Raptors
Page 7
Now I am looking down into the glen with its loch shaped like a rat. If I could bend down from this height and pick the loch up by its long river-tail it would squirm and wriggle beneath my grip. I’d heard of golden eagles doing that to adders, lifting the snakes and carrying them off in their talons as the snakes writhed and contorted in the air like a thread unravelling there. And more exotic things than snakes are sometimes taken by eagles. The lists of prey recorded are eclectic: grasshopper (Finland), pike (Scotland), tortoise (Persia), red-shafted flicker (USA), dog (Scotland, Estonia, Norway, Japan, USA), goshawk (Canada), porcupine (USA) … More hazardous, perhaps, than even a porcupine was the stoat that an eagle near Cape Wrath was once seen to lift, the eagle rising higher and higher in a strange manner then suddenly falling to the ground as if it had been shot. The stoat had managed to twist its way up to reach the eagle’s neck, where it fastened its teeth and killed the bird. Or the wildcat that an eagle was seen to lift in West Inverness-shire: the cat was dropped from several hundred feet and the eagle later found partly disembowelled with severe injuries to its leg.
The golden eagle is capable of predating a wide spectrum of birds, mammals and reptiles, and yet where possible they are essentially a specialist predator, feeding on a narrow range of prey items common to the eagle’s mountain and moorland habitat. Golden eagles adapt to become a more generalist predator when their usual prey is scarce. In the Eastern Highlands of Scotland 90 per cent of golden eagle prey is made up of lagomorphs (mostly mountain hare, but also rabbits) and grouse (both ptarmigan and red grouse). In the Outer Hebrides their diet is more varied because their usual moorland prey, hares and grouse, are scarce here. So, in the Western Isles, rabbits, fulmars and, in winter, sheep carrion make up a high percentage of the eagle’s diet. Grouse and hares are also less common in the Northern and Western Highlands than they are in the east, and consequently the eagle’s diet in these regions is also varied, with deer carrion becoming important in winter. But as a general rule, carrion, despite its availability, tends to be much less significant in the eagle’s diet through the bird’s nesting season, when live prey are preferred, and tend to be easier to transport to the nest than bulky carrion items.
I settle down above the glen with my back against a boulder and keep watch. I can spend hours like this, waiting in the margins for the chance of birds. But today it is a long wait and I can feel the wind drying out my lips. I am just about to give up and move on when I see two golden eagles flying low down a steep flank of the mountain. Their great wings pulled back behind them, their carpal joints jutting forward almost level with the birds’ heads. They cling so close to the side of the mountain they could be abseiling down the incline. An adult bird and a juvenile, the immature eagle with conspicuous white patches on the underside of its wings. All the time the young bird is calling to its parent, a low, excited cheek cheek cheek, the sound carrying down into the glen, skimming across the loch.
Both birds are only 100 feet now from where I am sitting. Through my binoculars I can see the lighter-coloured feathers down the adult’s nape and the yellow in its talons. The juvenile’s calling is growing more persistent, rising in pitch. Then the adult eagle drops fast into the heather with its talons stretched in front of it. At once the youngster is down beside its parent. Something has been killed there. The adult eagle rises and starts to climb above the glen. The young bird proceeds to dip and raise its head into the heather, wrenching at something. I stay with it, watching the young eagle feed. When it has finished it remains in the heather, carefully preening its left wing. Each time the young eagle lifts its wing there is a flash of white in the plumage like an intermittent signal from the grey backdrop of the mountain.
I realise I have witnessed something special, a juvenile golden eagle learning to hunt. The immature bird was clearly still reliant on its parents for food, but it was now piggybacking, tagging along while its parent hunted down the mountainside. The young bird flew so close to the adult, it must have seen the prey in the heather – whatever it was – at the same time as the adult eagle.
I remain watching the juvenile for the next twenty minutes and twice it lifts off the side of the mountain and lands again. Each time it lands it thrusts its talons hard out before it at the last minute as if practising its strike. The adult bird comes back into view again and the young eagle shoots up to meet it, circling its parent, crying repeatedly with its begging call, ttch-yup-yup, tee-yup. I have a very close view of the adult eagle as it swoops low across the cliff in front of me. Its tail is a dark grey colour, like the gneiss beneath it.
It all comes to a head, this gutting of the island from the inside out, when MacGillivray and his uncle are summoned by the laird to decide the fate of his uncle’s farm at Northton. The laird’s factor, Donald Stewart, is there, whom MacGillivray does not care for, whom he calls a wretch of a man. Donald Stewart, who is as ruthless as the sea, who will clear the bulk of the people from the west coast of Harris by 1830, who will even plough the graveyard at Seilebost till skulls and thigh bones roll about the ground like stones. And now Stewart has his eye on the farm at Northton, which is the finest farm in the country. So MacGillivray’s uncle has been duly summoned to the big house at Rodel for this meeting – the Set, as it’s known – and MacGillivray goes along to support him, to steady him, just as his uncle steadied MacGillivray when he was learning to shoot a gun all those years ago. The pair of them enter the house at Rodel where Stewart and the laird, MacLeod, are holding court at a large table, and before MacGillivray and his uncle have even sat down they are told that his uncle has lost the farm, that it has already been decided and would he like to bid for a different farm instead? What happens next is truly wonderful: MacGillivray’s uncle, distraught and silent, listens, Stewart seethes and listens and MacLeod squirms and listens and gulps at his snuff, while MacGillivray stands up and harangues them, boiling over with indignation at the injustice, at Stewart’s duplicity, at MacLeod’s promises to him about the farm. MacGillivray is like the sea that night in January when the wind picked up the water in whirlwinds of agitation. He is furious with MacLeod and Stewart, but most of all he is furious with Stewart, who he knows is really behind all this, the wretch. And when he has finished fuming at them, MacGillivray sits down and there is a long silence. Stewart sits in cowardly silence and MacLeod, who is also a coward, gulps prodigiously at his snuff. Then MacLeod nods and it’s settled and the farm is his uncle’s for another year at least. The rent is set at £170, the meeting is over and MacGillivray and his uncle are both leaving and making straight for the nearest public house.
Seton Gordon once helped a golden eagle cross back over from death. He found the eagle hanging off a cliff in upper Glen Feshie. The bird’s foot had been almost severed by the jaws of a trap which was fixed to the top of the cliff. Gordon and a companion quickly haul the eagle up the rock. They are shocked by how light the bird is, how many days it must have been hanging off the cliff. They carry the eagle, so weak it does not struggle, to some level ground. Very reluctantly, Gordon amputates the leg at the break. They wait and then watch the eagle as it starts to flop its way along the ground towards the precipice. Gordon’s friend shouts at him to catch the bird before it is dashed to its death, but he is too late and the eagle has reached the edge of the cliff. It wavers there and they are sure it is going to fall to its death. But then the eagle tastes the icy uprushing current of wind, opens its broad wings, and rises.
The story of birds of prey in these islands is the story of the birds’ relationship with humans. The nature of that relationship is integral to understanding the history and the current status of raptors in the British Isles. The status of golden eagles in the Outer Hebrides today is linked to the events that precipitated the meeting between MacGillivray, his uncle and the laird that day in April 1818. In particular, the eagles’ current status is linked to the work of the factor, Donald Stewart, who wanted to evict MacGillivray’s uncle and who went on after that meeting to clear
the people from the west of Harris in the 1820s and 1830s to make way for his sheep. For the legacy of those clearances – the way those events have impacted the landscape of these islands – is still felt by the eagles today. The sheep that replaced the people brought, through poor husbandry, a ready supply of carrion to the hills, enabling golden eagles to live at high densities in these mountains. At the same time the intensive grazing pressure the hills were put under by the flocks (and more recently the large red deer population) produced, eventually, a degraded landscape, stripped of heather, of nutritional quality, and in turn denuded of its native herbivores, grouse and hares in particular. There have been dramatic declines across the region of grouse and hares, the golden eagle’s natural prey. And whilst golden eagles can live at high densities in these mountains, they do not breed as well here. Live prey – its nutritional value – is critical to the breeding success of golden eagles; the birds breed better where live prey still thrives, as it does, for example, in the Eastern Highlands. The legacy of those clearances from MacGillivray’s time is still felt, their impact on the land has been as dramatic as the ice.
I miss so much compared with them. Gordon, for instance, on the side of Braeriach, finding the perfect impression of a golden eagle’s wings, like the imprint of a fossil, in the freshly fallen snow. MacGillivray: noticing how the currents in a channel are lit by different shades of brightness from the moon. Gordon: watching the aerial display of a male golden eagle, noticing that his neck seemed thinner than the female’s and that the male’s wings appeared larger in proportion to the body. MacGillivray: noticing the component parts of a raven’s nest: heather, willow twigs, the roots of sea bent and lady’s bedstraw … MacGillivray: not noticing that the eagle he shot and slung over his back fitted him like a cowl, clung to him, its spirit clung on to him.
IV
Osprey
Moray Firth
Travelling north, early spring: the osprey’s trajectory. March wakes a restlessness in the birds. Ospreys begin to part their winter quarters, leaving their roosts in the mangrove swamps of West Africa. Staggered departures, a slow release of birds. One morning rising higher than usual on the thermals above the palm-fringed coast, turning north instead of west in a mêlée of mobbing gulls.
What does that restlessness feel like in the bird, that longing to leave? It must be overwhelming. The muscles needing to work, tense for work. The pull of the north, the prospect of all that light, dragging at the bird like a rip tide. A thickening of need in the birds to be gone. The journey – the awful journey – thousands of miles across the Sahara, the Bay of Biscay, is not the point. It is getting back to spar and mate and claim a patch. Back to the deceiving north, still shuffling spring with winter.
The first ospreys make land off the south coast of England towards the end of March. Coming in over Poole Harbour, perhaps, up towards Rutland Water. The land below is lit by seams of water. Over the Lancashire Plain there is snow in the plough furrows and the crease of tractor prints, lighting the fields’ veins like a sonogram. Crossing the Southern Uplands, past Tinto Hill, over the Clyde and the cold flanks above Arrochar. Reaching Loch Linnhe, the bird swings north-east and tracks along the watery motorway of the Great Glen. Between Loch Oich and Loch Ness the earth curves just enough for the osprey – the fish-hawk – to catch its first glimpse of the Moray Firth and the huge expanse of Culbin forest, the sea-black wood.
I am reading all I can about ospreys. Of all the dismal stories: the perceived threat to fishponds, the blanket intolerance … The whole of England, Ireland and Wales rid of ospreys. Gone from England by the middle of the nineteenth century (though mostly by the end of the eighteenth). In the north of England the last known breeding attempts came at the end of the eighteenth century at Whinfield Park in Westmorland and the crags above Ullswater. A pair bred on Lundy in 1838 and on the north coast of Devon in 1842. The last known English nest site was at Monksilver in Somerset in 1847. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were only a handful of eyries dwindling in the Highlands. Lochs named after the osprey (Loch an Iasgair: the loch of the fisher) now outnumbered the birds themselves. And the osprey’s rarity hurrying its demise: egg collectors hunting down the beautiful, valuable eggs. A last-minute rally to try to halt the inevitable: barbed wire is draped beneath the remaining eyrie trees, one nest is even given police protection. But the thieves stop at nothing: a man swims across a freezing loch at night, six inches of snow on the ground, clambering up the island’s slippery castle ramparts to reach the nest, swimming back across the loch holding the eggs above the water, his accomplice hauling him in with a rope. Coming out of the black loch like that, his arms held above his head, he looks like a narwhal rising through a blowhole in the ice.
Two years earlier, May 1848, in north-west Sutherland, the egg collector Charles St John waits by the shore of Loch an Laig Aird while his companions go to fetch a boat. There is an osprey’s nest on an islet in the loch and St John can just make out the white head of the female sitting on her eggs. He will write later that he is sorry for what he does next. Before the boat arrives, before they row out to rob the nest, the osprey rises and flies across the loch towards St John. When she comes into range he raises his shotgun and fires. Her wings are so long that when she tumbles to the ground it looks like a windmill has come unhinged and its blades are spinning, falling towards him. She falls slowly like an ash tree’s rotating keys.
Late one May I headed north into the Highlands through a day of immense heat. Water-borne, water-navigating, following the course of the rivers, the Spey and then the Findhorn, travelling deep into osprey country. Rounding the Cairngorms, snow like a ferrule on the caps of the mountains.
I parked on the edge of Culbin forest and began to walk through the trees. Skin prickling with heat. Bronze-coloured pine seeds, like drops of resin, sticking to the sweat on my arms as if a vambrace was growing there. The forest quiet, sleeping off the day’s heat. Wood ants turning over the dead pine needles. Cowberry plants beneath the trees, glossy leaves, bright amongst the granite-dark pines. Slender, silvery rowans like waymarks in the pine-gloom. The forest floor rippling, moving under the ant-pannage.
Ninety years ago Culbin was a restless desert, a vast area of shifting sands. A place so unlike anywhere else in Britain that at the end of the nineteenth century it became home to a population of Pallas’s sand grouse, a species usually found in the deserts of central Asia. Culbin was known as ‘Britain’s Desert’, large enough to lodge in the imagination, a place where history shuffled with mythology: skeletons excavated by the shifting sands were either travellers who had lost their way in its expanse or an ancient race who had lived and foraged along the shingle ridges.
I walked for an hour through the forest and came out of the trees onto the shore of Findhorn Bay. I swam and cleaned the heat from my skin. Mute swans glided past then rose and flew in low, heavy-wingbeat processions across the water. Herring gulls in their different shades of age. Oystercatchers in their black and white synchrony. The bay loud with birds, busy with wings, squabbles, tern-twisting flight. I waded back through the shallows and dried myself in the warm air. Late afternoon, I pitched my tent just inside the trees. From there I could lean out of the tent flaps and take in the whole sweep of the bay.
Autumn 1694, a violent snow-globe shake: a great storm blows in from the west. Sand pours down from the dunes and sweeps over the fields of Culbin like an avalanche. The sand rushes towards the men working in the fields. Ploughs are abandoned, sheaves of barley smothered. Everything is sealed in sand: orchards, cottages, the mansion house … Whatever blocks the way is engulfed.
The sand has been working towards this for years, encroaching further and further east, deleting the land as it went. Sixteen seventy-six: the Culbin harvest is abandoned when the fields are drenched in sand. Year on year the estate keeps shrinking. The farms blotted out: Dalpottie, Laik, Sandifield, Middlebin. If you wanted someone to disappear to a remote spot the locals used to w
ish them, Gang to Dalpottie!
Culbin was destroyed in a single night, transformed into somewhere unrecognisable. The following morning the people woke in darkness, their windows and doors banked up with sand. There had been no warning, the storm coming out of nowhere, the sudden, rapid devastation. An act of God, they said: punishment meted out to an irresponsible landowner. After the storm the owner petitioned parliament to be exempt from cess (land tax), citing that the best three parts of his estate had been destroyed and what little remained was daily threatened by the dunes.
Then he is there, an osprey hovering over the bay. I am sitting at the edge of the forest, feet dangling over the crest of a dune. I found him a darker shape, hunting above the gulls, a high-hanging poise, a stillness there, so unlike the garrulous banter of the gulls. Long dark wings. Hovering, scanning, a kite-kestrel, 100 feet above the water. Then he drops, checks, hovers again. Then his drop tilts and gathers into a dive. In the last seconds, talons are thrown out in front of him to part the water and the osprey submerges in a great crashing plunge. A heartbeat later, he is rising, hauling the length of his wings out of the sea. Airborne, 10 feet up, he pauses, and what happens next is quite beautiful: he shakes the water from his feathers and a mist of droplets shivers off him like welding sparks.
I have never been so close to an osprey. I had watched one before, further south, in the Ochil Hills, in a buzzard-tangle over a reservoir. I heard the buzzard calling, looked up lazily thinking it was two buzzards sparring. But no, not a buzzard: look at the long, long wings, the carpal joints, angled sharp as Cuillin peaks. The buzzard was mobbing the larger bird, thumping down towards it, sending the osprey twirling and tumbling to avoid the buzzard’s jostling bulk. For days after that encounter: wonder and exhilaration, to finally see an osprey, to grasp and store its shape.