Raptors Read online

  The darkness Ronnie Simison’s spade had cut loose from the mound that summer’s evening was 5,000 years old. The mound was a Neolithic chambered cairn, and staring back at Simison when he sparked his lighter into the dark hole was a shelf of human skulls, resinous in the flickering light. There might have been a second or two when Simison mistook the bones’ bronzed colours for a cache of treasure before he realised what they were, grabbed his spade, and ran.

  When the tomb came to be excavated, amongst the human bones it was discovered that there were many bones and talons belonging to white-tailed sea eagles. In all, seventy sea-eagle talons were found and, in some instances, the birds’ talons had been placed beside the bones of human individuals (one person had been buried with fifteen talons and the bones of two sea eagles). It is estimated that there were thirty-five skeletons of birds of prey in the tomb and of these two-thirds belonged to sea eagles.

  The sea eagle was clearly a bird of totemic significance for the people living in that part of Orkney at that time. Presumably the bird performed some sort of funerary or shamanistic role for the community, perhaps in accompanying the dead on their journey to the afterlife, perhaps in assisting shamans in their magico-religious ceremonies. The importance of birds in shamanistic rituals is well known and there are archaeological examples from different cultures around the world of birds being involved in ceremonial and mortuary practices. In Alaska archaeologists unearthed a grave from a proto-Eskimo settlement at Ipiutak in which an adult and a child had been interred alongside, amongst other artefacts, the head of a loon (a species of diver). Strikingly, the diver’s skull had lifelike artificial eyes (carved ivory for the white of the eye inlaid with jet for the black pupils) placed in its eye sockets. It’s possible these ivory eyes served as a prophylactic to ward against evil (some human skulls from the settlement also contained artificial eyes). Equally, the eyes may have been placed in the diver in recognition of the belief amongst circumpolar peoples that the loon, a totemic bird for these cultures, was a bird with the power to both restore sight and also assist shamans with seeing into – and travelling through – different worlds.

  In the museum a mile from the tomb some of the skulls have been given names: ‘Jock Tamson’, ‘Granny’, ‘Charlie-Girl’. Beside the skulls there were pieces of pottery, fragments of bowl decorated by the imprint of human fingernails. The nails had scratched the wet clay and left a pattern like a wavy barcode around the bowl’s rim. I picked some of the sea-eagle talons out of their case and held them in my palm, running my fingers over their blunted points. They were smooth to touch, like polished marble, their creamy colours flecked with rust.

  The human bones, in contrast to the eagle and other animal bones in the cairn, were found to be in poor condition, noticeably bleached and weathered. This weathering suggests that the human dead were excarnated, given ‘sky burials’, their bodies exposed to the elements on raised platforms to be cleaned by natural decay and carrion feeders like the sea eagle. Besides the eagle bones, which were by far the most numerous, there were also bones of other carrion-feeding birds inside the tomb: two greater black-backed gulls, two rooks or crows and one raven. Once the excarnation process had been completed, the human skeletons – their bones scattered by carrion birds and bleached by the sun – would have been gathered up and interred inside the tomb.

  That the sea eagles were involved in the excarnation of the human dead on Orkney is almost certain given that the bird is such a prodigious carrion feeder. Excarnation: the separation (of the soul) from the body at death, the opposite of incarnation, where the soul or spirit is clothed, embodied in flesh. Excarnation is not just a method for disposing the dead (to excarnate means to remove the flesh). It was also, for some societies, the process by which the spirit or soul could be released from the flesh. Tibetan Buddhists believed that the vultures summoned to a sky burial were spirits of the netherworld come to assist the soul on its journey to its next incarnation. In parts of the Western Highlands of Scotland it was unlucky to kill seagulls because it was believed the birds housed the souls of the dead. For what better, more natural place to rehome the soul – the restless, fidgety soul – than a bird, whose shape and movement, whose own restless flight, could be said to resemble the soul? Perhaps the Neolithic peoples of Orkney believed something similar, that when sea eagles, this great totemic bird, cleaned the bodies of their dead, the person’s spirit, which after death still lived on inside the flesh, was taken in by the eagle. The spirit or soul transmigrated to the bird, lived on inside the bird. Human and eagle fusing – literally, ceremonially – each one inhabiting the other.

  II

  Merlin

  The Flow Country

  A man is walking south from Aberdeen to London. The night before he leaves his home in Aberdeen he dreams of birds, row upon row of birds perched in their glass cases in a locked museum. He walks along the museum’s deserted corridors, his footsteps scurry ahead of him. He wants to slow the dream, to pause and study every specimen. When he looks at a bird he looks inside it, thinks about the mechanics of it, how it works, the map of its soul. But the sterility of the place makes him itchy and the dream begins to tumble into itself as it rushes towards its closing. The birds wake inside their cabinets and start to tap the glass with their beaks. The noise of their tapping: it is almost as if the birds are applauding him. Then some of the cabinets are cracking and the birds are prising, squeezing through the cracks. A mallard drake cuts itself on a shard of glass and he sees its blood beading black against the duck’s emerald green. Then birds are pouring past him and the museum’s roof is a dark cloud of birds. And he – William MacGillivray – is flickering awake.

  It is 4 a.m., a September morning in 1819. William MacGillivray is twenty-three, fizzing, fidgety within himself. He writes: I have no peace of mind. He means: he is impatient of his own impatience. Often he is cramped by melancholy. In his journals he checks, frequently, the inventory of himself; always there are things missing and the gaps in his learning gnaw and grate. Travelling calms him, it gives him buoyancy, space to scrutinise his mind. And so he walks everywhere, thinks nothing of a journey of 100 miles on foot through the mountains. He recommends liniment of soap mixed with whisky to harden the soles of restless feet. His own feet are hard as gneiss, they never blister.

  He is not unlike a merlin in the way he boils with energy. He once watched a merlin pursuing a lark relentlessly over every twist and turn. The pair flashed so close to him he could clearly see the male merlin’s grey-blue dorsal plumage. The tiny falcon rushed after the lark, following it through farm steadings, between corn-stacks, amongst the garden trees.

  He lives his own life much like this, restless, obstinate, plunging headlong after everything. Not unlike a merlin, too, in the patterns of his wanderings, seasonal migrations. Leaving his home on the Isle of Harris to walk – at the beginning and end of every term – back and forth to university in Aberdeen, sleeping under brooms of heather, in caves above Loch Maree. Most of what he knows about the natural world – in botany, geology, ornithology – he has learnt from these walks. He can name all the plants that grow along the southern shore of Loch Ness. Often his walks digress into curiosity. He will follow a river to its source high in the mountains just to see what plants are growing there. Other times he eats up the distance, 40–50 miles in a day. If he stops moving for too long it’s not that his mind begins to stiffen, rather that it trembles uncontrollably.

  And now this long walk to London. Because: his mind is a wave of aftershocks and he is desperate – has been desperate for weeks – to be away from Aberdeen, to be out there on the cusp of things. In his house in the city he is tidying away his breakfast, crumbs from a barley cake have caught on his lip. Then a final check through the contents of his knapsack. He calls his knapsack this machine. It is made of thick oiled cloth and cost him six shillings and sixpence. Inside the machine: two travelling maps, one of Scotland, one of England; a small portfolio with a parcel of paper for
drying plants; a few sheets of clean paper, stitched; a bottle of ink; four quills; the Compendium Flora Britannica … He picks up the knapsack; its cloth is stiff with newness, like a frozen bat. For a while he tries to knead the stiffness out of the straps. His hands smell like a saddler’s.

  Five a.m. Outside in the street the light is like smoke, pale the way his dream was lit. He thinks about the dream, the brightness of the egrets in the grey rooms of the museum. Which way is it to London? It doesn’t really matter, he has no intention of taking the direct route. London is 500 miles as the crow flies from Aberdeen, but before he has even crossed the border into England he will already have wandered this distance, following his curiosity wherever it leads him. There are things he needs to see along the way, plants and birds to catalogue, places he has never been. Also, he is reluctant to leave the mountains too soon. He knows that once he descends out of them, on the long haul to London, the mountains will wrench at him terribly. So he pulls his long blue coat over his back and starts walking into the deep mountains to the west of Aberdeen. Already he feels his mind thawing; in his journal he writes, I am at length free. By the time he staggers into London, six weeks and 838 miles later, the blue of his coat will be weathered with grey like the plumage of the merlin that brushed past him in pursuit of the lark that day.

  There are fifteen breeding diurnal birds of prey found in the British Isles. This list does not include boreal migrants – bearing news from the Arctic – like the rough-legged buzzard and gyrfalcon, or rare vagrants such as the red-footed falcon, who occasionally brush the shores of these islands. Neither does it include owls. For they are raptors too; that is, a bird possessing acute vision, capable of killing its prey with sharp, curved talons and tearing it with a hooked beak, from the Latin rapere, to seize or take by force. But owls belong to a separate group, the Strigiformes. And although the change of shift between the diurnal and nocturnal birds of prey is not always clear-cut (as I experienced with short-eared owls on Orkney), owls require a list of their own; they are such a fascinating, culturally rich species, they need to be attended to in their own right.

  Acute vision is a distinguishing characteristic of raptors. Just how acute is illustrated by this vivid description of a golden eagle recorded by Seton Gordon in The Golden Eagle: King of Birds:

  Four days later I had an example of the marvellous eyesight of the golden eagle. The male bird was approaching at a height of at least 1,500 feet. Above a gradual hill slope where grew tussocky grass, whitened by the frosts and snow of winter, he suddenly checked his flight and fell headlong. A couple of minutes later he rose with a small object grasped in one foot. It was, I am almost sure, a field-mouse or vole. Since he had caught his prey at an elevation well above that of the eyrie, he was able to go into a glide when he took wing and made for home. When he had grasped his prey he had torn from the ground some of the long grass in which his small quarry had been hiding: during his subsequent glide, as he moved faster and faster, the grass streamed out rigidly behind him.

  Avian eyes are huge in relation to body size, and this is especially the case in birds of prey; many raptors have eyes that are as large, often larger, than an adult human’s. The foveal area in the retina of birds of prey is densely packed with photoreceptor cells. A human eye contains around 200,000 of these cells; the eye of a common buzzard, by comparison, has roughly one million of these rod-and-cone photoreceptors, enabling the buzzard to see the world in much greater detail than we can. Images are also magnified in a raptor’s eye by around 30 per cent. The birds’ eyes are designed much like a pair of binoculars: as light hits the fovea pit in the retina, its rays are bent – refracted – and magnified onto the retina so that the image is enhanced substantially. Birds of prey see the whole twitching world in infinite, immaculate detail.

  All fifteen of the diurnal birds of prey breed in these islands, though some in very small numbers. Many are permanent residents. The osprey, hobby, Montagu’s harrier and honey buzzard are summer visitors. All are classified within a single order, the Accipitriformes, and subdivided into three suborders. Accipitridae: the soarers and gliders, the nest builders, distinguished by their broad ‘fingered’ wings; so: hawks, buzzards, eagles, kites and harriers. Pandionidae: with its solitary member, the osprey – a specialist – the hoverer-above-water, the feet-first-diver after fish. Falconidae: the speed merchants (whose nests are scrapes or squats): kestrel, merlin, hobby, peregrine; fast, agile fliers with pointed wings, capable (though not all of them do) of catching their prey in the air.

  Pandionidae

  Osprey

  Accipitridae

  Honey Buzzard

  Red Kite

  Sea Eagle

  Marsh Harrier

  Hen Harrier

  Montagu’s Harrier

  Goshawk

  Sparrowhawk

  Buzzard

  Golden Eagle

  Falconidae

  Kestrel

  Merlin

  Hobby

  Peregrine Falcon

  Fifteen birds of prey, fifteen different landscapes. A journey in search of raptors, a journey through the birds and into their worlds. That is how I envisaged it. The aim simply to go in search of the birds, to look for each of them in a different place. To spend some time in the habitats of these birds of prey, hoping to encounter the birds, hoping to watch them. Beginning in the far north, in Orkney, and winding my way down to a river in Devon. A long journey south, clambering down this tall, spiny island, which is as vast and wondrous to me as any galaxy.

  Rain over the Pentland Firth. The cliffs of Hoy streaked with rain. The red sandstone a faint glow inside the fret. The low cloud makes the cliffs seem huge, there is no end to them. We could be sailing past a great red planet swirling in a storm of its own making. I am on the early morning crossing from Stromness to Scrabster. Light spilling from slot machines; the bar opening up; breakfast in the ferry’s empty café. Through the window: an arctic tern, so beautifully agile, it seemed to be threading its way through the rain’s interstices. Then a couple from Holland come in, hesitate when they hear themselves in the café’s emptiness. They have been walking for a week through Orkney and their faces are red with wind-burn. They hunch over their breakfasts and I see how we do this too: mantle our food, like a hawk, glower out from over it. We are passing The Old Man of Hoy and all three of us shift across to the port side for a better view. We see the great stack in pieces, its midriff showing through a tear in the cloud. Then the rain thickens like a shoal and The Old Man, the cliffs of Hoy, dissolve in rain.

  The way I’d pictured it, back home, doodling over maps, Orkney would be all hen harriers. Then the ferry, the train from Thurso, a request stop and stepping off the deserted platform into the blanket bog of the Flow Country. Then the vast, impossible search for merlins. I knew the birds were out there somewhere, not in large numbers, but I had seen a merlin once before, a skimming-stone, hunting fast and low far out on The Flows, the peaks of Morven, Maiden Pap and Scaraben on the southern horizon, a patch of snow on Morven’s north face like the white dab on a coot’s forehead.

  All of that happened as best it could. On the crossing over from Orkney I thought of home – ached for it – for my family there, and thought of the fishermen out of Wick and Scrabster who, should they dream of home, hauled in their nets and headed back to harbour, not willing to tamper with a dream like that. I shared a taxi with the Dutch couple from Scrabster into Thurso. They were tired and polite and wanted to pay, Orkney’s wind still rushing in them. They sat in the back of the cab, their faces glowing like rust.

  Waiting for the train at Thurso, a slow drizzle, the rails a curve of light, glinting like mica in the wet. The last stop, as far north as you can go. Buffers, then a wall and then another wall because, if you did not stop, the train would slip like a birthing ship down through Thurso’s steep streets, past her shops and houses and out into the frantic tides of the firth, rousing wreckers from their sleep who go down to poke about the
shore like foraging badgers.

  Then the warmth of the train, people steaming in their wet clothes. The start of my long journey south. All the staging posts between the moors of Orkney and the moors of Devon lying in wait for me. Reading the maps of each place obsessively, thinking the maps into life, imagining their landscape, their weather. The more I read the maps the more I imagined the possibility of raptors there. That hanging wood marked like a tide line above the valley: perfect for red kites. That cliff on the mountain’s south face: surely there must be peregrines there … The train now pulling away from the north coast. A last glimpse of Orkney shimmering behind us in her veil of rain. Her harriers grounded, hunched under the dripping sky, feathers beaded with rain. The mark I’d made in the heather beginning to fade. Time on the train to reproof my boots, because the place I’m heading for, the next stop on my journey south, hints in its name that I should really be donning waders, flippers, a bog snorkel …

  ‘Flow’, from the Norse flói, a marshy place. The Flow Country, or The Flows as it is usually known, is the name given to the area of West Caithness and East Sutherland covered by blanket bog (literally bog ‘blanketed’ by peat). It is one of the largest, most intact areas of peat bog in the world, extending to over 4,000 km². Flick the noun into a verb and you also have what the landscape wants to do. The Flows want to flow, to move. The land here is fluid, it quakes when you press yourself upon it. The Flows is the most sensitive, alert landscape I know. A human cannot move across it without marking – without hurting – the bog. The mire feels every footprint and stores your heavy spoor across its surface. But it is a wonder you can move across it at all. There are more solids found in milk than there are in the equivalent volume of peat. The bog is held in place only by a skin of vegetation (the acrotelm), predominantly sphagnum, which prevents the water-saturated lower layer of peat (the catotelm) from starting to flow. And, oh, how it wants to flow! Think of the bog as a great quivering mound of water held together like a jelly by its skin of vegetation and by the remarkably fibrous nature of the peat. Think of that great mound breathing like a sleeping whale. For that is what it does. The German word is Mooratmung (mire-breathing). It is the process by which the bog swells and contracts through wet and dry periods. The bog must breathe to stop itself from flowing away.