Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  I was sitting on my doorstep in the morning sun with my chain file, methodically sharpening my saw, when I noticed something crawling up the hillside towards me. It was a grey squirrel, but its head was swollen, its eyes bul-ging, and it appeared to be losing control of its limbs. I hadn’t realized that myxomatosis could affect squirrels; or perhaps this was not myxomatosis but an equivalent squirrel disease. It couldn’t support its weight; it was dragging itself up the hill on its belly, but it seemed absolutely determined and it never paused in its struggle. It was a pitiful sight. A buzzard flew up from the wood and perched in a tree above the squirrel, shaking its tail as it settled like they always do. I recognized this bird from its markings, it was one of the pair that nested in Penlan Wood. It flew down to the ground beside the squirrel and peered at it closely, and I thought it was curtains for the squirrel. But the buzzard lifted and flew back to the wood; it must have sensed that something was not right. The squirrel carried on, painfully slowly, irrevocably. Just over the track was an old ash, and there was a hollow in that ash right at ground level. The squirrel crawled into the shelter of that hole, from which it would never emerge.

  Buzzards are raggedy, untidy birds; every time they make a move they seem to lose another feather. You could come back from any walk with a hatband full of buzzard feathers. The ravens are much cooler customers altogether. They get a bad press, because they are black and feed on carrion, I suppose, though in some cultures they are revered, as the bird that brought us the sun, or even as our creator. They are thought to be the most intelligent of all birds, as intelligent as dogs. They mate for life and have a wide range of vocalizations, the most sophisticated communication skills of any bird. The most familiar call is a deep cronk; if you see a raven this is what you will probably hear. Because if you can see a raven you can be sure it will have seen you first, and the cronking is actually a very mild alarm call. The other constant call is a beautiful bell-like ringing tone that you hear when the birds are out of sight, the contact call between a pair.

  The ravens are monolithic black slabs that float across the hillside with scarcely a wing-beat; they are massive. With their straight wings, their diamond-shaped tails, their long necks and shaggy heads, they look like Maltese crosses silhouetted against the sky. As they fly they repeatedly fold their wings tight against their body, flip on to their backs and fly upside down, first one bird then the other. This stunning display seems almost joyous, as if the birds are rejoicing in the freedom of the skies. It is described as a spring courtship display, but I have seen it in every month of the year. They almost infallibly come in twos, and the pair remains together all year round, always close, always loyal. Except for when they are followed by a trail of their young they are not generally social members of the crow family, such as the rooks and the jackdaws, or the choughs on the cliffs. Although one August when I walked to the top of my mountain I found a meet of perhaps twenty-five birds above the summit, not just flipping on to their backs but performing complete rolls, then dropping like stones to the ground and swooping up at the last possible moment. This mysterious gathering continued for hours as I watched from a distance, awestruck by their total mastery of the air and wondering at the purpose of it all.

  Magpies are known for these occasional inscrutable parliaments too. They are not social birds either — the rhyme only goes up to seven, after all — but occasionally they will assemble in much larger numbers for reasons not fully understood. I saw such a meeting just once in my time in the hills. There were five birds in a circle on the ground, all facing inwards and hopping around awkwardly as if they were not sure quite what to do. All around them in the trees and bushes near by was an outer circle of nearly twenty watching birds, like the audience at a gladiatorial contest.

  I found the local raven nest during my first winter, before I had moved into Penlan full-time. On the steep bracken-covered eastern flank of my hill are a series of small copses. Some are natural — alder woods that follow the trickle of a stream down the mountainside — but evenly spaced between them are several small stands of ornamental conifers, planted long ago for the benefit of the view from the big house far away across the valley. The Victor-ians had a habit of introducing features to the landscape that would be seen to their full advantage only by their grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. In a way you have to admire their confidence; they must have thought their time would never end. That winter I picked my way across the hillside while the bracken was dead and brown, exploring each of the little copses in turn. And high up in the tallest cedar in the biggest of these copses I found the nest. It was vast; it looked like generations of ravens must have added to it, but in fact I later discovered that it was relatively recent. They had previously nested for years across the river and further up-valley, but the site had been visible from the road and drunks from the local pub had one night decided to take pot-shots at the nest with their air rifles.

  When spring came I began to watch the birds at the nest. Ravens are among the first birds to breed; they will work on their nest through February and then begin to lay in early March, when the hills where they live are often still streaked with drifts of snow. Birds time their nesting so that the weeks when the nest is full of hungry mouths to feed will coincide with the time their food supply is at its most plentiful. For ravens this meant lambing season, when the fields would be full of stillborn lambs and afterbirths. Whether or not the increased adoption of lambing sheds will affect the density of their population remains to be seen.

  From the ridge of the hill I could look straight down into the nest at the sitting bird brooding her eggs, far enough away that I did not disturb her. But I preferred to watch from below. At the track where the moorland met the highest fields, I would sit on the stile where I had seen my first polecat and look up at the nesting copse. The male would come sailing in across the valley, calling repeatedly. He was so big that his arrival seemed to make the hillside shrink around him. He would settle in a tree in the adjacent copse and the sitting female would fly out to him. And then he would sing to her, a quiet, gentle trilling song that you would never expect to hear from a member of the crow family, and they would touch beaks tenderly. After that they would launch themselves from the trees and circle together, each flipping over in turn, their calls ringing out across the valley. The pair raised their five young successfully that year. Once they were on the wing they spread themselves over the hillside trees, calling for food, but soon they began to follow their parents everywhere in a long line, a crocodile in the sky. Wherever I went I would see them trailing after the adults, trying to copy their every move, discovering their domain.

  It was late in February, the tail end of the following winter, and there was excitement in the air; there was a palpable feeling that everything in my world was preparing for change. A pair of ravens was displaying continually over Penlan Wood; one bird would fly down and pluck a twig, then circle around holding it proudly in its beak, while the other bird seemed driven to transports of delight, calling excitedly and not just rolling but plummeting down into the trees just like the displaying sparrowhawks. There was a third bird too, always watching from a distance; every time it approached a little too close the pair would chase it off angrily. I checked the pair in the hillside cedar, but they were in their place; these were different birds. I suspected they might be last year’s young that had not wandered too far from their birthplace; a couple that had paired off and an unmated male. I wondered if they planned to nest in the wood right on my doorstep, even though my sparrowhawks seemed none too keen on having them around, but once they became serious about nest-building I saw them daily ferrying sticks downhill towards the stream.

  Over the course of a week I kept a lookout for the nesting site in the streamside woods, but couldn’t locate it. Once breeding began in earnest the pair’s constant display flights came to a halt and I would see the male alone flying straight and purposeful down into the wooded valley. And it was only when the female start
ed sitting that the reason I had failed to find the nest became apparent; I had seen the nest almost straight away but had taken it for a wood-pigeon’s, it was so tiny. The old nest in the cedar was the size of a bale of hay, while this one was so small the sitting female overhung it, head, tail and sides too. The nest was about thirty feet up in a slender birch alongside my clearing across the old bridge, and wisps of wool lining trailed beneath it. It seemed such an unlikely location for a bird of the high crags and the open hills; but these birds were beginners, if my hunch was correct, and this was their first attempt. As I looked up and saw the bird sitting there, squeezed into her paltry nest, she saw me too and flew up, circling above the woods and calling over and over again. The male joined her within seconds, and the two birds took out their anger on an unfortunate buzzard that happened to be passing.

  I would go down to my bench on the far side of the clearing, a suitable distance away to keep an eye on them without disturbing them, and the spare bird would always be in the vicinity too, a fellow watcher, though every time he drifted too close the mated birds would be on his tail at once. The pair managed to successfully rear their own brood of five young that year, even though it seemed miraculous that all those birds could fit into such a tiny nest. They did leave the nest before they could fly, but it didn’t matter, they just draped themselves around the canopy of the little birch, like flags on a pirate ship, calling repeatedly for their parents to bring them food. And I was there as they took their first faltering flights.

  Coming down off the hill one sunny afternoon I noticed something big and black on the track by my cottage. At first I thought it must be one of the farm cats that sometimes wandered up this far. They lived in the barns around the farmhouse and I had no idea how many there were; I doubt the farmer did either. The most I ever saw at one time was thirteen of them waiting outside the farm door at feeding time. But as I approached I saw that this was no cat but a raven sitting motionless at the side of the track. I got closer and closer, expecting it to flush, but it never did, it just stayed in place, immobile save for the occasional blink. There was obviously something seriously wrong. They say that if a bird is so ill or badly hurt that it loses its fear of man, then it is too ill to survive. This bird didn’t flinch at all as I stretched down and picked it up. It was so big that my hands only reached partway around its breast, and its pickaxe bill was bigger than my thumb, although with their hollow bones birds are always much lighter than they appear. I could see no sign of injury, and it looked in perfect condition, but it didn’t struggle at all in my hands. There was not the least sign of life in it save for the blink of its eye. A hippoboscid, a wingless louse fly, scuttled out from under its feathers, then disappeared again. I had always taken ravens to be jet black, but this close up the bird was two-tone, its plumage shone with a glossy metallic sheen in purple and green. It felt like an incredible honour to have such a beautiful wild creature in my hands.

  I felt sure this was the third bird, the watcher. Perhaps he had been harried to exhaustion by the relentless mobbing of the mated pair, I thought. I carried him into the cottage and placed him carefully in a cardboard box with a bowl of water while I stoked up the fire and put on the kettle. I sat by the fire with the still, silent bird at my feet, and fantasized: I would nurse him gently back to health and he would become a wild companion. Not my pet but my familiar, my connection with the natural world around me. It was just a fantasy, though, and I knew that I had to do what was in the best interests of the bird. When I had finished my cup of tea I covered the box and left the bird to rest while I set off down the hillside to the lanes and the telephone box. I called the doctor at the field centre; luckily he was in and he arranged to meet me in a couple of hours at the bridge by my postbox, where he would pick up the bird and drive it to an animal-rescue centre. There they had the experience in caring for injured birds that I lacked, and I knew this would be the raven’s best chance for survival.

  When I got home from my round trip of perhaps an hour and a half the raven had not moved at all; his pro-spects did not look good. As I opened the box to check on him he looked up at me with a perfectly round black eye that revealed no trace of fear. I covered him again and set back off down the hill carrying the box. It was turning into a busy day for me. As I sat on the wall of the bridge waiting for the doctor to arrive, I heard a faint scratching of claws from inside the box, the very first movement the bird had made in all the hours he had been with me. The doctor arrived and took him away, and I made my way back up the hill, a little regretful perhaps, even though I knew I had done the right thing. What happened next I would find out only later. The doctor stopped off at his home in the village to have his dinner before the long drive to the rescue centre. When he came back to the car an hour later he heard sounds coming from inside the boot, so decided to check on the bird before starting the journey. As he lifted the lid of the box, the raven sprang into the air. It circled the village once to get its bearings, then headed straight back in the direction of Penlan. The most likely explanation is that he had been concussed, and just needed a little time to recover.

  It was dusk and I was trailing my way up the front field dragging a heavy fallen log. I would seldom arrive back at the cottage unencumbered as I always needed fresh wood. I heard a raven calling behind me. It was unmistakably a raven, but like no raven I had ever heard before; this bird sounded angry, or even scared. I looked back and saw him coming up the hillside towards me, flying low, weaving and swerving. Directly above him was his persecutor, a pale brown male goshawk with his long legs stretched out beneath him, following the raven’s every move from just a few feet over his head. The hawk dropped and slammed into the raven’s neck. Though there was only a short distance between them, the raven was visibly jolted by the impact, despite the fact he was the bigger bird. The hawk lifted and struck again a second time, and then a third. He didn’t fold his wings and swoop for the attack as you might expect, but instead gracefully raised his wings until they touched one another directly over him, like an avenging angel. The mated pair of ravens flew up from the streamside to see what the commotion was about and perched in Penlan Wood at the very tops of the two tallest Christmas trees, where the stars go. The frail tops sagged under their weight and the two birds bobbed and swayed like boxers entering the ring. I didn’t know if it was their arrival that frightened off the hawk, or if he saw me watching transfixed, my log still in my hands, but he sheered away and raced for cover. Game over; and it was a game too, as the hawk had no serious intention of killing the raven.

  The crows and the birds of prey live in a constant state of war. The instinct to mob a predator is so imprinted on birds that differing species of birds of prey will even relentlessly mob one another. In the battle between the crows and the hawks the crows will often win on tactics, for they are much brighter animals altogether. The hawks do not live on their wits; with their incredible eyesight and their bodies designed for speed and lightning-fast reactions they must live out their lives in a whirling rush of pure sensation.

  That year I was doing some work for the estate in the hilltop wood, the long plantation of mainly Scots pine above my top field. The wood was twenty years old now, and it had passed the thicket stage and needed thinning out. I was to fell every fifth row of trees, stripping them of branches and foliage and leaving their trunks to be collected later. It was slow, laborious work with only my cranky old chainsaw that would keep stalling on me, but there was no rush to finish the job, I just went up there as and when the mood took me. Most days I would stroll up the hill with my saw and petrol can for an hour or two. It was peaceful up there, at least until I started my chainsaw. I began to notice that every time I felled a tree and looked up at the newly revealed patch of sky, there seemed to be a raven circling directly overhead, drawn by curiosity, I supposed, to the noise I was making. I saw the raven whenever I was out at my woodpile too. I would be out there chopping wood every day the sun shone; my fire seldom went out and I constantly
needed to keep the woodshed stocked, in readiness for the long wet spells that could come at any time. Almost as soon as I struck the first blow with my axe the raven would appear overhead, circling and swooping low, and calling, calling. Not the usual cronk you hear when a raven sees you but the contact call. His bell-like ringing would echo each stroke of my axe.

  I was out at the woodpile again, weighing the axe in my hands. It was not a normal chopping axe but a big heavy splitting axe. Smaller logs I could split in a single swing, but the bigger rounds from the trunk of a tree took more work. I rolled them up on to my chopping block and drove a notch into them with the axe. Then I put a thick iron wedge into the split and hammered it in using the heel of the axe as a sledgehammer. It was satisfying work. The clang it made was a surprising facsimile of the calls of the raven above. I looked up at the circling raven. He was closer than ever, swooping down to me and calling more insistently than ever, as if he were trying to tell me something. I began to wonder if he wanted me to follow him, so I lay down my axe and set off after him.

  He led me right along the top edge of Penlan Wood, flying low just ahead of me, and he kept looking over his shoulder to check I was still with him. At the end of the wood I clambered over a barbed-wire fence and down into the steep fields beyond. After a short distance further the raven stopped leading me on and circled directly above me. I looked around me and finally saw a skein of white in a fold in the hillside, a long-dead sheep that I hadn’t noticed before because it was nearly hidden in the bracken. As I approached two ravens flew up, then four carrion crows. Finally, two magpies took to the trees, chattering angrily at being disturbed, and my raven flew down to the feast. I don’t know whether he was inviting me to join him for lunch, or simply using me to drive away his competitors, but either way he made me laugh. My familiar.