by Matt Merritt
No, in addition to the kittiwakes of the Tyne Bridge, at least one more of the UK’s very best seabird cities is visible without ever having to leave dry land, and as I wend my way south from the Farnes, I decide it’s high time I made another visit to it. I leave the A1 near Darlington, and head for the coast.
Bempton Cliffs is an RSPB reserve between Flamborough and Filey. When I first came here, maybe fifteen years ago, there wasn’t a great deal in the way of facilities at all, but today there’s a brand-new visitor centre promising refreshments, a shop, permanent exhibitions, and TV screens relaying live images from the nest sites along the towering cliffs.
Which is all great – anything that helps the casual birdwatcher or nature-lover to connect with these spectacular yet often baffling birds (to an experienced birder, let alone a beginner, seabirds can appear bewilderingly similar, and hopelessly remote) has to be a good thing. But what really makes Bempton special hits me before I’ve left the car park.
There’s another reason why a strong stomach is a good idea if you’re going in search of seabird cities, and that’s the fact that you can often smell them long before you see them. Indeed, in a fog-bound Scottish firth or sea loch, you can imagine that the overwhelming stench of guano combined with the clamour of thousands of birds is every bit as effective a warning of land full ahead as any lighthouse or foghorn. Most of us find bird excrement little more than an annoyance when dropped onto a freshly washed car or window. Even when we get bespattered ourselves, we tell ourselves that it’s good luck (a slightly odd concept, admittedly), but perhaps that’s because the average splash of the white stuff doesn’t smell of much. In a seabird colony, though, it most certainly does.
In the nineteenth century, guano was big business, being used to produce gunpowder and as a soil fertiliser. Although this mainly came from warmer, drier parts of the globe, such as Peru, where deposits deep enough to require actual mining built up over centuries, it was also taken from colonies closer to home. And this was far from the only way in which seabird colonies were exploited. The eggs of gulls and other species were taken, and the birds themselves, too, were often a source of food – and not just for the poor. Gannets don’t, I’d have to say, sound the most appetising of fare, neither fish nor fowl, exactly, but once upon a time they turned up on the menus of Scottish kings, so presumably the distinctly piscine taste wasn’t foul, either. In the Second World War there was even an attempt to market them as ‘highland geese’, although it’s hard to find many people who remember them fondly.
Today, however, the gannets, razorbills, guillemots and fulmars of Bempton are safe enough from human depredations, except that our overfishing of the oceans has made food difficult to find for some species, while global warming might also be forcing prey, and the birds with it, further and further north.
As I watch a distant dot tack its way across the waves, before finally resolving into another gannet, perhaps with a crop of half-digested fish for its young, I realise these birds are far too easy for us to co-opt as metaphors; the way their lives appear balanced delicately between earth-bound, sociable domesticity and restless, solitary searching continues to make them favourites of poets and other writers. But – and yes, this is rich coming from someone who has written his fair share of seabird poems – they deserve our attention for no other reason than that they are themselves, and that they’re here in these islands in greater numbers than in most places on earth. Until you know our seabirds, you can’t know Britain.
7 Killer in Our Midst
It’s a day of rich pickings, where the feral pigeons are concerned. Blue skies and hot sun have brought the crowds out, and the whole embankment is thronged with tourists gazing at one of the world’s most famous skylines, with office workers on their lunch breaks enjoying the weather, and street traders and performers eager to sell their wares and talents, and no doubt a few locals wondering what happened to what, thirty or forty years ago, was an unfashionable, rather industrial area of south London.
Where there are crowds, of course, there’s food – muffins from the coffee stand, doughnuts from a van, burgers from a nearby outlet of a certain international franchise, and salt beef sandwiches from Borough Market. All being enjoyed by the crowds, and all generating a veritable feast of crumbs and morsels and leavings.
If you’re not too fussy about your diet (what pigeon is?) and take a fairly liberal approach to food hygiene (as pigeons generally do), then today you can eat very well indeed. Perhaps forty pigeons are scattered around the concourse of the Tate Modern art gallery, formerly the Bankside power station, dodging nimbly between the feet of hurrying people to give the lie to their rather portly appearance. Here and there, they’re joined by the odd house sparrow, that most emblematic of London birds, and on the path along the embankment, a couple of black-headed gulls also come to the buffet, swooping to snatch the remains of a dropped takeaway meal.
But it’s the pigeons that do most of the dining. They tend not to inspire a great deal of affection or even tolerance in the hearts of birdwatchers or more casual observers, with ‘sky-rat’ being one of the more printable epithets thrown their way, but they shrug off such abuse the same way they do the pollution of the great, grimy city. Generation after generation have made the capital their home, congregating at every major tourist spot to take advantage of the endless opportunities on offer, like so many avian Del Boys. I have a photo of my own parents in Trafalgar Square, in the early 1960s, surrounded and covered by pigeons.
A clue to one of the reasons why birders dismiss them so willingly can be found in the first part of their name – feral. As in formerly domestic, now ‘gone wild’ again, but betraying their tame past not only in their habits, but in their endless variety of colours and markings.
A few, at least, retain the look of their forebears: the rock doves that once nested on sea cliffs and mountain crags long before man came into the picture. And which still nest there in a few locations on the furthest northern and western edges of Great Britain and Ireland. These birds are a neat mixture of greys and purplish-blues, with a startlingly white rump that only reveals their exact identity as they flee at high speed.
For some of their city lookalikes years of urban living have taken the edge off the flying skills and swiftness associated with their ancestors. A diet of exclusively fast food is no better for a pigeon than for a person. And it has made them complacent, too. Because, many centuries after they made the move into the urban landscape, their most deadly ancestral enemy has also embraced an environment of high-rise blocks and man-made canyons, of twenty-four-hour living by the light of neon and halogen – and the pigeons are item number one on its menu.
Three pigeons circle now, just about at the level of the tops of the gallery’s towers. I watch them through my binoculars, and high above and beyond them another shape comes into view, itself rather pigeon-chested, but with a long tail and pointed wings held slightly flexed at the carpal joint as it powers its way a little higher with shallow wingbeats.
It’s not, in itself, the most immediately impressive bird in flight, but even now it has the air of something completely different, and within seconds it is transformed totally. The wingbeats quicken, the flight becomes more purposeful, and then it folds into itself and drops for all the world as though shot dead.
A couple of hundred feet below it, but still a long way above the ground, the third pigeon, a little plumper and slower than the other two, and a touch more conspicuous with its brown and white mottled plumage, doesn’t know what’s about to hit it. Even were it to look up, the hunter is coming straight out of the sun, in classic Battle of Britain style, and travelling at around 200 mph, so escape would be highly unlikely. Powerful talons, balled into fists, strike the pigeon in the back of the neck, breaking it instantly. The force of the impact sends its wings and tail fanning and flaring out, acting like a parachute to slow its head-over-heels fall towards the ground. But long before it reaches terra firma, the killer has circled dow
n and round, grabbing the pigeon’s corpse firmly; and then there follow the same shallow, almost lazy wingbeats as earlier, carrying its prize away to a ledge on the highest tower.
The peregrine is back, and no pigeon will ever be safe again.
It’s easy, now, to forget just what a resurrection this bird has undergone, both in actual, physical terms, and in the consciousness of the public. Like most raptors, it had always suffered a certain amount of persecution from gamekeepers and shooting interests, and has never been a popular bird with pigeon-fanciers, but population levels remained at a sustainable level until the species was hit by a double-whammy.
First of these was the Second World War. Six years of bloody, tragic conflict actually had beneficial effects for some British birds: avocets recolonised the areas of coastal East Anglia that had been flooded as a defence against German invasion, while the bomb-sites of the Blitz provided a mock-montane environment that allowed the black redstart to get a foothold in this country. Peregrines, on the other hand, were enemies of the state. The Special Operations Executive used messenger pigeons on a massive scale to carry messages back to Britain from occupied Europe, and the last thing needed was for vital information to end up in a falcon’s stomach, so the peregrines of southern and eastern England were harried as mercilessly as the Wehrmacht.
Just as the bird began to recover ground a little in the aftermath of VE Day, along came a new generation of pesticides, such as DDT. These chemical substances played their part in boosting agricultural production, of course, and were welcomed by a nation suffering from austerity, but as the years went on it became clear that something was badly wrong. The pesticides had found their way into the food chain and worked their way to the top – which meant that raptors such as the peregrine and the sparrowhawk didn’t stand a chance. Rather than being directly poisoned, these birds suffered year after year of breeding disasters, with the chemicals thinning their eggs to the extent that they were easily broken by incubating females.
By the early 1960s, the peregrine was desperately threatened in Britain. At this time, along came an Essex librarian by the name of J.A. Baker, a keen but far from expert birdwatcher who enjoyed recording the avian life he saw near his Chelmsford home. On the face of it, his book The Peregrine is simply an account of his wanderings during the harsh winter of 1963, following the falcons on the estuaries and saltmarshes of the area.
If you’ve fallen under its spell, however – and I count myself among the growing band who have – it’s perhaps the most extraordinary piece of sustained nature writing in the English language, a virtuoso prose poem that acts as an elegy for a bird on the brink of disappearing, as well as a supreme evocation of the English winter. Baker’s writing is so intense, so concentrated with the essence of all that is wild, that you find yourself only able to sip at it, like a fifty-year-old single malt. If you intend to read it, and you should, put aside plenty of time.
Intriguingly, recent research by Conor Jameson, author of Looking for the Goshawk and Silent Spring Revisited, suggests that at least a few of the ‘peregrines’ Baker watched were misidentified by him, perhaps confused with some falconers’ hybrids among them; and also that some of the behaviour he mentions was a direct result of the pesticide-poisoning. But as Jameson says, these considerations don’t for a moment take away from the enduring impact of a truly unique book: Baker reminded us, in timely fashion, of exactly what we were about to lose, and added an extra layer of glamour, in the original, magical sense of the word, to a bird that already figured high in the imagination of every birdwatcher.
It would be great to be able to say that Baker’s masterpiece was one of the books that fired the enthusiasm of this nascent birdwatcher, but the truth is a little less romantic. It also, as you’ve probably come to expect, involved the Reader’s Digest.
My parents both being teachers, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house in which books were never in short supply, although neither my mother nor my father was a voracious consumer of fiction. Other than some nineteenth-century classics, most of the novels in our house belonged to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series – effectively mini-anthologies containing four or five stripped-down novels. Quite how much they condensed them, I can’t say, but I do remember reading Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed in this format, then reading the full version years later, and wondering what the difference was. Incidentally, I picked that book up purely because it mentioned birds in the title, and while my brief disappointment was assuaged by the gripping nature of the thriller, I was also quietly satisfied by the setting (the British birdwatching paradise of the north Norfolk coast), and the fact that two of the characters briefly take time out from the action to talk about looking for shore larks.
That same filtering method when looking for potential reading material – first select anything with a bird’s name in the title – served me even better when I came across a novel called In the Shadow of the Falcon, by Ewan Clarkson, in that condensed book series. This time, the bird was more than a mere codeword for an elaborate attempt to kidnap Winston Churchill, instead being the central character, rather in the style of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, or the rabbits in Watership Down by Richard Adams. I can’t recall exactly how the plot turns out, but I do remember that the pair of peregrines in the book faced many dangers, both natural and man-made, in their bid to raise a family, and I remember being completely enraptured, devouring the story in one sitting with an enthusiasm I had hitherto reserved for the likes of The Hobbit. Part of its appeal, I think, was that spotting a peregrine seemed only a tiny bit more likely than stumbling into a hobbit. While the kestrel I regularly watched hovering over the hill behind our house was an exciting, thrilling reminder that the natural world was never far away, its larger, more glamorous relative seemed impossibly unattainable.
There was one slim chance, though. Even in the darkest days, peregrines had hung on in a few of the more remote areas of Britain, such as around our rocky coasts, where prey items were less likely to be farmland birds. Now the novel was set in Pembrokeshire, and when I flicked through our big old atlas of Great Britain (yes, yes, another Reader’s Digest publication), it looked perfectly plausible to me that there would be peregrines in that county in real life too. I wondered if they might even edge their way east along the coast of South Wales.
I settled on that location specifically because, every summer, we’d spend at least ten days or so down with my grandmother in Bridgend. The beaches and fairground of Porthcawl were distraction enough for a young lad, and could quickly banish any thoughts of Wales as a wild, unspoiled corner of the country, but some days we’d leave town by the other route, and head to Ogmore-by-Sea and Southerndown. Here, even the road looked promising, with steep hills covered with bracken, gorse, and dramatic, rocky outcrops – and the coast itself was perfect. Cliffs, rocky shores, and rising beyond them those hills again. Given all this I rather let my peregrine fixation get the better of me, and convinced myself that if I could only be patient, and vigilant, I’d be rewarded by the sight of one soaring in the sunshine, before dropping onto its unfortunate prey.
I was similarly optimistic, and unrealistic, when it came to another rare raptor. In those days, red kites were one of Britain’s rarest breeding birds, with all field guides describing them as being restricted to the wooded valleys of mid-Wales. Again, a swift look at a road atlas convinced me that this vaguely defined region started a few miles north of the M4, and that were we to head in the direction of Brecon, we’d see the unmistakable long-winged, fork-tailed outline of these graceful carrion-eaters. Once, on a day too drizzly and cool for the beach, we did drive up the valleys to the Bwlch, where the route crossed the mountains, winding its way down beside great rock walls covered in paintings of Welsh dragons and the like. But I only had eyes for the peregrine-nesting potential of the rocky nooks and crannies, and the wide skies to the north of us with the kite-spotting possibilities they offered. The raptors were there, I was sure of
that.
I was doomed to disappointment, of course. I hadn’t appreciated just how rare (maybe half-a-dozen pairs) the kites were, or how long it can take a species to bounce back and expand its range after years of decline, as with the peregrines. But I learned something about birdwatching, which is that optimism is as vital a part of your kit as binoculars, and in the years that followed I never stopped looking, or hoping.
Nor did a lot of other birders. Peregrines carried on quietly but steadily building up their numbers in their strongholds, until they reached the point at which the young birds had to start roaming further and further afield in search of new territories. The bird’s very name, meaning ‘wanderer’, is a clue to its peripatetic tendencies, and pairs prefer to maintain large territories. For that reason it wasn’t long before they started looking at distinctly untypical breeding sites.
Red kites, on the other hand, were given a helping hand by the authorities, the Welsh population having become so small that extinction in the UK was very much on the cards, and with the bird being threatened more generally across its worldwide range. The RSPB had been involved in trying to protect it since 1905, and although they succeeded in reducing illegal poisoning and egg collecting, numbers increased only very slowly, so there was little chance of the bird spreading beyond its Welsh heartland any time soon. That led to the decision, in 1986, to start a reintroduction programme, initially on the Black Isle, near Inverness, and in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, followed by further releases in Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire; central Scotland; Dumfries and Galloway; around Harewood House, Leeds; and in the Derwent Valley, near Gateshead. There have been setbacks, for sure, with persecution proving a problem in Scotland, but for the most part the scheme has been a spectacular success, with the releases in intensively farmed southern and central England proving to be the most successful of all.