nest builders, little wonder their nests are often dismantled by a febrile wind.
But this harrier I am watching over the forest still has its nest on the ground. From my perch on the hillside I draw a sketch of his movements over the trees. Meandering, methodical, he covers every inch of the canopy. I watch him drift above the trees like this for half an hour until (I recognise it from Orkney) there is a sudden shift in purpose to his flight. He stalls low above a forest ride, hesitates a fraction, then whacks the ground with his feet. I make a note of the time: 14.50: he lifts from the kill and beats a heavy flight direct across the tops of the trees; there is the female harrier rising towards him; 14.51: the food pass; 14.52: the female keeps on rising, loops around the male; 14.53: she goes down into a newly planted corner of the forest. The trees are only a few feet tall here and I mark the position of her nest: four fence posts to the right of the corner post, then 12 feet down from the fence.
The hen harrier is the bird that brought me to William MacGillivray. The moment came when I was meandering, harrier-like, through books and papers, field notes and anecdotes about hen harriers. Then I read this passage from MacGillivray’s 1836 book, Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain:
Should we, on a fine summer’s day, betake us to the outfields bordering an extensive moor, on the sides of the Pentland, Ochill, or the Peebles hills, we might chance to see the harrier, although hawks have been so much persecuted that one may sometimes travel a whole day without meeting so much as a kestrel. But we are now wandering through thickets of furze and broom, where the blue milkwort, the purple pinguicula, the yellow violet, the spotted orchis, and all the other plants that render the desert so delightful to the strolling botanist, peep forth in modest beauty from their beds of green moss. The golden plover, stationed on the little knoll, on which he has just alighted, gives out his shrill note of anxiety, for he has come, not to welcome us to his retreats, but if possible to prevent us from approaching them, or at least to decoy us from his brood; the lapwing, on broad and dusky wing, hovers and plunges over head, chiding us with its querulous cry; the whinchat flits from bush to bush, warbles its little song from the top-spray, or sallies forth to seize a heedless fly whizzing joyously along in the bright sunshine. As we cross the sedgy bog, the snipe starts with loud scream from among our feet, while on the opposite bank the gor cock raises his scarlet-fringed head above the heath, and cackles his loud note of anger or alarm, as his mate crouches amid the brown herbage.
But see, a pair of searchers not less observant than ourselves have appeared over the slope of the bare hill. They wheel in narrow curves at the height of a few yards; round and round they fly, their eyes no doubt keenly bent on the ground beneath. One of them, the pale blue bird, is now stationary, hovering on almost motionless wing; down he shoots like a stone; he has clutched his prey, a young lapwing perhaps, and off he flies with it to a bit of smooth ground, where he will devour it in haste. Meanwhile his companion, who is larger, and of a brown colour, continues her search; she moves along with gentle flappings, sails for a short space, and judging the place over which she has arrived not unlikely to yield something that may satisfy her craving appetite, she flies slowly over it, now contracting her circles, now extending them, and now for a few moments hovering as if fixed in the air. At length, finding nothing, she shoots away and hies to another field; but she has not proceeded far when she spies a frog by the edge of a small pool, and, instantly descending, thrusts her sharp talons through its sides. It is soon devoured, and in the mean time the male comes up. Again they fly off together; and were you to watch their progress, you would see them traverse a large space of ground, wheeling, gliding, and flapping, in the same manner, until at length, having obtained a supply of savoury food for their young, they would fly off with it.
Attentive, accurate, warm and intimate, you cannot help but feel MacGillivray’s delight at being out there amongst the birds. The degree of observation: the way he records the hen harrier’s flight, the detail in the landscape, the description of the moorland flowers and moorland birds. It felt to me like the work of an exceptional field naturalist; the writer seemed to notice everything. And I wanted to read more, had to read more. Felt a kinship there, at least in the way MacGillivray responded to the birds. He caught the hen harrier’s beauty in his careful, graceful writing.
I walk through the middle of the day across the bog. Anything that breaks the horizon draws you towards it. The house is so far out on the flow it is like a boat set adrift. Not long abandoned, the building sagging, tipping into the bog. A portion of the corrugated-iron roof torn back, exposing timber cross-beams. Rock doves blurt out of the attic. Outside the house there is a bathtub turned upside down; four stumpy iron legs sticking upright, like a dead pig. In one of the rooms: a metal bed frame, a mattress patterned with mildew, blue ceramic tiles decorating the fireplace. A dead hind in the doorway, the stench of it everywhere. Deer droppings piled against the walls as if someone had swept them there.
MacGillivray often slept in places like this on his long walk to London. One night, on the outskirts of Lancaster, tired and wet, he stumbled upon a large, misshapen house in the dark. He went inside and groped his way around till he had made a complete circuit of the rooms. There was no loft, not even a culm of straw to bed down in, but earlier he had tried to sleep under a hedge and the house, despite its damp clay floor, was preferable. So he slept behind the door in wet feet with a handkerchief tied around his head, woke to a mild midnight to peep at the moon and walk up and down the floor a bit. Then slept again with his head on his knapsack to wake at dawn and walk down to the river to wash his face.
But that restless night on the outskirts of Lancaster comes much later. It is only five days since MacGillivray set out from Aberdeen and he is still in Aberdeenshire, crossing the Cairngorms on route from Braemar to Kingussie. He spends the night of Sunday 12 September high in the mountains in a palaver of sleeplessness and shivering. Supper is a quarter of a barley cake and a few crumbs of cheese. After which he does his best to make a shelter out of stones and grass and heath, then settles the knapsack and some heather over his feet, to try to keep the cold at bay.
He wakes at sunrise and resumes his climb into the mountains. It is slow going and he pauses often to rest; his muscles, after so little food, shiver with fatigue. At the source of the Dee he pauses to drink a glassful of its cold, blissful water. Up on the plateau he finds moss campion and dwarf willow; in the steep grey corries: dog’s violet, smooth heath bedstraw, alpine lady’s mantle.
During my time in Caithness and Sutherland I heard rumours of merlins. People were generous with their knowledge, pointing places out to me on my map. Somebody’s faint memory of a nest site was enough to set me trekking far out across the bog. One afternoon I walked out to a distant mountain that rose sheer out of the flow. I had been told that a corrie high on the mountain’s north face was a traditional nesting site for merlins. I walked there through a land creased with water, through dense clusters of dubh lochans, the hundreds of small lakes that form beautiful patterns across the surface of the bog. In some places the lochans are packed so tightly you can drift through their mazy streets for hours with no sense of where you might emerge. Most of the pools are shallow, two or three feet deep, though occasionally one would sink its depth into blackness. Water horsetail grew in some of the shallower pools, bell heather and cotton sedge along the banks. Around the edge of the pools were great mounds of sphagnum moss built up like ant hills. I pushed my arm into one of them, losing it up to my shoulder in the moss’s cool dampness, sphagnum tentacles crawling over my skin. Some of these mounds had been perched on by birds, wisps of down feather left behind, the imprint of the bird’s weight on the soft moss.
Hours I spent out there on the bog, and so many distractions on the way to the mountain, so much water to weave around. At one point, I gave up and slithered otter-like between the lochans, swirling up clouds of peat particles when I dived into the pools. And somewhere out on the flow a great boulder – just as the abandoned house had done – drew me towards it. A huge lump of rock, 20 feet high, jettisoned by the retreating ice. There was a solitary mountain ash growing up through a crack in the rock like a ship’s mast. I clambered up the boulder and found, on the slab’s flat top, a plate of bones. I had discovered
