Kestrel
There it comes, advancing briskly against the breeze, at the height of about thirty feet, its wings in rapid motion, its head drawn close between its shoulders, its tail slightly spread in a horizontal direction, and its feet concealed among the plumage. Now it sails or glides a few yards, as if on motionless wings, curves upwards some feet, and stops short, supporting itself by rapid movements of its pinions, and expanding its tail. In a few seconds it flies forwards, flapping its wings, shoots off to a side, and sails, then rises a little, and fixes itself in the air. On such occasions it is searching the ground beneath for mice and small birds, feeding or reposing among the grass. Having discovered nothing, it proceeds a short way, and again hovers. In a few seconds it wheels round, flies right down the wind at a rapid rate, to the distance of some hundred yards, brings up, and hovers. Still nothing results, and again it glides away, bearing up at intervals, fixing itself for some seconds in the air, and then shooting along. When about to hover, it rises a few feet in a gentle curve, faces the wind, spreads its tail, moves its wings rapidly, and thus balancing itself keenly surveys the ground beneath. The range of the tips of the wings at this time is apparently about six or eight inches, but sometimes for a few seconds these organs seem almost, if not entirely, motionless. The bird has once more suddenly drawn up, and is examining the grass with more determinate attention. It slowly descends, fixes itself for a moment, inclines a little to one side, hovers so long that you may advance much nearer, but at length closing its wings and tail, falls like a stone, suddenly expands its wings and tail just as it touches the ground, clutches its prey, and ascending obliquely flies off with a rapid and direct flight.
How does a kestrel hover the way it does? It is a movement of such precision and control. The falcon holds itself in the air like a star you could navigate by. The bird is standing still, walking into the wind. Its head, its eyes are fixed to the ground beneath. Every minute adjustment of its wings and tail is made to keep the head in place. It is astonishing it can keep its head that still despite the wind which flings itself at the bird’s light frame. And really – more accurately – the kestrel is not hovering but balancing itself, pushing itself against the wind so that the force of the wind is cancelled out by the momentum of the bird’s flight. The kestrel is held in place, pinned by the interplay of wind and flight. If it is pushed back a few millimetres by the wind the falcon stretches its neck to keep its head in place. It adjusts to the rise or fall in the wind’s speed by alternating between glide and flap.
To hunt like this the kestrel needs the wind to hold it up. But if the wind is too strong, it becomes difficult to hover effectively, even more so when there is no wind at all. The kestrel can hover on a windless day, wings flickering, winnowing the air. But it is expensive – inefficient – to keep this up. So when the wind is not right or, in winter, when energy is precious, a kestrel hunts by other means than hovering. Sometimes it resorts to piracy: dive-bombing short-eared owls to make them spill their catch. But more often the kestrel will revert to hunting from a static perch, a hedgerow, tree or telegraph wire. A beetle can be spotted clambering through the grass from a perch 50 metres away, starlings foraging amongst cattle are clocked at 300 metres. It is less successful, this method of hunting, because the falcon cannot cover as much ground. But, especially in winter, static hunting conserves crucial energy. In spring and summer, when the male kestrel needs to work overtime, more often than not he reverts to aerial hunting.
After the ostrich and the field of mist I climb higher up onto the moor, but it is hopeless up here as I can see very little in the fog. A kestrel could not hunt in this. Occasionally the mist shifts enough for me to see a flashing red light from a television signal mast on the summit of the hill. The narrow road leading to the mast is cracked and split where frost has picked at it. I head down off the hill and follow a path pebbled black with sheep droppings. A few sheep cross the path ahead of me, smudged identification marks sprayed onto their backs, the turquoise dye corposant on their wool. On the lower slopes there is a brightness building inside the fog. Then suddenly I am out: the mist has ended like a stratum of the moor and I can see the wooded slopes above Rivington and a great stretch of the Lancashire Plain opening up below.
Of all the birds of prey the kestrel flares the most with light. In Gaelic she is the Clamhan ruadh, the red hawk. Ruadh: a less true red than the bolder, purer red of dearg. Ruadh: the coppery red of fox and rust and a roe deer’s summer pelt. The male kestrel is the brighter red, his brightness offset by his beautiful pearl-grey head and tail. The female lacks this grey but both have black wings from the carpal joint down to the tip which accentuates the ochre colour of their back and upper wings. The female’s red is thinner, browner, more chestnut-coloured. Often, when the falcon banks to glide away, you catch that blush of colour down their back and wings. Sometimes, when the sun brushes a kestrel’s back, the bird’s feathers glint with brightness.
One night in July 1913 a huge blaze is spotted on the side of the hill above Rivington. Lord Leverhulme’s wooden summer home is on fire, burning through the night. A few hours earlier, the suffragette Edith Rigby had walked around Leverhulme’s property checking nobody was inside. When she was sure the house was empty she broke a window and poured paraffin through the hole, felt the trapped heat of the day spill out of the house when she smashed the glass. The place was tinder-dry, the pitch-pine walls warm to touch. Later, a night breeze licked up the fire, and from across the valley flames could be seen pouring out of the hillside. At her trial Rigby said:
I want to ask Sir William Lever whether he thinks his property on Rivington Pike is more valuable as one of his superfluous homes occasionally to be opened to people, or as a beacon lighted for King and Country, to see that here are some intolerable grievances for women.
I walk on down the hill’s shoulder. Around the 1,000-feet contour point, on the western edge of the hill, there is a large levelled area cut into the side of the moor. This is the spot where Leverhulme’s house stood. The area is matted with reeds and thick tussocks of grass. There are hints of concrete, like puddles, in amongst the grass. The flatness, the concrete undercoat, make the place feel like a neglected car park. No trace of the house, as if it had been swept clean away. Except, I find some black and white chequered tiles amongst the grass, the remains of a lavatory floor (once situated off the entrance to the ballroom). The tiles are in good condition, the white ones even look clean. A few dead leaves have settled on them as if someone had left a door open.
After the fire the house was rebuilt with stone. Leverhulme, who had made his fortune from packaging soap, was one of the wealthiest industrialists on the planet and he poured money into his hilltop home. Photographs from its brief heyday are otherworldly: wooden pagodas beside a Japanese lake, a glass-roofed pergola, a minstrel’s gallery above the ballroom, fluted pillars, Flemish tapestries, an ‘orchestra’ lawn. An entire hillside reclaimed from the moor and sculpted into ornate Italian gardens, boating lakes, waterfalls, terraces of rhododendrons. When Edith Rigby was reconnoitring the house for her arson attack she walked through the grounds passing grazing herds of llamas, kangaroos and ostriches. She noted how the animals seemed better housed and fed than many people on the land.
I stand up from the sundial stump where I ate my lunch and start to drop down off the hill, walking through the gardens. Everywhere the moor has crept back in. The croquet lawns are thick with rushes, the lakes silted up and grown over, the summer houses in brambles. Along the terrace steps, in the Italianate archways, you can see the detailed craftsmanship in the stonework. Then I am out of the terraced gardens onto a change in gradient. The ground begins to level and I think this is where the zebras and ostriches must have grazed, where Edith Rigby parked her car before the long slog up the hill with the paraffin kegs. The paths here are deeply grooved by runoff from the moor. Allotments, school playing fields, the woods giving way to the creased edge of the town.
A few
years after Edith Rigby burnt down his home, Leverhulme bought the islands of Lewis and Harris in their entirety. The village where William MacGillivray went to school as a boy, Obbe, Leverhulme renamed after himself, changing its name to Leverburgh. A century on from the meeting between MacGillivray, his uncle and the laird over the tenancy of the farm at Northton, the same land disputes continued to flare through the islands. In 1919 a group of crofters from Northton challenged their new landlord, Leverhulme, with his lack of empathy for their need for land, with the same passion as MacGillivray had done when he confronted MacLeod and his duplicitous factor, Stewart. In a letter from 1919 petitioning the Board of Agriculture for the farm at Rodel, ten crofters from Northton wrote:
We shall never submit tamely like our forefathers. We shall not be compelled to leave our native land without struggle. If something is not done soon, I am afraid we shall be compelled to take possession in our own way. The following are those who wish to be given a small-holding on Rodel without delay …
When MacGillivray opened up the kestrel to inspect its stomach he found, for the most part, the hair, bones and teeth of mice and shrews. But also, he wrote,
I have found the remains of young larks, thrushes, lapwings and several small birds both granivorous and slender-billed, together with the common dung-beetle, many other coleopteran, and the earthworm.
Add to this: the occasional lizard, rat, mole and slug (one kestrel was observed carefully skinning slugs, lifting them up to its bill, swallowing the slugs whole, a residue of slime glistening on the kestrel’s foot). The kestrel is somewhere between a specialist and generalist, somewhere between the short-eared owl, with its dependency on voles, and the more omnivorous buzzard. The kestrel can adapt its diet, diverge from voles when it needs to, but field voles are its mainstay; it cannot completely do without them. Population density, breeding success: both are impacted by the availability of voles. Starvation, the most common cause of mortality in kestrels (juvenile birds especially), is most prevalent in poor vole years, or when the voles are sealed by heavy snow.
They live short lives, these small falcons. There is none of the slow burn to adulthood you find in larger birds of prey. Kestrels can breed in their first year. The majority die before their second. They can be sedentary or migratory; much, again, depends on voles. There is an emptying out of kestrels from the uplands in winter; some birds migrate long distances, others remain in their breeding territories year round. Nest is a hole in a hollow tree, a disused crow’s nest, a scrape on the side of a cliff (like all falcons, the kestrel does not build a nest). On treeless Orkney, where there are no foxes, kestrels nest in deep heather. Buildings serve as stand-in cliffs; in German the kestrel is the Turmfalke (the tower falcon). Window boxes, windmill ledges, church steeples, gutters … as long as the site is sheltered, out of reach of ground predators, and will contain and hold their eggs.
There is a risk we take this common bird of prey for granted, that we view the kestrel as more adaptable than it is capable of being. The kestrel is not as common as it used to be. Since the mid-1970s its population has declined in England by more than a quarter. Scotland’s population has also plummeted in the last two decades. If we destroy the habitats for field voles, the meadows and field margins, the tangled unkempt places, kestrels will find it hard to cope.
From the town I keep looking back towards the moor and the wooded slopes below Leverhulme’s home. It is not so clear-cut, the switch from moor to town: the two can mingle and fuse with one another. Kestrels move easily between the two spheres, hunting over the moor, nesting on the town’s buildings, on its disused factory chimneys. And sometimes the town slips out of itself to re-emerge up on the moor. In September 1896, 10,000 people walked up through the streets of Bolton, climbing up onto the hill in a mass trespass to stake their right to follow a path over the moor, the buildings emptying that morning and the noise of the exodus like a slow exhalation of the town’s breath. Gamekeepers and policemen met the trespassers at the edge of the moor, noting ringleaders, the crowd churning past them through the disputed gate.
During the war a replica town was built up on the moor: a decoy, constructed of lights and long channels laid over the turf. The lights were used to resemble a poorly blacked-out town, leaking light from its doorways and factory furnaces. The purpose was to fool enemy aircraft into thinking they had reached their target. Fuel in the channels was ignited then flooded with oil and water so that it looked as if a town was already burning (and exploding) down there. The decoy was built on the moor to protect the crucial royal ordnance factory near Chorley. The fuel tanks, pipes and poles with lights on top of them stayed in place up there, on the hillside to the west of Belmont, for the duration of the war. Not so much a replica town, more the idea – the thought – of a town sketched onto the moor. A town stripped down to its circuit board.
I am walking through the suburbs of Horwich now, heading towards the M61 motorway. The hum of its traffic has been with me all morning. On one street, in a tiny front garden, there is a birch tree with all its leaves shaken out. A collared dove is perched in the tree like a bulb of grey light. MacGillivray paused near here on route to London, recharging his spirits in a public house in Chorley, sitting beside the fire, smoking a pipe, deciding then to not give up, to shun the stagecoach seat, and carry on with his walk to London, although, he wrote, my stumps should be worn off to the knees …
I turn left off the street into a thin alleyway that runs along a row of back gardens. Old grass cuttings, tipped over the fence, are suspended in bramble bushes like frozen spray. The ground is slippery from the mulch made by the cuttings. In places logs have been laid across the path to serve as stepping stones. The other side of the path is flanked by the embankment of a disused railway, its slope rusty with discarded Christmas trees. Birch and hawthorn take over as the path becomes muddier and I drop down towards the edge of the town.
The rest of the day I spend walking beside the motorway through the wet fields on either side. This is where I hope to find the kestrel, in the tall grass along the motorway’s sidings, between the slip roads and roundabouts. I use the footbridges over the motorway as lookout points, scanning the embankment with my binoculars, swaying above the traffic. A farm track leads to a tunnel under the motorway; it is a quiet echo chamber, lit with puddles, with a high ceiling to allow farm vehicles through. The tunnel is a good place to pause a while away from the wind and whoosh of the motorway. Its arched entrance frames the view of where I have walked today: the hill, now clear of mist, the wooded slopes of Leverhulme’s old home, the town across the fields to the east.
Raptors Page 13