Raptors

by James Macdonald Lockhart

  Buzzards will also hunt on foot and, even when on the ground, can surprise you with their speed. They will graze through a field on damp early mornings for earthworms, or stand beside a mole run and wait for the earth to quiver, sprinting across to grab the mole where it surfaces.

  I sit on the bank for half an hour watching the buzzard hunting from its perch on the telegraph poles. Head bobbing, judging the distance and angle of its swoop. Then: launch, glide, pounce, stabbing at something in the grass before returning to its lookout on one of the poles. On it goes like this. When the buzzard finally flies off, I get up and follow the small road west into a large conifer plantation. The wood is dripping, glittering from a recent heavy shower. The rocks and trunks are coated in moss; in places, where the light reaches the wood’s understory, the moss emits a brightness, a green luminescence. Then I am out of the wood and dropping down a slope and I can see the headwaters of the North Teign in front of me, deep-pooled, fast and black. I walk down to the river, pick it up like a path, and follow it up onto the moor.

  South-west, due west, north-west: erratic thing you are up here, river, trying to figure out a way off this vast granite plateau. I am looking for a place to camp the night near the river’s source when I see another buzzard, querying the moor grass, hunting low like a harrier. And for a moment I mistake it for a harrier until I can see the bird is definitely a buzzard, a shape-shifter, flying much lower than I’m used to seeing, but the broadness of its wings – the sheer bulk of the bird – gives it away.

  An hour later the moor is cooling fast and in the dusk light, sitting outside my tent, I have a wonderful, unexpected visitor. A merlin lands on the stone dyke just 12 feet away. If, that is, you can say a merlin ever really lands, ever settles properly. It is a bird that is always on the point of leaving, a quivering pause before it springs off again. Sharp-pointed wings, forked behind her like a swallow. Hello merlin, how good to see your shape again … Please don’t go just yet … But when I shift my binoculars a fraction she is off, fast and low over the moor. Hello-goodbye-gone! Messenger from Orkney and The Flows and the winter marshes of Sheppey. Almost at the end of my journey and what a gift to have it linked up like this, a line drawn by a merlin from Orkney all the way to Devon.

  In the morning: thick, cold mist. I can see only a few yards around my tent. The end of September and the high moor is already in another season. The moor has drifted so far ahead into autumn it has become inexplicable to the land – the in-country – below. A pony comes out of the mist like an apparition and wanders through the reeds in front of me. Its mane is beaded with dew, its coat is a tinny, bracken-red colour. I will not see any birds until this mist has burnt off, so I strike camp and walk on up the river to try to find its source.

  London is: MacGillivray getting out of his drenched clothes; his feet exhaling; collapsing at the home of Mr Cowie, 31 Poultry (whose address MacGillivray had been given by his friend, Dr Barclay); washing his feet with warm water; opening a letter from his aunt, Mary MacAskill from the Isles; his feet are barely recognisable, they are so pale and crinkled they seem mummified; 838 miles since he left Aberdeen; what a queer sort of dream this journey of mine has been; then sleep and sleep and waking at nine into (oh bliss!) fresh clothes.

  Before he heads out to explore the city he remembers he has forgotten to mention in his journal the plants he examined on the outskirts of London. And I am amazed in the blur and agony of those final miles he had the wherewithal to even notice these things:

  I forgot to mention in its proper place that I had examined on Tuesday the Blue Bramble Rubus caesius. It occurred in several places by the road, and I eat a great quantity of its berries which I find delicious and quite unlike those of the Common Bramble Rubus fruticosus which are most nauseous. Yesterday I found and examined another plant by the road near the fifteenth milestone, the Wild Succory. The Small Bindweed I found very common, but it is out of flower. I have now finished my journey and I am satisfied with my conduct.

  London is: snowing heavily on the night of 22 October 1819; MacGillivray walking everywhere; climbing the Monument and peering out across the city through the smoky air; paying three shillings to visit the sad collection of animals at the Exeter Change menagerie; stopping to listen to a young girl singing in the street; dipping inside Westminster Abbey and MacGillivray coming out grumpy and angry at all the monuments to generals and admirals (what about the scientists and poets, he cries!).

  Monday 25 October, 1819. MacGillivray is one of the first through the doors of the British Museum when it opens its rooms at eleven o’clock. He gravitates past the displays of minerals and shells towards the collection of British Birds, which has a room all to its own. What happens to MacGillivray in that room? He has walked all the way from Aberdeen to here, for this. It is an important moment. For ornithology, as significant, surely, as MacGillivray’s meeting with Audubon. What is important about the time MacGillivray spends drifting through the collection is that it gives him confidence. He realises that his own self-taught theories of ornithology are accurate, that his intuition about these things is correct. That knowledge gladdens him, warms him inestimably. The ways the birds have been arranged according to their genera are much as he would have arranged them (though he also feels he could improve on the museum’s system). What is most significant about his visit to the museum is that MacGillivray comes away from it knowing for certain that this is what he must do with his life. He must study the natural world but, above all, he knows that this approach – the sterility of the museum, all those specimens locked behind their glass cases – that approach is not for him. If he is to study the natural world, it must be out there – he needs to be out there – immersed, on the interface with nature:

  I felt my love of Natural History very much increased by the inspection of the museum. At the same time I felt convinced that to study nature I must have recourse to nature alone, pure and free from human interference.

  What MacGillivray writes in the closing pages of his journal, he does not need to. Already – for some time now – he has achieved what he aspires to:

  Ornithology is my favourite study and it will go hard with me if I do not one day merit the name of ornithologist, aye, and of Botanist too – and moreover of something else of greater importance than either.

  The mist is clearing above Whitehorse Leat. The first inkling, a thinning where the sun is a faint laser trying to burn through. Then, quite rapidly, the mist is being disassembled and I can see a tor’s rubbled top, its clitter spill. Then I see the sharp spruce edge of Fernworthy running down the long back of White Ridge.

  There is a kestrel over the ruins of Teignhead farm. Below the kestrel, downstream beyond the clapper bridge, a buzzard is rising. Though he may take on the hunting guise of so many different birds of prey, this morning, soaring above the river, the buzzard is himself, calling his high echoing call that is unlike any other raptor’s. Sometimes I think I can detect a w or p sound in a buzzard’s call: wee-ooe or pee-ooe. The first syllable usually short, followed quickly by a longer, wavering ooe sound. Other times, though I try to decipher it, I cannot hear any ‘letters’. It is just two high notes with the second note sounding – feeling like – a reverberation of the first. It is always unmistakably a buzzard but the call (that second note especially) can vary in length and pitch. Sometimes that note is left to carry, other times it is brought up short and raised in pitch. Occasionally the first note is so short-lived the call feels like one long note, rather than two in quick succession. In late summer, while they are still in the vicinity of the nest and being fed by their parents, juvenile buzzards call a great deal and their call is distinctive, sounding longer, sharper, higher-pitched than the adult bird’s. This morning, above the moor, the buzzard’s call lingers on and on with an echo’s resonance as if the bird is testing – using its voice like sonar – to gauge the depth of the valley.

  Buzzards call in aggression, agitation, in courtship, to ward and warn off other b
uzzards. They are tenacious in their defence of territory and pursuits and squabbles with trespassing buzzards are vociferous affairs. Kestrels call often too with their high trilling whistle, but I don’t think any other bird of prey is as conspicuous by its call as the common buzzard. Often you will hear a buzzard before you see it. How different, in this respect, the buzzard is to the largely silent golden eagle. I have watched buzzards flanked and jostled by a mobbing raven, the buzzards calling in what sounds like annoyance or frustration. The call always sounding shorter, more agitated, when the buzzard is being mobbed like this. Most of the time a buzzard’s calling is prompted – is a part of – the bird’s territorial display. A buzzard calling while it soars above its patch is like an acoustic ‘beating of the bounds’ of its parish; the long-drawn-out calls carry to the boundaries where they reverberate then settle.

  Cattle are out along the side of Great Varracombe. I walk through them as I climb the bank up to Teignhead farm. Campfire pits in amongst the ruins, their ashes congealed to a black mulch, rain-prints dent the ash. A small shed with a rusty, sphagnum-coloured, corrugated-iron roof. The walls of the old farmhouse are huge, thick slabs of granite. How many ruins have I rummaged through on this journey? That abandoned house far out on the Caithness flows; the empty shell of Coventry cathedral; the chequered black and white floor tiles that were all that remained of Lord Leverhulme’s home on the side of the hill above Rivington; the view from the open window of the abandoned croft on Oronsay across to the hills of Ardnamurchan … It is strange how a ruin can pull you in, compel you towards it from miles away.

  What happened here at Teignhead? The farm’s buildings were substantial: a large courtyard with its own walled-in dung-pit, a sheep-dip, paved paths leading out to the moor, clapper bridges laid across the brook and river … A leat is cut to carry water from the hill to a well outside the front door. Gateposts are quarried from the rock on Magna Hill and left there until a fall of snow allowed them to be strapped to sleighs and sledded down to the farm. Seventeen eighty, the first tenant moves in. Sometimes the farm is cut off by snow for weeks. But even more than snow, it is the mists that cut the place off, stubborn, heavy mists that will not shift, that snag over the farm for days on end. It is as if the moorland bogs somehow engineer the mists, breathe them into being. By 1808, 1,551 acres of the farm have been enclosed and the long stone walls that have been built across the moor (one of these is where I had seen the merlin) are causing offence to the Gidleigh commoners who feel their rights and access to the common grazing lands are being encroached. Eighteen seventy-six, the incumbent tenant is evicted by the landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall, because the tenant’s rent is in arrears. Nineteen forty-two, the land is requisitioned by the War Office and troops move in for training exercises. The following year, 1943, the last tenant leaves Teignhead farm (bundled out with some compensation from the War Office) and goes to live with a relative in Chagford. As happened at Arne during the war, the military take over the area completely. But unlike at Arne, after the war was over and the army had left, nobody moves back to Teignhead. By 1950 the place is in a bad state, the enclosure walls have begun to split, the buildings disfigured by the wind and vandals working off each other.

  What happened at Teignhead is what happened to Leverhulme’s summer home on the moor above Rivington. It is the same trajectory, the same story. Encroachment is followed by retraction, and before you know it the place is crumbling and the moor has crept back in again. What happened to Teignhead is also what happened to the hill farms of the Upper Tyne and Upper Tywi. There is an inevitability in the way it ends for these upland farms, as if these places endure a different level of gravity, as if something is constantly pushing down on them so that in the end it becomes impossible to cling on up there.

  Dartmoor has always been drawn over, sculpted, its surface etched with standing stones and monoliths. Its granite outcrops are beautifully irregular and the wind like a potter continues to work at them. More recently, the peat (no longer accumulating on the high blanket bogs because of climatic shifts) has begun to shrink. The ensuing erosion looks as if someone has torn chunks out of the ground, pools and canyons weaving around islets of peat.

  In the nineteenth century a great redrawing of the moor took place. Stone dykes were erected and charged off into the distance. Rapidly the moor was repatterned, made linear. On Dartmoor the term for this newly enclosed land was ‘newtake’ and by the end of that century the northern part of the moor had been completely severed from the southern by newtake walls. Inevitably, there were disputes: occasionally you still come across walls on Dartmoor that suddenly peter out, where the commoners had managed to assert their grazing rights and halt the enclosure. Besides these enclosures made by the larger tenant farmers (as at Teignhead), many small enclosures were made by the commoners themselves, appropriating, parcelling off tiny pockets around the edge of the moor. Often these small enclosures were thrown up in a single night, claimed and asserted in the same way that the ‘one-night houses’ in the marginal lands of rural Wales were.

  Debatable, Batable, Disputed ground … Every seven years on Dartmoor parishioners go out to beat the parish bounds. The boundaries themselves are often hazy, fluid, contentious things. It is not so clear-cut where the moor (the Forest) and Common divide. And boundaries can be porous, shifting lines. So every seven years people from the parish walk out along these boundaries, repairing, extending, adjusting the lines. Traditionally it is an exercise conducted in a spirit of subversion and the purpose, wherever possible, is to infringe anything imposed by the landowner. As they circumnavigate the parish, whenever the party arrive at a significant boundary marker, the custom is for the oldest man in the group to pick up the youngest boy, flip him upside down, and tap the youngster’s head on the boundary marker to ensure that the younger generation stores, and does not forget, the position of the border.

  MacGillivray wrote:

  A river is nothing but a continuous series of continually renewed drops of water following each other in a groove.

  But when I drop down off the moor and pick the river up again in the shade of the woods, it is unrecognisable. All that moorland energy has dissipated, it has settled into itself. It has become a river of deep pools and sandy beds, a hoarder of leaves and branches, tucking them under its rocks to store there. And fish hang in its pools like shards of mica.

  For the rest of the day I follow the river eastwards. Often it does not want to be seen, hidden under dark banks of rhododendron, contour-screened. And that is fine, I am just as happy to follow its sound-road, to veer away but to stay within earshot. The path deepens as it drops down from the moor, becomes a cutting, almost a tunnel. Holly and gorse line the high banks on either side. Badger runs criss-cross the path, I can see their claw marks in the soil where the bank is steepest. A buzzard drops from a tree and swoops low and fast through a narrow gap in the hedge. Its face is a light grey colour; wings and back a sandy brown. Again, I am struck by the huge bird’s agility and turn of speed. A tussle through the hedge-gap with a crow: then gone.

  The way frost peels and recedes across a field until there is just a small pocket, a corner of the field, which the low winter sun cannot touch and where the frost sleeps all day, that is what happened to buzzards in the nineteenth century. They were exterminated from lowland Britain, peeled back, like the red kite (and for the same reasons as the kite), to the corners, the fringes of these islands. Devon and Cornwall, the New Forest, parts of Wales, the West of Scotland and North West England held remnant populations of buzzards. That the buzzard has crept back across most of the rest of the country (becoming our most common bird of prey), spreading east, colonising old lowland haunts, is a remarkable turnaround, explained by a new era of tolerance and by the buzzard’s adaptability, its versatility to both a variety of habitats and a variety of prey.

  Bird of woodland, bird of farmland, bird of moorland, wherever these places meet and mix. The ideal buzzard habitat is one which contains
a bit of each. Mixed, irregular farmland is ideal. A monochrome landscape is not so good, at least when it comes to breeding success. The buzzards I have watched closely hunt especially over the brambly, rabbity, vole-rich, unkempt no-man’s-lands, the steep banks and field edges that are so important to so many birds of prey.

  And buzzards, too, will often lead you to other birds, often other birds of prey. They are such a conspicuous, vocal bird. When you see a buzzard it frequently draws your eye to something else that has been drawn in by the large bird’s wake. I have watched a sparrowhawk displaying in early spring beside a rising buzzard, seen kestrels and ravens and other corvids (especially ravens) sparring with buzzards. Throughout this journey buzzards have been a helpful guide, more often than not standing in for other raptors I have been searching for, but sometimes, too, helping me to find these other birds.

  Downstream, in deep woods, the valley narrowed to a gorge. I’m trying to make out the mix of leaves gyrating slowly, a slack flotilla in the river’s current: beech and birch, maple, alder, oak, some pheasant feathers in amongst the leaves. What is flushing the pheasant poults out of the trees and across the river? Something is panicking them. There is a Coke can floating in the shallows. I wade out to retrieve it and the water is lovely and cool on my moor-weary feet. An otter has left its tarry spraint, bitty with tiny bones, on a mossy boulder. A buzzard has started calling somewhere above the river.