Nothing like a raptor, it digs like a dog, scratches away, deeper and deeper until the bird can sometimes disappear into its own hole. So absorbed in the task of excavating the wasps’ nest, it is said that you can walk right up to a digging honey buzzard. Though this is not advisable: where a honey buzzard digs there are likely to be furious wasps, made more furious by the fact they cannot do anything about the honey buzzard and have been known instead to turn their fury on anything else to hand, ponies, dogs, passing ornithologists …
The honey buzzard seems to work at its diggings with impunity. Wasps will swarm about the bird but appear not to harm or deter it greatly. It’s possible the bird releases a chemical to calm the insects. The thick scale-like feathers on its face (which other raptors do not possess) may also offer protection from stings (like trying to sting through a pineapple’s skin). Even so, sometimes a honey buzzard will be driven back by a ferocious onslaught from the wasps. But after a respite of head shaking, shrugging and intensive preening the honey buzzard usually resumes its pillage. Sometimes wasps and bees are snapped at by the bird, plucked from the air (often decapitated) and eaten. The whole process of digging out the wasps’ nest can last for hours, with the nests often awkward to get at, lodged under layers of grass and tree roots. And once the nest is accessible the process of feeding from it can last for days, with the honey buzzard returning again and again to retrieve chunks of grub-rich comb.
Nothing like a raptor, but not exempt from the raptor’s fate. You would think a chiefly insectivorous bird (a predator of wasps no less) might be immune from persecution, even welcomed. But when the war against birds of prey was at its height during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was little discrimination between raptor species. The Birds of Hampshire notes that twenty-four honey-buzzard nests were recorded in the New Forest between 1856 and 1872; at least twenty of these were robbed of eggs or young birds and the adult honey buzzards killed.
One evening in the New Forest, walking back to my tent through the trees, I heard a bird of prey calling. It was a loud, piercing call, agitated, persistent, a long whistling note, rising in pitch. It confused me, I couldn’t identify the caller. It was roughly the same volume and pitch as a common buzzard but it sounded different, deeper, more plaintive. At least, it sounded different from the soundtrack of common buzzards I was so used to hearing at home. I walked towards the call, trying to get a bearing on where it was coming from. I searched for half an hour, pausing and listening, scanning the branches of tree after tree. Nothing. I found it impossible to pinpoint the sound in the deep foliage of the trees. Instead I tried to memorise the call (ke-yeeeep ke-yeeeep …) and when I got home I spent a whole morning of confusion, listening to recordings of common buzzards and honey buzzards, trying to convince myself that what I had heard was a honey buzzard.
I went to the New Forest determined to be more patient about not finding the birds, but it would be dishonest to say that I didn’t mind not seeing a honey buzzard. I longed to see one. And I explored as much of the Forest as I could in my search for the birds, even following wasps to see if they would lead me to their nest (they never did). I tried, but I could not shake that longing to find the birds. Not seeing them only made me dream of honey buzzards incessantly. Perhaps that is what a cryptozoologist is, somebody who dreams about the same creature over and over again; perhaps that is what a cryptid is, a creature that hides inside dreams.
After I got home from the Forest I read a fascinating paper hypothesising that the juvenile plumage of honey buzzards has evolved to resemble the plumage of common buzzards. Goshawks predate honey buzzards (especially when pigeons and rabbits are scarce), but goshawks are more reluctant to predate the sharper-clawed, more aggressive common buzzard and so juvenile honey buzzards, to deflect the risk of predation from goshawks, have, through a process of Batesian mimicry, adapted their plumage to more closely resemble their more robust cousins. The two species – common and honey buzzard – are difficult enough to tell apart; that the honey buzzard should try to absent itself even more by hiding in another bird seems somehow apt for this most cryptozoic bird of prey.
But how absent are they? Perhaps not as much as we tend to think given the honey buzzard is so good at being overlooked. MacGillivray wrote in his book The Natural History of Deeside:
Even on the border of the most frequented paths are many things travellers have passed by unheeded or unexamined.
The honey buzzard, despite its size, is an easy bird to pass by unnoticed. Still, it is only here in fairly small numbers, roughly sixty-plus pairs. But there is room – plenty of room – in these islands for many more. Anywhere that is diggable, friable and waspy is good for the wasp-hawk.
The sections I keep returning to in MacGillivray’s journal of his walk to London are the lists of flora he recorded along the way, each night writing up the Latin names of all the plants he’d seen that day. Between the Bridge of Dee and Upper Banchory, alone, he notes down fifty-seven species of plant in flower and sixty-two out of flower (all of these committed to memory as he walked along).
There are moments in his journal when he seems to conjure beauty out of nothing, out of nowhere. For instance, a quarter of a mile on the road out of Buxton he pauses to listen in the clear morning air to larks singing and out of the corner of his eye he sees a plant he does not recognise, a musk thistle (Carduus nutans), the most beautiful thistle, he writes in his journal, which I have yet seen. Soon after this he finds the common carline thistle and, at that point, everything, he writes, conspired to render me cheerful.
Some of the plants MacGillivray collected on his walk to London have survived and are held at the University of Aberdeen’s Herbarium. I spent a whole morning in the Herbarium going through the collection, looking at the sheets of plants exactly as MacGillivray had left and labelled them almost 200 years ago. Hundreds of specimens from a lifetime’s botanical wanderings and all of them presented and organised with such clarity. I found plants he picked on his 1819 walk to London and many he collected from the high Cairngorms in the summer of 1850, just two years before his death. Several of the mountain ferns and grasses still had residues of peat tangled in their roots. Some of the flowering plants, remarkably, still retained the colour in their petals. The purple flowers of Statice armeria were paled and rusted but still had hints of pink in them. The note that MacGillivray wrote beneath each specimen (his handwriting straight and neat across the page, no archaic floridness to it) was usually the plant’s Latin name followed by the place and date he had collected it. I thought that if I spent enough time with his collection I could draw a map of all the places he went in search of plants. I could trace MacGillivray’s movements across the land, across the years, that way. That would be how I would write a biography of William MacGillivray, his life told through his plant cuttings, his botanical wanderings …
– Deschampsia Flexuosa: Gathered on Ben Nevis, Inverness-shire 16th September 1819, by Mr MacGillivray.
– Statice Armeria: Summit of Benvrotan near one of the Sources of the Dee, 10th September 1819.
– Statice Armeria: By the Dee, 8 miles from its mouth, May 1819.
– Asplenium Adiantum nigrum: Wall of the Marquis of Abercorn’s orchard at Duddingston, near Edinburgh, 1st January 1820, 1 A.M. moonlight.
– Lycopodium Selago: Lochnagar, 8th August, 1850.
– Carex Saxatilis: Corry of Lochan uain, Cairntoul, 12th August, 1850.
Dear William, I am sorry for their desecration. After twenty minutes of searching the New Calton cemetery in Edinburgh I have found William MacGillivray’s grave. For a while I was concerned I might not find it at all, several of the headstones in the churchyard have keeled over and I was worried his might be one of these. But I found it in the end, a great pink-flecked slab of granite with an Iona cross set in a Celtic scroll at its head. The long inscription a little faded inside the granite, though still legible:
In memory of William MacGillivray, M.A., LL.D., born 1796, died 1852. Aut
hor of A History of British Birds and other standard works in Natural Science; Professor of Natural History and Lecturer on Botany in Marischal College and University from 1841 to 1852. Erected in 1900, together with a memorial brass in Marischal College, Aberdeen, by his relatives and surviving students, who affectionately cherish his memory, and by others desirous of doing honour to his character as a man and to his eminence as a naturalist.
It is a fine spot, his grave, with views out across to Arthur’s Seat, a bird-busy place with gulls coming and going from off the Firth of Forth. But the shock is what has been done to his gravestone. Somebody has hacked away at the granite and stolen the brass plaque that had been fixed to the base of the stone. I have seen photographs of it before it was vandalised, the plaque had been beautifully cast with the image of a golden eagle modelled from one of MacGillivray’s own paintings of the bird.
I kneel down and run my fingers along the jagged edge of the granite where it has been hacked and chipped. It is still possible, just, to see the eagle’s outline imprinted on the stone. It’s as if the shape of the metal cast has branded – seared – the stone beneath. Sear: flip the verb into a noun and a ‘sear’ is also the ‘foot of a bird of prey’, from the Old French serrer to grasp, lock, hold fast … I can see in the stone the line of the eagle’s back, the curve of its chest, its long tail. All that is left is the faintest trace of the bird, a ghost eagle scratched into the stone, a hieroglyph.
XIII
Hobby
Dorset
Anything to make him feel less absent. With the brass plaque on his gravestone stolen, presumably melted down, I went in search of MacGillivray’s painting of the golden eagle which the plaque had been modelled on. There are over 200 of MacGillivray’s paintings held in the library of the Natural History Museum in London. Most of them are watercolours of birds and there are also several paintings of different species of fish and mammals. MacGillivray’s intention was that the bird paintings would be used to illustrate his five-volume History of British Birds, though, tragically – and it is tragic because the paintings are quite exceptional – in the end the watercolours were left out of his books because MacGillivray could not afford the printing costs of including them. MacGillivray’s son, Paul, donated his father’s paintings to the Natural History Museum in 1892, where they sit in storage and seldom see the light of day.
But that is MacGillivray for you, a man eclipsed, the legacy of his work eclipsed by his contemporaries, Darwin, Audubon and Yarrell (William Yarrell, whose own more accessible, more popular, A History of British Birds was published in 1845). So that MacGillivray himself could be said to have become a type of cryptid, virtually unknown, hidden from view, forgotten. When I started to research this book I had no idea who William MacGillivray was, but then a brief quotation led me to his work on birds of prey, Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain. And of course the book was out of print and impossible to find but, when I finally tracked it down and began to read it, I could not stop reading. And soon I was trying to find and read everything I could by MacGillivray. His descriptions of the natural world felt chiselled from hours of careful observation. His account of watching hen harriers in his book Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds led me to his great work, A History of British Birds, where I sought him out and found him kneeling on the side of a hill, watching, this time, a different pair of hen harriers:
Kneel down here, then, among the long broom and let us watch the pair that have just made their appearance on the shoulder of the hill … How beautifully they glide along, in their circling flight, with gentle flaps of their expanded wings, floating, as it were, in the air, their half-spread tails inclined from side to side, as they balance themselves, or alter their course! Now they are near enough to enable us to distinguish the male from the female. They seem to be hunting in concert, and their search is keen, for they fly at times so low as almost to touch the bushes, and never rise higher than thirty feet. The grey bird hovers, fixing himself in the air like the Kestrel; now he stoops, but recovers himself. A hare breaks from the cover, but they follow her not, though doubtless were they to spy her young one, it would not escape so well. The female now hovers for a few seconds, gradually sinks for a short space, ascends, turns a little to one side, closes her wings, and comes to the ground. She has secured her prey, for she remains concealed among the furze, while the male shoots away, flying at the height of three or four yards, sweeps along the hawthorn hedge, bounds over it to the other side, turns away to skim over the sedgy pool, where he hovers a short while. He now enters upon the grass field, when a Partridge springs off, and he pursues it, with a rapid gliding flight like that of the Sparrow Hawk; but they have turned to the right, and the wood conceals them from our view. In the meantime, the female has sprung up, and advances, keenly inspecting the ground, and so heedless of our presence that she passes within twenty yards of us. Away she speeds, and in passing the pool, again stoops, but recovers herself, and rising in a beautiful curve, bounds over the plantation, and is out of sight.
There is a warmth and intimacy to the writing, also a passionate energy; MacGillivray’s voice, in this respect, feels different from many of his Victorian contemporaries’. He draws you in: Kneel down here, then, among the long broom and let us watch … He himself is so palpable, so present in his work; you cannot help but warm to him. MacGillivray’s friend and correspondent the ornithologist James Harley wrote of MacGillivray’s writing:
Having for several years past paid considerable attention to the Ornithology of the British Islands, I would venture to recommend the beautifully written and elaborate History of British Birds, Indigenous and Migratory, by Mr MacGillivray, as being the best work in that department of science yet published. There is a peculiar mountain freshness about Mr MacGillivray’s writings, combined with fidelity and truths in delineation, rarely possessed by Naturalists, and hitherto not surpassed. To the Ornithological Student this charming History of British Birds ought to become a hand-book – to the observer, a companion – and to the rambler in woods and wilds, a guide and pole-star.
MacGillivray wrote in the journal he kept of his walk to London a sort of manifesto of how he intended to write the journal. In these notes to himself, these memoranda, you glimpse a little of where that peculiar mountain freshness to his writing is drawn from:
– I shall write it with as much freedom as if I were convinced that no person should ever read it. At the same time it must be so written that others may readily understand it …
– I must avoid obscurity …
– I despise opinion unsupported by reason, detest bigotry, and rejoice in persecution, that is in being persecuted, but not in exercising any authority, much less persecution, over others …
– But while I write with the intention of benefitting others, and of gratifying my own vanity, I also write from the conviction that my notes will be useful to myself on many future occasions, yea even unto the day of my death.
– Partly from the instigation of vanity, and partly from other motives, I refrain from laying down any general or particular plan either for my journey or journal. Only I shall drink a mouthful from the source of the Dee, and give three cheers to myself on the top of Ben Nevis; and till that time keep a regular list of all the plants and birds which may occur.
Hobby, from the Old French hober: to move, to stir, to jump about. The hobby is the most kinetic bird of prey I know. It is all zip and dash and rushing speed, like a frantic whirligig of the heath. Its scientific Latin name, Falco subbuteo, simply means ‘smaller than a buzzard’; its Greek name, Hypotriorches, translates as ‘somewhat near a bird of prey’ (the hobby’s original scientific name was Hypotriorchis subbuteo). Both definitions are so wonderfully hazy in their description of the hobby, strangely, paradoxically, they actually capture the difficulty of grasping this small falcon as it rushes past you in its blur of speed.
A hop and a skip from the New Forest and I cross the border from Hampshire into Dorset. I
head east from Wareham down a narrow road across the dusty heath to the Arne peninsula, a fist and outstretched thumb of land that juts out into Poole Harbour.
Walk due north from the tiny village of Arne, following the track across the heath, till you come to a scattering of birch and oak which lines the top lip of Arne Bay. Enter the trees and wade through the undergrowth of bracken, pausing when you reach the first lunar white birch. You will know it because of the way its trunk glows like a bar of light inside the wood. Turn left at the birch and you will come to a great oak draped in honeysuckle and ivy. Try to go there when the honeysuckle is in flower, when its flowers glow like small pale suns amongst the oak’s dark leaves. You will know the oak for sure because one of its huge arms has broken off and is lying amongst the bracken beside the base of the trunk.
That is where, in a shallow hollow next to the huge oak, I slept that first rainy, windy night. A night of not much sleep, woken by rain and by deer sheltering from the rain; sika deer with their white mottled red-brown coats and their high-pitched alarm calls sounding like a bird’s screech. I can’t remember if I was asleep when the branch from the oak cracked then split and crashed to the ground, but it was a heart-thumping moment and I was up and out the tent within seconds peering into the gloom till I noticed that something was wrong with the tree, that it did not look right. Then I saw the branch sticking out of the bracken like a half-submerged wreck and the crashing noise suddenly made sense and, a little less spooked, I crept back inside the tent. Earlier, before the wind got up, I heard music coming from a bar across the harbour. Then, much closer, a churring noise as nightjars began to whirr across the heath.
MacGillivray’s paintings have been arriving all afternoon in huge green boxes wheeled down on trolleys from the museum’s storage. Wearing vinyl gloves, I lay the paintings out on a table one by one and write my notes in pencil.
Raptors Page 21
