To be stilled – stopped – that is what birds of prey do to me. There is a phrase particular to Dartmoor: The Ammil. It describes the phenomenon, occasionally witnessed on the moor in winter, when everything exposed to the air, every blade of grass, every rock, every twig, becomes encased in ice. The Ammil is the thaw put on hold, paused for a while. The temperature suddenly drops below freezing and the thawing, dripping, running world is held in check, suspended, so that everything, even the great rocky outcrops of the tors, is sheathed in ice. Ammil: from ammel, the Old English term for enamel, to encrust, to coat with a vitreous sheen. A rare event. The moor is decorated, it glistens. The land is stilled, and to witness it is also to be stilled.
XV
Sparrowhawk
Home
Home is: three doors down from the end of a street on the edge of a small village. The street ends at a kissing gate. The gate leads through to a grassy field, boggy around the gate, rising quickly to a steep bank. Hawthorn, elder, gorse and bramble grow along the bank, sporadic oak and ash trees too. Bracken dominates the western end. In May, before the bracken takes over, there are thousands of bluebells. I love the range of colours along the slope, there always seems to be a brightness there: the elder in flower, hawthorn blossom, the pink rosebay willowherb. Even in winter there is yellow on the gorse. Foxes have their den deep within the gorse. Ravens nest in a Scots pine windbreak above the slope. At the eastern end, where the trees thicken to a spinney, there is an ancient badger city, a lumpy quarried place. Roe and muntjac use the bank for cover. Fallow make channels through the bracken in summer. From the field – from the washing line in my back garden – the top of the bank forms the horizon. Sometimes a swollen moon seems to snag itself on the bank as its huge pale dome rolls along the horizon. The soil is heavy clay. The field is full of wounds, the slightest rain sets it weeping.
To the west of the field there is a large wood. A medieval bank marks its edge. Ancient ash stools, like eroded gargoyles, line the bank. Dog-rose and bramble form a hedge between the wood and field. The wood stretches west for nearly a mile and goes through different belts of trees: larch, spruce, sweet chestnut, the occasional colossal beech, its trunk black with rain seep. But here, in the corner closest to the field, it is mostly oak with hazel coppice. Ash grows around the wood’s edge and there are some dark pools of holly in amongst the hazel understory.
For many months I walked all over the wood and further into the fields beyond looking for sparrowhawks. I walked miles searching for the birds. But my technique was all wrong. They are like ghosts, sparrowhawks, they cannot be tracked or followed; they appear from nowhere in a rush of speed and then they are gone. Sparrowhawks operate in a different dimension from other birds of prey. They live in the pocket of air that hugs the surface of the land. Quick and low, they cut the ground like a scythe.
Still, I pursued my wanderings through the wood and fields. Sometimes I came across a hawk’s plucking post and occasionally – more rarely – there was a snatched glimpse of hawk disappearing through the trees. In deep summer, when the wood droned with the sound of hoverflies, I often heard the sharp begging calls of young sparrowhawks. All these things encouraged me into thinking I was getting closer to the birds. But that was never true: with every rare encounter the hawks would briefly shimmer then dissolve. Always, though, the encounters, when they happened, were breathtaking. Once when I was walking down the side of a field towards a brook there was a movement 10 feet away. Rising out behind a bramble thicket beside a gate was a female sparrowhawk, wings spread and tail opened in a fan as she rose. I could see the dark striped bars running across the underside of her tail. As she climbed above the thicket she dropped something, a grey shape. I waded through the brambles and there, next to the gate, was the body of a pigeon, head missing, a deep red gash down its breast.
Most encounters happened when I was not looking for the birds. Early one morning, putting a bag in the boot of the car, the quiet street suddenly interrupted by a clatter of pigeons and in their wake a sparrowhawk sheering over the kissing gate. I would sometimes see sparrowhawks when I was driving slowly through the village. Once I pulled the car up beside a hawk I had seen land on a neighbour’s wall, so close I could see the speckled patterning on her breast and the yellow flash of her eye. Another time – an astonishing encounter – a hawk flashed low in front of my car and slid over a garden gate. The hawk looked like it was going to collide with the front of the house, but at the last moment it shot straight up, glanced over the roof, and dropped down into the back garden. I had never seen any bird steer itself past objects at such speed. No bird I know flies this fast and low.
Sometimes garden birds would warn me of a hawk approaching, chaffinches and great tits at a garden feeder suddenly ratcheting up their anxious chatter. Sure enough, three seconds later, there was a male hawk swooping across the lawn and, as he rose to clear a hedge, I could see the rusty orange flecks that lit his breast.
In early spring the washing line is a good place to watch. On a fine day in March I sometimes see sparrowhawks displaying above the bank. My elderly neighbour often pauses by the fence to chat while I hang the washing out. I like to linger there as much to talk to him as watch for birds. Sometimes he brings offerings from his garden: potatoes, small thick cucumbers, delicious red and yellow tomatoes. Grass snakes lay their eggs beneath the empty plastic compost bags in his greenhouse. He walks slowly and explains his hip is no good since a shire horse backed into him when he was young as he was leading the horse through a narrow gate. His anecdotes animate the field, the bank and the wood beyond. Tanks, he tells me, were parked at the bottom of the garden during the war and tested on the bank’s steep gradient. The army camped in the wood and bartered sugar and tea for vegetables from his parents’ garden. He remembers a Wellington crashing on the bank and he and his classmates rushing out of school and up the hill to find the plane on fire. I ask if he remembers the bombers coming over on their way to Coventry. He nods and tells me that there used to be a farmer who kept a few chickens up on the hill above the village. One night during the war a German bomber returning from a raid (and needing to jettison an unused bomb) must have seen the light from the farmer’s torch glittering as he locked the chickens up. Missed by a mile, thank God, but for a long time you could see the hole made by the bomb up there.
Often, while we chat, buzzards run the gauntlet of the raven’s airspace above the bank. A raven’s loud, rapid croaking usually indicates a buzzard has appeared. Recently red kites have settled in the area and I see them almost daily now, their ash-grey heads conspicuous as the birds perch on top of a bare winter ash. I doubt these birds have been seen over the wood for two hundred years. Very occasionally I hear one calling, a high thin whistle, thinner than a buzzard’s call. The kites appear taller than the buzzards when they perch, their long folded wings give them a longer back. Perched and silhouetted against the sky, the kites can seem huge; clear winter skies seem to magnify them.
William MacGillivray’s home on Harris is a ruin now, the buildings from his uncle’s farm commandeered for a sheep fank, a maze of gates, walkways and holding pens. The floor of the fank is littered with scraps of wool. The ruin sits on the lower slopes of Ceapabhal, looking east across the great expanse of Scarista Sands and north to the mountains of Harris. This was MacGillivray’s childhood home and somewhere on Ceapabhal’s rocky neck was the pit where he concealed himself to shoot the golden eagle. The low walls of the ruin are blotched with amber-coloured lichen, nettles grow in the cracks between the stones. The lush machair runs down from the ruin to the beach, its seed-heavy grasses pricked with yellow, white and purple flowers: eyebright, red clover, birdsfoot trefoil … A smaller ruin, 40 feet by 12, stands to the side of the old steadings. It is being used to store coils of fencing wire. Sections of its walls have been patched with mortar. Meadow pipits, with their streaked breasts, flicker along the top of the wall. The way the pipits blend into the backdrop of the stones, when the bird
s skitter about the ruin, it looks as if the wall itself is trembling.
From MacGillivray’s Hebridean journal:
Monday 10th November, 1817
Today I rose early, drank warm milk at the gate as yesterday – then walked along the shore of Tastir, over Traigh-na-clibhadh, and along the rocks to the upper end of Moll-na-h-Uidhadh, then crossed Ui to the great sand, and returned along its margin. In this course the birds seen were the Starling, among the cattle and in the corn-yard, the Shag on the coast, the Common Gull in South town and on Ui, the Great Black-backed Gull on Moll-na-h’Ui, the Curlew on Ui in large flocks, the Wren on the marsh dyke of Ui, the Meadow Pipit on the shore, the Hooded Crow on Ui, the Raven on Fastir, and the Ringed Plover on the sands …
I have determined to describe all the birds found in Harris & shall fall to work immediately. In the evening I went to Moll to search the shores for shell-fish …
Wednesday 12th November, 1817
… The description of birds should be made in the following order. Name, (Linnaean, English, Gaelic) Description proper, very minute. Bill, feet, irides, general colour, dorsal, sternal, colours, habitation, migration, nuptials, nidification, ovation, incubation, education, food, use. Bill, dimensions, colour, shape, nostrils, tongue, shape, colour, mouth colour, eyes, appendages – feet, legs, shape, colour &c. toes number, nails.
Monday, 27th April, 1818
… I have not yet seen an account of the Birds of Britain with which I am entirely pleased; and I have of late been thinking upon the subject. Perhaps it might not be a mad scheme to attempt the Ornithology of Scotland. I certainly would not engage for more. But whether this alone would be acceptable I cannot yet determine. However I shall begin to note every particular regarding it, which I can observe, or collect from creditable authority. The time I occupy in this will not be misspent, even at the worst. For I will thus perhaps acquire habits of attention, observation, and activity.
After his visit to the British Museum, MacGillivray left London on 28 October, returning to Aberdeen by sea. He did not have enough money for a cabin and took passage instead in the misery of the ship’s forecastle. Perhaps someone took pity on him there or he pleaded a discount, for after two uncomfortable days he was upgraded to a cabin and arrived back in Aberdeen on Saturday 6 November, 1819. The return journey by sea was about 450 miles. In all, since he walked out of his front door in Aberdeen two months earlier, MacGillivray had covered 1,288 miles.
From Aberdeen to Gretna: 501 miles
From Gretna to London: 337 miles
838 miles
From London to Aberdeen by sea: about 450 miles
In all: 1,288 miles
The last entry he writes in his journal:
My journey is now finished. I arrived here early on Saturday the 6th after a disagreeable passage of ten days from London in the smack Expert. I am again plunged into the gulf of actual existence, and I can scarcely brandish a quill. Sapient remarks and practical conclusions, and resolutions sine fine should now be made, but all these fine things I must defer till I have another journey …
Vanity of vanities – all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? For he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
For the next few years, after the walk to London, it is hard to keep track of MacGillivray. There are hints here and there of his whereabouts. The plant specimens he collected, carefully labelled with a date and location, offer clues as to his wanderings. Scotland in the 1820s becomes triangular for him and he seems to have travelled regularly between the three points of that triangle: Harris, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Harris is where he hones his fieldwork, where he hammered at the gneiss rocks, gathered gulls’ eggs, and shot plovers and pigeons … and where, in September 1820, he marries his aunt’s younger stepsister, Marion McCaskill.
Edinburgh in the 1820s is where he has not yet settled into himself. He attends the lectures of Professor Jameson, who held the Regius Chair of Natural History at Edinburgh University. And Jameson must have seen something in MacGillivray, something glinting there, because MacGillivray becomes Jameson’s secretary and assistant in 1823 and he is also put in charge of Jameson’s substantial Museum of Natural History. A dream job, a kid in a candy store: the museum held specimens of birds, rocks and minerals in their thousands. And for a few years MacGillivray is pin-down-able, working at the museum, testing his knowledge, starting to publish papers in journals on all aspects of natural history from geology to botany to ornithology. There are drawings from this period MacGillivray made of microscopic fossil sections which are beautiful in their precision. He becomes fluent in conchology, in mineralogy and lichenology (in a lovely phrase in his book A Natural History of Deeside he wrote that he was especially addicted to Lichenology). He meets Darwin (then a student at Edinburgh University); to Darwin, MacGillivray appears a bit uncouth, a bit ragged-looking: He had not much the appearance and manners of the gentleman … But the two absorb themselves in natural history talk and Darwin, in his autobiography, remembers MacGillivray as being very kind to me and giving him some rare shells for his own collection.
In 1826 there is another lurch, another breakout from the city. Perhaps the museum and/or Jameson had become too stifling, perhaps the claustrophobia of the museum grated at him. Whatever the reason, MacGillivray quits working for Jameson, flits the city to continue his observations in the fields … And for a few years he disappears, lost to the hills. Income, often precarious for MacGillivray, is perhaps most insecure during this period; by 1829 he has five children and he is trying to support both them and his fieldwork through what he calls my labour in the closet, editing, translating, piecemeal writing.
Eighteen thirty is an important year for MacGillivray. He is settled back in Edinburgh and books and papers start to come in a flurry. His writing begins to take on the pace of his walking. In 1830 he publishes a revised edition of Withering’s A Systematic Arrangement of British Plants, which he abridges from four volumes into one. Lives of the Eminent Zoologists, From Aristotle to Linnaeus quickly follows this. Then a translation from the French of Elements of Botany and Vegetable Physiology in 1831. In September 1830 he is appointed to the role of Conservator of the Museum of the Edinburgh Royal College of Surgeons. The following month, October 1830, John James Audubon knocks on his door to ask for MacGillivray’s help in writing his Ornithological Biography.
The 1830s are a giddy blur of work for MacGillivray: by the end of the decade he will have published thirteen books. How he manages to juggle everything seems extraordinary. His work for Audubon, and especially his work at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, is hugely demanding. At the same time there is his teaching, editing, journal publications, fieldwork, his painting and draughtsmanship. And despite all of these commitments he somehow manages to pull together what he considers his proper work. Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain is published in 1836. It is the warm-up act for what follows, his monumental five-volume A History of British Birds. Volumes I–III are published between 1837 and 1840. The final two volumes are published in 1852, the same year MacGillivray died.
The breakthrough in my search for sparrowhawks came in late summer when I found a feather. For several weeks I had been coming across the aftermath of hawk kills, the downy snow of pigeon feathers sprayed across a path or snagged in a hedge. On one occasion a goldfinch, tiny black and yellow feathers in a bright wet pile at the edge of a field. There was a pattern to these kills. The hawks were hunting in a radius which took in a corner of the wood, the field and the back gardens along my street. So I slowed my wanderings down to concentrate on this area. Then one evening, walking along a track, I found a scattered bloom of pigeon feathers; not that many, but enough to suggest hawk work. I wondered if the attack had been aborted, if the sparrowhawk had swiped but failed to grip the pigeon. The way the pigeon’s feathers were smeared across the track suggested this.
Many sparrowhawk attacks are aborted, the majo
rity fail. Juvenile hawks, especially, can misjudge prey and attempt to tackle birds that are too large. A woodpigeon is too heavy for a sparrowhawk to carry far and only female hawks are large enough to tackle such heavy prey. Female sparrowhawks are substantially larger than males, the size difference between the sexes greater than in any other British raptor (males weigh around 150 g, females around 290 g). Such is the difference in weight that female sparrowhawks are known to occasionally kill and eat males. Sometimes a female sparrowhawk can lump a pigeon a short distance, but she would not be able to fly more than a few feet above the ground with such a load. So usually pigeons are plucked and eaten close to where they are killed, the tell-tale sign a circle of feathers spread around where the hawk has worked. Sometimes a large prey item such as a pigeon will not be killed outright and the hawk will simply pin it down and begin to eat while the pigeon is still alive. There are several accounts of sparrowhawks being disturbed at their plucking and their prey then flying, stumbling away.
In amongst the pigeon feathers on the track was a sparrowhawk’s feather, a primary, with a deep notch and narrow leading edge. Pale white at the base along the trailing edge, brown towards the top. The reverse side much paler than the front. Five brown bands running across – interrupting – the feather’s white, the hint of a sixth at the top but too faint to make out against the darker brown. I wondered if the hawk had lost the feather in the maelstrom of the attack. I picked the feather up and took it home with me.
Raptors Page 25