by Neil Ansell
Unlike most birds, male and female ravens don’t differ in size or plumage, and unlike the buzzards, for example, they don’t have markings that vary from bird to bird. To our eyes they are indistinguishable. I didn’t really even know for sure that the injured bird I had found was a male, I was just making an educated guess. It was a measure of how far immersed I was becoming in this little patch of wild country that I called my own that I was no longer seeing birds as representatives of their species, but as often as not would have an idea of their histories, how old they were, where they had been born, where they were nesting, where their territories and hunting ranges began and ended. My methods may not always have been scientifically rigorous, but then I was not attempting a scientific study, rather an experiment in life.
The raven pair never came back to their birch-tree nest in the woods. It was only to be expected; this was a starter home, after all. Ravens are long-lived birds, and I like to imagine them now as a venerable old pair living in a mansion, a stately pile on a mountainside crag. The big old nest in the cedar was still used, year after year, so there were always ravens close at hand for me to watch. My world would have been a poorer place without them. And as for my familiar, well, over the course of a year he became gradually less and less familiar. His social visits became steadily more and more sporadic until the following winter when they ceased altogether. And that was as it should be; this was a majestic wild bird, a creature of the skies, not a pet. I hope and trust that he found a mate of his own in time, and I wish him a life free of persecution by marauding goshawks. And when I am out walking in the hills and a raven comes sailing by that little bit closer than usual, I like to imagine that, just possibly, it could be him.
5. Restless Creatures
Spring came to me like a liberation, the first gulp of air after diving too deep. Though I enjoyed facing the challenges that winter brought, by the tail end of the season I began to yearn for the first signs of change. I had my own personal marker for the new season; not the arrival of the summer migrants, the first swallow or the first cuckoo, but earlier than that. I waited impatiently for it. It came to me in the early dawn, a plangent peal that rippled up the hillside from the fields below, then trailed away to nothing. It was such an evocative sound for me, it transported me instantly back to when I was a boy. My childhood haunt was the local marshes, and my habit was to rise at first light to get there before the dog-walkers. In the winter vast flocks of dunlin wheeled over the mudflats, and chevrons of little black brent geese would settle on the salt marsh. In spring the hares would be boxing in the fields. But always, always, there would be the curlews.
The curlews that came to these hills each year to nest never failed me; they always returned in the second week of March. I knew that the hard times were not really over yet, and there would still be more snow, but from this point on change was in the air, there would be new arrivals almost daily. The curlews didn’t just always arrive in the same week each year, they always returned to the same place too, and on the day I first heard one I would always go to see them. Down the hill and past the old crook barn, through the woods and over the bridge. Across the overgrown fields where the winter woodcock hid I reached the lanes. By the crossroads on the lanes were a series of flat fields that once were boggy and almost unworkable. Years ago, many pairs of curlews would nest here, and many pairs of lapwings too. That was before the farmer who owned the land dug trenches and put in land drains to dry out the soil, then ploughed and reseeded these fields to make better grazing.
The curlews, the biggest of our waders, with their impossibly long decurved bills designed for finding food in deep mud, didn’t much like this improved grassland, and usually just one pair would remain here to breed, and one pair of noisy lapwings too. Yet still the curlews came here to gather each year before they dispersed to the hills, and I could expect to see twelve or fifteen of them together, taking turns to rise into the air and display, making their curling calls and that liquid song so beautiful it can bring a tear to the eye. And as for the many lapwings that used to come here to breed, each year fewer and fewer of them seemed to come. At first there might be perhaps fifteen of them displaying among the curlews, but now, apart from that last remaining pair that clung on here to breed, they hardly came at all. I knew of nowhere else in the area where they remained. They are one of the farmland birds that have been worst affected by agricultural changes, a creature rapidly disappearing from our landscape.
Long before the international migrants began to appear, while the winter parties of redwings and fieldfares were still moving north, our own internal migrants were returning from the low ground and the coast. The hills, desolate all winter, were suddenly filled with an abundance of skylarks and meadow pipits. It would be months before the moors fell silent again. And the peregrines were back on their eyrie. They used to frequent the steep hill directly across the river valley from me, whose crags I could see looming above the oak wood. It was an unusual nesting site; the crags were too accessible for the falcons’ tastes and they preferred to make their home in an old ravens’ nest in the plantation below. If the peregrines had still nested there I would have seen them daily, but now I would see them from the cottage only a few times a year. When the big commercial quarry up-valley was abandoned, the pair moved straight on to the high cliffs there, less convenient for me, but much more suitable for them.
It was about a two-hour walk for me to go and visit them, but for peregrines it was worth it, and all through spring and right into summer, when the young took to the wing, a weekly walk up to the old quarry would be a part of my routine. Sometimes it is enough just to wander aimlessly, but sometimes it is good to have a destination in mind. On the hill alongside the crags was a large plantation and I would approach through the dense cover of the trees, crossing a stream that fell through the wood in a series of wild cascades. I would position myself just inside the wood and level with the eyrie, far enough away that I would not disturb them. In fact they never gave any sign of even having noticed me, as I was too far away to constitute any kind of threat. The male, the tiercel, would nearly always be in place, motionless on his buttress like a gargoyle, looking out intently over the valley far below from beneath his black helmet. Occasionally he would light out and turn a few graceful circles, his wild keening call echoing on the rocks. Immediately, the throng of jackdaws that nested at the far end of the crags and in the abandoned quarry buildings would take to the air in a cacophony of alarm. A pair of kestrels lived on these crags too, well away from the much larger peregrine falcons, and they would slip out from their nest with the utmost caution.
Whenever a bird passed close by, the peregrine would launch himself from the cliffs in pursuit. An incautious woodpigeon flew up the valley and he raced after it, following every twist and turn as it tried to make its escape, before circling back to his perch. He was not hunting, it was just a reflex. A raven loomed over the top of the crags, and the tiercel caught up with it in seconds; he flew directly beneath it, rolled on to his back, and tapped it repeatedly on its breast with a single talon. It was done with balletic poise, the peregrine seems incapable of a clumsy move. At last the female burst from the nest and raced across the valley for the hills, her wings winnowing in her hurry to find food. The tiercel circled and took his turn at the nest, and my watching was over for the day unless I decided to await the falcon’s return.
A sparrowhawk raced up-valley across the river from where I was watching, near to home, and settled in the crest of a fully grown Scots pine directly opposite me. It began to drizzle with rain as I waited for her to emerge from cover. Eventually she left her perch and started to rise, to where a group of four buzzards was circling over the hillside. The hawk circled higher and higher, bypassing the buzzards and climbing far above them. The sparrowhawk’s nesting display is typically associated with sunny spring mornings. It was late afternoon and it was raining, but I had seen enough of sparrowhawks by then to know that they can be relied on to
do the unexpected.
The next day I set off across the footbridge over the river to take a look at the suspected nesting site. Parties of black-headed gulls drifted far above me, all headed north, on their way from the sea to their breeding grounds in the hills. As I crossed the road I found a dead polecat, roadkill. I was surprised it hadn’t been cleared away by the buzzards and crows; it looked like it had been there for a while. The place I was headed for was a pretty spot: a rocky outcrop of the hillside flanked by larch woods and capped by a little copse of mature Scots pine. As I clambered up the hillside through the greening larches I found a recently killed crow, only half-plucked, and saw the hawk soaring above the pines, her tail broadly fanned, her breast delicately barred in brown and white. After making a few circuits she folded her wings and swooped down towards the trees, then rose, then swooped again, five or six times. Eight buzzards soared over the treeline. One seemed to be trying to impersonate the hawk in its own untidy fashion, folding its wings and plunging down fifty or a hundred feet. The difference was that at the bottom of each dive was a second buzzard. The first few times the attacking bird swung away at the last moment, but finally it reached out a claw and struck home. I scrambled up rocks the last few metres to the stand of pines. It was too early in the year for nest-building, but I found two old nests in adjacent trees: broad, flattened tangles of sticks high up and close to the trunk. The purpose of the hawk’s spring display is to ensure that nests are evenly distributed across the available range; this site was only half a mile or so away from the nest in Penlan Wood, and beyond Penlan the next site I knew of was a scant five hundred metres further west. It showed just how many of these hawks the hills could support. As I left, a pair of crows was relentlessly mobbing a buzzard, driving it almost to the ground. Above them all circled the sparrowhawk, watching.
On my way home I decided to take a long cut up the hill, on a well-worn sheep trail across the moor. The first pale green tendrils were emerging from the thick chestnut mat of last year’s bracken. I rubbed my fingers on one of the delicate coils for that distinctive musty smell, the smell of spring on the moor. When I was halfway up the trail, a male sparrowhawk shot over the hilltop and hurtled down the sheer hillside a few feet above the ground, crossing the track just ahead of me. His wings were not outstretched but folded almost to his sides like those of a stooping peregrine. He raced down into the valley at great speed, compact and bullet-like, without apparently moving a muscle. This was not so much flight as controlled freefall. I couldn’t help but note his trajectory, which led him by the shortest possible route from Penlan Wood towards the new site I had identified earlier that day. I knew that a male sparrowhawk had recently been found dead near by in the valley, beneath someone’s French windows, and my suspicion was that the Penlan Wood male had filled the vacancy, and was supporting two females.
But as I followed the hawk’s traverse of the hillside, I noticed something else too, a familiar-looking mound of earth protruding from the flattened remains of dead bracken, and decided to go down for a closer look. The sett was bigger and older than most others in the area, with five holes in regular use, and two more that looked abandoned now. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t found this sett before; it was incredibly close to home, and it made me realize how easy it is to become a creature of habit, always following the same paths and keeping the same times. The sett I had been using for badger-watching was much further along the hill, over past the ravens’ nest in the cedar, and was hard to get close to without drawing attention to myself. This would be much more suitable; I needed to cross only one field to look down over it from a distance, and if I wanted to get up close, there was a clump of alders on a patch of level boggy ground just twenty feet away which would almost always be downwind of the sett.
The badgers around here fed mostly on the farmland, but their setts were on the moor. I knew of only two setts down on the farmland, both in impenetrable thickets, while on the east and north sides of the mountain where the bracken grew tall there were setts every couple of hundred yards, all at the same altitude, about fifty yards above where the topmost fields turned to moor. They were wary animals here, and with good reason. In the wild valley to the north of my hill, I found a sett that had been recently dug out. On the mound of earth beside it was the skull of a badger cub, unmistakable from the thick bony ridge down the centre of the cranium. And walking on the lanes one day, a Land Rover had pulled up alongside me; a huntsman late for the hunt and asking if I had seen or heard it. We got to chatting and the conversation turned to badgers. Badgers were beautiful, harmless creatures, he told me, and he liked to kill them too. This was a country matter; townsfolk didn’t understand these things.
I didn’t visit the sett that night — the scent I must have left around their home during my inspection would have made them too cautious — but soon I returned, approaching from behind the cover of the alder wood. I positioned myself at the edge of the copse looking down over the sett, my back to the trunk of a tree so that my silhouette wouldn’t stand out against the sky. Badger-watching is a good test of one’s ability to stay still. It is harder than you would think; we are restless creatures by nature. After the sun had set, but well before dark, a striped muzzle emerged from the underground lair and tested the air. It disappeared again, and I thought at first that I had been rumbled, but then a big boar badger came barrelling out of the sett, closely followed by two sows. They remained around their heavily trampled arena for a while, scratching and sniffing. Badgers move with a sinuous roll that belies their bulk. As darkness began to fall, the boar and one of the sows set off on separate trails, to search for earthworms in the fields below, while the second sow remained behind and made a great show of collecting up dead bracken as fresh bedding, dragging bundles of it backwards into the sett. When she too had left the area I slipped away unnoticed. With luck I would get to see this year’s young emerging for the first time before the end of May. By then the whole hillside would be deep in bracken, and the badgers’ trails would be green tunnels that would render them as unwatchable above ground as below.
But the badgers had competition for their share of my spring evenings. Just as often I would head to my spot down the hill and over my stream. These fields had a life all their own: untrodden and ungrazed, they were rapidly returning to their natural state. There were plenty of kestrels in the hills, but I never saw them hovering over the farmland elsewhere; the close-cropped grass simply didn’t support enough small mammals for them. These overgrown fields, though, were like an island of plenty for them. Cuckoos came here too, drawn I think not only by the availability of caterpillars, their preferred food, but also by the plenitude of tree pipits that launched themselves from their song posts in every scrubby tree. The call of the cuckoo can be heard for miles around, and they are much less common than it might seem. You will hear them often but see them seldom, even with their voice to guide you. Think what a rare sight they would be were they silent.
Barn owls hunted here too, attracted by the multitude of voles that tunnelled their way through the long grass. No barn owls nested on this side of the river, though I knew of two nesting sites across the valley, one in an old hollow oak and one in an abandoned barn. This was the only place they would cross the river for, and sometimes their unearthly screeching would drift up to me at the cottage from these fields. Barn owls have a completely different breeding strategy from the tawnies. The tawny will adjust its clutch size each year according to the availability of food, while the barn will produce four or five young each year without fail. In an exceptional year, all the young will survive, but in most years only the biggest and strongest will make it. My farmer’s nephew once found a young owl down on the edge of these fields. He took it to the rescue centre but it was dead on arrival. It was just feather and bone, starved to death.
Now that spring had come the vast majority of the winter woodcocks had already headed back to Scandinavia for the season, but a handful remained here to breed, an
d it was the wondrous roding display of the woodcock that I had come here to see. I arrived at my bench earlier than I needed so that I could first listen to the evening chorus. The thicket across the clearing was dense with life; there was a whole symphony of birdsong there, an invisible orchestra. As darkness began to settle over the land, the birds started to fall silent one by one, until none was left save for the last mistle thrush. And just as he too fell silent, the male woodcock emerged and began his flight. He circled the clearing with a slow, moth-like fluttering flight. Round and round he went, flying low at about treetop level, silhouetted against the sky and continually making his twin roding call, a low frog-like croak followed by a high-pitched chirrup. He would do this every night for months, and every morning too, in his efforts to attract a mate. Unlike the Penlan sparrowhawk, he was a strictly clockwise bird. Sometimes, as he flew over the alder copse to the east of the clearing, he would pass by a second displaying bird, also travelling clockwise. This fringe of alders must have marked the territorial boundary. As well as having a subtle beauty, this bird has a mystique to it that drew me back again and again. Victorian naturalists reported that the woodcock, unlike any other bird, would transport its young to safety by carrying them between its thighs. For generations this was thought most probably to be a myth, until a century later it was reliably observed and found to be true. After watching this bird’s display many times, I finally saw something that, while perhaps not as dramatic as the way it carries its young, was extraordinary enough for me. He was mid-circuit when a second bird suddenly rose from the long grass and flew straight up to him, pulling him up short. For a short while the pair danced together in the air, breast to breast, claw to claw, then they fluttered down to the ground to mate.