Raptors

by James Macdonald Lockhart

  In the end all landscapes tell the same stories, everywhere is layered with the same strata of clearances, displacements, resettlements. Around the Isle of Sheppey, in the mudbanks and creeks of the Medway, there is everywhere the legacy of enforced detentions, segregations and quarantines. Lazarets and prison ships: vessels on route to London from plague-infected ports were placed in quarantine in the creeks off Sheppey; hulks stuffed to the brim with French prisoners from the Napoleonic wars were also moored in the Medway. The prisoners died from smallpox, typhoid and cholera in their thousands and were buried in the surrounding marshes. Deadman’s Island, lying just off Sheppey’s west coast, became an island tomb. If you go to Deadman’s Island today it is a place strewn with human bones, spilt from their graves by the sea’s gnawing.

  After the sparrowhawk encounter I head west across the fields towards a long, sinuous reed bed. The light is going and in the middle of one field I disturb a dozen swans, camouflaged against the snow. The swans rise heavily into the dusk. A merlin is here too, still charged with energy, still flickering intensely. He darts past me, skimming the ground, checking nothing is loose.

  I wait beside the reed bed and watch as marsh harriers come in off the white fields making for their roost. Dark and slow, low-flying shapes folding into reeds. A large dark brown female with a reddish tint to her tail comes very close. At the last moment, when she sees me, she banks away, tipping herself over the edge of the reeds. Her pale cream face a faint light inside the dusk.

  XII

  Honey Buzzard

  The New Forest

  I reach the New Forest in the middle of August when the place is locked in its own microclimate of humidity. In deep bracken, beneath holly trees, I clear a space to pitch my tent. Bracken, cut and flattened, softens the floor to sleep on; in the Forest, for centuries, it was harvested as litter and bedding for animals. In the autumn, huge bracken stacks, tall as houses, grew up next to farm steadings as if the buildings had sprouted – bloomed – sudden strange appendages. Some of the stacks were so vast it looked as if an old rusty sun had been rolled into the farmyard and left there to burn itself out. And the smell! The great bracken-rich smell of the forest come out of the forest to linger in people’s homes and hair and skin so that the smell pervaded everything.

  There are holly trees all around my tent. Birch and oak are here too but holly dominates and I am glad of its shade and the way its thick screen hides my tent. Holly is hospitable like that, protective, nurturing: the humus it lays down helps oak and beech to get a footing in the degraded acidic soils of the Forest. A ‘holm’ in the New Forest is the name for a dense stand of holly. You see the holly holms rolling over the higher ground above the valleys like storm clouds snagged on the heath. I like that a holm can also, for a while, be a home to other species, to oak and beech and yew and rowan, nurturing them, protecting these trees from the voracious grazing of the Forest’s deer and ponies. In places around my tent the ground is ankle-deep with brittle holly leaves, the floor crackles when I step on them. In among the leaves are dried whorls of pony dung, baked hard and white by the sun. When I flick the droppings with a stick to clear a space for my tent, underneath the baked exterior the dung is black and moist and pitted with tiny insect burrowing.

  Holm is a common place-name in the Forest. As is ‘hat’, an older word for holm, and a lovely term which describes the prominent shape and stance of the holly stands sitting up on the high ground. Though such is the age of the New Forest, many of the ‘holm’ or ‘hat’ place-names no longer have hollies (or sometimes any trees) growing there, the original hollies having died and been replaced by open heath or other species of tree.

  Often a place forgets its given name. Landscape is always changing and it can quickly become remote and unreconciled from the meaning of its name. So a holly holm becomes a home for something else, and ‘hawk hill’ or Cnoc na h-Iolaire (the eagle’s hill) may not have seen a bird of prey for centuries. But the name remains to document the absence. And sometimes all you see of a place is what is missing.

  The experience of absence was the most important experience of my journey. More often than not, that is the experience of searching for raptors: the birds are not where they might be, or not where you want them to be. Many birds of prey lead evanescent, hidden lives and many species are instinctively wary of man. Even buzzards, which are now quite common throughout much of the country, never let you get that close, always exiting their perch just ahead of your approach. Most of my time out looking for the birds was spent not seeing them, not finding them. Sometimes, as with goshawks in the Border forests or sea eagles in the Morvern peninsula, I went for days without seeing the birds. So I was confronted all the time by their absence and I came, gradually, sometimes reluctantly, to appreciate the experience of that absence as being crucial to experiencing the birds, to appreciating their rarity and fragility, to respecting their space, to acknowledging the distance the birds needed to put between us.

  Everywhere I went – from Morvern’s empty glens to the abandoned one-night houses of Wales – I witnessed absence, or, more accurately, the legacies of absence. A journey through Britain’s landscapes is a journey through narratives of absence. The land is so much emptier than I had imagined. Sometimes I found it difficult to separate the two strands of my journey: the stories of the birds, and the stories of the landscapes I went to search for the birds in, were always interacting, always working off each other; human and raptor fusing, each one inhabiting the other. You cannot separate the story of Britain’s birds of prey from the birds’ relationship with man. That relationship is the birds’ story. So the narratives of absence I kept coming across in the wider landscape often, unavoidably, tangled themselves with the stories of persecution, removal and extinction that mark the narrative of so many of our birds of prey.

  I went to the New Forest to try to get better at not seeing, not finding the birds. I wanted to be more patient, to not always be impatient to try to tick the birds off with a sighting. I wanted not to worry too much if I did or didn’t find the birds. I wanted to appreciate more the experience of not seeing them. Historically, traditionally, honey buzzards have bred in the New Forest. Perhaps they were there when I visited, perhaps not; I was determined to not really mind, to let go of minding. Some birds live cryptozoic (hidden) lives and I wanted to respect that. My aim was simply to immerse myself in the honey buzzard’s forest habitat and spend some time amid the possibility of the birds.

  I am drawn to cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, the searching for creatures that may not (and are unlikely to) exist. Most scientists think cryptozoology a nonsense and a waste of time, searching for Yetis, Loch Ness Monsters and the like. But I’m drawn to cryptozoology as a depository of metaphors, that searching for something that may not be there, the questing after absence. Cryptids (the creatures that cryptozoologists study) are things of absence or such elusiveness that they only exist beyond our reach or ken. Sometimes on my journey it felt that I was searching for birds that had slipped beyond my reach. Birds of prey can be so elusive, so unattainable, they can feel, at times, like cryptids themselves.

  If I had to pick one bird of prey to represent – to epitomise – absence, it would be hard to choose from the roll-call of candidates. So many of our raptors are synonymous with absence. Several, still, are conspicuous by their absence. But if I had to choose, I would choose the one that lives the most cryptozoic life. The honey buzzard is a bird of such elusiveness and strangeness that it teeters on the brink of myth, a bird whose presence here is so short-lived and secretive it is barely here at all.

  The first visitor to my new home – to my clearing in the bracken – was a robin. I heard its tiny feet on the leaf litter and noticed the bracken fronds shifting as the bird brushed against them. The robin hopped closer, paused, tilted his head towards me then skittered across the leaf fall, his feet over the dry leaves making a soft scratching sound.

  After the robin had gone there was a l
ong stint of quiet. I sat outside the tent until it was dark. Then the owls began. Right over my head the first tawny owl sent out a sharp, piercing k-wick, answered by a long-drawn-out hal-loo. For the next half an hour the owls took over and the noise of their calling was all around me. The tent caught and amplified every sound that touched it and I heard one owl leave its perch and zip over the top of the tent to land in the nearest holly tree. There must have been only an inch or two between my face and the owl as it skimmed over the canvas. Then it was quiet and I slept a little and woke again at 2 a.m., woken not by any noise but by the silence. It was so still, so strangely quiet, as if the forest was listening to itself.

  At dawn, all new sounds: a blackbird scuffle, a jay’s scratch, a woodpecker’s yaffle. I get up and wash my face in a rusty brook, stirring up clouds of iron breath. After washing, I push, by mistake, through a cove of spiders’ webs strung between pine branches, feel the threads prickling, sticking to my damp hair and skin. Beside the brook are several birch trees, their trunks so wrinkled with age they look like oaks.

  The rest of the day I spend wandering through the Forest. For long periods I just sat, waited and listened. And wonderful things came to me that way: a nuthatch, a lesser spotted woodpecker, a squirrel-shower (beech leaves spluttering down on top of me from where a squirrel leapt). Tree stumps were dinner plates for pine-cone seeds left there by the squirrels. The air among the spacious rows of pine was cooler where the breeze had more room to flex. The pink skin of Scots pine showed through the cracks in its fissured bark. Ponies stood in swishing pools of shade amongst the trees.

  The New Forest is such a vulnerable, fragile place, encircled – periodically threatened – by development. It is an environment which endures massive pressures on it, from recreation to livestock grazing; in places the forest is so sparse, grazed down to its bare knuckles by the ponies and deer. Only the unpalatable species remain: wood spurge, wood sorrel, butcher’s broom … The forest understory is such a depleted space, you can see a long way – unnaturally far – through the trees. What is abundant – what is luxuriant – in the Forest is the great diversity of bryophytes, the mosses which love to fur the moist south-western side of trees and the lichens which blotch and crust the rest. And everywhere too in the Forest there is an abundance of decaying wood. Old trees take so long to die and in their long death the Forest’s ancient trees are home to many insects. All the dead-wood tenants are here: flies, beetles, bees and wasps. And they are here like nowhere else in the country, the diversity of invertebrate species is quite exceptional. Thirty species of bees and wasps alone in the New Forest and, of the wasps, the common wasp is found here, also the German wasp, the red wasp, the tree wasp and Norwegian wasp.

  Wasps: they are the reason the honey buzzard is here. They are the reason the bird migrates in summer from sub-Saharan Africa into Europe and Russia. Wasps are the reason too why the honey buzzard lives such a cryptozoic, secretive life and why it is so unlike any other bird of prey. An old name for the honey buzzard was bee-hawk and that is a more true description of what the honey buzzard is, though wasp-hawk would be more accurate still. For, despite its beautiful name, the honey buzzard does not eat honey, nor is it a buzzard. What it does eat – what it loves to eat more than anything – is wasp larvae.

  Unlike any other bird of prey is the way its claws are blunt and almost straight (not sharp and curved like other raptors). For the honey buzzard is a walker, a burrower, a digger-out of wasp nests from underground, a bird-badger. And it is a good walker, not awkward on its feet like other large birds of prey. MacGillivray noticed from his dissecting table that the bee-hawk’s claws were long, rather slender, arcuate, less curved than in any other British genus. He noticed too in the specimen of a young male honey buzzard killed near Stirling in June 1838 which came into his hands on the 9th of that month, when it was perfectly fresh that its soles were crusted with mud or earth; the claws very slightly blunted.

  Also unlike other birds of prey in the way its bill is more delicate. It needs to be, to enable the honey buzzard to carefully extract the wasp grubs from their cells. For the same reason, the bird’s tongue is also highly distinctive, fat and tubular, designed for prising – perhaps sucking – the larvae from their chambers. The adult honey buzzard feeds its young like this, plucking out wasp grubs one at a time from the wasp comb then presenting the grubs to its chicks. It is a delicate, tidy procedure, the comb is handled carefully until every grub has been removed. Only then is the comb discarded, often trodden down into the detritus of the nest.

  Even the honey buzzard’s internal organs (MacGillivray would love this observation) are distinct from other birds of prey. Their gizzards are lighter and their small intestine much shorter than in most other raptors because the soft wasp larvae are more easily digested than the flesh and bones and fur that many other birds of prey consume. Also, wasps are the reason the honey buzzard rarely regurgitates pellets. It rarely needs to, because, again, the softness of the insect larvae is easy to digest, unlike the indigestible matter – the bones and feathers – which other birds of prey expel in their pellets.

  Wasps are crucial, they are integral to what the honey buzzard is. But wasp larvae are not the only thing honey buzzards eat, the larva is not always available. In Britain, when the first honey buzzards arrive from their migration around the middle of May, wasps are largely inactive. So the birds top up their diet and, importantly, the females increase fat reserves before laying, by feeding on nestling birds (especially pigeon squabs), frogs, lizards and other insects. Dungheaps are favoured resources for excavating grubs and worms. Beetles, weevils, earwigs, ants … have all been found in a honey buzzard’s stomach. The stomach of the male specimen that MacGillivray dissected was filled with fragments of bees and numerous larvae, among which no honey or wax was found. Bee nests are frequently raided by honey buzzards. In the British uplands, where bumblebees are common on the heather moors, the bees are a significant prey species for the birds. Sometimes young honey buzzards become gluey with honey that leaks from the combs brought into the nest by the adult birds, leaves and twigs stick to the legs of the chicks as they wander about the nest. In poor wasp years, bees can provide an important supplement. Also frogs, which are usually skinned first by the adult birds before they are fed to the young.

  But even when wasps are inactive, the honey buzzard is thinking about wasps. It has to think about them – to anticipate the wasps – in order to survive and rear its young. So after laying and during the long period of incubation the male honey buzzard becomes a map-maker, a cartographer of wasp nests. He does not raid the nests during this period as they are not sufficiently developed. Instead he makes a survey of his patch, recording – storing – the locations of all the wasp nests he can find. Later in the season, he will draw on this memory-map to return and plunder the nests when they are more advanced and stocked with fattening grubs.

  But all birds of prey are map-makers. They rely on intimate knowledge of landscape to hunt, routinely returning to the places where they know prey can be found at certain times of day. Routine is everything. Landscape is memorised, landscape is memory. But the honey buzzard’s map is more enhanced in scale. It deals in the minutiae of place, in the minuscule world of invertebrates. The woodland clearing, the forest ride and forest purlieu, these are the honey buzzard’s theatres, its zones of interest. Dense forestry plantations are no good, they suffocate everything. The honey buzzard needs woodland that is light and roomy. It needs glades and tracks, woods that intersperse themselves with openings. The honey buzzard sits in a tree on the edge of these clearings, keeping watch, static hunting. And when it spots a worker wasp heading back to its colony, the honey buzzard slips from its lookout branch like a shadow unhooking itself and follows in the wasp’s wake, tracking the wasp back to its nest.

  But if the weather closes in, smudging everything, then wasps can be hard to track like this. And it’s then that the honey buzzard’s memory-map of wasp-nest locatio
ns becomes a lifeline. By storing the locations of wasp nests early in the season, the honey buzzard is laying down a cache of knowledge. And this enables the birds to be more climatically resilient than it’s often assumed they are. It enables honey buzzards, for instance, to breed just as successfully in the British uplands (where it is generally cooler and wetter) as they do in the more benign lowlands. If wasp numbers are seriously depressed this can impact honey buzzard breeding success. But wasps are also more climatically resilient than we assume and the insects have been observed to forage even in heavy rain.

  Perhaps more than climate – more than temperature and precipitation – soil consistency is what limits the distribution of honey buzzards. The earth needs to be diggable, friable. The honey buzzard is a miner of wasp nests, it needs to be able to extract the nests from the ground. So heavy clay is no good, hard, arid ground is no good for honey buzzards. Even where wasp numbers are high, as in Mediterranean countries, honey buzzards are scarce because of the difficulty of getting at the wasps in such a dry, baked landscape. Light sandy soils are good, ground covered in a thick mulch of pine needles is good. The bird’s digging instinct is so strong that young honey buzzards are known to scrape holes in the bottom of their nest, occasionally to such an extent that their digging undermines the stability of its structure.