– Here is his kestrel, a female, flaring red. He has the bird’s bright chestnut colours, the detail of its down feathers, the cupped disc beneath the eye, the steep cliff-drop of its beak, the beak’s black tip, the marble blue of the beak below the cere, the faint yellow of the cere itself, a black glint to the claws, a thread of ivy winding round the rock the bird is perched on; the kestrel poised, about to take off.
– Here is his ptarmigan with its feathered feet and semi-winter dress, painted ‘from an individual purchased in the Edinburgh market October 1831’. What is beautiful about his ptarmigan is the way he captures those feathers dissipating as they ermine from gold and grey and black to northern white.
– Next, a storm petrel, ‘from an individual caught off the Isle of May, 1832’.
– Then a pair of buoyant, bobbing wrens, ‘shot in the Pentland Hills in the Summer of 1832’.
– His water ouzels, ‘from individuals shot near St. Mary’s Loch, September 1832’, one in its first year of plumage and one young bird after moulting, the red-brown colours of its chest just starting to leak through.
– Sparrowhawks: an old orange-eyed female, long stretching talons, long legs, grey-black back.
– A tall, broad-chested, yellow-eyed female peregrine and a juvenile (I think) beside her with a reddish chest and heavy chainmail streaks across its breast.
– His merlins are precise: the blue of the male’s back, the black wing and tail primaries, the orange blush of his chest; the female’s lesser reds, her brown back, longer wings, longer tail; the juvenile’s crenulated brown and chestnut patterning, mantling a ring ouzel which is almost the same size as the merlins.
– Ah, and here is his honey buzzard, that male ‘taken near Stirling in the beginning of June 1838’. What a dark brown bird it is, so uniformly brown except for the grey above the cere and the light russet plumage above its legs.
– A red kite, another kestrel (the two red raptors next to one another).
– An osprey with the incomplete painting of the fish it’s caught, just a pencil sketch of where the fish should be. One of the osprey’s talons is also unfinished, lodged into the unfinished fish.
– And here is the painting of the golden eagle I was looking for. It is the last to emerge from storage. In fact, two paintings of eagles. One, like the osprey, is incomplete, only the cere and bill are painted. The other is of the eagle MacGillivray’s gravestone plaque was modelled on, the eagle’s thick talons embedded in a rabbit, the rabbit’s right eye wide and bright. The painting feels a little artificial: the eagle is standing too tall, not mantling its prey, and the rabbit, despite the eagle’s talon puncturing its neck, seems very much alive. A juvenile bird with white feathers showing on its tail and legs and wing, every feather delineated, the base of its tail all white except for the black trailing band. Demerara hues in the feathers along the eagle’s crown and nape.
Hobby, hober: to move, to stir, to jump about … I never learn; better to stay put and wait for the birds to come to me, don’t wander aimlessly about the heath all day. Which, of course, is what I do, and do not mind because I see so much that way. I am looking for the flash of white of a hobby’s throat lit up against the pine greens of the heath. And so everything that is white draws me in: egrets, an albino sika deer, black-headed gulls, a pair of spoonbills in the shallows, shelduck further out in the bay. In the woods I disturb a herd of deer and walk through the warmth of where they had been.
What am I looking for? A bolt of speed, a disturbance amongst the swifts. Something ‘smaller than a buzzard’, something ‘almost like a bird of prey’. The hobby’s jizz – its feel – the gist of it: somewhere between a peregrine and a swift. It has the peregrine’s black moustachial stripe, the falcon’s sharp-angled wings; it has the swift’s sickle, boomerang shape in flight. Prey: anything from a flying ant to a turtle dove. But especially dragonflies, moths, beetles, small birds, willow-wrens, chiffchaffs, tits, pipits, hirundines (swallows and martins), swifts, bats … The hobby is the only British bird of prey agile and fast enough to catch a swift, a bat, or a swallow in mid-air.
Just as the honey buzzard times its arrival and nesting to coincide with wasps, the hobby breeds in sync with the glut of young hirundines and July’s crop of dragonflies. That the hobby (like the honey buzzard, osprey and Montagu’s harrier) has to get out by autumn, migrating to sub-Saharan Africa, shows just how insectivorous a bird it is. Diet dictates migratory behaviour: the general rule of thumb is those raptors that feed on warm-blooded prey stay put, those that feed on cold-blooded species get out for winter as their prey dries up in the north. But why come back in spring? Why bother with such a long, hazardous migration twice a year? Why not stay in their wintering grounds, where it is generally warmer, where there is still food even for the insectivorous raptors in winter? Because the north in summer can be a land that is overbrimming, a place which offers much better opportunities for these birds to breed successfully. The pull of the north in spring is overwhelming. Hobbies have been recorded migrating northwards at an average speed of 71 kph (the return journey south in autumn is usually much slower than this). The journey – the awful journey – running the gauntlet of storms and Maltese gunmen who will shoot any migrating raptor within range, is not the point. It is getting back to the fickle north with its promise of all that light to work in.
Diet dictates migratory behaviour but also – for MacGillivray – diet dictates everything. To properly understand the bird, he felt, you needed to understand the mechanics of the bird:
… although I have selected the digestive organ as pre-eminently worthy of attention, I have not done so because I suppose them capable of affording a key to the natural system, but because the structure of the food determines not only the form and structure of the bird, but also the greater part of its daily occupations.
Wasps and other hymenoptera (bees especially) are integral to what the honey buzzard is; dragonflies and hirundines to what the hobby is. Especially dragonflies: in the British Isles, in recent decades, hobbies have been both increasing their numbers and spreading northwards out from their traditional heartland, the downlands and heathlands of southern England. Increase in dragonfly numbers has been an important factor in enabling hobbies to spread like this. There are roughly 2,800 hobby pairs now breeding here. Blink, and you will miss them.
The hobby in its winter quarters becomes a rain bird. It follows the rain, tracking thunderstorms and bands of rain that sweep south through southern Africa at this time of year. The hobby is much more insectivorous here than it is in its summer breeding territory. It can afford to be, can afford to hunt and eat less without the burden of young to raise. So the hobby tracks the rain, flies through the rain, flitting from rain cloud to rain cloud. Because the rain releases – induces – insects in their millions: locusts, flying ants, termites … The hobby is just one among many species of raptor that follows these insect blooms. After the rains come grasshoppers, beetles, dragonflies, small birds such as queleas, pipits and cisticoles.
I spend a lot of time walking along the north shore of the Arne peninsula. A fringe of gorse and birch separates the shore from the heath beyond. I enjoy slipping through this curtain of trees and scrub, from heath to shore and back again. The heath feels as remote as anywhere I have been on this journey, yet I just need to step through a gap in the gorse, breach the border, and there are the office blocks, the flats and cranes of Poole, and a parting in the trees is suddenly filled by the vast bulk of a ferry coming into dock. The heath is like a pulse of wildness nudging the fringes of the town. A deer’s alarm bark is followed by a lorry’s warning alarm as it reverses along the quayside. I go from the blue-green glint of dragonflies flickering over the heath to sunlight glinting off the windows of houses in Poole.
MacGillivray loved this zone, where the city gave way to the countryside. Faced with a disappointment or difficulty his instinct, usually, was to walk to the edge of the city and dip himself in the surrounding fiel
ds. It’s not that he was fleeing the city, he simply walked out to its margins, took stock, reorientated himself, then walked back into town again. Often he would jot down some notes on the geological features he observed at the edge of a city (on an excursion to the south of London he was delighted to have the opportunity to study the chalk there, a geological district he had never seen before). On a visit to Glasgow in 1833 he finds the museum he wishes to visit closed and writes in his journal:
I then proceeded to the College, whence I was, however, obliged to return, the Museum not being open. So I had recourse to Nature, as I often have under more grievous disappointments, and betook myself to the margin of the city …
Recently some birds of prey have come to live amongst us in our towns and cities in ways that they have not done for many centuries. Peregrine and red kite, most notably, can now be seen across many of our urban centres. Some of the most memorable encounters I’ve had with birds on this journey have been in built-up areas. I once spent a morning standing behind a huge oak doorway that led out onto the flat roof of a church tower in the centre of a large town in South West England. Three spy holes had been drilled through the door. Before I put my eye to one of the holes I could smell the falcons: it was a warm day in June and the place reeked. So this is what a raptor’s eyrie smells like … It was as if I had climbed to the top of a cliff, poked my nose over the brim of a nest and inhaled the pungent carcass stench of the place.
I put my eye to one of the holes in the door. The roof was littered with feathers, small fragments of bone; I could just make out a pigeon’s leg. And there, in the far corner, were three young peregrines, well feathered, the odd clump of down sticking to them like candyfloss. The birds were only 6 feet away from me behind the door. They were lying flat with their chins pressed to the floor, long necks stretched out behind their heads. One of the birds was panting in the heat.
The adult female was perched above the roof on a corner spire. Dark bars drawn across her breast. Heavy, muscular chest. Bright yellow talons: scaly, reptilian. The black moustachial stripe running down her cheek was like a long drip of wax. She kept twisting her head back, glancing up at the sky.
What happened to Arne was another form of clearance. Just as a slice of the moor above Bolton was commandeered during the war as a decoy to draw bombing raids away from the ordnance factory at Chorley, they also built a decoy on the Arne peninsula to draw the Luftwaffe away from the crucial Royal Naval cordite factory at Holton Heath to the west of Poole. Arne was a small rural community: if the decoy worked the majority of bombs would fall, it was hoped, on heathland, oak woods, saltmarsh and that rare, beautiful space where oak woods hem a saltmarsh.
On the night of 3 June 1942 the Luftwaffe come over to destroy the cordite factory. Searchlights go up from the garrison on Brownsea Island and the first decoy fires are lit on Brownsea and Arne. Old bathtubs packed with wood and coal are ignited. Lavatory cisterns flush paraffin and water down pipes into the burning tubs. With every flush the fires flare up violently in simulation of a bomb blast. Acres of scaffolding, constructed to resemble a giant warehouse, are set alight with tar barrels and paraffin. So it looks, from the air, as if one of the warehouses at Holton Heath has gone up in flames. Everywhere the stench of paraffin. People run to cellars, ditches, cram into cupboards under stairs. One man can’t bear the shaking of his garden shelter and decides, though the others in the shelter beg him not to, to sit the raid out in the woods instead.
It is a terrible night on Arne. But the deception works. Five hundred tonnes of bombs are dropped on Arne that night. So many bombs explode on the woods and heaths that the topography of the place is changed. The land is pockmarked, pitted with craters. Two hundred and six bomb craters are counted across the peninsula. And Arne burned and burned. The oak and birch woods burned, the bracken and the heather burned. And the peat burned. Above all, the peat, the underlying structure of the heaths. Once the fire took hold of the peat it would not go out, would not be put out. For weeks Arne smouldered like that. At night planes could see patches of the heath glowing red. The fire brigade would come and put the fire out. Then hours later a rush of oxygen would flush through the peat and stoke another fire into life.
After the raid the people were evacuated. They were given a month’s notice and everyone on Arne left the peninsula. A dairy herd on one of the farms was so traumatised by the raid that the cows took sick with milk fever (their milk congealed inside them) and they all had to be destroyed. Four weeks to sell up and get out. Livestock sent for auction. Boats sold off on the cheap. It was such a hurried thing, the evacuation; they could not even stay for the harvest. Some families went to Blandford, some were given replacement farms elsewhere. Then the army moved in for the duration of the war and Arne was closed off, taken over by the military as a training centre.
After the war a few people came back to live on Arne, but very few of those who left in 1942 returned. The place was in ruins, the village derelict, its houses in an awful state, bullet-chipped, tiles ripped, smothered in ivy. Most of the buildings had to be pulled down. Meanwhile fields had grown rushy, scrub had invaded the ungrazed heath. And hundreds of bomb craters had become pools for dragonflies.
Dawn and dusk. Sometimes it feels like these are the best times to see raptors. You have to get up early for hawks! And so many diurnal birds of prey are surprisingly crepuscular. I have watched buzzards, in particular, hunting through the last dregs of light when it seemed there was barely enough light to fly in, let alone hunt. Hobbies, too, with their large eyes, can hunt for bats and insects deep into the twilight. So I go back out onto the heath in the evening and settle down to wait and watch for hobbies.
A kestrel is here and I watch it above me, quartering the heath. It has young in a pine-tree nest on a slope above a boggy sump. Every time the adult kestrel swoops close to the nest the young call loudly to it with their shrill begging keeks. The sound the young kestrels make carries right across the heath. Then, after ten minutes, a falcon’s shadow flashes over me. I presume it is the kestrel back again, swooping through another arc of air. But the speed it is going is nothing like a kestrel.
Hobby! At last! Shooting low over the heath, long, sharp wings, a hundred times faster than a kestrel. Hobby: using up every ounce of sky, flinging himself at the air.
This heath is not big enough for him. He circles it in seconds, crosses from one end to the other in a blink. Can he even slow down? Could he go any faster? He is quicker, by far, than any bird I have watched. All the books say the peregrine is the speed master but this hobby feels so much faster than any falcon I have seen. Because he is flying so close to the ground the effect is that the ground is always rushing away from him. He needs to run and run. And then he needs to climb, to fling himself up, only to dive straight back down again to skim the ground. No bird I know flies like this. The closest thing he resembles is a swift, but a hobby is a swift enhanced. Even merlins, those compressed balls of energy, do not burst apart the air like this hobby.
He is hawking for dragonflies. I watch him seize one mid-air. Then, still on the wing, the hobby brings his foot up to his beak. He plucks at the dragonfly, peeling off the chitinous layer, the legs and wings, before he eats the insect. Fragments of dragonfly elytra drop beneath him as he feeds. Then he is on to the next (feeding like this can be frenetic, up to a dozen insects per minute).
A woman from the village has walked out across the heath and has sat down on a bench behind me. I want her to see what I am seeing too. Has she seen the hobby? Surely she cannot miss him, he is mad with speed. I stand up from the heather, grin and point at the hobby. God, what must I look like … But the woman smiles, waves and her wave seems to say, yes, I am seeing him – witnessing this – too.
What is unique about this experience is that the hobby is not going anywhere. I am not going to lose him suddenly over a ridge or in the depths of a wood. I do not have to try and keep up with him or go looking for him. The heath this evening is his pat
ch. He is not going anywhere else and appears to be feeding for himself, rather than taking prey back to the nest. I just need to sit here and watch as he whirls around me. The only effort in finding him is trying to keep up with his speed.
What is the hobby doing to the air? As he accelerates the air itself accelerates around him, down and back, lifting, thrusting the hobby forwards. In his wake he leaves behind air in mayhem, air like a whirlpool, several whirlpools swirling around each other. He makes a cauldron, a Corryvreckan of the air. He stokes, he concertinas it. The air cannot know what has hit it. If we could see what the hobby does to the air as he smashes through it we would see air in storm, vortexes, geysers, collisions.
A hobby in its northern breeding quarters is the inverse of its winter self. It is no longer a chaser of rain clouds. The damper western coasts of these islands are not ideal for hobbies; they prefer drier, warmer, insect-alluring habitats. Above all, they are a bird of open spaces, of heathlands, marshlands and farmlands where they have the space to fling themselves after their avian and insect prey. Woods and trees are only for nesting in, these cluttered spaces are the hawks’ hunting territory. Hobbies only step into the woods to nest and, crucially, such a wood must provide its own abandoned nests. For hobbies, like all falcons, are squatters, not nest builders. In England, abandoned crows’ nests are especially favoured, so much so that hobbies may well depend on a healthy crow population for their own breeding success. You would think that a falcon on its nest would be a no-go zone for other birds. In fact, sometimes the reverse is true. As with geese nesting close to peregrine eyries, so pigeons have been observed to nest in close proximity to hobbies. It is thought that, like the geese, pigeons do this to benefit from the hobbies’ fierce protection of their nest sites against predators. Ravens and goshawks, in particular, are abominable to hobbies and the small falcons will harangue these larger predators at every opportunity.
Raptors Page 22