The next one is inside the trees, moving in and out of view. A large shadow flying through the trees, as if they were parting to let it through. Suddenly swinging up to land on a branch. I cannot see all of the bird because it is perched behind a curtain of leaves. There is just a hint of grey shoulder and folded wing, an unevenness of colour inside the trees.
A goshawk spends most of its time perched, blended into a tree. Absence or agitation can sometimes betray the presence of a goshawk: an absence of corvid nests (or successful nests) suggests a goshawk is in residence in a wood, as if the hawk has pulled in an exclusion zone around it. But this absence can just as quickly flip into mobbing agitation, crows furious with fear and ancestral spite, yelling to the wood, to the wind, to the whole world: Here is a hawk.
Most birds of prey wear the mobbing with indifference until it becomes so persistent that they are forced to move on. There is an account of one juvenile goshawk being killed by a flock of 200 hooded crows. But mobbing a larger predator is full of risk and there are many more accounts of the harassed raptor suddenly turning and seizing their pursuer. One goshawk I read about was seen joining a raven in mobbing a sea eagle only for the eagle to turn and stoop on the hawk, catching it in its talons. Occasionally, rarely, the hawk becomes the mobsman: Eurasian eagle owls (one of the few species to predate goshawks) have this effect on most raptors. These apex predators are not tolerated by other birds of prey, to the extent that eagle owls are sometimes used as decoys to lure in birds such as goshawks and ospreys for ringing purposes.
Female goshawks are faster in flight, the males have more agility and acceleration. The females are all low-geared power, gulping up the space. Males are slalomers, threading through the trees, twisting after prey.
Often a kill starts from a standstill, an ambush along a quiet forest ride, dropping from a perch, accelerating into a passing pigeon or a noisy undulating woodpecker. Sometimes a goshawk will stalk its prey, tree-creep, pausing to listen and check its bearing on prey that the hawk may be able to hear but not yet see. Woodland raptors (hawks and owls for instance) hunt with their ears as well as their eyes. Folds in the land, hedges, walls: all are used as cover to take prey by surprise. Not the leisurely contour-hugging of a harrier’s flight, more a dash along a ditch, everything done at hawk-speed. A flock of pigeons feeding in an open field is approached from a low glide, skimming the fields. Then, when the flock breaks and scatters, the goshawk is beating, bursting out of the glide, rushing at the stragglers.
Above all pigeons. Also: corvids, grouse (especially the displaying males of woodland grouse), squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, though lifting a bird as heavy as a pheasant is a struggle. Occasionally other raptors are predated by goshawks: kestrels, sparrowhawks, honey buzzard broods … There are records of everything from domestic cats to birds as large as common buzzards. Even male goshawks must tread warily around the larger female gos, which, recent studies suggest, is becoming larger, the size dimorphism between the male and female goshawk widening in certain localities across the birds’ range. Where the goshawk’s traditional prey, woodland grouse, have grown scarce, the hawks have shifted to different prey species, evolving in size to adapt to this change. The male goshawks becoming smaller to pursue swifter more agile prey; the females, in turn, switching from woodland grouse to hares and growing larger, evolving to better tackle the hares with all their strength and speed and risk.
A hare must rarely pose a risk. But there is the unfortunate goshawk I read about who grasped a hare in one foot and tried to halt the hare’s momentum by seizing a clump of vegetation with its other foot. The hare cried out with its witchy screech but its powerful legs kept moving, charging onwards. The hawk instinctively tightened its grip on both hare and plant and the bird, apparently, was torn apart by the force of the hare’s momentum …
Above all, too, a bird of woodland and woodland edge zones. But the goshawk does not need so much deep forest as we tend to assume. Spinneys, scattered copses, neglected churchyards will do fine. Even city parks, playgrounds, just so long as there is a tree in which to build its heavy nest. Some central European cities now have established populations of goshawks (Berlin has around ninety pairs), where the hawks can be seen hunting magpies, blackbirds and feral pigeons through the parks and streets.
Even – of all the treeless places – Orkney, where MacGillivray had reports from his contemporaries of goshawks not unfrequently being seen. And, amongst the many bones of sea eagles that spilled from the tomb on South Ronaldsay, as well as the remains of gulls and corvids they also found the bones of a goshawk. What was a goshawk doing way up there on Orkney miles from any wood? Why would a goshawk, along with all those other birds, be interred in the burial chamber at Isbister? Some of the birds – the gulls and corvids – are carrion feeders like the sea eagle and may have also played their part in excarnating the dead. Goshawks will sometimes eat carrion, though are not renowned for it. But all the birds that were discovered in the tomb – the sea eagles, short-eared owls, black-backed gulls, raven, goshawk – have in common that they are long-winged, powerful fliers. So perhaps they were included in the tomb because of their strength and flying prowess. For the dead need things that will be of use to them, coins to pay the ferryman, amulets, birds capable – strong enough – to assist the soul on its journey.
MacGillivray rises about half past eight and leaves Newton Stewart at nine feeling stiff and slow. A mile from town he hears somebody coming up behind him on the road:
– Are you gaun far this way?
– Yes.
– How far are you gaun?
– East a good way.
– Eh?
– East apiece.
The stranger walks on, hesitatingly, then half turns about, tries again:
– Because if you were for company I’m gaun that way too.
– I walk alone always.
– Eh?
– No.
At Dumfries MacGillivray goes in search of Robert Burns’s grave. He wanders about the town in the dusk looking for the churchyard. Struggling to find it, walking round in circles, he almost gives up and heads back to the inn. But then the thought strikes him, he cannot possibly pass up the opportunity to pay his respects to the poet. So he wanders on and at last sights the kirkyard. The gate is locked so he scrambles over the wall and drops down into a wilderness of tombs. Burns’s tomb is locked with a sign from the magistrate warning that he will throw anyone in jail who is caught climbing the wall. What, thinks MacGillivray, have I to do with restraint? These walls were not intended to exclude me, for the memory of the poet is dear to my heart, and I could not injure his monument. So he climbs the railings, sits down on the steps of Burns’s tomb, and bursts into tears.
It is nearly dark now and MacGillivray spends the next hour on the steps of the tomb in a muddle of grief. He feels that the poet’s memory is dearer to him than any living being. He doesn’t know why this is, only that there is a kinship, a recognition there. It is not that Burns is also a child of nature, rather that MacGillivray feels acutely Burns’s own misfortunes and his untimely death. He tries speaking to God, who he has not spoken to for half a year. Afterwards he feels a soft melancholy, for often, he writes, there is a stage in the paroxysm of grief which to me is highly pleasing. Then it is past: MacGillivray climbs out of the tomb, back over the cemetery wall and drops softly down into the street.
It was not always easy to follow the line of the Border accurately. This middle stretch of the boundary is so detached and abandoned, swallowed by forestry. Left to its own devices the line behaves strangely here. It jinks and doubles back on itself, rushes off at sudden, unexpected angles across the hill with no thought to topography. I trace the Border line between Deadwater and Hobbs’ Flow on my map. Deadwater, Foulmire Heights, Bloody Bush … the place-names do their best to ward you off. Even Hobbs’ Flow comes with a warning from the great explorer and chronicler of the Border, James Logan Mack:
In a wet season the
passage of the Flow should not be attempted, and even in a dry one the traveller is not free from the risk of being engulfed in the morass. While I have crossed it twice in safety, I do not advise that this route be followed, and he who ventures into such solitude should keep to the west and circle round on higher ground.
If you went on the run from justice in Scotland or in England, this is where you ran to, the Debatable Grounds, the Batable Lands, the No-Man’s-Land that straddles sections of the Border. A place which neither nation could agree on, a refuge, a place to flee to. Batable: contentious, discorded lands. To bate: the austringer’s term for an untrained, skittish goshawk when it tries to flee the wrist. Batable: the reason this middle section of the Border above Kielder behaves so strangely, jinking, doubling back on itself, given to sudden unexpected flights. Maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describe much of this area as ‘Disputed Ground’, uncertain, feral places, tending to bate, to flee the authorities. The courses of streams that marked this section of the Border were often diverted, dykes ploughed up in the night, lines erased, land appropriated. It takes a surveyor to referee such disputes, to compromise, to mark a boundary so esoterically with little or no thought to topography. Only a surveyor could create such sharp angles, draw such straight and unexpected lines across the hills.
I climb along the flanks below Deadwater Moor. Deadwater: still water, water with no movement; a watershed, between east and west, between the North Sea and the Solway. Also, a watershed for language, above all dialect. Just as in the Flow Country where Norse and Gaelic met and barely recognised each other, the Anglo-Scots border cuts language markedly in two. The distinction between dialects on either side of the Border is abrupt, like nowhere else. MacGillivray felt this when he stopped in Carlisle to ask the way and found the dialect so completely altered:
– When thou comes to the corner, though maun keep to the right, and when thou comes to some houses they will show thee.
– I thank you.
– Welcome.
I treated the Border as the most porous of things, to be breached constantly on my walks along it. But language – dialect – slams up against it, reflects the presence of a boundary along almost all of it. The whole district is rife with dialect isoglosses. Within the space of a mile or two you can go from being a scarecrow to a flaycrow to a crowbogle to a tattiebogle …
The Batable Lands had their own rules. From sunrise to sundown they were treated as common ground where livestock from either nation could be grazed. Anything left overnight – cattle or goods – was fair game and could be taken or destroyed. If property was built inside the area it could be burnt down and any people found inside the building taken prisoner. From time to time the district would be settled and in turn provoke the authorities to clear the people out again. This was the objective behind the Treaty of Norham of 1551:
Debatable Ground should be restored to its old condition, according to usage, that therefore all subjects of either realm living in it or having houses there were to remove with wives, children, goods and cattle by the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel next, any found there after that date to be expelled by the Wardens and punished according to law.
But always there was a drift of people returning to fill the vacuum, fugitives, rebels, the dispossessed. As quickly as the Debatable Lands were cleared they were colonised again.
Goshawks went the way – the same ways (and at the same time) more or less – the osprey and sea eagle went. Bounty schemes, vermin lists, clearances … When they began to return in the 1960s goshawks did so more quietly, more secretively than the sea eagle and osprey: falconers releasing – sometimes losing – goshawks to the wild. A slow trickle of imports and escapees, the latter often trailing jesses into their new lives. The birds are well established now in certain districts, especially the Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scots borderlands, but there remain areas, debatable grounds, where goshawks are expelled before they have arrived, sink holes, briefly colonised before they are cleared out again.
My last hour in the forest. The buzzards have returned, the raven too. Late afternoon, light going around the edges of the clearing. The raven steadies out above the treeline and starts to rise and fall in peaks and troughs. Then a goshawk is calling and lifting up from the dark trees to the left of me. This hawk has been calling on and off for much of the day. I am glad to see her. She is much larger than the male goshawk that flew over earlier. Wings held straight and stiff, she flies around the rim of the clearing then crosses in front of me. Slow wing strokes: glide, flap.
VII
Kestrel
Bolton
Late October on the outskirts of Bolton, everything drenched in mist. The town below me in a sump of fog. Rush-hour buses sliding down the hill, tail lights like fading fire ships in a haar. I cross the main road and skirt around the back of a pub. Dormant extractor fans, a yellow drum of cooking oil, starlings in the beer-garden grass, very black in the pale light. Behind the wheelie bins, a five-bar steel gate, an electric strap fence hooked to the gate’s straining post. The white strap runs out across the field, 3 feet off the ground, undulating, held up by yew-green plastic pegs. I climb the gate and the metal rattling sound it makes spooks the starlings into flight, black shots through the mist as if the birds were punching holes in it. Beyond the gate a field of deeper mist, the ground bumpy with horse dung, a grey fur on the dung like frost. The strap fence branches off at right angles from itself, demarcating the field into tiny paddocks. The field is full of docks, small thin rabbits bolt from under their blotched leaves.
Another crossing point, another border post. The switch is so sudden here, from town to moor: the end of a street, a sliver of no-man’s-land, gorse and bramble, a wet field overrun with rushes. Then I am climbing up onto the crumbling, hacked-at moors. Farms perched on the edge of huge quarries, deep bowls of mist. A peregrine down there somewhere, I can hear it calling from the quarry workings.
Above the quarry, a large field sculpted by landfill, buried and smoothed over, its surface pitted with rubble, glass, tight balls of burnt plastic. Damp sheep on the landfill, muddy Herdwicks, hooves clacking against bits of brick. Across a ditch and the next field is soaking wet. A stunted, windswept holly along its edge, remnant clumps of heather rolled up against the windward side of the dyke, rushes in the peaty hollows. Snipe are here, bursting out from under me in rapid, jagged flight. And from out of the mist a wonderful sight: a large flock of lapwings, thirty birds, rising from the soft field with such lightness, swooping over the moor, flickering black and white. I keep on disturbing them in the mist, dislodging the flock, watching it rise and settle again further up the field like a thrown sheet coming to rest over a bed.
Then something large is heading towards me out of the mist. A tall heavy shape and I think it must be a horse made skittish by my presence in the fog. It is trotting towards me and I am worried that it will not see me in time, that it will rear up and bolt in fright. But when it steps out of the mist and is almost on top of me, the shape and movement are wrong. Not a horse at all: nothing like a horse. What on earth … an ostrich! Of all the places, in the middle of this boggy field above Bolton, striding out of the mist, skidding to a halt in front of me. Thick neck, head tilting down, peering at me. Its huge brown eyes blink. Then it wheels around, its feet slap a puddle left by a tractor print, and it strides back up the hill into the mist. Something about the bulbous shape of its body, the loose straggling feathers, reminds me of huge buzzard nests I’ve seen, like a nest on stilts. So now, I think, I have the avian extremes of my journey: the tiny wren that bobbed around my heather lookout on Orkney, to this escapee ostrich, fugitive giant of the West Pennine Moors.
I left MacGillivray in Carlisle, asking directions for the road south.
– When thou comes to the corner, though maun keep to the right, and when thou comes to some houses they will show thee.
– I thank you.
– Welcome.
Beneath the sandstone g
low of Carlisle castle MacGillivray goes into a bank and exchanges his five Scotch notes for English ones. He searches among the back streets for cheap lodgings but there is nothing available and no one will give him change for one of his notes. So he heads out of the city along the Keswick road. It is a shock how sudden the dark comes on, there is so little preamble. MacGillivray arrived in Carlisle at five o’clock with no sense that the day might be dissolving. By seven he is out on the road to Keswick and there is not a trace of daylight left. The night is so assertive now.
He does not say why, but the next inn refuses him lodging. Though his appearance cannot have helped: he looks so tattered and road-weary, like some wandering scarecrow come down out of the north. Half a mile on he comes to another inn and it’s, No beds here, mister. But he orders supper anyway because by now he is exhausted, has not eaten a thing all day except for a twopenny cake. But here is a new difficulty which he could not have seen coming: the innkeeper can give MacGillivray change for his note but she cannot accept a Bank of England note. And no, it’s no good that MacGillivray only exchanged it at the bank in Carlisle a few hours ago. She is very sorry and her husband is sorry too, you do sound like an honest fellow but, you see, there are Bank of England forgeries circulating through Cumberland and, you must understand, they have been cheated once before and resolved to never take a Bank of England note again. It is too much, this small injustice, and MacGillivray hears himself almost yelling that he is hungry and tired and can scarcely proceed upon his journey. And, yes, you do seem like an honest fellow, really, and they are very sorry, but it will not do. So MacGillivray is back out through the door and trudging along the road. And something about the rhythm of walking once more – reverting to what his muscles know – calms him. But it does not alleviate his hunger and he is brittle with tiredness. It is cloudy with slivers of moonlight showing between the clouds. The road has narrowed to a lane, tall hedges loom up on either side. The lane is exceptionally muddy and MacGillivray is soon wet to his ankles. He notices, when the lane sinks beneath the hedgerows, that he is walking through a seam of shadow and he sees how the night’s gradient can change so quickly as he passes through pools of darker, cooler air. Crossroads keep bisecting the lane. Soon he is sure he is on the wrong road and has to knock on the door of a house to ask directions. Further on he comes to another inn. But it’s no beds here, mister, and, sorry, but we can’t let you sleep in the outhouse either and the cook has gone to bed and so it’s out the door again, first turning on the left, then right, then straight ahead to the common. Another crossroads, another farmhouse. The door is shut. MacGillivray finds himself swaying in the centre of a quiet farmyard, a cart shed in front of him. So he goes into the shed, climbs up onto the cart and lies down. Then he notices steps up to a loft, so he climbs up and there are rushes and wattlings plus a bit of scruffy mat he has carried up from the cart. Unhooks his knapsack, punches it into a pillow, lies down on the rushes, drapes the mat over his legs, tries to sleep. At midnight his wet feet wake him with cold. Puts off his shoes, wraps his feet in the mat. Then sleep of sorts till he is woken by people moving below in the farmyard, feeding the horses and poultry. Descending the hayloft, back down into the muddy lane. He seems to have passed beyond hunger into a dizzy weakness. He is, by now, covered in grime as if a carriage had splattered him with mud as it hurtled past on the road. And he must have slept on his hat because it is so crumpled it will not be coaxed back into shape. Two miles down the road and he enters a public house. Breakfast at last: tea, bread, butter and eggs. And MacGillivray does something which is unlike him and which racks him with guilt for days to come. He waits until he’s finished his breakfast before he presents, nonchalantly, his Bank of England note. Both the innkeeper and his wife, inspecting it, prodding it, shaking their heads. Sorry, but if you had a Scotch note instead … they would be happy to give change for that. But a Bank of England note: no, we simply cannot take the risk, would rather forfeit the shilling for your breakfast. And they show MacGillivray great kindness, this couple, and say that it does not matter and he is welcome to the bread and eggs. Still, he leaves them feeling a little guilty, a little sly he had not mentioned the pesky notes up front. He makes a vow not to be so dishonest again. Outside the inn he can see Carlisle cathedral in the distance. The hills of Scotland are rinsed in mist. It is eleven o’clock in the morning. The mud on his clothes is starting to dry and flake.
Raptors Page 12