Raptors

by James Macdonald Lockhart

  The pesticides were banned, the bans enforced: it was not after all too late. Peregrines pulled back from the brink. The population slowly recovered. Old eyries on the cliffs of Devon and Cornwall were tenanted once more. Flocks of pigeons coming in off the Bristol Channel scattered like seed. Rock doves learnt to hug the cliffs rather than expose themselves to the falcon’s swoop. As peregrine numbers swelled, the falcons, for so long a bird associated with the margins of these islands, began to colonise urban spaces. Peregrines found sanctuary in our towns and cities, habitats where they were left undisturbed to nest on the tall cliffs of buildings and hunt the large urban populations of feral pigeons. What occurred was an unexpected breaching of worlds, a shift from the depopulated corners of these islands into the centres of population. Peregrines came to live amongst us and their wildness pulsed through our cities.

  Listen! Look up! When I hear the falcon I do not hear anything else. The city drops away from under me and there is just the sharp, piercing kee-errk, kee-errk cutting through the warm air. The surrounding buildings bounce the sound back so that it rushes at me, amplified, the call rising in pitch, the second note sounding more drawn out. I try to pick out the phonetics of the falcon’s call, ee-ack, ee-ack; kee-errk, kee-errk … but it’s hard to transcribe and my notebook scrawls with imitations until the page looks like something from a codebook.

  From the bench I watch the male – the tiercel – leave his perch and circle out in a wide arc back to the spire on Holy Trinity. A flexing flight, a pirouette: no intent to it. He lands on the spire’s weather vane and his landing sets the vane rotating. Every few seconds, as he spins around the circumference of the spire, the tiercel’s profile changes, black wings rotating through the mottled white plumage of his chest. The vane keeps on spinning like this, absorbing the force of the bird’s landing; for several minutes the whole city lies under the tiercel’s rotating gaze.

  I get up off the bench and walk around the perimeter of the cathedral ruins along the adjoining streets. In drains and gutters lining the cathedral’s walls I find the detritus of falcon meals: parcels of bone stringy with dried sinew, feathers matted with skin, a pigeon’s claw with a turquoise ring around its ankle.

  Too far inland to be bombed, at the beginning of the war Coventry and the Midlands were felt to be out of range of the Luftwaffe. When France was invaded in the spring of 1940 children who had been sent to stay with relatives on the English south coast were pulled back by their families to Coventry, to the distant safety of the Midlands. When the bombings began to reach the outskirts of the city in June 1940 they did so tentatively like the first wisps of an approaching shower. A ruined house was a novelty, buses did a good trade taking Sunday afternoon sightseers to see the damage. Bomb fragments were much sought after, treasured like pieces from a meteor.

  June bends towards July. The light tilts. The air thickens with heat. The bombing raids become more familiar. The falcon young have flown and passed into another stage of their nomenclature: they are soar hawks now, learning what they are capable of. Very few of them will survive beyond the winter. On 1 July 1940 the Secretary of State for Air issues the Destruction of Peregrine Falcons Order. Adults, eyasses, eggs are destroyed up and down the land. The peregrines pose too great a threat to carrier pigeons, lifelines for the military. The order lasts the duration of the war. Cliffs are overseen instead by ravens, the falcon’s grudging neighbour.

  To reach Coventry, to plot their way accurately, German pathfinders follow a system of radio navigation beams that lead the pilots to their target. A main approach beam is intersected by a series of cross-beams which mark off the decreasing distance to the drop zone. Fifty seconds after the planes pass the final cross-beam an electric circuit on the bomb-release clock closes and the first incendiaries fall over Coventry, lighting up the city for the subsequent waves of bombers.

  Peregrines will return to the same nest sites year after year. Signs on the cliffs can help to guide the returning birds: green stains where nutrients in the droppings of last season’s young have spilled down the rock and lit it up with algae blooms.

  By early autumn 1940 Coventry is increasingly deserted at night. The doors of empty houses are marked S.O. in chalk – the wardens do not wish to risk their lives searching for people who are not there. S.O. stands for Sleeps Out. Out means the surrounding countryside, sleeping under hedges, bridges, in barns, burrowing under ricks of hay. Cars parked in pools of darkness. A shilling a head the going rate if you could find a bed at a farm or someone’s house, baths were extra. Each evening at rush hour the nightly trek begins, thousands streaming out of the city, prams and wheelbarrows carrying bedding, a long procession of torches glittering in the cold air.

  Almost half the city empties out like that each night. The wealthy have places to stay, cars to take them; the poor walk and sleep beneath tarpaulins in the woods. And the countryside at night so vivid and strange: bedding down with the noise of the roe in rut; finding piles of crab apples spilt from hedgerows like pools of green and yellow light; and once the noise of badgers rummaging through a wood, sounding like the wood was murmuring to itself. Hearing the raids coming in, the ground guttural, rumbling. An aftertaste of gasoline in the air. Fires breaking out across the distant city. Then back again come morning, stiff and dewy, the streets smelling of smoke. Dust on everything like a thin layer of snow. Searching for homes and finding just the staircase, the ribcage of the house, leading into thin air.

  So that autumn of 1940 there was a constant flow, tidal in its regularity, between the city and the surrounding countryside, a crossing over from one zone to the next, from the dark of the blackout city to the deeper dark of the city’s periphery. The city slept outside itself and every morning sleepwalked back into its own skin.

  Between the Leisure Centre and the underpass I find him, banking above an empty car park in a tangle of crows. I hear the crows, look up, and there is the tiercel’s sickle shape cutting away to the north. All morning I follow him through the city. The old cathedral looms like the great sandstone cliffs of Hoy. I see his reflection swipe the glass front of the museum. Sometimes I lose him behind a building until scolding crows give him away and he appears once more, quick and low over my head.

  When he perches, often for long spells, I perch beneath him, keeping watch from a shopping centre, a bench outside an office block, through the window of a bar, open at 8 a.m., the only place round here you can get Newkie Brown; the tiercel outside, shifting.

  A pub in Birmingham, 14 November 1940. The moon so bright it finds the glasses’ sheen. A man in grey overalls bursts in, out of breath. The moonlight seems to clean his clothes. He stands there, gannet-bright. Just come in the lorry from Coventry, he says. You want to go outside and take a look: they’re getting it badly tonight.

  The first sign of the raid: dogs barking through the city, hearing the drone of the planes before anyone else. Then incendiaries making swishing sounds like heavy rain. People running into the streets with wet rags to put the fires out. A lady with white hair wears a colander on her head to stop the aircrews spotting her. Bombs coming down like hailstones. Shelters filling up. Candles are lit in upturned plant pots. Blown-off doors are used as stretchers. Hospitals spill over with the wounded. The fires and the moon feeding off each other make it light as day; one boy tells his mother he doesn’t like this sort of sun. The air is hot and acrid. Then the electricity and gas are cut. The fire crews have no pressure in the water. Parachute mines look like German airmen bailing out; people run to apprehend them with sticks, axes, anything to hand. The explosion stops their lungs.

  He is hunting now and everything has changed. A falcon at rest creates a truce and the world beneath his perch is suspended for a while. So pigeons can pass casually by, a dipper can glance from rock to rock. But once the peregrine is up, the world that hangs beneath the hunting bird is suddenly charged. Everything is in flight from the falcon. Pigeons sharpen into speed, become almost falcons in themselves: compact s
hots of speed. Hunted birds have been known to be shocked into tameness, seeking out the safety of people, even allowing themselves to be picked up. Some birds grow so paralysed with fear there are accounts of people walking along a shoreline beneath a hunting peregrine gathering up the cowering snipe, placing them in the warmth of their pockets, each snipe a trembling, unexploded ordnance.

  Even a falcon’s absence can be felt. The presence of other birds of prey like the kestrel or merlin can sometimes indicate the absence of a peregrine, as if the smaller raptors have moved into a zone of refuge created by the absent falcon. Those peregrines, pesticide-addled, that reared the kestrel young were raising prey. Almost all birds are at risk from peregrines. There are records of geese, black-backed gulls, even buzzards being struck down. MacGillivray was told about the remains of a black grouse found at a peregrine’s eyrie on the Bass Rock. The falcon would have had to carry this heavy prey a distance of 3 miles from the mainland. In falconry’s heyday peregrines were trained to bring down birds as large as red kites and herons. But prey of this size is really an anomaly; peregrines are essentially a specialist predator in that their preference is for medium-sized avian prey. In these islands, pigeons (specifically rock doves, feral and homing pigeons) are by far the most common source of food for peregrine falcons. Depending on season and habitat, marine birds are also taken, especially black-headed gulls and fulmars. Additionally, corvids, red grouse and waders such as lapwings, golden plover and redshank can be locally important prey species for peregrines.

  Some birds, conversely, are pulled towards a falcon’s presence. The tiny wren will often nest close to peregrine eyries, gathering feathers from the falcon’s plucking posts to line its own nest. Geese, too, have been known to cluster their nests close to peregrine cliffs, benefiting from the falcons’ protection against ground predators such as foxes. Gauntlet-runners, the geese choose to walk to and from their nests, rather than risk drawing attention from their hosts. Once, in the glen near home, I took a dog with me and the presence of the dog seemed to ratchet up the falcon’s fury. I had a glimpse of how unrelenting and aggressive the birds could be to foxes that strayed too close to their nests. The falcon rushed at the dog (and me), screaming, swooping low over our heads. All I wanted to do was get out of the way.

  Towards eight o’clock the first incendiaries hit the cathedral, singeing the frost from its roof. Four men are on duty to defend it. The fires work through the building, moving from nave to vestry. A large incendiary lands amongst the pews and it takes two buckets of sand to extinguish it. The men rescue what they can: the altar cross and candlesticks, a silver wafer box and snuffer, a wooden crucifix … They are soon exhausted, soaked in sweat. Steel girders twist in the heat. The organ (which Handel played) is a concentrated blaze. They can hear the drip of molten lead as the roof begins to melt. Throughout it all – throughout the night – the cathedral’s tower clock keeps striking the hours. People across the city, when they hear the chimes, presume the cathedral has survived.

  Suddenly he is alert, restless, clicking his gaze through every inch of sky. Three pigeons, flying just above the rooftops, seem to slow as they pass beneath him. The tiercel tilts towards them, slips from his perch, throws himself at the pigeons. The city rushes towards him. The pigeons blur then fracture. They drop down into the safety of the street, killing the falcon’s space to swoop. The hunt is abandoned and the peregrine is back on his glaring perch.

  One hundred and fifty, 180 mph a falcon reaches in its stoop. Waiting-up in the clouds or, when prey is spotted, climbing rapidly to position itself above the target. Then wings are folded back and the peregrine hurls itself at an angle of 30º–45º to the horizontal, sometimes almost vertical. Occasionally aiming wide and then striking from below as the falcon surges up out of the stoop. Often, the force of the impact is such that prey is knocked out of the sky and the peregrine then has ample time to glide down to the crash site. More often than not the falcon misses. If the hunt is not abandoned then the peregrine will beat back up to gain sufficient height to launch another attack, wings folded back, tearing down through the astonished air.

  Later that morning he makes a kill. I miss the moment. It happens somewhere out on the edge of the city where I lose him in a fury of speed. When I find him again he is plucking at something on a ledge of the new cathedral. All I can see of the kill is a boil of red flesh. The female stands to one side calling to him, bobbing, agitated. When he has finished feeding he shifts his perch and begins to preen. Feathers drift away from him like thistledown.

  Sounding the all clear, crawling out of shelters, mist over the city, a slow drizzle in the cold dawn. Everywhere the crunch of glass underfoot. A butcher’s shop still burning, the smell of roasting meat. Houses quiet, missing the whirr of gas and electricity meters. Dust in the food. Kettles filled from rainwater butts. Fires lit. Tea made. Someone serves out treacle tart for breakfast. The outer walls of the cathedral enclose a great pile of smoking rubble. Incredibly, the tower is still intact, blackened down one side from all the smoke.

  Then I am up in their realm. One wing flap and the falcons could reach me. I have climbed to the top of the old cathedral tower, miraculous blitz survivor, 295 feet high, the third-tallest spire in England. There are squirrels carved into the tower’s stonework representing the medieval woods that surrounded the city. A slow coiling climb, past bell ropes, their sallies hanging in dusty stillness.

  The night of Friday 15 November the Luftwaffe’s main bombing force is dispatched to London. Only six or seven planes reach Coventry and drop 7 tonnes of high explosive. It is so trivial compared with the night before that the raid is barely noticed. The roads out of Coventry are streams of refugees wading through piles of glass. The roads have turned to quagmires from all the mud the bombs threw up. Aftershocks: delayed-action bombs, fires reigniting, shattered nerves, screaming when the sirens start again. The night following the raid the city is emptier than at any time for half a century.

  From the top of the spire I can look directly across to the tiercel and the falcon still perched on the flèche of the new cathedral. The falcon – the female – is preening. The male has begun his ballet of agitation, flicking his gaze across the city. I am exhilarated by this new perspective, to be among the falcons, at the same height as the birds, looking down their avenues of sky. The female is taller than I had expected. In some artists’ depictions of peregrines the birds often seem too tall, their necks elongated as if the perspective is not quite right, but I can see now that once the female stretches out of her hunched perch she unravels a long back. Her tail hangs behind her, tapering to a narrow end. The wrists of her folded wings protrude up to her neckline, making the wing-wrists look like shoulder pads.

  Counting the dead. The first mass funeral of the war. Aid pours in to Coventry, donations from across the globe. Four lorryloads of shoes are dispatched from Leicester. In the ruins of the cathedral, on Christmas Day 1940, the Provost broadcasts to the world: We are trying, hard as it may be, to banish all thoughts of revenge.

  The male flexes his wings, peers over his ledge and drops. From the tower I can keep track of him more easily. I watch him gaining height, circling over the city. He moves towards the north through a vast acreage of sky. I can see for 20 miles in every direction. I watch him hanging above the city and for long periods he is just a black speck against the cloud. I follow him as he starts to track to the east and suddenly I am aware he has dipped into a stoop, my binoculars trembling to keep up with his change of speed. The next ten minutes I spend trying to locate him over the city’s outskirts. I trace my binoculars over every corner of sky and pause to unpick each speck and dot against the blue. But the heat blurs things and I have lost him again in the rising haze of the day.

  I walk around the roof of the tower still trying to spot the male. My feet crunch the claws and bones of pigeons that have dropped from the falcons’ plucking post above. I find a jackdaw’s head lying on the roof. Dried, mummified in the hea
t, not yet a skull. I crouch down to take a closer look. One for sorrow, two for joy … The rhyme starts before I realise my mistake: a magpie’s head, a seam of metallic green running through the black feathers.

  I cannot find the tiercel. He is shimmering somewhere above the city. I walk around the roof of the tower and pause opposite the falcon still on her perch on the new cathedral. I can see the yellow orbit of her eye, the black sunspot in the centre of it. Then she lifts, turns, and flies towards me.

  X

  Red Kite

  Upper Tywi Valley, Wales

  MacGillivray reaches Manchester on 13 October, the distance he has come starting to resemble a migration. Six hundred and fifty-six miles since he left Aberdeen thirty-seven days ago, a steady bearing southwards, picking up momentum, barely stopping now, as if London were all downhill from here. Weaving through the streets of Manchester, trying to find lodgings for the night, but everywhere refusing him. They only need to open the door a chink and take one look at his mud-splattered coat, his worn-out shoes, his grass-stained knapsack … It is not that they doubt he can pay, rather, that if they let him enter, they fear they would be letting in the weather.

  Manchester is a low point. The miles are starting to tell. MacGillivray is exhausted and cannot shake off the feeling he is being followed through the streets. It is strange he should feel so haunted here amongst the cluttered city when the loneliness of the moor has never troubled him. He is trying to persuade a landlady to give him lodging for the night; she is wavering in the doorway and all MacGillivray wants to do is find a place to rest. He would like to curl up there and then and I wonder, if he could find a quiet spot away from the crowds, the coal wagons and beer wagons, could he not make a nest from all the plant cuttings he has in his knapsack and bed down instead in them for the night.