Raptors Read online

  But see, a pair of searchers not less observant than ourselves have appeared over the slope of the bare hill. They wheel in narrow curves at the height of a few yards; round and round they fly, their eyes no doubt keenly bent on the ground beneath. One of them, the pale blue bird, is now stationary, hovering on almost motionless wing; down he shoots like a stone; he has clutched his prey, a young lapwing perhaps, and off he flies with it to a bit of smooth ground, where he will devour it in haste. Meanwhile his companion, who is larger, and of a brown colour, continues her search; she moves along with gentle flappings, sails for a short space, and judging the place over which she has arrived not unlikely to yield something that may satisfy her craving appetite, she flies slowly over it, now contracting her circles, now extending them, and now for a few moments hovering as if fixed in the air. At length, finding nothing, she shoots away and hies to another field; but she has not proceeded far when she spies a frog by the edge of a small pool, and, instantly descending, thrusts her sharp talons through its sides. It is soon devoured, and in the mean time the male comes up. Again they fly off together; and were you to watch their progress, you would see them traverse a large space of ground, wheeling, gliding, and flapping, in the same manner, until at length, having obtained a supply of savoury food for their young, they would fly off with it.

  Attentive, accurate, warm and intimate, you cannot help but feel MacGillivray’s delight at being out there amongst the birds. The degree of observation: the way he records the hen harrier’s flight, the detail in the landscape, the description of the moorland flowers and moorland birds. It felt to me like the work of an exceptional field naturalist; the writer seemed to notice everything. And I wanted to read more, had to read more. Felt a kinship there, at least in the way MacGillivray responded to the birds. He caught the hen harrier’s beauty in his careful, graceful writing.

  I walk through the middle of the day across the bog. Anything that breaks the horizon draws you towards it. The house is so far out on the flow it is like a boat set adrift. Not long abandoned, the building sagging, tipping into the bog. A portion of the corrugated-iron roof torn back, exposing timber cross-beams. Rock doves blurt out of the attic. Outside the house there is a bathtub turned upside down; four stumpy iron legs sticking upright, like a dead pig. In one of the rooms: a metal bed frame, a mattress patterned with mildew, blue ceramic tiles decorating the fireplace. A dead hind in the doorway, the stench of it everywhere. Deer droppings piled against the walls as if someone had swept them there.

  MacGillivray often slept in places like this on his long walk to London. One night, on the outskirts of Lancaster, tired and wet, he stumbled upon a large, misshapen house in the dark. He went inside and groped his way around till he had made a complete circuit of the rooms. There was no loft, not even a culm of straw to bed down in, but earlier he had tried to sleep under a hedge and the house, despite its damp clay floor, was preferable. So he slept behind the door in wet feet with a handkerchief tied around his head, woke to a mild midnight to peep at the moon and walk up and down the floor a bit. Then slept again with his head on his knapsack to wake at dawn and walk down to the river to wash his face.

  But that restless night on the outskirts of Lancaster comes much later. It is only five days since MacGillivray set out from Aberdeen and he is still in Aberdeenshire, crossing the Cairngorms on route from Braemar to Kingussie. He spends the night of Sunday 12 September high in the mountains in a palaver of sleeplessness and shivering. Supper is a quarter of a barley cake and a few crumbs of cheese. After which he does his best to make a shelter out of stones and grass and heath, then settles the knapsack and some heather over his feet, to try to keep the cold at bay.

  He wakes at sunrise and resumes his climb into the mountains. It is slow going and he pauses often to rest; his muscles, after so little food, shiver with fatigue. At the source of the Dee he pauses to drink a glassful of its cold, blissful water. Up on the plateau he finds moss campion and dwarf willow; in the steep grey corries: dog’s violet, smooth heath bedstraw, alpine lady’s mantle.

  During my time in Caithness and Sutherland I heard rumours of merlins. People were generous with their knowledge, pointing places out to me on my map. Somebody’s faint memory of a nest site was enough to set me trekking far out across the bog. One afternoon I walked out to a distant mountain that rose sheer out of the flow. I had been told that a corrie high on the mountain’s north face was a traditional nesting site for merlins. I walked there through a land creased with water, through dense clusters of dubh lochans, the hundreds of small lakes that form beautiful patterns across the surface of the bog. In some places the lochans are packed so tightly you can drift through their mazy streets for hours with no sense of where you might emerge. Most of the pools are shallow, two or three feet deep, though occasionally one would sink its depth into blackness. Water horsetail grew in some of the shallower pools, bell heather and cotton sedge along the banks. Around the edge of the pools were great mounds of sphagnum moss built up like ant hills. I pushed my arm into one of them, losing it up to my shoulder in the moss’s cool dampness, sphagnum tentacles crawling over my skin. Some of these mounds had been perched on by birds, wisps of down feather left behind, the imprint of the bird’s weight on the soft moss.

  Hours I spent out there on the bog, and so many distractions on the way to the mountain, so much water to weave around. At one point, I gave up and slithered otter-like between the lochans, swirling up clouds of peat particles when I dived into the pools. And somewhere out on the flow a great boulder – just as the abandoned house had done – drew me towards it. A huge lump of rock, 20 feet high, jettisoned by the retreating ice. There was a solitary mountain ash growing up through a crack in the rock like a ship’s mast. I clambered up the boulder and found, on the slab’s flat top, a plate of bones. I had discovered an eagle’s plucking perch, bones strewn everywhere, on the slab and in the heather around the base of the boulder. Amongst the bones there was a red deer’s hoof, its ankle still clothed in grey hide.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the mountain and climbed up to the corrie. I sat down with my back against a rock, listened and waited for the merlins. A corrie is the mountain’s cupped ear. It is a contained space away from the rushing noise of the tops, an amphitheatre of silence. You walk into it and enter an enclosed stillness where everything is suddenly closer, amplified, the raven’s croaking echo, the golden plover’s whistle. I was glad to be out of the wind. I thought, if merlins were here, their calls would sound cleaner, sharper, and hopefully I could track them more easily by listening out for the birds. But, something about the quiet stillness of the corrie, the release from the rushing wind out on the flow … when I sat down beside the rock, I fell asleep and when I woke the corrie had grown cooler, thicker with shadow.

  Later I heard another rumour, a sure bet this time, a place where merlins nested year after year. The site was a deep cut through the flow where a burn wound down towards the river. I walked there across the glittering bog, light finding and lifting pools into pools of light. Near the burn I found signs of merlins everywhere: chalk-marked boulders – perches, lookout posts – patterned white by the birds’ excretions.

  There are some neighbourhoods of the moor that draw merlins to them time and again. It is difficult to identify what it is about a location that has so much appeal, but availability of prey and suitable nesting sites play a crucial role in the land’s capacity to draw in raptors. In his pioneering study of merlins in the Yorkshire Dales published in 1921, William Rowan observed nineteen different pairs of merlins return to the same patch of heather every year for nineteen years. Each spring there was always a new influx of birds because each year, without fail, both the male and female merlin were killed by gamekeepers on their breeding ground and their eggs destroyed.

  It was enough for keepers to set their traps on top of a merlin’s favourite lookout boulder. No need to even camouflage the trap: the merlin’s fidelity to certain perches
always outweighed the bird’s mistrust of the sharp jaws of a trap. Rowan used to plead – even tried to bribe – the keepers to spare the merlins. He had watched grouse quietly foraging bilberry leaves right in front of the adult merlins at their nest, so he knew that merlins posed no threat to grouse. But a few days before the grouse season opened the keeper would go out early with his gun and clear the moor of hawks of every shape and size. And every year another sacrificial pair of merlins arrived to plug the gap. Rowan wondered where they came from, this surplus tap of merlins, replenishing the same patch of moor year after year. What was it about that clump of heather on the side of the fell that had such a pull on the birds? Rowan identified a few characteristics of the place, of merlin nests in general: a bank of deep, old heather; an expansive view from the nest site of the surrounding moorland; a number of lookout boulders above the nest …

  But it is hard to see the land as the birds must see it, to feel a place as they must do. I am always looking for clues in the landscape, trying to anticipate the birds from the feel of a place. The ornithologist Ian Newton observed that, when he was studying sparrowhawks in South West Scotland, he could glance inside a wood and tell straight away if its internal landscape was conducive for sparrowhawks. Eventually, after you have spent time amongst the birds, once you have settled into their landscapes, you can walk through a wood or sit above a moorland burn and think: this is a good place to be a hawk, I could be a hawk here.

  I keep well back from the burn and settle myself against one of the boulders. The rock is limed with merlin droppings and I think, of all the things that draw a merlin down onto a particular bank of heather, these white-splashed boulders, like runway lights, must guide the birds in, signalling that this is a good place for them, signalling to the birds that generations of merlins have bred here.

  Then – my notebook records the time – 10.30: ‘Heard male merlin calling and turned to see him just above me. He gained height and then flew fast, dropping to ground level and skimming out across the bog, a smear of speed …’ I try to keep up with him but he is rushing so low against the ground, eventually the haze and fold of the moor fold him away. I try to pick him up again, but the vast acreage of sky, the speed of the tiny bird … I have lost him.

  That was the pattern for much of the day. There were long absences when the merlin was hunting far out on the flow. I caught the occasional flash of him through my binoculars when he glanced above the skyline, followed him as he tumbled downwards and levelled out over a great sweep of the bog. Sometimes I was impatient to follow him out across the flow, to try to intercept him out there. But I knew that would be hopeless, I could never follow a bird so absorbed in its own speed. Gordon would have kept still and waited. Rowan would have kept still; I thought of William Rowan, his night-long vigils in the cramped hide on Barden Moor, buried in tall bracken, so close to the merlins’ nest that, when he lit a cigarette to help ward off the flies that infested his hide, the smoke drifted over the female merlin, parted round her, making slow eddies of itself as the falcon bent to feed her young.

  You have so little time to take in what you see of merlins. Their world is glimpsed in snatches of blurred speed. I was lucky on Orkney to have spent time beside a merlin who paused long enough for me to notice the russet plumage of his breast. But the merlin seen rushing past you in a bolt of speed is just as beautiful. At times, from my perch above the burn in the Flow Country, watching the male merlin coming and going, it felt like I was in a meteor storm. Always I heard him calling first, then scrambled to pick him up just in time to glimpse his sharp-angled wings and his low rush up the burn. On one approach, I heard the male call and the female answered him, a high-pitched cheo, cheo, cheo. As she called (still out of sight) I noticed the male suddenly jink mid-flight as if he’d tripped over a rise in the moor. Then it looked as if he had grazed, scraped something – another bird – because there was a small explosion of feathers beneath him. And just at that moment I saw a second bird rising from under him and realised it was the female (who up till then I had not seen) meeting the male there, receiving prey from him.

  Later, when the moor was quiet, I walked up to the spot where the merlin pair had met. When the female gathered the prey from the male she must have scuffed it, loosening feathers from the dead bird. There was a dusting of feathers across the site where the food pass had taken place: down feathers snagged in the heather and in the cotton grass. How else could two birds of such charged intensity meet except in an explosion, a fit of sparks? I picked up some of the loose feathers and lined my pockets with them. Then I walked on up the burn, following in the merlin’s slipstream.

  III

  Golden Eagle

  Outer Hebrides

  Before the long walk to London, before university in Aberdeen, before birds had entered his life, William MacGillivray learnt to shoot a gun. The first shot he fired – his uncle supervising, leaning over him, telling him to keep the butt flush against his shoulder, to anticipate the recoil – he blasts a table, hurries up to it afterwards through the bruised air to inspect the splintered wood. Getting his eye in, his uncle nodding, encouraging. With the second shot, he brushes a rock pigeon off the cliffs, flicking the bird into the sea. His third shot hits two pigeons simultaneously, sets them rolling like skittles. Recharging his gun with buckshot, peering over the cliff, searching for the pigeons bobbing in the thick swell. Let the barrel cool, William. His uncle saying this and as he says it MacGillivray tests the barrel with his finger and flinches at the heat, and in that instant the gun worries him, becomes something more physical, and his shoulder wakes to the ache of the recoil. So by the time he fires the fourth and fifth shots he is too wary of it, of the power of the thing, his body squinting, flinching when he squeezes the trigger. And he pulls the shots wildly. His uncle lightly ribs him at this: You even missed the mountain! Some hours later, when the barrel has cooled, when his anxiety has cooled, MacGillivray fires the gun again. This time he hits and kills a golden eagle.

  The first time I fired a gun? I must have been the same age as MacGillivray was, ten or eleven, staying at a friend’s house on a farm. We drove out with his father one evening in a pickup truck, bumping slowly along the side of a wood, scanning the brambly undergrowth. At first I could not find the rabbit, though my friend kept pointing to it, only a few feet from the truck; puffy, weeping eyes, hunched in on itself. A crumpled, shuffling thing. It had not noticed us. Its eyes looked like they had been smeared with glue. A mixy, his dad said; here, put it out of its misery. He turned the engine off, draped an old coat over the open window, a cushion for me to lean the rifle on. Then, like an afterthought, as if he felt it would stop the gun shaking in my hand, he pulled the handbrake up; its wrenching sound like a shriek inside the truck.

  So MacGillivray waits for the ache in his shoulder to subside. Then sets about gathering what he will need to shoot the eagle: a white hen from his uncle’s farmyard, some twine, a wooden peg, a pocketful of barley grain, newspapers, the gun. He walks out of the farm and up the hill. When he reaches the pit that has been dug into the side of the moor, he ties the hen’s leg to the twine and fastens the twine to the wooden peg. He pushes the peg into the ground, sprinkles some of the grain beside the hen and primes the gun with a double charge of buckshot. Then he retreats to the pit with its roof of turf. When he enters the hide it is as if the moor folds him into itself. He can keep an eye on the hen from a peephole cut into the wall of the pit. He starts to read the newspapers. Rain seeps through the roof and the damp paper comes apart when he turns it. He finds himself rolling scraps of newspaper into balls of mush in his palm until it looks as if he is holding a clutch of tiny wren’s eggs. Outside he can hear the hen shaking the rain off itself.

  He is dozing when he hears the hen scream. He scrambles to the peephole and there is the eagle fastened to the back of the chicken. The eagle is so huge it has shut out the horizon with its wings. The hen looks as if it has been flattened. MacGillivray hurries to pick up the
gun, takes aim, and fires. But he has overloaded it with shot and the recoil shunts him backwards, the butt smashing into his cheek. He cannot see what has happened – if he has hit anything – as smoke from the gun has engulfed the eagle and the chicken, so he pushes through the heather doorway of the hide and rushes up to the target. The shot, he sees, has entered the side of the eagle and killed the great bird outright. The hen, amazingly, is still alive, trying to hobble away. So this is an eagle, he thinks; it is nothing wonderful after all … Gun in one hand, hen in the other, he throws the eagle over his back and brings its legs down on each side of his neck. Then he sets off back down the hill, wearing the huge bird like a knapsack.

  Eagles started to make themselves felt while I was searching for merlins in The Flows of Caithness and Sutherland. There was the eagle’s plucking post – that huge flat-topped boulder, littered with bones – I came across far out on the bog. Now and then, too, I saw eagles – often a pair – rising high over the mountains to the west. It was hard not to act on these sightings, to stay on the flow and not follow the eagles into the west. Once, watching the male merlin rising above the burn, in the far distance, perhaps a mile away, I saw an eagle circling high over the moor. I liked the symmetry in that moment, lining up the smallest raptor in these islands with the largest. A telescopic projection, the merlin’s wingspan magnified onto the rising eagle, pointing the way to the next stage of my journey. So I left the merlins above their burn in the Flow Country and followed that eagle into the west, to spend a week amongst the mountains of Lewis and Harris, William MacGillivray’s stamping ground, the place where he shot the golden eagle on that morning of steady drizzle.