– King James I, Basilikon Doran, 1599
Thirty-one years ago, aged twenty-three, I’d carried the eyas kestrel Freeman home from Tankersley Old Hall in a cardboard box. Today, in 1999, at the age of fifty-four, I brought my eyas merlin home to Sheffield in a pet carrier, the type usually used for cats. When I reached inside feeling for his jesses he backed away, striking at my hand with his talons, pecking at my fingers. I eased him out and he hopped on to my gloveless fist. We were in our living room and for a moment he seemed mesmerised by the array of colours, the books on the bookshelves, the paintings on the walls and then he lunged into mid-air.
Imagine his life until then. After hatching, for the previous month or so this captive-bred young merlin had lived with his siblings in an aviary in an isolated garden surrounded by wheatfields in Norfolk. Then, earlier this evening, in an explosion of flapping wings, he’d flown in a panic around the aviary trying to escape being caught in a large butterfly net. Finally, beak open and panting with fear, he was untangled from the net and held by the falconer who had bred him while I fitted the jesses. He was then subjected to my intense gaze as I checked his eyes were bright, that he had no sign of ‘bumblefoot’, an inflammatory foot infection, under his lovely yellow feet, and that he was feather-perfect. Heart racing, he’d then been bundled into a pet carrier, and trapped in this claustrophobic tomb he’d been driven from Norfolk up to Sheffield unable to escape the terrifying noises all around him. After the car engine, and the roar of overtaking motorbikes, and the whoosh of air from lorries speeding by, here he was in our living room hanging upside down at the end of his jesses calling ‘kikiki . . . kikiki’, in fear.
Jackie closed the curtains and I gently lifted the young merlin back on to my fist. In the half-light he was calmer and didn’t bate. Holding a tea towel, Jackie tiptoed up behind him like someone on stage in a pantomime. She threw the towel over him and pinned his wings by his side, then, while she held him, I slipped a hood on to him. Jackie then put the merlin on to my now gloved hand and removed the towel. I touched the scales with the back of his legs and he stepped backwards. He weighed just under six ounces.
Screen perches were no longer used, as over the years there had been rare instances of falcons getting in a tangle with their jesses, and hanging upside down in the mews. So, in the mews I had made of a converted brick building in our back garden, I’d fixed a wide shelf perch covered with Astroturf to cushion his feet and prevent bumblefoot. That night my young falcon wasn’t in danger of having problems with his feet, for he lay down on the shelf perch, and the next day when I tried him on his block perch in the garden, instead of standing on it he lay on the grass beside it. Yet he quickly got the hang of things. On the first day he stepped on to the glove to feed, and when I manned him by standing in the front window to let him watch people, dogs and cars passing by in the street, he didn’t bate from the glove. Soon he was flying a leash length to the glove in the mews, then a leash length from a fence post in the garden. A little more than a week later I stood amid the purple heather on Burbage Moor, a few minutes’ drive from our house, and with my glove raised I blasted on my whistle. The juvenile merlin powered off Jackie’s fist and he flew with the creance trailing behind him along a sheep track through the heather, towards me and on to the glove to take his reward of meat. After that flight I flew him free.
My only problem was getting him used to a hood. I hadn’t hooded my kestrels, but traditionally proper hunting falcons, such as merlins, were hooded to keep them calm while being transported or carried before flying. At first I made our spaniel sit in front of us, and while the hawk was looking at the dog I practised hooding him without too many problems. Later, however, when he’d become used to the dog, each time I tried to hood him his head ducked and writhed like a snake’s, making it difficult for me to slip on the hood and tighten the hood braces with my teeth. One of my books suggested that the way to deal with a hawk that resisted hooding was to carry it under your arm and repeatedly hood it until it accepted the procedure. Suspecting it was my incompetence that was the problem, not my merlin, and realising he was so well manned that he didn’t really need a hood, I decided against this drastic advice, accepted defeat and abandoned my efforts to get him used to the hood.
I’d intended calling my merlin Lilburne, after John Lilburne, a Parliamentarian hero of mine who’d helped to defeat Sir Richard Fanshawe and his Royalist mates in the English Civil War. However, I changed my mind while reflecting on Lady Fanshawe’s memoirs. Although Sir Richard was the secretary of the Council of War for Charles I’s Royalists, who I disagreed with, he was a fascinating character. He was a poet and a brave man. Once when he and Lady Fanshawe were walking by the sea in Portsmouth they were fired at from two Dutch ships. Hearing the musket balls whiz by, Lady Fanshawe began to run, but Sir Richard carried on walking and said, ‘If we must be killed, it were as good to be killed walking as running’. According to Lady Fanshawe even Oliver Cromwell, his enemy and the leader of the Parliamentarians, had respect for him and ‘would have bought him off to his service on any terms’. After the Battle of Worcester Sir Richard was captured and imprisoned in Whitehall where, penned up in a cold, small room, scurvy had ‘brought him almost to death’s door’. Finally, released on four thousand pounds’ bail, he visited his friend William Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who offered him the tenancy of Tankersley Hall a couple of miles away from Wentworth’s own country house.
Although our ties to the Old Hall were very different, I felt a connection, and so I called my merlin Fanshawe.
Had Mother been alive to see Fanshawe, she’d have said he was not much bigger than a ‘throstle’. At a flying weight of only five and a half ounces, he was a little beauty, with big brown eyes and buff and brown feathers in perfect condition, and his instinct to survive showed in spirited and endearing ways. Standing on his perch on the lawn, for instance, his eyes to the sky, he’d ‘chup, chup, chup’ at sparrowhawks soaring high overhead. He once ‘chupped’ at something in the cloudless sky – probably a soaring peregrine – which was so high I couldn’t see it, not even through the binoculars that I hurriedly fetched from the house. Once he delicately pecked at a tiny spot of red among the swirl of colours on an empty coffee mug, as if it was a piece of meat he was about to feed to a newly hatched chick. On another occasion, when I’d brought him into the house to keep me company, he cocked his head to one side and looked under tables and chairs for the bird singing on the birdsong recording I was playing.
Fanshawe had a small wooden travelling box with an Astroturf-covered perch. One evening, to get my young falcon used to this and to man him, I drove over to my old haunts. After walking with him on my glove for a while I sat on a bench beside Tankersley church. Flat in the grass by my feet was a gravestone, and although the letters and numbers were green with moss, I could make out the words:
LVKE BVRDET
BU r d 1680
As I gazed at his gravestone I wondered what Luke would have thought had he seen me with a merlin. The 1486 Boke of St Albans had been through many reprints, the last one in 1614, and coming from the landowning classes who’d been able to afford a gravestone I guessed that Luke would most likely have been able to read. Yet even if Luke hadn’t read the book and come across ‘Ther is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady’, he would have known that merlins were flown by women of high social standing. Until the death of her beloved daughter Ann had made her ‘desirous to quit’ Tankersley, Lady Fanshawe said she had ‘found all the neighbourhood very civil’. So maybe Luke had even greeted her as she rode out of Tankersley Hall with a merlin on her glove for an afternoon’s hawking on Tankersley Moor. He’d have been puzzled to see me, a man, with a merlin on my glove.
Sitting there on the bench beside Luke’s gravestone, I began to wonder if Sir Richard Fanshawe, whose beloved daughter Ann was buried in the church behind me, had after a Sunday service ever stood in this ancient churchyard with Luke Burdet discussing country sports. Fluent
in several languages, and later Charles II’s Ambassador to Portugal, perhaps Sir Richard would have read the 1643 book D’Arcussia’s Falconry in French. If so, maybe he’d put Luke straight, for the Abbess Juliana Berners hadn’t got it quite right in the Boke of St Albans, as men, King Louis XIII of France among them, did occasionally fly merlins. In Britain, however, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that men began to fly merlins regularly. The most famous of these falconers was E. B. Michell, an Oxford scholar and champion boxer, who was said to have knocked two soldiers unconscious for throwing stones at his merlin.
It was a lovely early September morning with a clear blue sky. One knee of my jeans was wet with dew when I stood up from putting my young merlin on his block perch. During the summer, head cocked on one side, Fanshawe had watched the squealing swifts fly over the garden. Now that the swifts were on their way back to Africa for the winter, Fanshawe made do with watching me carry stones across the garden to an old rockery that I was rebuilding. I needed a couple of extra large stones and as I worked I remembered a demolished cottage where I could get them from. Later that morning, carrying a large stone under each arm, I was walking up a path opposite Tankersley church when a stern voice called: ‘Hey! Where tha going with them?’
Heart racing, I turned. It was Budgie. Dog at heel, he was walking up the path behind me grinning at the fright he’d given me.
After loading the stones into the car boot I called in at Budgie’s house and was sitting in a garden chair while he fetched his pet rabbit out of the shed to show me. It was a sweet little thing and sat on its haunches on the lawn while Budgie, sleeves rolled up as usual on his tattooed arms, fed it from his fingers.
‘I never thought I’d see thee hand-feeding a rabbit,’ I said, before reminding him of his wild young days when he used to poach rabbits.
‘I couldn’t bear to do that now,’ he told me.
Budgie loved birds and had listened intently when I told him about my merlin. So when he came to the car to see me off I suggested he could come out hawking with Fanshawe, once he’d started catching his supper on the moors. But, rather than looking pleased by my invitation, Budgie suddenly looked uncomfortable and brusquely said: ‘It’s too far – travelling over there.’
‘It’s not. It wouldn’t take thi long,’ I said naively.
‘I’m not bothered about going,’ he said more forcefully.
‘Keep thi timber up,’ Budgie called to me as I drove off. It was an old mining farewell, meaning take care of yourself by setting your pit props properly. Despite our friendly goodbyes, Budgie had made clear his disapproval of my plans to fly Fanshawe after his natural prey. Since I’d recruited Budgie for the part in Kes, we’d rekindled our childhood friendship. Our shared histories and the history of the village were important to us. Budgie had got his job back at the local pit and, when it was open to the public on its centenary, he had pulled aside sacking which signalled an out-of-bounds area, and taken me on an unofficial tour of the dark tunnels where my dad and grandads had worked. Then, when I left the village for Sheffield, we fell into the habit of meeting up for a drink every couple of months or so. He was a dear friend. His disapproval upset me, and as I drove home, and later worked on the rockery while Fanshawe watched, I couldn’t stop my mind going over arguments I thought I’d already put to rest.
With his dogs and ferrets and rabbit nets, Budgie had been a hunter as a young man. Once when we’d walked together in the countryside, mid-conversation he’d suddenly dived into a patch of long grass, stood up holding a flapping pheasant, wrung its neck and had it for his dinner next day. When working on Kes, Ken Loach had told me how he didn’t look for actors to play a part so much as seek actors who were the part. Budgie was certainly that when he took on the role of a poacher in Ken’s television film of Barry’s book The Gamekeeper. Now Budgie had turned against all that, and regarded hawking for live prey as cruel.
As a youth I’d taken my guidance from M. H. Woodford, a vet who had spent his life caring for animals. In A Manual of Falconry he wrote: ‘There has never been a slur cast on falconry on the grounds of cruelty’ because ‘all quarry have sanctuary and frequently outfly their pursuer’. To me, as a vegetarian, it seemed fairer to let a hawk catch animals that have had an independent life in the wild, and which have evolved to escape, than to feed it on farmed animals. Yet even before Budgie had disapproved, I’d felt uneasy.
When I’d discovered it was possible to buy any captive-bred hawk you wanted, I’d at first considered stooping a lanner or peregrine to the lure, without letting it fly at quarry. I’d flown my kestrels like this but now it seemed wrong. It seemed to me that if I did get a hawk I needed to give it a life as near as possible to the life it had evolved to live. Had I bumped into Budgie months earlier, maybe I would have overcome the yearning to bring a hawk back into my life, but it was too late now. As I worked on the rockery, there was Fanshawe on his perch on the lawn and I’d no choice but to do what I was convinced was best for him.
TWENTY-NINE
ENTER, to fly a hawk at quarry for the first time.
– J. E. Harting, Bibliotheca Accipitraria, 1891
It was early evening, time to fly my merlin. Keen to get on my glove, Fanshawe raised his wings when I approached him on his perch on the lawn. In the mews he hopped from my glove on to the scales. He weighed five and a half ounces. Spot on. He hopped back on to the glove and the moment I opened the door of his small wooden travelling box he eagerly stepped on to its little Astroturf-covered perch. I fastened the door, checked my pocket for the licence allowing Fanshawe to catch his natural prey – chiefly meadow pipits, which were common at that time – then carried the travelling box out of the mews and headed for the car.
Within a couple of minutes I was driving past Burbage Moor, where I’d trained Fanshawe. On this moor, the meadow pipits would have simply disappeared into the heather the moment he left the glove. So, to give my young falcon a chance to learn to hunt for himself, and the chance to survive in the wild if he ever got lost, I was taking him further afield. I passed the DERBYSHIRE sign and left South Yorkshire. Slowing down for sheep wandering on to the road, driving across cattle grids, and with views of peaks stretching into the distance before me, I drove across the moors. Leaving the heather moors behind, I drove down into the valley and through a softer landscape, with wooded hills and green fields. Then, after driving up a steep, narrow street of stone cottages, and up a lane no wider than a cart track, I reached Bradwell Moor. Burbage Moor had been purple with heather. Here, on his new flying ground, the grass was heavy with seed and the moor the colour of ripe corn. Crucially, from the viewpoint of Fanshawe, on this moor the meadow pipits would need to outfly him rather than just drop into the heather to escape.
At the top of the moor I parked beside a cart track, took out Fanshawe from his travelling box in the boot, then slipped on to my shoulder the strap of what looked like a canvas fishing-rod case; this was my telemetry. I hadn’t walked far when Fanshawe hurtled off my glove, his jesses slipping through my fingers. I desperately looked down the moor, trying to spot what he’d seen. Wings flapping furiously, my young falcon was powering up into the sky towards a raven, as if about to drive it off and establish this moor as his territory. If that was his intention it was about to be thwarted, because flying towards him was another raven, and moments later I watched in horror, as, jet black against the sky, the two ravens, which were twice as big as Fanshawe, chased him across the moor and out of sight.
I jogged across the moor to where Fanshawe had disappeared. Out of breath, I stopped at the edge of a disused quarry, took the telemetry receiver from its case and unfolded what looked like a small television aerial. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. To my relief the tiny transmitter attached to Fanshawe’s leg was sending a signal. He wasn’t far away. I aimed the receiver at the steep rock face on the other side of the quarry and slowly swept it in front of me. At first the signal wasn’t strong, but when the receiver was pointing directly ahead the s
ignal became much louder: BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Raising my binoculars I scanned the rock face opposite. There was no sign of him standing in the grass on top of the rock face, or perched on any of the ledges. I was about to put the receiver on the ground and take the lure from my pocket when I saw Fanshawe standing between my boots. I don’t know if he’d flown in low and landed there, or if I’d almost trodden on him.
I was soon walking through the grass with my young merlin back on my glove. Although merlins, as falcons, are called ‘longwings’, their wings are broader than peregrines, and almost hawk-shaped to aid acceleration. Again he hurtled off my fist, and again I didn’t see what he was pursuing. After the experience with the ravens, I held on tight to his jesses. By the time I saw the pipit that had flown out of the grass, Fanshawe was already hanging upside down by his jesses screaming with rage. Lifting him back on to the glove, I walked on. Again he launched into flight at something I hadn’t seen, but this time I didn’t hold him back. It turned out that this instinctive response had been triggered by nothing more than a moth fluttering out of the grass, and turning in the air he flew back to the glove. I was concentrating hard, trying to make sure I saw what had caught his eye, so I could decide whether to hold on to his jesses, or let him fly, when once again he shot off my glove. His jesses slipped through my fingers, and this time the young hawk was chasing prey which was so far away that he wouldn’t have been able to catch it even if he’d been able to fly ten miles an hour faster. Fuming, I blasted on my whistle and swung the lure. Giving up the chase he turned and flew low over the moor towards me, and rather than throwing the lure into the grass I pulled it on to my raised glove for him to land on.
Poor Fanshawe. It was hard enough for him trying to catch prey that had evolved over thousands of years to escape his clutches without me making it even more difficult. I’d read that at least six out of ten young wild hawks and falcons die in their first year, mostly because they can’t catch enough food. I hadn’t thought much about the reality of those young hawks’ lives until this evening, watching my juvenile merlin’s heart-rending attempts to catch his quarry. One chase ended with him crashing into a bed of nettles near a derelict stone barn. When I got to him he was hanging upside down, his wings spread out among the nettles, panting with anger and frustration. On the final flight of the evening my young falcon followed a pipit into long grass. When he didn’t fly up I thought at last he must have nailed his supper, but the small brown moorland bird he thought he was killing turned out to be a dried-out sheep’s dropping.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 23