Despite its remoteness, its largely un-keepered woods and hills, the Upper Tywi was never a safe refuge for kites. It was just where they ended up after they had been driven out from everywhere else. But the bird’s status there was always precarious. Egg collectors, the limited gene pool, the climate of those rain-drenched, infertile hills: there were so many ways for the kites to fail in Wales. And for decades the few remaining birds lived a miserable banishment, their toehold on the land constantly pulled from under them. Even some of those responsible for safeguarding the few nests were corruptible and eggs were frequently stolen to order. When the Welsh kite population did finally begin to increase in the 1960s it was not because more birds were being born, rather that fewer adult kites were dying.
Britain’s commonest bird of prey reduced in the blink of an eye to a rump, to just a handful of birds. The kite’s undoing facilitated – accelerated – by that tolerance of human beings and human spaces. A large, slow bird swimming leisurely overhead made the easiest of targets; its propensity for carrion made it just as easy to trap or poison. We preferred (we still prefer in some cases) our birds of prey to be banished to the margins. We drove them to the furthest reaches, to the outliers of these islands, like the last lone sea eagle living out her days on Shetland. The Upper Tywi was the red kite’s Shetland, its Oronsay.
But when we let them back in, as we have recently with the red kite through successful reintroduction schemes in England and in Scotland, their presence is transformative. The birds transform – they restore – the land. A landscape without raptors is an unnatural one.
People were found to be in the way once more in the Upper Tywi valley in the mid-twentieth century. The first the farmers of the area heard about it was a summons to a public meeting at Llandovery Town Hall on 18 November 1949. There they were told, abruptly, dismissively (in English), of the Forestry Commission’s scheme to plant the largest forest in Wales, covering 20,000 acres, swamping forty-eight farms. The forest would take forty years to come to fruition. Farmers could volunteer to sell up or, failing that, the Commission would have no alternative but to issue compulsory purchase orders.
So the ‘Battle of the Tywi’ began and the farming community, angered by the manner and tone with which the Forestry Commission had proposed the scheme, organised itself to resist and petition against the purchase order. The ‘battle’ rumbled on for several years and ended with this statement in the House of Commons on 31 January 1952:
– Mr Baldwin asked the Minister of Agriculture whether he can yet make a statement about the proposals for the compulsory purchase for afforestation of a large area in the Towy Valley.
– Sir T. Dugdale: Yes. I should welcome an opportunity of explaining the position. A draft Order for the compulsory purchase of some 11,450 acres was published on 18th September, 1950, objections were lodged and a public local inquiry into them was held. The report of the inspector appointed to hold the inquiry was submitted to me on 20th November, 1951.
I have examined the proposals and considered the objections as reported by the inspector. After considering all the circumstances, including the country’s financial and economic situation, my conclusion – with which the Forestry Commission concurs – is that it is not expedient to proceed with the project, which would involve heavy capital expenditure as a preliminary to a programme extending over 20 years. I have, therefore, after consulting my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary and Minister for Welsh Affairs decided not to make an Order.
I sit down in a small field just above the river. For a while I watch a pair of ravens, vocal, busy about their nest site on a cliff high above the valley. Then a kite glances above the ridge. The rest of the morning I spend sitting at the edge of the field following the kite as it hunts slowly over the adjacent hillside. Behind me, great tits call and skitter through the hanging oak wood. Sessile oaks: hobbled and mossy, ferns growing along their thick shoulders. Sheep are inside the wood. Four skittish ewes with winter coughs, coughing at me when I disturb them coming down through the trees.
Sometimes the kite drifts towards me and hangs above the river. Its tail tips a fraction, pitching the bird into another angle of drift. The tail is almost fishlike in its flickering, waving movements. Other kites pass across the valley and I try, unsuccessfully, to distinguish the sexes. I read that the male is a fraction smaller, a fraction lighter, more agile, his tail working, flexing constantly. The female’s tail is not as deeply forked, her wings are slightly longer, broader, more pointed at the tips. Later that day I watch a pair of kites flying close together, mirroring each other, one kite riding 8 feet above the other, a synchrony, a courtship in the air.
Throughout the morning buzzards and ravens interject into the kite’s airspace. The kite amongst its neighbours is so much slower and less purposeful; even the buzzards are usually heading somewhere, crossing from left to right, or working to gain height. The kite, it seems, is not going anywhere. It is too intent on scrutinising the ground, rotating, adrift in its own gyre.
During the nesting season the relationship between the three species – kite, buzzard and raven – is fraught with squabbles. Red kite nests situated close to breeding ravens will often fail. If you hear the unmistakable quick-fire coughing of a raven’s alarm call it is almost certainly aimed at a kite or buzzard passing through the raven’s territory. Mid-air skirmishes, dive-bombings, are commonplace at this time of year and the cliffs ricochet with the ruckus.
Despite its size, the kite is not a powerful bird of prey. It relies on the stronger-beaked buzzard or raven to puncture a new sheep casualty. So the dynamic between the three birds can shift as the kite waits its turn behind buzzard and raven in the pecking order at a carcass, with the usual attendants – carrion crow and magpie – darting in between to snatch what they can. There is also a staggering of laying and hatching dates between the three species, as there is between the harrier species and between other raptors that share a habitat. Red kites breed seven to ten days earlier than buzzards, enabling the kites to feed their young on the potential glut of young black-headed gulls, corvids and woodpigeons; buzzards time their nests a little later to coincide with the abundance in young rabbits and voles.
Kites also take voles, immature rabbits, leverets, though rarely anything larger than a small rabbit. Live prey is usually dispatched with the bill, rather than the kite’s relatively weak talons. Field voles, as with so many British raptors, can be a locally significant prey and fluctuations in the vole population can impact on the kite’s breeding success. Red kites in Wales bred poorly in the years when myxomatosis in rabbits was at its peak. But no raptor is more of a generalist, more adaptable, more omnivorous, than the kite. It seems to have a characteristic taken from almost every other bird of prey I’ve met. As much a scavenger of carrion as the sea eagle, it will also forage for worms alongside buzzards on moist fields in the early mornings, or hawk for dragonflies and crane-flies like a hobby. It will eat anything that is dead or nearly dead. Lambs’ tails and lambs’ scrota are a favourite titbit in Wales, even the rubber rings used to dock them are consumed. Fish, reptiles, amphibians are also taken across the kite’s European range. A nineteenth-century egg collector in Wales used to warn people climbing up to kites’ nests to Beware of half-killed adders!
Communal winter roosts can attract spectacular numbers of red kites. So many birds flocking together to spend the night you wonder how the trees can bear their weight. MacGillivray relates an incident at a kite roost of fog suddenly freezing one night and affixing the birds’ feet to the boughs of a tree. In the morning some boys clambered up the tree and retrieved fifteen red kites, prising the birds from the branch as if they were dislodging a row of icicles.
More gregarious, more relaxed about territorial spacing than most other raptors, kites can concentrate in very high densities. Their only territory is the immediate vicinity around the nest. Everything else is air! Adult birds are also prone to returning to their natal nesting areas to bree
d. So there are pockets of the country now where you can walk all day through a swirl of red kites. The birds function as a community: red kites are chiefly scavenger birds, foraging in loose groups, ‘network foraging’, relying on each other to pass the word along when a carcass has been spotted, much as vultures do. But this tendency to bunch together, to concentrate their numbers at high densities, also exposes the kite to harm. Still today, when carrion is laced with poison and deliberately planted in a red kite area, there follows a wholesale destruction of the birds. Other scavengers – buzzards, corvids, foxes – will be casualties too, but kites invariably pay a heavy price.
After the compulsory purchase order was dropped, the Forestry Commission employed softer tactics in the Upper Tywi. This time they approached farmers individually, using Welsh speakers as intermediaries. Many of the hill farms were still reeling from the losses to their flocks during the harsh winter of 1947, and once one had been persuaded to sell, many others followed suit. In the end more land in the Upper Tywi was afforested than had originally been proposed. Farms were cleared, even the oak woods were cleared to make way for the conifers. The stubs of one-night houses were covered over, the kites’ foraging grounds covered over.
In the afternoon I return to the car park in Llandovery. I climb the small hill in the rain and stand amongst the castle ruins. Jackdaws spill, squabbling and chattering, from the town hall roof. Then two kites come into view, glancing over chimneys and television aerials. I watch as they drift across the town, unhurried, checking every yard and garden. One of the kites adjusts its path and starts to glide towards me. I can see its ash-grey face and nape, the white markings on its underwings, the flash of red between its tail and breast. Then the kite ducks out of sight behind one of the castle walls and I think I have lost it, but next moment it is suddenly above me, holding itself in the rain just 10 feet from my head. Face tipped downwards, beak angled towards the ground. Its eyes follow the line of the beak. Its beak opens, as if it is going to call.
XI
Marsh Harrier
Isle of Sheppey
I go down to the north Kent coast in January. It is snowing and there are thin drifts across the motorway. Early morning, still dark, the traffic moving to the outside lane where the drift is thinner. Flashing lights in the rear-view mirror, then a brief clatter as my car is brushed with the discharge from a gritter. Single file, down to 20 mph, headlights seem to make the snow fall slower.
That day the Isle of Sheppey felt abandoned to the birds, utterly given over to them. The marshes under ice, the ditches frozen, snow banked up on the windward side of dykes. I spent the day from dawn to dusk walking over the island’s eastern marshes in an ice-shot wind beside a frantic sea. That wind never let up, never moved on; it had snagged itself on the island and spent the day trying to tear itself free. All day snow clouds waited off the coast, banked above the brown sea, waves of snow rolling in over the mudbanks and brittle reed beds. But when the snow hit the wind took it and flung it out across the marshes so that it was nothing like snow, had none of snow’s quietness. It was snow corrupted into ice, snow consumed by wind. It made the day impossible, a madcap wind that yelled and spat at me relentlessly: Keep your gloves on; face away from me; stop dilly-dallying … And I found that even taking my gloves off for a few seconds was so painful I gave up on trying to write notes or photograph. What was there to photograph? The land speeded up in a blur of snow and wind and snowflakes smudging the camera’s lens.
But birds were there on Sheppey in their thousands, huge flocks of woodpigeon, lapwing, curlew and starling. And none of the flocks, it seemed, were deterred by the wind. At least, they had not been grounded by it and were buoyed and buffeted and flung everywhere inside the wind’s madness. A small covey of red partridges split from under me and the lunatic wind grabbed the birds and hurled them across a ploughed field. The partridges whirled away so fast, I thought: they will not be able to stop, unless they can turn into the wind they will be flung across the marshes, over the mudbanks and out to sea. And if they reach the sea I knew I’d lose sight of the birds, not because of the distance (the sea was only two fields away) and not because the waves might grab the birds, but because the sea was so churned with mud and sand it had lost its usual grey and turned a muddy brown, so that the partridges, when they cleared the last field, would simply blend into the ferrous backdrop of the sea.
And in between the restless flocks – between the passerines, the waders and the ducks – were the flocks’ magnets, the avian specialists: merlin, sparrowhawk and peregrine.
If I had to fold one of the places on my journey onto another, it would have to be Orkney folded onto – twinned with – Sheppey. Not so much for the wind or the sting of the sea’s breath on everything, nor for the fact that if Sheppey broke its moorings and floated out of the Thames estuary, it would be blown north like the dregs of the Armada until it crashed into Orkney and wedged itself in one of the steep-sided geos on South Ronaldsay. Rather, for the sense that birds had overrun – had inherited – both island landscapes. Also, a sense that I had caught up with many of the birds again from Orkney here in their winter quarters on the north Kent marshes: curlew, lapwing, hen harrier and merlin.
I am crouching in the lee of a sea wall eating a freezing lunch (my water bottle has turned to mushy ice), trying to ignore the wind’s harassment: Go away wind; leave me alone; I’m trying to eat a sandwich; look what you have done to my fingers … they have turned a colour I do not recognise … Then, above the pale reed bed, a sickle-shape echo from Orkney, from the Flow Country, from the mountains of Lewis and Harris. My first thought: a peregrine. But, no: too small, too low, skimming far too low across the saltmarsh. Not peregrine, but merlin.
Of all the raptors the merlin is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him bird. And in the seconds it takes me to gather my things, pack up my lunch, he is gone. This merlin was so charged with wind he could have been flung as far as Essex or Orkney for all I knew. But I find him again high above the marsh and it is as if he clears a space around him, as if the sky is purged of all other birds until there is just the merlin, an erratic black dot – an eye spot – backlit by the snow clouds. Kinetic, wind-invigorated, he rushes across the grey sky then drops suddenly down, flicking small birds out of the reeds, veering after them. I follow him across the marsh, thinking: is he hunting, what is he doing? He seemed to be testing the birds, looking for the stragglers, the slow-to-react. The reed birds spat out from under the merlin but he did not latch on to a pursuit, he just ploughed on, flushing out the tiny birds, broadcasting them like seed. The last time I see him he is perched on a bank of snow, catching his breath, glaring back at all the dislodged birds in his wake.
If a day can give up on itself long before it is over, even before, for goodness’ sake, it has reached its midpoint, that winter’s day on Sheppey was such a day. But then the day never really stood a chance faced with all that wind and snow. It was better that it closed itself down and let the onslaught continue through the dark. So it was strange to see figures coming towards me across the marsh just at the point, in the early afternoon, when the light was being raked out of the sky and the day was perishing. Wildfowlers: coming out of the grey and the snow with their dogs, faces buried under balaclavas, bulky camouflage jackets, shotguns sleeved over shoulders, nodding as they passed me. Strange apparitions, they were only briefly real. Though I knew they were not spectral because, at the moment we passed each other, I heard them cussing their dogs to keep back.
The first marsh harriers I met on Sheppey were a pair. Huge dark brown birds, untroubled by the wind, working a small field that bordered the marsh. I stood above the harriers, looking down on them from a slight hill. They shifted through the wind lifting over hedges and fences, peering into field margins, scanning the dead winter grasses. More than their size, their slow flight made them conspicuous. They were using the wind to hold themselves up, turning in to the wind to slow and steady their flight. The wind was so strong, at
times it held the harriers static, pinned them in the air like giant kestrels. They were a female and male. Too distant to make out the patterns of their plumage but the male lighter, greyer; the female, when she came close to the male, noticeably larger, heavier.
I was so pleased to see them. There are some days when I spend all day searching and find nothing and that’s as it should be. But it is such a relief when I do catch up with the birds. I was worried that the day’s weather would have grounded any harriers who had stayed on Sheppey for the winter, but they were unmistakably harriers, could not have been anything else, gliding on V-shaped wings, sliding over the ground, foraging, occupying the harrier zone which is theirs and theirs alone, those first 2 to 6 metres above the ground, within earshot of the slightest squeak or rustle. Sound-gatherers, radars, listening in to the undergrowth as no other bird of prey, except for those great auditory hunters, the owls, can do.
I walked down the hill towards the harriers, hoping to get a closer look at the birds’ colours. The male marsh harrier does not have the pearl-grey colouring of the male hen and Montagu’s harriers. Instead the male marsh’s plumage is a distinctive tricolour, black wing tips, light grey wings, a chestnut undercarriage. The contrast between these colour bands is like early morning fireplace ash before it is disturbed, the undercoat of grey, the black charcoal splints, the red fibrous imprint of the burnt-out logs.
I stalked the two harriers under the cover of a hedge which fell down towards the marsh like a slipway. But when I reached the field where they had been hunting the harriers had split apart and were a long way off, heading east, flapping slowly along the high-water mark.
Raptors Page 18
