On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  There was still an hour to go before dusk, when another angel appeared: another white-winged being that seemed there to bless the marsh and the transformation it had undergone that day.

  Here was a barn own, exploiting his power of silence. The sun was still in the sky, though sinking fast, but it wasn’t the great floodlight that illuminates the entire world. It seemed to be the narrowest and smallest kind of spotlight, one that existed only to pick out the white wings of the owl. The bird sank to the ground, out of sight for a short while, and then rose again, continuing its slow, silent inspection of the digger’s labours. It dropped again, clearly finding great profit in all this disruption.

  There was more than a hint of spring in the air, and in a fragile world there was promise of renewal: war songs and love songs, feeding frenzies, sex and new life. All across the marsh there was the earth and the water that would fuel that process.

  I had a sudden memory of that line in The Rainbow, which was a great favourite of Ralph’s when we were both sixth-formers arguing about books and the meaning of life. ‘But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease?’

  These days we could all come up with a dozen reasons why earth should stop teeming; we might in certain moods argue that teeming was already a thing of the past. Everything we love is vulnerable, we all know that. But in these modest few acres there was a certain amount of teeming going on.

  7

  BEING MAGNIFICENT . . . NUDGE-NUDGE, WINK-WINK

  Morning chores and a squadron of goldfinches. Charm offensive?

  Birds of prey were once cherished above all others. A raptor is always top bird: when tamed, the bird of prey became an expression of rank and fortune – the power of the noble owner. Falconry was the pastime of choice among the rich and powerful; the flown hawk was a living symbol of its owner: a great soul taking wing, the terror of the world. A falcon was the noble bird.

  There’s another reason why humans had such strong feelings for their captive birds of prey. All birds of prey have their eyes on the front of their heads, facing forward: what matters to them, in terms of perception, is the narrow arc of stereoscopic vision in which they can appreciate the world in three dimensions. That’s how they make their hyperaccurate judgements of speed and distance.

  We humans also have forward-facing eyes and two-eyed vision. Our ancestors needed to make equally accurate calculations about speed and distance, but not to catch birds. They needed to move with speed and safety from branch to branch. All the same, we can see something of ourselves in the face of a hawk: and the two-eyed glare we get back is a comparison that flatters us at a very deep level.

  And here is one more reason for the closeness of humans and hawks: when you carry a hawk on your left wrist (I have done this on a few occasions) the hooked bill is of necessity very close to your own left eye. You can’t hold the hawk at arm’s length: that would soon tire you out. You must tuck your elbow into your side: and that puts beak and human eye just a few inches apart.

  In other words, this is about the immense privilege of trust. Trusting, and being trusted. The extension of trust beyond the species barrier is a powerful experience for us humans. We seek it by bringing carnivores into our homes, onto our laps, onto our beds. We keep horses, who could lay us out with single irritated movement, and we even get on their backs. And the ancient arts of falconry require humans to put their trust in a bird cherished for its ferocity. (I am left-eye dominant: my right eye is a second-rate performer. To accept the proximity of that beak to my favourite eye was a powerful experience.)

  But then we turned against them. We invented the shotgun and declared war on all birds of prey. A hooked beak was no longer to be tolerated. A bird of prey on your land was clear evidence of failure. At a stroke, birds of prey changed from beloved companions to hated rivals.

  During the great Victorian persecution, the numbers of birds of prey fell dramatically. Five species were down to fewer than 100 pairs: golden eagle, hobby, hen harrier, red kite and Montagu’s harrier. Five species were driven to extinction in this country: goshawk, honey buzzard, osprey, white-tailed eagle . . . and marsh harrier.

  I could see three of them. All of them over – and indeed on – the marsh. Marsh harriers. All of them female. As I’ve been saying, some conservationists would look at the marsh and say: you could do better; I wouldn’t manage it like this, I’d manage it like that. But here were three marsh harriers and every nuance of their body language said: you’re not doing so badly; this place isn’t so shabby, it’ll do us. And what’s more, I was able to keep all three of them constantly in view: the removal of the sallow blob had made that possible. The marsh was more open, more to their liking: and as a bonus I was able to gourmandise on the sight.

  One of them dropped down to the ground. My guess was that she’d caught something and was devouring it at her leisure, while the other two were inspecting the place without getting too close to the female on the ground. This was, for all of them, an exciting encounter at an exciting time of year. There may not be highland cattle down there, and perhaps there won’t be so many orchids, but there is stuff that keeps a marsh harrier going. This was a place worth inspecting at close quarters.

  Marsh harriers started to come back to Britain after the Second World War, though in 1971 – after all birds of prey had been hammered by the use of pesticides – they were back down to a single breeding pair. That was at Minsmere, Ian’s old place. By then, they were protected by law. What’s more, the reedbeds and marshes they love to hunt over were now places cherished and maintained by conservation organisations. Marsh harriers started to spread again, doing so throughout the wet and watery landscapes on the eastern side of England. They’re now at their highest levels for 100 years: in 2005 there were 375 breeding females. (Marsh harriers are counted by numbers of breeding females, rather than pairs, because some males will have two or even three females.) What would Charles Rothschild have made of that?

  It was round about then that a strange thing happened. Some of them stopped migrating. They began to overwinter in England. It had been accepted that all marsh harriers went south for the winter. Now they were staying on: and at Hickling Broad, not a million miles from my place, I have seen 50 in the air at the same time in January. In winter they go there to roost together, before separating in the morning to set out and forage.

  These magnificent birds—

  —don’t you hate that? All birds of prey are magnificent, apparently. So is every stadium that ever held a major sporting event. There seems to be an adjectival paralysis that seizes people where birds of prey and stadiums are concerned.

  I have never worked out why it’s so important for birds of prey to be magnificent, nor why their magnificence is relevant to their conservation. Is it more important to conserve magnificent birds than humble and homely ones? Is their impact on human emotions a relevant factor to the urgency of their conservation?

  Perhaps what matters here is the top-down concept of conservation. There are many plants out there on the marsh, many invertebrates, and as a result good numbers of small birds and mammals. And because of that, the female marsh harrier was able to drop in and feed. The magnificence or otherwise of the three visiting marsh harriers shows that things are in half-decent shape: marsh harriers on the wing, all’s right with the marsh. Even if the vole or whatever it was being consumed might regret his own role in that economy.

  So the marsh is not for marsh harriers. It’s for everything. But if there’s a marsh harrier making a living there . . . well, everything – everything else – must be doing all right.

  Morning ride. How dare the egret claim to be more beautiful than my horse?

  Let me try and make you see a marsh harrier, for – spoiler alert – this is not the last page they will turn up on in this chronicle. They are birds of prey, but not of the quick and dashing sort. They operate at the opposite end of the speed spectrum. A marsh harrier’s power – Eddie, are you listening? –
is slowness. It has a very low stalling speed. It flies like an aeroplane with its flaps down: it can fly safely at a slower speed than most other birds; an eagle would fall out of the sky if it tried to match a marsh harrier for slowness. That’s air speed, of course: the speed of the air passing over the wings, not speed over the ground. This slow flight is a different form of agility, a different sort of flying skill: but it is a very considerable one and it is the way a marsh harrier makes its living.

  It holds its wings in a shallow vee – a dihedral – and that gives it control during its wavering glides. They patrol the marsh, with a particular fancy for the edges of the dykes, and from their drastically gentle speed, they have the leisure to see everything that lives and moves underneath, and then to drop down like a shuttlecock onto anything that might look like a meal. Nothing dramatic about the pounce of a marsh harrier: it dips in the air – is gone. And if it doesn’t get up at once, it’s probably caught something.

  Three females at the same time: that was deeply pleasing. They were no longer hunting: this was now an examination of each other and of each other’s claim on the patch of country below. There was a sizing-up going on: no active aggression but a general eyeing-up. It seemed that this bit of marsh was a valuable property. It mattered: to those three marsh harriers, it mattered very much.

  The females are dark brown with creamy heads. Their lines tend to be long and slim in straight and level flight. You can, with an idle glance, mistake them for a buzzard when they are soaring – gaining height without flapping their wings – but when they un-fan their tails and drop back into the dihedral, they are harriers through and through.

  These magnificent birds of prey have become rather homely birds of prey since I moved in here: and my daily life is all the richer because of that. To live on terms of familiarity with a once-extinct bird is a good feeling. I remember being shown marsh harriers at Minsmere by John Denny, an old boy who used to arrive at the reserve at opening time every day on his tricycle and spend the day in Island Mere Hide looking at marsh harriers. When he saw one he would bellow at the top of his voice: ‘Marsh harrier! Flying right!’ I don’t know if it was the birds’ rarity or their magnificence that got to him: but to Denny this was the bird of birds. After his death he donated his copy of Birds of the Western Palaearctic to Minsmere’s library, a highly acceptable bequest. It comes in nine volumes – I have them all on my own shelves, naturally – that cover, in considerable detail, every species routinely found in the biogeographical area in the title. Eight of Denny’s volumes had scarcely been opened. In the ninth only one species account had been seriously perused: and that one again and again and again.

  Birds of prey will do that to humans more than any other kind.

  As the year advanced, so did the vegetation – reminding us of one of our more disastrous and costly episodes in management. It’s not enough just to cut down vegetation: you need to clear it as well. If you don’t, you’re adding nutrients to the soil, creating an over-rich and unnatural environment. If a farmer maintains wide field margins, the job is not done with an annual cut. Jake at Raveningham also bales what’s cut, and then removes the bales. That’s why his field margins are bright with flowers and buzzing with bees.

  We had tried creating the same effect by strimming and raking, but that was either time-consuming or expensive. So after taking good and proper advice, we bought an impressive machine that cut vegetation and retained what it cut. The idea was to make a pile of the cuttings on the marsh, which would make a nice warm rotting place where snakes could lay their eggs. Alas, the tractor was a complete dud. We spent a good deal of money trying to fix it, but we had to get rid of it at a considerable loss – and in the meantime the management jobs stacked up. Doing the right thing is never easy.

  Deer footprints look like inverted commas, but don’t quote me.

  The tiny common that lies to the north-west of us – about ten acres, so a little bigger than our bit of marsh – is grazed by sheep. Jane, the shepherd, is good at her job. It’s a difficult business: farming people will tell you that, from the moment of birth, a sheep has one ambition and that is to die. Get even slightly behind in the system of prevention and they will be eaten alive by maggots. Fly-strike it’s called, and it’s a highly distressing business to clean up.

  The sheep are good custodians of the land – being light-footed, they don’t compact it as much as cattle or horses – and the place looks good. In certain moods I longed to get my hands on the place and manage it with wildlife as a priority. It’s a classic grazing marsh: a Broadland meadow, in short.

  A couple of miles down the road, and not entirely by coincidence, there is a place called Broadland Meadows. But there is no meadow there. It’s a housing development; and I’m not arguing about the need for housing. It sounds lovely: fancy living at number 15, Broadland Meadows. But the meadows were destroyed to build the houses. The houses stand packed together, without so much as a garden, not an ounce of generosity in the planning. It’s loudly agreed that we need houses; by choosing such a name, it’s tacitly agreed that we also want – need – meadows.

  The pattern of naming a place for what has been destroyed is found all over the country: names that might have been borrowed from Thomas Hardy are used for light industrial estates, motorway service stations and housing developments. And somehow everybody is fooled. By choosing a sweet especial rural name, we can pretend that we’re having our cake and eating it: living a rural idyll, at peace with the nature, while having all the convenience of suburbia.

  Little egret recalls Isaiah. How beautiful are the feet!

  The end of January is the time for the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch. The best thing about taking part is that you must sit for a full hour, doing nothing but looking for wildlife. This is a large-scale, citizen science project: the previous year more than half a million people sent back their forms and recorded more than 40 million birds.

  Naturally, my pride in the marsh means that I long to send our own form back full of impossible exoticisms: bitterns, cranes and Montagu’s harriers, say. But this is about gardens, so Cindy, Eddie and I took a seat looking out at the bird-feeders and the lawn leading down towards the dykes and the marsh. That’s not the country for bitterns or cranes. And anyway, you won’t see a Monty in the winter; they have stuck to their migratory habits, the few that ever turn up in this country.

  So there we were, at the dining table, with cups of tea and pencils and binoculars: and the usual sort of garden birds came to the feeders. That’s all good fun: great tits and blue tits hanging upside down; blackbirds and dunnocks at the bottom; robins making fleeting visits for the softer food; pheasants walking up to scavenge on the ground beneath.

  Eddie could identify most of these. The watch began, as always, in a mild frenzy of activity, and then, once the obvious birds had made their mark, the exercise became more contemplative. Under the rules of the Birdwatch, you’re not allowed to count flyovers, which is bad for showing off. We couldn’t count the little egret, which seemed unfair. However, I managed to pick out a female kestrel, perched in the willows at the far end of the garden.

  We had already had a great shared wildlife moment in January, Eddie and I. It was a blue whale: not, alas, a living one, but the great model that lies in the Mammal Hall at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington: a wondrous thing I gazed on as a child, and which helped to shape my world. Eddie had grown fascinated by blue whales. Two different geniuses of wildlife had inspired this love. The first was David Attenborough: Attenborough’s cry of joy – ‘The Blue Whale!’ – had lifted his heart: all his being was out there in the open boat in the middle of the ocean with the great hero: and he shared his joy as the greatest creature that ever lived came to the surface to breathe.

  The second genius was Nicola Davies, who has written many wildlife books for children, including Bat Loves the Night, already mentioned in these pages. Her Great Big Blue Whale is a masterpiece – poetry and science in gl
orious combination – and I have read it to Eddie more times than I can easily guess.

  I told him nothing about where we were heading as we set off from my father’s place in London. He recognised the building from the film Paddington, and that was a good start. Then, as we filed in, we dodged the rush to the dinosaurs and went straight to the Mammal Hall: and there, 100 feet long and swimming through the air above our heads . . . the blue whale!

  What could be better than that? Eddie held up his little finger to indicate the size of the krill, the blue whale’s chosen prey. A still better moment came after we had climbed to the gallery and were walking around, face to face with skeletons of other cetaceans that were suspended from the ceiling high above. And as we looked at the extent of a grey whale skeleton – the famous migrant that makes biennial journeys between the Arctic and the Pacific coast of Mexico – Eddie called out with joy and reverence: ‘Baleen plates!’

  He had seen pictures of these mysterious things, he had seen Attenborough demonstrate their function, he had read and been read Nicola’s description. Now he was confronted by the real thing: real baleen that had been used to sieve real food from water, the secret of the great whales’ existence. So once again I told him of my own encounter with grey whales in Mexico, and how they came up to the boat to be patted.

  Now at the dining table, we were making a list of these homely, non-exotic, decidedly non-magnificent birds, and spending a full hour at the task. The best bits came when the long-tailed tits dropped down. These are birds that love togetherness. They call to each other the whole time: the answering si-si-si to their own si-si-si is more than mere reassurance, it is ocular proof that all’s right with the world at that particular moment. They drop down with their impossible shapes (fat little round ball, ridiculously long stick of a tail) and colours (pale and dark grey picked out with the most tasteful possible pink, the sort of thing they go in for in the lounges of four-star hotels) as they filled the window with their busyness, their pleasure in being together, and in the abundance of the food resource that they could find in front of our windows. But the most constant birds are blue tits, dropping in again and again to eat their acrobatic meals. Blue tits, blue whales: both equally magnificent, in their different ways.