Raptors Read online

  As it breathes the bog changes its appearance. Unlike a mineral soil where the shape of the land is determined by physical processes, the patterns and shapes of the bog are continually shifting; peat accumulates and erodes, the bog swells and recedes. Occasionally, after exceptionally heavy rain, the water in the bog swells to such a volume that the peat, despite its great strength, can no longer hold the mound together. So the bog bursts, hacking a great chunk of itself away. In Lancashire in the mid-sixteenth century the large raised bog of Chat Moss burst and spilt out over the surrounding countryside, taking lives and causing terrible damage, a great smear of black water blotting out the land. Huge chunks of peat which were carried down the river Glazebrook were later found washed up on the Isle of Man and as far as the Irish coast.

  The train follows the river Thurso. Herons in their pterodactyl shadows. The river so black it could be a fracture in the earth’s crust, an opening into the depths of the planet. Passing Norse farmsteads, Houstry, Halkirk, Tormsdale. The Norse language here flowing down from Orkney and spreading up the course of the river. Flagstone dykes marking field boundaries. Sheep, bright as stars against the pine-dark grass, disturbed by the train, cantering away like brushed snow. Then the train is crossing an unmarked border, a linguistic watershed, the last Norse outpost before the Gaelic hinterland of the bog, a ruined farmstead with a Norse name, Tormsdale, peered down on by low hills, each one attended to by its Gaelic, Bad á Cheò, Beinn Chàiteag, Cnoc Bad na Caorach. The last stop, as far as the Norse settlers would go. Because if you didn’t stop here you would wander for days adrift on the bog before you sank, exhausted, into the marshy flói.

  ‘Bog bursts’, ‘quaking ground’, ‘sink holes’ … I am trying to pay heed to the dramatic vernacular of the bog, checking my boots are well proofed, my gaiters are a good fit. I must remember to check and recheck compass bearings against the map, must remember to tread carefully over this landscape. Because once, I nearly lost my brother in a peat bog.

  Another family holiday, another peaty, midge-infested destination. This time, the Ardnamurchan peninsula, Scotland’s gangplank, the jump off to America. My brother was six or thereabouts and we had been to the village shop, where he had bought a toy car. More than a car, it was a six-wheeled, off-road thing. Orange plastic like a street lamp’s sodium glare, round white stickers for headlights, a purple siren on the roof. My brother took it everywhere. And lucky for all of us he had the car with him on a walk up the hill one afternoon, holding the toy out in front of him, chatting to it, running through some imagined commentary, when he dropped, as if down a hole, into what looked like nothing more than just a puddle. The bog had got him. And he was struggling, sinking into the mire. But his instinct was to protect the car, to stop it getting muddy. So he held it out in front of him and by holding his arms out like that he stopped himself sinking any further and we leant over and hauled him out, oozing with black peat, like some urchin fallen down a chimney.

  The train glides across the flow. Fences beside the track to hold the drifting snow. Tundra accents: greylag, skua, greenshank, golden plover. Wild cat and otter’s braided tracks. Sphagnum’s crimson greens. Red deer, nomads in a great wet desert, stepping between the myriad lochans. Mark the deer, for they can blend into the backdrop of the flow as a hare in ermine folds itself against the snow.

  Then the train is pulling into Forsinard, where the Norse language has flanked around the bog and found an opening to the south through the long, fertile reach of Strath Halladale. And halfway down the strath met and fused with Gaelic making something beautiful. Forsinard: ‘the waterfall on the height’. Fors from the Norse (waterfall); an from the Gaelic (of the); aird from the Gaelic (height). Clothes still dank with Orkney rain, smelling of rain, I stepped down off the train, crossed the single-track road, and walked out into the bog in search of merlins.

  What else does he have in his knapsack, his machine? He has taken it off while he pauses to rest at Banchory, 23 miles out of Aberdeen. He leaves the road, sheds his coat and washes his hands and feet in the river Dee. He notices how people’s accent here has slipped away from Aberdeen, a softening in the tone, a slower pace to it, as if the dialect here still carries a memory of Gaelic. And sure enough, a little further up the road he passes two men on horseback talking in Gaelic. He speaks Gaelic himself, has considerable knowledge of Scots and its many dialects. All along his journey he passes through the ebb and flow of dialect. Every mile along the road accents are shaved a fraction. Often he struggles to make himself understood. He might follow a seam of Gaelic like a thin trail through the landscape until it peters out on the outskirts of a town.

  What else is in his knapsack? Two black lead pencils; eight camel-hair pencils with stalks; an Indian rubber; a shirt; a false neck; two pairs of short stockings; a soap box; two razors; a sharpening stone; a lancet; a pair of scissors; some thread; needles. In a small pocket in the inner side of his flannel undervest there is nine pounds sterling in bank notes. One pound in silver is secured in a purse of chamois leather kept in a pocket of his trousers. In all, ten pounds to last him through to London.

  That first day he walks as far as Aboyne, 30 miles from Aberdeen. That night, at the inn, he writes in his journal until the candle has burnt down. He writes a long list of all the plants he has seen that day, both those in and out of flower. He dreams again of the museum, the place obsesses his dreams. But this dreaming is inevitable because the museum is the reason he is making this walk to London. He has heard that the British Museum holds an astonishing collection of beasts and birds, of all the creatures that have been found upon the face of the earth. And he must go to London to see these things. There are gaps in his knowledge, in the survey of himself, he needs to fill. As a student at Aberdeen he studied medicine for nearly five years, then, in 1817, switched to zoology. Since then he has devoted himself completely to studying the natural world. Linnaeus and Pennant have been his guides but now he has reached the point where he needs to set what he has learnt of the natural world against the museum’s collection. He wants to check his own observations and theories against the museum’s. Above all, he wants to see the museum’s collection of British birds. Birds are what stir him more than anything. He is anxious to get there, to get on with his life.

  The way I’d pictured it, back home planning this journey, was a neat transition: Orkney’s hen harriers followed by merlins out on The Flows. Instead, on Orkney, merlins had darted through my days, led me astray across the moor in search of them. Then, not far out of Forsinard, in a large expanse of forestry, the first bird I saw was a male hen harrier, a shard of light, hunting the canopy.

  Before I set out on this journey I had planned to try to look for each species of raptor in a different place, to dedicate a bird to a particular landscape, or rather the landscape to the bird, to immerse myself as much as I could in each bird’s habitat. But the plan unravelled soon after I lay down in the heather on Orkney and a jack merlin, a plunging meteor, dropped from the sky, wings folded back behind him, diving straight at a kestrel who had drifted over the merlin’s territory. It was astonishing to see the size difference between the birds, the merlin a speck, a frantic satellite, buzzing around the kestrel. He was furious, screaming at the kestrel, diving repeatedly at the larger bird until the kestrel relented and let the wind slice it away down the valley.

  I stayed with that jack merlin for much of the day. Sometimes I would catch a flash of him circling the horizon or zipping low across the hillside, full tilt, breakneck speed. The sense of sprung energy in this tiny bird of prey was extraordinary, a fizzing atom, bombarding the sky.

  Once I tracked the merlin down into a dusty peat hollow below clouds of heather. I marked the spot and started to walk slowly down the moor towards him. Grandmother’s footsteps: every few paces I froze and watched him through my binoculars. At each pause the colours of his slate-blue back grew sharper. Even at rest he was a quivering ball of energy, primed to spring up and fling himself out and up
. Relentless, fearless, missile of the moor, you would not be able to shake him off once he had latched on to you. There are stories of merlins – like William MacGillivray’s account of watching a merlin pursuing a lark amongst farm steadings and corn-stacks – where the falcon is so locked in on the pursuit of a wheatear, skylark, stonechat, finch or pipit (the merlin’s most common prey species) it follows them into buildings, garages, in and out of people’s homes. Even a ship out in the Atlantic, 500 miles west of Cape Wrath, became, for a week, a merlin’s hunting ground. The crew reported that the merlin – on migration from Iceland – hitched a ride with them, chasing small migrant birds all over the ship, darting across the gunwale, around coiled hillocks of rope, perching on the bright orange fenders.

  They don’t always get away with it, this all-out pursuit; merlins have been known to kill themselves, colliding with walls, fences, trees. Merlins need the space – the sort of space there is on The Flows – to run their prey down. They do not possess the sparrowhawk’s agility to hunt through the tight landscape of a wood.

  I am still playing grandmother’s footsteps with the merlin, but I do not get very far before one of the short-eared owls overtakes me and swoops low over the merlin, disturbing him, dusting him, so that he flicks away out of the peat hollow and lands again further down the slope. I mark his position. This time he has landed on a fence post. There is a burn running down towards the fence and I drop into it and use its depth to stalk closer to the merlin. I crawl quietly down the burn and, when I poke my head up again over the bank, the merlin is still there and I am very close to him. He is looking up at the sky, agitated. His breast is a russet-bracken colour, his back a blue-grey lead. That’s it: he is gone. The female is above us, calling to him, a sharp, pierced whistle. And then I see the merlin pair together. She is a darker shape, a fraction larger. In his description of the merlin, William MacGillivray picks out the distinction between the male and female’s dorsal colouring brilliantly. The male’s upper parts he describes as a deep greyish-blue; the female’s as a dark bluish-grey. But now I cannot make out any difference between the pair. Both the male and female merlin are gaining height, moving away from my hideout in the burn, pushing themselves into speed.

  They were beautiful distractions, those Orkney merlins, pulling me after them, away from the hen harriers I was supposed to be watching. And throughout my journey, at every juncture, different species of raptor, inevitably, moved through the places I was in. So, hen harriers spilt out of Orkney and, like the Norse language, followed me across the Pentland Firth; merlins flickered through many of the moorland landscapes I visited; buzzards were present almost everywhere I went, however much I tried to convince myself they might be something else, the something that was eluding me – goshawk, honey buzzard, golden eagle … Every buzzard I saw made me look at it more carefully.

  Quickly the map I had imagined for my journey became a muddled thing, transgressed by other birds of prey, criss-crossed by their wanderings. And though each staging post was supposed to concentrate on a single species, I loved it when I was visited, unexpectedly, by other birds of prey. I liked the sense that the different stops along my journey started to feel linked up by the birds, I liked the ways they set my journey echoing. Sometimes I came across a bird of prey again far from where I had first encountered it: a merlin on its winter wanderings in the south of England, an osprey on the cusp of autumn refuelling on an estuary that cut into Scotland’s narrow girth.

  The great Orkney ornithologist Eddie Balfour discussed, in one of his many papers on hen harriers, the minimum distance harriers nest from each other (hen harriers, notably on Orkney, will often nest in loose communities). But in a lovely afterthought to this, like a harrier pirouetting and changing tack, he touches on the optimum distance between nests as well, the distance beyond which breeding stimuli would diminish, neighbourly contact become lost. Extending the thought outwards from hen harriers living in a moorland community, he imagines larger raptors, golden eagles, with their vast, isolated territories, living, in fact, like the harriers, within a single community that extended across the whole of the Highlands, each nest within reach of its neighbour, like a great network of signal beacons.

  I was fascinated by this idea of a community of raptors extending right across the country. It touched on my experience of re-encountering and being revisited by birds of prey as I journeyed south. Balfour’s idea also seemed to challenge the notion that many birds of prey were solitary, non-communal predators, inviting the idea that even a species we perceive as being fiercely independent, like the eagle, still belongs to – perhaps needs – a wider community of eagles. It got hold of me, this idea, it got hold of the initial map I had sketched for my journey and redesigned it. Instead of moving from one isolated area of study to the next, from Orkney to the Flow Country and so on, I started to see myself passing through neighbourhoods – through communities – of raptors, the boundaries of my map – the national, topographic, linguistic borders – giving way to the birds’ network of interconnecting, overlapping territories. A journey through birds.

  The first bird I see as I am walking through the forestry above Forsinard: a male hen harrier, hunting the sea of conifers. And I could still be on that hillside in Orkney, except, what has changed? The bird, the bedrock, remain the same, but the sky is different here, not always rushing away from you as it is on Orkney. The wind is not as skittish here, the vastness of the land seems to stabilise it, give it traction. On Orkney I wonder if the wind even notices the land. And what else has changed, of course, are the trees that no more belong out here on the bog than they do on Orkney, where trees don’t stand a chance against that feral wind. But still there are conifers here planted in their millions, squeezing the breath out of the bog. And today the male harrier is hunting over the tops of the trees just as I watched the Orkney harriers quartering the open moor. It is the same procedure except here, over the forestry, he is looking for passerine birds to scoop out of the trees. It is fascinating to watch the harrier hunt like this, as if the canopy were simply the ground vegetation raised up by 20 feet.

  To begin with the newly planted forests would have been harrier havens, just the sort of scrubby, ungrazed zones they like to hunt, ripe with voles. But all of that is gone once the trees thicken and the canopy closes over, suffocating the bog. Greenshank, dunlin, golden plover, hen harrier, merlin, birds of the open bog, are forced to move on, or cling on, as this harrier was doing, trying to adapt to his changed world. Recently, hen harriers – always assumed to be strictly ground-nesting birds – have been observed nesting in conifer trees where the plantations have swamped their moorland breeding grounds. Hopeless, inexperienced nest builders, little wonder their nests are often dismantled by a febrile wind.

  But this harrier I am watching over the forest still has its nest on the ground. From my perch on the hillside I draw a sketch of his movements over the trees. Meandering, methodical, he covers every inch of the canopy. I watch him drift above the trees like this for half an hour until (I recognise it from Orkney) there is a sudden shift in purpose to his flight. He stalls low above a forest ride, hesitates a fraction, then whacks the ground with his feet. I make a note of the time: 14.50: he lifts from the kill and beats a heavy flight direct across the tops of the trees; there is the female harrier rising towards him; 14.51: the food pass; 14.52: the female keeps on rising, loops around the male; 14.53: she goes down into a newly planted corner of the forest. The trees are only a few feet tall here and I mark the position of her nest: four fence posts to the right of the corner post, then 12 feet down from the fence.

  The hen harrier is the bird that brought me to William MacGillivray. The moment came when I was meandering, harrier-like, through books and papers, field notes and anecdotes about hen harriers. Then I read this passage from MacGillivray’s 1836 book, Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain:

  Should we, on a fine summer’s day, betake us to the outfields bordering an extensive moo
r, on the sides of the Pentland, Ochill, or the Peebles hills, we might chance to see the harrier, although hawks have been so much persecuted that one may sometimes travel a whole day without meeting so much as a kestrel. But we are now wandering through thickets of furze and broom, where the blue milkwort, the purple pinguicula, the yellow violet, the spotted orchis, and all the other plants that render the desert so delightful to the strolling botanist, peep forth in modest beauty from their beds of green moss. The golden plover, stationed on the little knoll, on which he has just alighted, gives out his shrill note of anxiety, for he has come, not to welcome us to his retreats, but if possible to prevent us from approaching them, or at least to decoy us from his brood; the lapwing, on broad and dusky wing, hovers and plunges over head, chiding us with its querulous cry; the whinchat flits from bush to bush, warbles its little song from the top-spray, or sallies forth to seize a heedless fly whizzing joyously along in the bright sunshine. As we cross the sedgy bog, the snipe starts with loud scream from among our feet, while on the opposite bank the gor cock raises his scarlet-fringed head above the heath, and cackles his loud note of anger or alarm, as his mate crouches amid the brown herbage.