’s momentum to make her strike.

  Striking at: skylark, meadow pipit, lizard, partridge chick, reed bunting, common vole, field vole, grasshopper, cricket … In their African and Asian wintering grounds, locusts are an especially important prey species for these harriers. The Montagu’s harrier can switch between small passerines and small mammals and, though it is not as dependent on voles as some other birds of prey, there are locations where voles are a
significant part of the Montagu’s diet and the harrier’s breeding success is strongly influenced by the vole population.

  Lightness and lift, will-o’-the-wisp, the soul set adrift like a plume of smoke … The poet John Clare described the Montagu’s harriers he saw from his home on the edge of The Fens as swimming close to the green corn. It is in her lightness and ease of buoyancy that the corn-swimmer is most distinct from the hen harrier, the heather-wanderer, a sense that you have met, in the Montagu’s harrier, the epitome of lightness and drift, that you could not perceive any creature more buoyant than this.

  If I were to mark a halfway point on my journey I think it would be here on the edge of The Fens. The place feels like a junction of sorts, a crossing point between the north and south. At least, I have the sense that I have crossed a border between birds, between the hen harrier who breeds on the northern uplands and the Montagu’s harrier who, on the edge of its northern range in England, breeds in the fenlands and chalklands of the south country. It is a border which dissolves outside the breeding season when, at the end of summer, Montagu’s harriers depart for the locust-rich habitats of sub-Saharan Africa, returning again in the spring. In the interim, a change of shift: hen harriers come down from the moors to overwinter in the lowlands, sometimes moving into the vacuum left by the departed Montagu’s harriers.

  There used to be more interaction between the harrier species in this country, more blurring of their breeding range. Historically the Montagu’s harrier has never been a numerous summer migrant to the British Isles, but there are accounts of it breeding alongside hen harriers and marsh harriers in The Fens. There are records of the birds being snared and their eggs sold when the collecting rage was at its height in the nineteenth century (a male Montagu’s harrier in good condition could fetch 20 shillings; eggs could go for a similar sum). So this border between birds – this north–south divide between harrier species – is not a natural one. The hen harrier’s breeding range is only confined to the northern uplands because persecution forced it to retreat to the far north and west, and it has never recolonised the extent of its former range. In tandem, the Montagu’s harrier’s breeding range (which historically had been more widely, though still thinly, scattered) has contracted to the opposite corner of these islands and today the Montagu’s harrier only breeds in tiny numbers in the south and east of England.