Landscape can be lost, persecuted, reduced as much as any bird, as much as any species. In Dorset only a fraction of the heaths remain which were there in the early nineteenth century. Heathland – that difficult, acidic, nutrient-poor habitat, with its low-growing, woody, oily, inflammable plants (that burned for days on Arne) – has everywhere shrunk. Across southern England, heathland has receded by more than 70 per cent over the last 200 years. Agriculture, afforestation, development have all chipped away at the heaths. What are left are isolated fragments, adrift from one another. What we do to landscape is interrupt it. We plant blocks of conifers across the peat bogs of the Flow Country and cut the bog off from itself, squeezing out the moorland specialists, the golden plover, dunlin and merlin. We flood the Upper Tyne and Upper Tywi valleys with water and forestry until the land no longer recognises itself. Lives, landscapes are interrupted.
If MacGillivray could have afforded to include his watercolours of birds in his History of British Birds would that have changed things for him? Would it have changed how his work was received? Would the paintings not have stilled the reviewers who so dismissed the books, their classification scheme, MacGillivray’s ‘affected’ prose, almost everything about the work, even the ‘spirit’ of the ‘Practical Ornithology’ sections (his fieldwork notes), which, to my mind, soar with spirit and show how he – William MacGillivray – was one of the finest field naturalists this country has ever known? If MacGillivray had been able to include, for instance, his life-size painting of a grey heron or his watercolour of three linnets perched on a beech sapling, would that not have stopped the critics in their tracks? How might his paintings have rescued him?
The American ornithologist and great bird artist John James Audubon said this of MacGillivray’s paintings:
In short, I think them decidedly the best representations of birds I have ever seen, and have no hesitation in saying, that, should they be engraved in a manner worthy of their excellence, they will form a work not only creditable to you, but surpassing in splendour anything of the kind that Great Britain, or even Europe, has ever produced. Believe me always your sincere friend, John J. Audubon.
Audubon, who leaned on MacGillivray, needed him, needed MacGillivray to help him write his Ornithological Biography, the accompanying text to his illustrated The Birds of America. Audubon, who came knocking on MacGillivray’s door in Edinburgh one day in October 1830 looking for help. And MacGillivray agreed to assist Audubon with his work and correct his manuscripts, his wobbly English and hazy scientific descriptions of the birds for a modest fee of two guineas per sheet of sixteen pages.
The collaboration between Audubon and MacGillivray that ensued was the coming together of an ornithological dream team, the two great American and Scottish ornithologists of the age working together in a haze of bird skins, paper and ink. Audubon starting work early, MacGillivray joining him later in the morning but then working on late into the night. And they worked at such a pace, columns of manuscripts rising up around them. The pair were consumed – swamped – by birds; at night they dreamed of nothing else. They worked like this, on and off, for the next nine years until Audubon’s five-volume Ornithological Biography had been completed. In the gaps between writing Audubon travelled back and forth between the United States (to procure more bird specimens) and Britain (to write and garner subscriptions for his book). After each field trip to America, Audubon would return to Edinburgh – the engine room – and seek out MacGillivray to resume the writing again.
They would bicker about technicalities, classification, the correct order to arrange the birds. But despite the occasional quarrel and the sheer intensity of the work, the pair became very close friends, working together, walking together, shooting birds together. MacGillivray named one of his sons after Audubon; Audubon named two species of American birds after MacGillivray, MacGillivray’s shore finch and MacGillivray’s warbler. Their sons, John MacGillivray and John Audubon, also became friends. John MacGillivray once crashed through the Audubons’ Edinburgh home breaking a glass case that housed one of Audubon’s birds. If Audubon disapproved of this clumsiness, he and MacGillivray must surely, on another occasion, have secretly approved when their sons were caught poaching together in Ravelston Woods outside Edinburgh and had their guns confiscated by the keeper.
If MacGillivray was not adequately acknowledged by Audubon for his part in the Biography’s completion, well, that is MacGillivray for you … self-effacing, not especially concerned with accreditation. But subsequently others have acknowledged that MacGillivray’s role was crucial, that without his contribution the Ornithological Biography could not have become the great founding work of American ornithology that it is. The American ornithologist Elliott Coues attempted to set the record straight when he wrote of Audubon’s Biography:
MacGillivray supplied what was necessary to make his [Audubon’s] work a contribution to science as well as to art.
But Audubon was not ungrateful. In the entry for MacGillivray’s warbler in the Ornithological Biography, Audubon wrote:
I cannot do better than dedicate this pretty little bird to my excellent friend William MacGillivray Esq. I feel much pleasure in introducing it to the notice of the ornithological world, under a name which I trust will endure as long as the species itself.
Still, MacGillivray’s name has not endured. He has slipped from view, his books and paintings have slipped from view. And MacGillivray’s shore finch was later renamed the seaside sparrow. Audubon, by contrast, is renowned the world over and his paintings sell for vast sums today.
In his introduction to volume V of the Ornithological Biography, Audubon wrote:
Allow me also to mention the names of a few friends to whom I shall ever feel most deeply indebted. The first on the list is William MacGillivray, and I wish you, Reader, and all the world besides, knew him as well as I do.
I envy Audubon greatly, that he knew William MacGillivray so well.
The hobby is still here, hunting over the heath. Fast and low, charging straight up, then down again to skim the heather. Sometimes he hangs a while in the air not unlike a kestrel. But never for long and he is always off again running into the wind. As the sun drops lower I see the hobby more sharply: white face, black hood, grey-black dorsal, a faint rusty orange high up on the underside of the tail and around his legs. Every time he turns into the low sun I can see the mottled white patterns of his breast and the reds below his chest.
When the hobby passes close to the young kestrels in their pine-tree nest, the kestrels call to him. They must confuse him for their parent, that sharp-winged falcon shape. They are roughly – kestrel and hobby – a similar size, though the hobby appears a little smaller when he perches briefly on a fence post. He seems to shrink into himself then, much as I’ve seen sparrowhawks do when they are also perched.
I clamber out of the heather and walk over to the woman still sitting on the bench behind me. Fast as a peregrine! is the first thing she says to me. She has lived in the village for fifteen years, she says, and has never seen anything as impressive as this hobby’s display. We stand there together for a while in the middle of the heath. Then the woman is turning to head for home, Goodbye, well that was very special, wasn’t it …
I don’t want to leave. I think the hobby is still out there, but the light is hopeless now. The last thing I see before I go is an egret flying slowly up from the shore, crossing the heath in front of me, heading for the wood to roost. A slow, heron-heavy flight, porcelain white. As the egret passes in front of the pine trees that skirt the heath, the bird suddenly brightens, becoming whiter against the dark backdrop of the pines.
XIV
Buzzard
River Teign, Devon
MacGillivray leaves Buxton on the Friday at twelve o’clock. It is one of those rare days when he is immune from melancholy. Crossing the high hills of Derbyshire he feels like he is soaring there and, for the first time on his marathon, he senses he is closing in on London.
Derby to Leicester: 26 miles
Leicester to Northampton: 32 miles
Northampton to London: 66 miles
Up on the hills, that day, he sees: skylark, rook, starling, hedge sparrow, pied wagtail, wren, chaffinch, magpie, yellowhammer.
That night, in a scruffy, smoky lodging house outside Ashbourne, MacGillivray sits up late, smoking, comparing Scots Gaelic to Irish Gaelic with an Irish pedlar, then trying out his Latin on a young Italian salesman to see how the Italian and Latin words relate to one another. How these sister languages fit inside each other is not dissimilar to the ways that different species of birds coincide and resemble one another. Through his dissections, his close observations of anatomy, plumage, diet and behaviour, MacGillivray tries to see how the birds converge and form a passage into one another. In Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds he writes:
The genera Circaetus and Harpyia connect the eagles and osprey with the buzzards, while the Morphni would seem to unite them with the asturs. But of the birds that occur in our country, none are intermediate between the eagles and buzzards.
The next morning, two miles from Ashbourne, the musk mallow is in flower, and further on MacGillivray finds the ivy-leaved toadflax growing on a bridge. In Derby he buys bread and cheese and eats it in a field where water figwort is showing. He leaves Loughborough at three o’clock and the air is sharp with frost. There are vines growing up the sides of houses with tiny embryonic grapes. Field-mouse-ear chickweed, black horehound and common creeping cinquefoil all delay him. It is a day of sudden bursts of light: a glint of green beside a stream is a kingfisher and, in the dusk, as MacGillivray passes through Leicester, he sees, briefly, the Aurora borealis dancing, lighting the clouds to the north. Later it begins to rain and he finds a barn and buries himself in a heap of straw with his knapsack for a pillow. But it is far too cold to sleep and around two o’clock he gets up and continues walking. The dark propels him as if he had somehow grown much lighter. Figures loom towards him through the darkness and he flinches as they pass, but nobody tries to hassle him and he seems unaware how intimidating he must have seemed to others on the road, what with bits of straw still sticking to him and his knapsack swelling – doubling – his size in the dark. At first light the land is under frost and MacGillivray shoves his hands (he lost his gloves three weeks ago) deep into his pockets to muffle them. His feet ache and he is dizzy with weakness. The next milestone is the 80th from London.
Bread for breakfast and, cutting it with his knife, MacGillivray slices his thumb to the bone. Near Northampton he finds specimens of common nightshade, greater knapweed, dwarf mallow. And that evening, despite walking 51 miles without sleeping, he is able to write this wonderful sentence in his journal:
Flora still continued to smile upon me and in the evening I found the Common Traveller’s Joy which I examined in the Inn.
The inn is at Grafton Regis between Northampton and Stoney Stratford. That night MacGillivray sleeps under warm blankets and wakes at nine. Fifty-eight miles to London and he only has thirteen pence halfpenny left. So onwards without eating and the hard road is gnawing at his feet. His shoes and stockings have dismantled themselves and he has become such a ragged, hobbling thing. He buys some bread to chew and by midnight he is passing through St Albans. He lies down under a tree and tries to grab a few hours’ rest, but then he is up again and crawling on – cocks crowing – a herd of oxen swaying down the road – still 18 miles to London – heavy rain – threepence halfpenny remains, he can hear the coppers sloshing in his pocket – a bite of bread – an apple – god, how his feet ache – how his thumb aches – his clothes are soaking – it is still raining – his long blue coat is heavy with rain – soon after midday MacGillivray is staggering through Highgate – 838 miles since he left Aberdeen – his knapsack, his ‘machine’, so stuffed with specimens of plants it looks like he has grown some strange herbal appendage on his back … Jolting, grimacing, dreaming the final mile into London.
Buzzard
The upper and fore part of the cere is bare, but its sides are covered with bristly feathers, which are downy at the base; the space between the bill and eye is pretty closely covered with radiating bristly feathers, slightly downy at the base; the sharp projecting eyebrow bare; the edges of the eyelids furnished with ciliary bristles. The plumage in general is full and soft, but rather compact and glossy above, although the margins are loose. The feathers of the head are small and narrow, those of the neck larger and more rounded, of the other parts broad and rounded; but the plumage has not, as some allege, any decided resemblance to that of the owls, being, in fact, as firm as that of the goshawk, and, in proportion to the size of the birds, as that of the eagles.
Coming down the lane in the car through blue June warmth. Just before we splash through the ford I see the buzzard.
– Boys, look up!
– What is it, Dad?
– A buzzard, can you see it?
I stop the car.
A commotion in the high branches of an oak. The leaves obscure what is happening but there is a screech and flash of magpie. Then a glimpse of buzzard, 20 feet away, trying to untangle something from the tree.
– What is it, Dad?
– Is it an eagle?
– There it is!
We see the buzzard detaching itself from the branches and the thing dangling from its talons gives the buzzard a different profile in the air: a limp, black shape only identifiable as a fledgling magpie because the two adult magpies are in the field beneath the tree, bobbing, yikkering with distress.
Buzzard
The bill is black, near the cere greyish-blue, its soft edges yellow; the cere and bare space over the eye greenish-yellow; the irides yellowish-brown; the feet bright yellow, the claws like the bill.
From Dorset I turned west then south to Dartmoor. I wanted to walk along a stretch of the river Teign and follow the river from its source high up on the moor down through its wooded, buzzard-rich valley to the east.
I reached Chagford in the early afternoon and set off walking over Meldon Hill to the south of the village, weaving through banks of gorse, ponies parked in amongst the gorse, stubs of granite around the summit. Coming down off the hill into deep, high-banked lanes; sunken, subterranean pathways, you cannot see out of them until you pass a gateway cut into the side of the hedge. It’s only then you catch a glimpse into one of the small fields that flank the lanes. Those fields seemed so remote, enclosed by their tall, thick hedgerows. In one of the fields I glimpsed, through its gateway, a flock of rooks and jackdaws, the jackdaws noisy in their squeaky chatter, bobbing around the larger rooks.
Then, climbing out of the lanes, approaching the moor, and up ahead a buzzard rises from the verge. It grows in flight! Huge, broad, long-fingered wings unfolding. It lands a little further up the road on a wooden telegraph pole and I sit down on the bank to watch. The dark creosoted pole accentuates the bird’s greys and whites. Its grey face twitches and bobs, scanning the field in front. Then it is dropping from its perch in a low glide. Lands in a hunched pounce, talons first, stabbing at something in the grass. Misses: is quickly up again, this time landing on another pole further up the road.
Just as the kestrel hangs inside the air – hovers there – the buzzard, so often, hunts statically, scanning the ground from its perch in a tree, on a pole or fence post, waiting, listening for a vole to crinkle the grass below. And so often, as with so many British raptors, it is field voles (short-tailed voles) that a buzzard is hunting. Voles (particularly during the winter months) are a staple of the common buzzard’s diet. If not voles, then: rabbits, insects, moles, frogs, earthworms, carrion, road-kill and, during the breeding season, fledgling birds. Insects (grubs and beetles especially) are also consumed in large quantities by buzzards. As are rabbits, notably in spring and early summer, when buzzards need to hunt through all the long daylight hours to provide for their young. Rabbits and voles are to the common buzza
rd what wasps are to the honey buzzard. Without these crucial prey species the common buzzard would struggle to rear its young successfully.
The buzzard is both a static hunter, a hoverer and a low-level searcher. Sometimes I have seen buzzards poised in strong wind like a kestrel, their carpal joints pushed forward, their wings braced back so that the bird assumes a tight, streamlined shape, nothing like the broad, upcurved wings and fanned tail of a soaring buzzard. Other times I have watched buzzards hunting low and fast across the ground much like a golden eagle. And seen them too hunting like a hawk, swerving fast through woodland. The buzzard seems capable of taking on the hunting guise of many different birds of prey.
High-up soaring buzzards are not hunting. They are displaying, marking their territory, making the most of a rising thermal. The smaller, lighter male can rise more quickly than the female; often, when you see a pair of soaring buzzards, they are layered, one above the other, with the male invariably the higher bird. When the pair come together, as for example when the male swoops down at the female in his spectacular display flight, the difference in size between the sexes is clear. Soaring buzzards often call to one another and their calling will sometimes draw in other buzzards from adjoining areas to join their circling flight. On a still day their calls travel far. Cliffs ricochet a buzzard’s call, making it sound sharper; woods soften and dampen the call; valleys carry it along their alleyways, extending it. A buzzard’s call is among the most beautiful sounds I know.
A hunting buzzard is altogether different, capable, despite the buzzard’s reputation for sluggishness, of astonishing bursts of speed. Many times I have been taken aback by a buzzard’s turn of speed and on several occasions have wished-mistaken a buzzard into a hawk because it was flying so fast through the trees. Once, in a wood near my home, a bird rushed past me just 10 feet away and landed on the long thick branch of an oak. In the moment between it brushing past me and landing, before I could focus my binoculars, I was convinced, because of the speed with which it had shot into the wood, and because of the bird’s size, it must have been a goshawk. But no, it was a buzzard, an adult, who, as soon as he touched down on the branch, was joined by a juvenile. The adult bird dropped some prey on the branch then quickly left. The young bird picked up the prey item in its beak, swallowing it whole.
Raptors Page 23