Raptors

by James Macdonald Lockhart

  There is a species of goshawk, the beautifully named Dark Chanting Goshawk, that builds its nest by selecting twigs with social spiders living on them. The spiders quickly consume the hawk’s nest with their silk so that the structure becomes hidden – concealed from predators – by a bulb of silk. If MacGillivray could build a nest like that, which hid him, protected him, he could forgo the lodging house and sleep instead amongst the noisy streets of Manchester, despite the sewer stench, the stink from all the tanneries, the butcher stalls and tallow chandleries.

  There is no doubt now, there is definitely someone following him. He has had enough of this and so he whirls around to face his stalker:

  – Sir (the man says to MacGillivray, as if he had spoken to him).

  MacGillivray says nothing.

  – Do you know me?

  – No, I do not.

  – Upon my word, I beg your pardon. I thought your name had been John Parkins.

  I love these tetchy conversations MacGillivray has along the way, these brusque rebuttals. It seems that anyone who spoils his momentum is unwelcome. Pity the farmer, for instance, he met on the road outside Lancaster who was foolish enough to remark that MacGillivray seemed in a great hurry …

  – What? (MacGillivray answers).

  – You are in a great hurry.

  – No I am not.

  – Aren’t you?

  – No.

  – Where have you come from?

  – From the North.

  – Is there any quarrelling there? Any fighting?

  – No.

  – From what part of the North have you come from?

  – From Scotland.

  – Where are you going?

  – To London.

  MacGillivray becomes so irritable he almost punches him. Poor man, he starts to back away:

  – Farewell, farewell, good morrow, good morrow …

  The only exception to these prickly exchanges I can find was the poor man, turned off by his laird, that MacGillivray passed on the road outside Elgin when he was walking home one time to Harris from Aberdeen. MacGillivray stopped and gave the man a shilling and apologised it was not in his power to give more, and the man blessed MacGillivray and said he had given too much.

  MacGillivray leaves Manchester at ten o’clock next morning. When he reaches the outskirts he joins the London road and settles, more relaxed now, into his stride. Behind him the city’s factory chimneys look like colonnades of rain. What did the farmer he barked at mean by any quarrelling, any fighting? MacGillivray is leaving Manchester just a few weeks after the Peterloo Massacre, and though he does not mention this in his journal, he must have been aware of what happened, that the region felt charged and changed and fragile. What with his experience of these forces at work in the Hebrides, of the wholesale displacement of people, he must have recognised what happened at Peterloo – the charge of the cavalry troop into the crowd – as another, more brutal branch of this work, the clearance of people who are in the way.

  He passes a milestone – To London 182 miles – and his spirits begin to lift. For the first time, London – the British Museum with its great collection of birds – starts to feel in reach. He walks through Stockport and on through Cheshire, approaching the green hills of Derbyshire. His pace picks up, he even (whisper it) starts to feel quite cheerful. A quick calculation: yesterday he covered 24 miles, London is now 158 miles off. Today is Friday. MacGillivray proposes to be in London by two o’clock on Thursday. That’s 26 miles a day on a budget of one and twenty pence per day. He would like (of course he would!) to travel more cheaply, but why torment himself with bad meals and scratchy beds when there is no need for that. After all, he has nothing to prove: he is confident of his ability to walk for miles without food. He once travelled 240 miles on just twelve shillings, but there was also the occasion when he spent (he shudders to recall the lack of prudence) fifteen shillings in a day! These are his extremes.

  Red Kite

  The mouth is wide, measuring an inch and two-twelfths across … the oesophagus six inches and a half long, the crop two inches in width; the stomach round, and two inches in diameter, its muscular coat very thin. The intestine five feet long, from four to two and a half twelfths in width, until the commencement of the rectum, which is half an inch wide, and forms a large globular dilatation … Wings extremely long, broad, narrow, but rounded at the end; the third quill longest, the fourth almost equal, the first short; the primary quills of moderate strength, broad, toward the end tapering, in-curved, with the tip rounded, the outer five having the inner web cut out … Tail very long, broad, forked, or emarginated, of twelve broad feathers … The flight of this bird is remarkably elegant, the lightness of its body, and the proportionally great extent of the wings and tail, producing a buoyancy which reminds one of the mode of flying of the Gulls and Jagers …

  I am sitting on a wall at the far end of a car park in Llandovery, strapping the tent to my rucksack. Late February, a granite light, the sky looks like it has been washed with silt. A pair of red kites come in low over the town from the north. They circle above the car park, one of the birds calling a high, echoing whistle. Not unlike a buzzard, but the kite’s call sounds higher, quicker, less resonant.

  I drive north out of the town following the river Tywi into the hills. Higher up the valley the land is under mist. Blocks of conifers are darker shapes inside the mist. There are glimpses of oak woods on the steep banks above the river; birch trees in amongst them lighten the oaks’ colour. I have to slow the car to crawling pace, put the fog lights on and creep along the narrow road. Through a village smoking in the mist, then a bridge across the river and the road is suddenly even narrower. I park up, wedging the car out of the way under a tall bank. Tree roots, crimson ligaments, show through the turf where the bank has been cut back. Then the familiar ritual, feet up on the car’s rear bumper, boots loosened and threaded, backpack tightened.

  If the Montagu’s harrier is all buoyancy, lightness and drift, then the red kite is pure agility, pure manoeuvrability. And if the Montagu’s harrier is all wing, then the red kite is all tail. MacGillivray wrote, It is his tail that seems to direct all his evolutions, and he moves it continually. In the Upper Tywi valley the kite is known as Boda wennol (the swallow-tailed hawk). Further south in Wales, she is Hebog cwt-fforchog (the falcon with the forked tail).

  Everything in the kite’s design lends itself to agility: long-winged, light-framed, with a tail that is shaped to decrease drag and increase lift, a tail that can perform miracles inside the air. The ‘swallow-tailed hawk’ has swallow-like agility. A kite can hold itself inside the bumpiest of thermals, constantly adjusting its tail to keep itself in place to scrutinise the ground below. And a kite can suddenly turn on a sixpence, despite its great size, in order to twist around and take a closer look at something it might have missed. What is so mesmerising about the red kite is that a bird of its size – a bird with such long wings – can perform such aerial acrobatics. You would think that it was too gangly for such aerial dexterity. The kite’s size constantly belies its behaviour in the air.

  The forked tail enhances manoeuvrability, it gives the bird stability through the tightest of turns. The span of the fork can be varied depending on how wide or tight the turn. The sharper the turn, the wider the fork, and vice versa. It is no good, such a forked tail, in a densely packed habitat like a wood, as the tail’s outer primaries – the long exposed sides of the tail – are vulnerable to damage through snagging branches. So kites prefer to nest in roomy deciduous woods with ample space to reach their nests. The sparrowhawk, in comparison, has a long straight tail which is less vulnerable to damage as it hunts at speed through the clutter of a wood.

  What the kite needs – like the swallow, like the harrier – is open space to range and forage over. Woodland is used by the kite only for nesting and roosting. The rest of its time is spent hunting over open landscapes. Of all the birds of prey the kite is the one that lives the most ins
ide the air. She does not belong on the ground, does not make sense unless she is in the air.

  I pass through a quiet farmyard. Nobody about, not a soul since I left the village. But I notice, as I brush close to it, the warmth coming off the bonnet of a tractor. I follow a quad-bike track out of the farm, spilled wisps of hay in the mud. A path filters off the track and starts to climb between gorse and hawthorn, across beds of flattened bracken. This is the kite’s backyard, the ffridd, the tangled vole-rich lower slopes, equivalent to the margins between the moor and fields the hen harriers frequent over Orkney. Unkempt no-man’s-land, so critical to foraging birds of prey.

  The path takes me through a small wood, dripping and still. A kite turns out of the mist and flickers slowly over me. I have seen several kites already including the ones over Llandovery, but every kite is a gift because its flight is rarely hurried and you have time to follow it, watch what the bird’s gymnastics do to the air. I think how different the experience is to following the merlins out on the flows of Sutherland, those tiny balls of energy fizzing out across all that distance. The kite is the least linear of raptors, it spends its time unravelling imaginary balls of string in the air.

  I walk for several hours into the hills. The mist accentuates the quiet. I find fox prints in the mud, and at one point, the mist stirs enough for me to make out three chequered black and white wild ponies grazing on the hillside. An hour before dusk, I make camp in a small oak wood hanging above the river. I pitch my tent on a narrow clearing in the bracken. As I work a kite takes off from one of the trees in front of me and glides across the river. An hour before dark the mist lifts and I can see clear down the valley. It is clearer now, at dusk, than it has been at any time during the day. The kite is still in view and I watch the bird working her way down the valley, backlit by a thin layer of blue.

  Each kite is a gift because more than any other bird of prey they are indulgent of you. They don’t mind you being close to them and, outside the nesting period, are little troubled by human presence. One afternoon I followed a red kite foraging over the ground between a busy ring road and the outskirts of a town. The kite banked above houses, hunting over side streets and alleyways. At one point I watched it hovering just above me and saw it drop something, a vole I think. But before the vole could reach the ground the kite swooped down after it and retrieved it in mid-air. What I remember most from the incident was not the showy acrobatics, more the bird’s dramatic turn of speed. All afternoon it had glanced over rooftops and hedgerows so slowly it was fairly easy for me to keep pace with it. But when the vole was dropped, the kite paused for a split second then burst after it in a sudden flex of speed.

  They are more tolerant, red kites, of human beings and human spaces than other birds of prey. Kites are essentially scavengers, and like other scavenging raptors, such as vultures, they are often drawn in large numbers to the rubbish produced by humans. Some Asian cities have large resident populations of black kites, and English cities too were once home to substantial numbers of red kites, protected by royal statute because of the important role the birds performed in gleaning the filthy medieval streets. Medieval London was famous for its red kites and the birds so brazen in their interaction with people it was not unknown for a kite to snatch bread from a child in the street, or a cap from off a man’s head to line its nest with.

  Piratical; fanatical nest decorators: it is not improbable that London’s medieval kites were as bold as this. Kites are well known for their piratical habits of harassing corvids and other raptors to drop their prey, utilising their aerial agility to harry the other bird into spilling its catch. Then it is the simplest thing for the kite to swoop down and pluck the tumbling item out of the air. Nests are adorned with anything that comes to hand: caps, handkerchiefs, plastic bags, discarded lottery tickets …

  In Wales I found red kites over car parks, playing fields, allotments, as well as across the Cambrian mountain heights. There seems to be no other bird of prey that crosses over so fluidly, so constantly, into our world. The red kite is a bird that lives in the slipstream of human beings, gleaning, foraging around us. They will follow ploughs and harvesters and take scraps left out in people’s gardens. They have even been known to tear net curtains from open windows to decorate their nests.

  I sit outside the tent as it grows dark. Cold air has sunk into the valley and my breath is suddenly visible. Moths are out, flickering over my hands, whirring past my ear. There is a scuffling in one of the trees, something scratching at the bark, then a red squirrel scurries down the trunk and hops away over the crunchy leaf litter. If I had not seen it first I might have thought a larger animal, a deer or sheep perhaps, was moving through the spinney; in its frenetic scrabbling, a squirrel can make so much noise inside a wood.

  All afternoon kites had come down out of the mist like sudden angels. As I walked up the valley I kept putting up a buzzard that flapped heavily away from me then waited round the next bend before I came into sight again. The buzzard seemed huge and slow in comparison with the flickering, twisting kites. Halfway into the hills a raven flew close and low, its glossy blackness lit up against the winter grass. There was frogspawn all over the hillside, stranded on clumps of reeds, as if it had drifted there like blown sea spume.

  The light going now and at the last, before I turn in for the night, a buzzard rushes into the spinney, just a few feet from where I am sitting. It swerves between the trees and I think, because it is flying so fast, it must be hunting. But then it lifts out of its flight and lands on a wide branch. There is very little light now but I can just make out the dark shape of the buzzard, settling its weight on its perch, preparing to roost.

  I am up before it is light. I did not sleep much. There was a small stream a few feet from the tent and all night, with my ear pressed against the ground, I kept waking to the sound of water, sounding as if it was running under me. As I sit outside the tent at dawn, making tea, there is a movement in the bracken. Stepping out into the clearing, right in front of me: a fox, white-chested, a brightness to her coat, made brighter – redder – by the rusty bracken behind her. Then she turns, coils away from me, and begins to climb the steep bank. After a minute she stops, glances back towards me. She repeats this several times, pausing, turning her head to look in my direction, finally disappearing into the bracken.

  Take a hammer or an axe, whatever is to hand, swing it round and round you in a circle by its handle and, at the point of greatest energy, or before the dizziness overwhelms you, let go the handle and let the hammer fly. Retrieve it, and when you do so, mark the spot where it has landed. Then walk back to where you started and repeat the action. But this time send the hammer off in the opposite direction, until you have flung it out to every compass bearing. Then draw a line between all the spots where the hammer landed. In this way you can mark out the perimeter of your territory, your plot, your home.

  This is how squatters in the first half of the nineteenth century would claim a patch of ground for their own on the marginal lands, the ffridd, of the Upper Tywi and elsewhere in rural Wales. The point where you swung the hammer had to be the front door of your house. But the house (and herein lay the catch) must be built in a single night in order for the squatter to validate their claim on the land.

  Ty un nos: a one-night house. The key was to prepare the roof in advance and gather as many friends as possible to help with the night’s work. The walls and roof had to be up and, crucially, a fire lit in the hearth so that smoke could be seen drawing from the chimney at dawn. Surprise: a house!

  I looked for traces of these houses while I walked through the hills of the Upper Tywi, drawn to poking about ruins marked on the map. In most cases I found very little, just the skeletal outlines of buildings, soothed over with mosses, riddled with bracken. These one-night houses in Wales coincided with the advance of Parliamentary Enclosures in the first half of the nineteenth century. Access to common lands and upland pastures was rescinded by landlords, forcing the poor t
o try and make a living from the scrappy wastelands around the margins.

  A clearance is an ongoing process. It only succeeds in displacing a people to somewhere they will be in the way again. I found this with the story of the people shunted around the Morvern peninsula until they ended up dumped on the barren outcrop of Oronsay. But even there, of all the godforsaken places, they were not allowed to settle long before they were picked up and herded on. A common name for the Welsh one-night house was ‘labour in vain’. More often than not the squatters’ cottages were destroyed by farmers who felt their own grazings were being encroached. Fences, hedges, those hammer-marked perimeters, were dismantled and often just as quickly put back up again by the squatters. Disputes rumbled on like this for years. Sometimes squatters’ houses were destroyed decades after they had been constructed when commissioners judged that the land they were on should be enclosed. You try to establish a toehold on the land, try to cling on to it, but that hold is just as soon pulled from under you.

  In the first half of the twentieth century the hills and hanging woods of the Upper Tywi became the red kite’s last refuge in these islands. A tiny, remnant population, dwindling, clinging on. At their lowest ebb, in the 1930s and early 1940s, there were perhaps no more than ten pairs. They entered a genetic bottleneck and for a long time afterwards all Welsh kites could trace their ancestry to a single female bird. That was how close the birds came to extinction in the British Isles.