by Neil Ansell
But this year they were all too late; the nesting hole had been appropriated by the owls who last year used the dying oak fifty yards away at the nearest corner of Penlan Wood. Or rather, by last year’s female, for this year she had a new mate: the pale grey male of last year had been usurped or had died. The female staked her claim incredibly early; just before New Year I saw her pay her first visit. It was dusk, and she had been calling relentlessly from within the dark depths of the wood. Then she flew over on silent wings to the ash and began to weigh up its possibilities, looking thoughtful, hesitant even. The whole time she kept on calling, a soft crooning call that I had not heard before and was audible only from close by. When the season came, and she began to incubate, I was able to watch her as she sat since the hole was not sunken, and as I worked in the garden I could see her eyes following me everywhere. And when I looked up and could no longer see her I was able to guess that the eggs had hatched. I donned my chainsaw goggles for protection and shinned up the tree for a look. The two tiny chicks must have been born that same day, the eggshells were still in the nest, and the proud parents had been busy collecting a buffet to welcome them, a pick-and-mix of one long-tailed field mouse, one short-tailed field vole, one bank vole and one pygmy shrew.
Because I knew the exact date of hatching, it was possible to arrange with the doctor at the field centre for the young birds to be ringed at precisely the right stage in their development. On the appointed day I scrambled back up the tree to the hole. Although the nest was nearly twenty feet up I didn’t need a ladder; the old tree was so knobbly and gnarly I could easily find footholds and handholds. The young owls were now enormous balls of down that looked disgruntled at being disturbed, and I put each one in turn into a cloth bag and lowered it on a string to the doctor waiting below. It would not be long before they were ready to leave the nest. Soon they were jostling for position at the entrance to their hole in order to be first when the food arrived. The opening was not wide enough for the two of them so inevitably they left the hole before they were able to fly. First one and then the other scrambled up the tree trunk to the first available bough, and there they perched, huddled side by side, blinking in the sunlight. They remained there for days, but eventually one day I returned from a walk to find them missing from their branch. It didn’t take long to locate them; they were calling for food from a tree about fifty yards away. I pictured them clambering down the tree trunk, then hopping and bounding across the hillside on their oversized feet, but in reality I had probably simply missed their first flight.
Spring was beginning to turn to summer, and the year’s lambs were teenagers now, in sheep years. They hung around in gangs and used the path to my cottage as a racetrack, thundering up and down it for hours each day. The woods were full to bursting with the year’s fledglings, a bonanza for the hungry hawks. The brood of redstarts from my box had left the nest; as I walked around the garden they sprang unexpectedly from the ground at my feet and whirred away, until their clockwork apparently ran down and they slumped suddenly back to earth.
Early one morning I was out in my front garden when I saw the unmistakable slate-grey back of a male sparrowhawk slipping low up the hillside straight towards me, right alongside the barbed-wire fence. He touched down momentarily on the rock just across the track — where the stoat had reared up and watched me that last winter gone — then with a single flick of his wings was on the fence post right before my eyes. I had never been so close to a sparrowhawk before, never imagined that I would be. His breast was delicately barred in pastel orange. His eyes were a piercing brilliant yellow, as were the clawed feet that clutched at the post convulsively. He was poised like a coiled spring, the intensity of his nervous tension was palpable. He ruffled his feathers, he twitched, he jerked his head from left to right until he saw his mark, and then he struck. In the front field was a short row of tangled hawthorns and hazels, the last relic of a long-gone hedge, and he hurled himself into it. Claws snapped shut, and when he lifted off a moment later and sailed down towards the wood, a lifeless bundle trailed from the gibbet of his dangling talon. A second, luckier fledgling redstart flew panicking out of the same hawthorns and straight towards me, heading I suppose for the safety of its home box. It didn’t quite make it; instead, it crashed into my leg and fell to the ground at my feet, cheeping piteously.
6. The Bird in the Bush
The goshawks caught me unawares. So far as I knew they had died out in Britain decades ago, and their stealthy return had passed me by completely. I don’t know how many times I must have watched them unknowingly, but it was certainly months before I gave in to the evidence of my senses, for I was watching a creature that I believed to be extinct.
This is also a notoriously elusive bird to watch; even more so than the sparrowhawk it seems to live on the very periphery of human vision, and before you can turn to look at it, it has already gone. It is particularly hard to judge the size of a bird against an open sky because you have no frame of reference, and the goshawk is fundamentally an outsize sparrowhawk, with colouring and markings almost identical to those of the female of the smaller species. The male and female differ in size too, so the two species form a size gradient, from the little male sparrowhawk, barely bigger than a mistle thrush, to the big female goshawk, the size of a buzzard. In essence they are sparrowhawks writ large. Bigger, bolder, fiercer, faster. They have all the qualities I had learned to love in the sparrowhawk, but in overdrive.
I do remember the first time I allowed the merest thought of a goshawk to enter my mind, if only fleetingly. It was during my first autumn at the cottage, and I was walking past the beech-hanger that clings on to the hillside halfway down towards the river. There had been a heavy crop of beech mast that year, and the woodpigeons had gathered for the feast. As I walked alongside the woodland edge, a bird of prey passed twenty feet over my head and into the wood, sending pigeons spouting out in all directions. Then it turned and crossed the valley ahead of me. It looked to be about the size of a buzzard, but something was not right; its tail was too long for one thing. As the bird settled into an isolated tree directly across the river from me, a dark cloud passed overhead and there was a sudden torrential shower of rain. I leaned into the broad grey trunk of the nearest beech for shelter, though I was dripping wet in seconds, and tried to keep my eye on the bird, but it was no use. Thick veils of rain gusted up the valley above the river and I could hardly make out the tree the bird had perched in, let alone the bird itself. A few minutes later, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun came out, but the bird had slipped away. I quickly convinced myself that it had been a female sparrowhawk and I had misjudged its distance and size. It seemed the only plausible explanation.
Over the course of that winter several of my sparrowhawk sightings gave me pause for thought, but it was not until the following February that the evidence became incontrovertible. It was a dull, overcast day, one of those days when the birds seem to go into hiding, when even the ever-present buzzards stay in the trees listlessly, and it feels as though the whole world is still and poised, waiting for the sun to shine again. In the field at the edge of the pine wood, on the hillside above my cottage, a flock of around twenty-five woodpigeons was feeding in the grass. This was about as large as pigeon flocks got here in the hills; you would never see the flocks of hundreds that you get in the lowlands on arable farmland. They all suddenly took to the air, in close formation and mounting fast, and I stopped dead in my tracks, for I knew that something exciting was about to happen. These birds had been spooked, and not by me; I was too far off.
I didn’t have to wait long. A hawk burst over the top of the wood with quick, flicked-back wingbeats, and set off in pursuit of the fleeing pigeons. This rowing motion of the wings is distinctive, and immediately separates hawk from falcon, with even the briefest of glimpses. The flock was flying close and fast over the oak wood. Pigeons are no slouches on the wing themselves, but the hawk closed the gap in seconds. Right
above them, it suddenly dropped. The cluster of pigeons momentarily spread out, then reformed. The hawk seemed to fall through a hole in the middle of them, and for a second it was surrounded by pigeons, all just out of reach, and then it was beneath them, empty-handed. It turned to resume the pursuit, but its one chance had been missed, and the element of surprise had been lost. It abandoned the chase, flew a single tight circle, and set off back over the wood. But there was no longer any denying it: this was a goshawk. It was too big to have been anything else.
I checked at the field centre and found that, yes, it was true, the goshawks had returned, and there was even a suspected nesting site a few miles down-valley. If the red kite had been brought back from the brink of extinction, the goshawk had long ago flown all the way over that brink and disappeared into the distance. While sparrowhawks are happy with our traditional rural landscape, the chequerboard of fields and hedgerows and copses that make up the vast bulk of our countryside, the goshawks need relatively large tracts of undisturbed woodland to live in. This was not a problem here as the valley was heavily wooded; in fact trees were the main source of revenue for the estate, more so than the rents of the tenant farmers. Long, long ago, when Britain was entirely covered with dense woodland, the goshawks would have been numerous, the pole predator among the birds, but as the woods were hacked away over the centuries these birds were pushed back into the ever smaller and remoter pockets of remaining woodland. And persecution finished them off. For decades there were no breeding records of goshawks in Britain. Perhaps a tiny handful clung on unnoticed; as I had found myself this was an incredibly easy bird to overlook. What is certain is that their revival depended in part on birds that had escaped from falconers, or even been deliberately released, perhaps in combination with a few strays that had drifted over from the continent. The landscape they found was marginally more hospitable than it had been when their predecessors had died out; gamekeeping was in decline, the pesticides that threatened the future of so many of our birds of prey had been outlawed, and most importantly vast swathes of our uplands had been planted with huge tracts of conifer plantations. These alien forests of spruce may have caused a habitat loss that was hugely detrimental to many of our upland species, but for the goshawk they were a godsend.
As soon as I knew I had goshawks on the hill they became my holy grail, the bird I most hoped to see each new day as I woke. And I was amply rewarded. I saw them almost every day that spring. There was a pair of them, or at least there was a male and there was a female; I never once saw the two birds together. I kept a meticulous record of every sighting, savouring every moment, and formed a mental map of the flight path of each bird as I saw it, just as I had with the sparrowhawks when I first arrived here. Now that I had found these birds I wanted to understand them too, read the auspices, unlock the mystery hidden behind the turn of each bird’s wing. The world I knew was a ball of wool, criss-crossed with a network of invisible pathways, like the gossamer that would be revealed only on a dewy morning. And I wanted to unravel it. If only the birds would leave contrails in the sky for me to follow, so that I would not always be left behind.
It was the time of year when my sparrowhawks became more active too, or at least more visible, beginning their spring display flights and staking their claim on Penlan Wood. That spring there was one gale after another, the westerly winds blew at fifty miles an hour, but still the hawks were out. Early one morning I was watching the birds on the bird table when the male cruised past just outside the window, sending the nuthatches and the tits dashing for cover. He was without intent; if he had been determined he would not have been cruising. As he reached the front corner of the cottage he was hit by the wind from the west, and for a few moments the two opposing forces were equally matched, so that the hawk hung motionless just two feet above the ground. At this range and in this light the bird’s upperparts no longer looked a uniform slate grey, but were flecked with gold. I could pick out every individual feather, the paler tip of each one making the bird seem mottled, somehow more complicated. He didn’t need to fight back against the wind; he looked about him, tilted his wings ever so slightly, and slipped across and down the hillside until he was lost to view.
Later, a goshawk raced through the trees at the bottom of the front field. He slalomed around the tree trunks at waist height, using up every inch of cover. This was serious hunting flight, and at the end of this hawk’s trajectory an unsuspecting bird was about to die, but the kill was out of sight behind the corner of Penlan Wood. When I stepped outside that day, the wind was so strong I could barely stand upright. The goshawk had been flying directly into that wind, at incredible speed, as if in defiance.
After so long being unable to see, or rather to recognize, the goshawks, now I could hardly stop spotting them. They were suddenly everywhere I went. It felt like an honour that they had chosen to share my very own patch of hillside. A single crow diving wildly for cover alerted me to a goshawk flying up from the valley bottom. He was flying at tree level, thirty or forty feet up, but the hillside was steep, and he was having to work at it. With each flicker of his wings he surged forward, and then slowed with each soar. He passed close above the roof of the cottage, and I rushed to the back door to see him off. As the hillside levelled off over the pine wood he began to pick up speed, jerking to left and right and rolling as though tossed by sudden gusts of wind. But now, now there was no wind.
That day the starlings returned and began to build their nest in their favoured corner of my loft. One of them took up its place on the topmost twig of the ash tree right in front of the house, singing snatches of borrowed song. Two days later it was there singing when it suddenly broke off mid-phrase and threw itself down-valley as the black shadow of the big female goshawk cruised above my roof from behind. She effortlessly followed the twists and turns of the desperate starling, but didn’t pick up speed; this was only a matter of habit for her. She had either already fed or considered a starling too paltry a snack to trouble herself over. A minute later, the starling was back on its perch, preening itself silently. It looked decidedly ruffled.
Down the hill to collect my mail. A red kite swung over the hilltop to join the circling buzzards and ravens. Birds of prey so often seem to choose the same place at the same time. The kite was joined by a partner, and the two floated seemingly without effort over the hillside, then drifted over the streamside woods. I followed them down, walking alongside the old cart track, churned up now by cattle, and through the alder woods to the old bridge, where I paused and sat on the crumbling stone wall for a while. A goshawk careered over my head in search of pigeons. She banked, she rocked, she turned, it was as if she were flying through the trees rather than skimming their tops. She twisted so fast that her long straight tail seemed almost to lag behind her every move, as though if she went a little faster still she would have left it behind altogether. I barely had time to catch sight of the thick white eyestripe frowning like an eyebrow over a big, blood-orange eye. This was a fierce, swift, hungry bird, with killing on her mind. Down to the river, and there was the male bird, circling right above the water’s edge in the company of four buzzards. He was barely smaller than them, and seemed to be trying to impersonate them. He soared in slow, lazy circles, opening and closing his long, heavily barred tail like a fan. But he could not help himself; compared to him the buzzards looked graceless and awkward. Twice he passed directly over me, rolling his head through ninety degrees, first to the left, then to the right, and looked down at me with his huge, fiery eye. I felt as though I was being pinned to the ground.
A circling hawk is a displaying hawk, and soon I would see the female’s spring display flight too. Spring was truly here now, a clear blue sky dotted with only a few little white clouds. The first butterfly of the year, a peacock, flitted in through the open window and settled on my hand. I carried it out and went to check on the cluster of tortoiseshells that had slept the winter away in the corner of the upstairs ceiling. They were still hanging
there, huddled together in suspended animation. A raven passed overhead, uttering a strangely delicate trill as if calling me, and I went outside to see. The raven pair was out too, circling over the hillside and flipping on to their backs in turn, showing off to one another, and a buzzard was soaring lazily and mewling, its broad motionless wings canted upwards. As they all drifted together against the clear blue sky, I saw another bird with them. One of the ravens made a single half-hearted pass at the slightly smaller female hawk, but she ignored it, rising above them. This was a big, powerful bird, barrel-chested like a falcon peregrine. She rose fast, turning in tight circles. Her back and tail were a dark brown, but on each turn the sunlight gleamed from her pale breast and most of all from the brilliant white feathers beneath her tail. She rose hundreds of feet, turned to the west, and briefly hung there immobile. Then she suddenly jerked back her wings and thrust herself forward. The acceleration was tremendous, like a jet plane during take-off, and instantly she was racing towards the open hills, a flicker of backswept wings, then a soar, then a flicker again, until she was nothing more than a black speck that winked out over the distant slopes of bracken.