Dissolve the border: bring the different harrier species together, let their territories overlap (as they do across their global breeding range). It is then that you really see how the birds differ. Within a shared habitat each species of harrier is its own specialist. The marsh harrier, with its longer legs, hunts over the taller reed beds; the Montagu’s, with its shorter tarsi and claws, ranges inland across shallower vegetation, pursuing smaller, more agile prey and with a tendency to be more insectivorous than its larger neighbours, the hen and marsh harriers. Even their breeding seasons are staggered so that the different harrier species avoid competing with each other when the demand for prey to provide for their young is at its height. Marsh harrier, Montagu’s harrier, hen harrier, pallid harrier (which overwinters with the Montagu’s in India and Africa and has a shorter wing and faster flight), they have all evolved to coexist.
Dissolving borders, the interchange of land and water, the blurring of the two together: welcome to The Fens, where the land is lower than the sea and everywhere is peat and silt and water. And if it is not water then it is land reclaimed from water, and land taken from water is land that has a memory of water, or land that tries to dream the water back to life. A place where water loses its identity, where there is no gravity to instruct the rivers, where salt and fresh water meet and meld and sometimes meet so destructively, like two avalanches rushing at each other, that the land is drowned for weeks on end. A place where a plough working a black field miles inland can exhume the skeleton of a whale from out of the peat; where once, during a winter flood, a ship ran aground on a submerged house and, thinking they had struck a rock, the sailors committed themselves to God and saved themselves only by clinging to the roof.
She is still coming towards me down the side of the hedge. Through my binoculars I can see the cupped disc of her face and the dark bands across her tail. When she veers close to the hedge the white rump at the top of her tail looks like a splash of hawthorn blossom against the hedge. It is the most conspicuous part of her, this white strap across her middle, the most brightly lit part of her plumage, flashing, signalling across the fields. She is moving quickly and I wonder if the lack of wind means she is finding it hard to steady her pace. I try to stay hidden. I don’t want to startle her with my presence and so I burrow a little deeper into the hedge, combing the long grass over my back and around my head. My worry is that she will notice the sun glinting off the glass lenses of my binoculars. I watch her as she keeps to the same course, the same linear route across the field.
Lines are an important feature of the way a Montagu’s harrier hunts. The birds will often head out from the nest site in a straight line following a hedge or the side of a wood, foraging along its tangled margin, looking to come across prey by surprise. The birds rarely deviate from this flight path, continuing to head out on the same trajectory, sometimes for up to 12 kilometres from the nest site, a much greater distance than hen and marsh harriers forage from the nest. In this way the Montagu’s harrier reads the landscape differently from the hen harrier. The latter is more inclined to hunt by hugging contours, dipping and rising with the swell of the land. The Montagu’s harrier is a bird of grids and patchworks, of roadside verges and ditches, utilising the linear structures we have drawn across the land.
And there is no landscape more linear than The Fens, no place I have come across in these islands that has been so straightened by drainage and agriculture. Here is an uncovered landscape, the inverse of what happened at Culbin, where the land was smothered by the sandstorm, and the valley of the Upper Tyne, when it was flooded by the building of the Kielder dam.
Before it was uncovered – before it was fully drained – much of The Fens was known as ‘half-land’, ground that was neither permanently flooded nor high enough to escape the winter floods, a place where the border between land and water was constantly breached and blurred and the boundary between fresh and salt water was often hazy. Sometimes spring tides would breach so far inland that deposits of silt would be left like a smear of grease across the peat. Beneath the peat of the southern fens and the silt zones to the north which border The Wash, there is such an interchange of marine and freshwater deposits layering the soil, it is impossible to tell where the sea began or the rivers ended.
How do you begin to bring such a disobedient landscape under control? It took centuries of incremental progress, of drainage schemes that could be undone by a single night of heavy rain, a drain left unmaintained, or somebody’s pigs rooting over a dyke. For every acre of reclaimed land, the fen would revert to water at the slightest opportunity. Often drainage works would be sabotaged by locals fed up with the taxes levied on them to pay for the schemes and the disruptions that drainage caused to their livelihoods, to navigation, fishing and wildfowling.
But the land’s potential to be made profitable drove the drainage schemes on. Rivers were straightened and diverted, cuttings and outlets excavated, outfalls dredged of silt. Sluices, locks, scoop wheels, pumping stations were implemented; windmills, then steam, then diesel, drove the pumps. The old scribbled, sluggish routes of the rivers that choked and spilled across The Fens were diverted, dried up, became ghost rivers, extinct waterways, void of all but their names – a roddon, a slade. Extinct, but still visible – made ghostlike – from their residues of silt and shell marl winding across the dark and shrinking peat. Shrinking because if you take the water out of peat it is quickly replaced with air, oxidation follows and then bacteria set to work, breaking down the peat so that the plant materials decompose. The impact of this is dramatic: the peat shrinks and the land drops away from under itself, leaving behind the strangest of landscapes, a place where rivers have to be carried like aqueducts above the constantly shrinking fields, where houses are left with their front doors suspended 12 feet above the ground, where trees sit on top of their exposed roots.
And linking the ghost rivers – the roddons and slades – are the outlines of eviscerated lakes or meres, the lakes’ white freshwater chalk deposits and marls, like pale birthmarks, still visible against the black peat. Huge lakes were drained and disappeared: Trundle, Ugg, Brick, Ramsey, Benwick, Whittlesea … all names of lakes that have vanished from The Fens. Whittlesea Mere: the second-largest lake in England, which in the space of two years between 1851 and 1853 went from a place of pleasure yachts and sudden storms to fields of yellow corn.
I watch the female Montagu’s harrier circling for a long time with prey in her talons. She seems hesitant about returning to her nest and instead lands several times a good distance away. Then she is up again, circling, the prey still clutched beneath her. Something is unsettling her. I move back deeper into the hedge. Then I notice the farmer has parked his car at the edge of the field and he is slowly walking through the crop, waist-deep in barley. As he walks he picks the occasional barley ear, rubs it against his palm and inspects the grains. They are skittish birds, Montagu’s harriers, they live the jittery, nervous life of a ground-nester, often unsettled by the presence of a large animal near the nest site, anything from a passing roe deer to a pheasant. Eventually the farmer leaves the field and the female is quickly down onto the nest.
It is a strange spot for a bird as rare as this (the rarest British breeding bird of prey): a busy habitat, a steady flow of traffic down the road that borders one side of the field. Walkers and horse riders pass along a bridleway which separates the wheat from the barley crop and I notice how the harrier uses this path and the adjacent hedge as one of her linear hunting routes. There is a village two fields away, a glimpse of brick and flint through the trees, though the buildings are barely visible in the shimmering heat. The nest is monitored by the RSPB, and before the field is harvested, the immediate vicinity around the nest is cordoned off and the young harriers fenced in so they do not disperse through the crop when it is being cut.
If a ghost is nothing more than the trace left behind, the scent or spoor of something vanished like a line of snowy shell marl from an extinct river, sem
i-luminous against the black peat, then the Montagu’s harrier is like a ghost over the English fenlands. She is so rare and dwindling a species in these islands, she is barely here at all and exists on the verge of vanishing. She hunts over a landscape that has changed beyond all recognition. A place so drained and straightened that her long-distance linear flight paths could be a symptom of the landscape, a heading out indefinitely in search of a less sanitised – a more disobedient – version of the land.
Huge crowds gathered to witness the draining of Whittlesea Mere. People waded across the wet mud with boards attached to the soles of their shoes, scooping up the thousands of stranded fish into sacks and baskets. The mud was so thick, the boards on their shoes so cumbersome, the fish-gleaners moved like cattle across the lake bed, slow and heavy. Eels shivered and flickered through the remaining pools as if the water was boiling over. So many fish were gathered up that day that several carts were filled and the catch wheeled off to the markets in Birmingham and Manchester. Some months later, after roads and farms had been marked out across the reclaimed land, heavy November rains swelled the rivers causing the dykes to burst, and within hours the lake was a lake once more.
The breached dykes were repaired and reinforced. An Appold pump with a 25-horsepower engine was put to work and Whittlesea Mere was drained again within the space of three weeks. Then came the drying and the cracking of the mud into thousands of fissures and crevasses. Horses were out of the question: even if they were shod with wooden boards the mud was too thick to take their weight, and when it dried the cracks too wide and deep for horses to tread safely. To make the mud pliable the new ground had to be harrowed over and over again by hand. Coleseed and Italian ryegrass were planted first; the ryegrass did better in the wet conditions.
As the mud was worked over it dislodged things – treasures – of startling antiquity: items, lost from storm-havocked boats, that had lain at the bottom of the lake for centuries. Objects caked in mud that when picked up felt heavier than mud and possessed the hint of a bright undercoat, a tincture of light seen through cracks in the mantle. Two of these treasures, a fourteenth-century gilded silver censer and an incense boat, are on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I went and found them one afternoon in their glass case in a basement room of the museum. Both objects are assumed to have belonged to the Benedictine monastery at Ramsey Abbey situated a few miles from Whittlesea Mere. The censer and incense boat are the only surviving examples of their kind; all similar ecclesiastical treasures were confiscated and melted down during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Survivors, gilded rarities, they shimmer under the glass. The deck and hull of the incense boat is worn silver accentuated by a rim of gold leaf around the gunwale. A ram’s head at either end, carved into the stern and prow, with curved horns like tiny mollusc shells. The fleece down the rams’ necks is plaited drops of silver. The engraving along the gunwale is very delicate like a seam of stitchwork. Next to the boat, the censer is brighter, entirely covered in gold leaf. About the size of a child’s face, the censer is designed as a medieval chapter house, complete with miniature lancet windows, battlements, parapets … The lights in the museum are so bright they make a shadow of the lancet arches in the censer’s charcoal-scuffed centre.
As the Montagu’s harrier ages there is a gradual uncovering of the bird’s eye colour. Both sexes are born with their eyes brown, though their underlying colour, like the mud-coated censer, is a bright jewel-like yellow. Whilst they are still in the nest the males’ eyes quickly change to a greyish-brown (a useful indicator in sexing the birds at this age). By their first winter the males’ irides have changed again from grey-brown to a clear bright yellow. The brown in the females’ eyes fades more slowly, gradually revealing glimpses of the yellow beneath as the brown dissipates. For several years, whilst the brown slowly gives way to the underlying yellow, the female harrier’s eyes appear orange. By her third or fourth year her eyes have cleared to the same bright yellow as the male.
For nearly an hour through the heat of the early afternoon I do not see the female. Then at 2.10 p.m. she startles me by flying straight past my hiding place in the hedge – long wings and a whoosh of air. By the time I pick her up again she has reached the end of the hedge. She turns around and begins to fly quickly back down the side of the hedge towards me, twisting, flickering low across the field. As she draws parallel she tilts her head in my direction. Her face seems very small, more like an eye than a face. I can see the dark shading on her cheeks and the white patch around her eyes.
She keeps to the same line, tracking along the side of the hedge. At the point where she passes the dead oak tree she is briefly surrounded by a flurry of white shapes. It looks as if a pillow has burst around her. I refocus my binoculars: the downdraught from her wings is disturbing a cluster of white butterflies. Everywhere butterflies are being shaken up towards her, dusting around the harrier as if she has entered a sudden snow shower.
IX
Peregrine Falcon
Coventry
When I reach the bench I find them as I had left them the week before. Both birds are perched above me, the male on a ledge high on the spire of Holy Trinity, the female on the flèche of the new cathedral, directly opposite her mate. The bench sits in the ruins of Coventry’s old cathedral. It is a contained space away from the noise of the city, not unlike the corrie on the side of the mountain in Sutherland, a place of enclosed stillness, where the ruin’s walls hold and amplify the sound of the falcons calling to each other.
Coventry is not far from where I live and I was able to visit the peregrines there on several occasions. My frustration with this journey, trying to find the different birds of prey, is that my time with the birds – in each place – was so transitory. I always left reluctantly. I felt acutely the need to spend more time among the birds. So with the peregrines in the centre of Coventry I was fortunate that I could keep returning to them. One June, whenever I had a spare morning, I hurried back to the cathedral ruins, arriving at the bench soon after dawn, the sun turning the cathedral’s sandstone a deep chestnut red, flocks of gulls passing over the city in their silent morning height. The falcons were always there, at home, often perched in the same place I had left them.
June: the peregrine’s month, when skies are pierced with the male’s hunting tracers, when cliffs echo with the begging calls of young falcons who rush towards flight so rapidly they have different names for almost every passing week: an eyass, then a ramage hawk, then a brancher, all before the young have left the nest and learnt to soar.
I used to spend hours as a boy in a secretive glen near our home. Its steep, bracken-covered slopes cut if off from the world; a refuge for roe deer, a waterway for dippers. In the summer months I camped down there amid the reek of wild garlic, swam in the burn’s slack elbows. Bright, cold water: lovely to drink, so cold it burnt your teeth. Halfway up the glen, around a sharp kink in the burn, was the peregrine’s cliff. At the foot of the cliff the rock was curtained by a deep bank of moss where dippers hid their nest. The water was so clear I sometimes watched the dippers treading the shallows after the caddis and mayfly nymphs. The current, where it met the dipper’s breast, shaped the water like bracken fronds when their young necks are fiddleheads.
Dippers were my water scouts, leading the way up the burn. A sharp zeet call, then a short dash upstream to the next boulder where they waited for me, bobbing above the rushing water, their lit breasts, like white aprons, signalling. The dippers lived on the cusp of worlds, half in the water, half out. Jettisoning their buoyancy, they somehow, miraculously, walked along the river bed, foraging there, head first into the fierce currents.
Back then peregrines were scarcer, birds of the peripheries, of upland crags and seabird islands. Their population was still recovering from a dramatic crash in the middle of the twentieth century. From the early 1950s through to the mid-Sixties peregrines had been somewhere awful. Poison seeped into their world: a
gricultural pesticides trickling down the chain from seed to pigeon to falcon. Organochlorine compounds built up in the tissues of peregrines (also other raptors, notably golden eagles and sparrowhawks). The effect of these compounds was to reduce the supply of calcium carbonate (critical in the egg-formation process) to the egg shells. It caused the shells to thin and grow so fragile that the eggs would crack under the weight of the brooding adult birds. Thieves, looking for eggs patterned with the swirling reds and browns of Mars or Jupiter, found only broken shells. The birds’ behaviour addled. Female peregrines brooded empty scrapes or sat for weeks on the wreckage of their eggs. Some peregrines took to ousting kestrels from their nests, hatching and then raising kestrel chicks instead. The population crashed. The birds died like a language, receding to the outer skerries of our world.
They were fiercely territorial, those falcons that came to nest each spring in the glen. Launching themselves from the cliff, tearing down towards me, screaming as they swooped low over my head. I would hurry on up the glen, criss-crossing the burn, then climb one of the steep banks, past the falcons’ plucking post, a puff of pigeon feathers turning in the breeze, to where I could watch the birds through binoculars without disturbing them. My memory of the glen is of a world of terrific speeds, the falcons rushing high above me or tearing past my head, the young peregrines chasing after their parents along the cliffs, begging for food. Nothing was ever still in their world. For a few months in spring and early summer the glen was pierced with noise and speed.
Raptors Page 15