So he pulls his long blue coat over his back and starts walking into the deep mountains to the west of Aberdeen. Already he feels his mind thawing; in his journal he writes, I am at length free. By the time he staggers into London, six weeks and 838 miles later, the blue of his coat will be weathered with grey like the plumage of the merlin that brushed past him in pursuit of the lark that day.
There are fifteen breeding diurnal birds of prey found in the British Isles. This list does not include boreal migrants – bearing news from the Arctic – like the rough-legged buzzard and gyrfalcon, or rare vagrants such as the red-footed falcon, who occasionally brush the shores of these islands. Neither does it include owls. For they are raptors too; that is, a bird possessing acute vision, capable of killing its prey with sharp, curved talons and tearing it with a hooked beak, from the Latin rapere, to seize or take by force. But owls belong to a separate group, the Strigiformes. And although the change of shift between the diurnal and nocturnal birds of prey is not always clear-cut (as I experienced with short-eared owls on Orkney), owls require a list of their own; they are such a fascinating, culturally rich species, they need to be attended to in their own right.
Acute vision is a distinguishing characteristic of raptors. Just how acute is illustrated by this vivid description of a golden eagle recorded by Seton Gordon in The Golden Eagle: King of Birds:
Four days later I had an example of the marvellous eyesight of the golden eagle. The male bird was approaching at a height of at least 1,500 feet. Above a gradual hill slope where grew tussocky grass, whitened by the frosts and snow of winter, he suddenly checked his flight and fell headlong. A couple of minutes later he rose with a small object grasped in one foot. It was, I am almost sure, a field-mouse or vole. Since he had caught his prey at an elevation well above that of the eyrie, he was able to go into a glide when he took wing and made for home. When he had grasped his prey he had torn from the ground some of the long grass in which his small quarry had been hiding: during his subsequent glide, as he moved faster and faster, the grass streamed out rigidly behind him.
Avian eyes are huge in relation to body size, and this is especially the case in birds of prey; many raptors have eyes that are as large, often larger, than an adult human’s. The foveal area in the retina of birds of prey is densely packed with photoreceptor cells. A human eye contains around 200,000 of these cells; the eye of a common buzzard, by comparison, has roughly one million of these rod-and-cone photoreceptors, enabling the buzzard to see the world in much greater detail than we can. Images are also magnified in a raptor’s eye by around 30 per cent. The birds’ eyes are designed much like a pair of binoculars: as light hits the fovea pit in the retina, its rays are bent – refracted – and magnified onto the retina so that the image is enhanced substantially. Birds of prey see the whole twitching world in infinite, immaculate detail.
All fifteen of the diurnal birds of prey breed in these islands, though some in very small numbers. Many are permanent residents. The osprey, hobby, Montagu’s harrier and honey buzzard are summer visitors. All are classified within a single order, the Accipitriformes, and subdivided into three suborders. Accipitridae: the soarers and gliders, the nest builders, distinguished by their broad ‘fingered’ wings; so: hawks, buzzards, eagles, kites and harriers. Pandionidae: with its solitary member, the osprey – a specialist – the hoverer-above-water, the feet-first-diver after fish. Falconidae: the speed merchants (whose nests are scrapes or squats): kestrel, merlin, hobby, peregrine; fast, agile fliers with pointed wings, capable (though not all of them do) of catching their prey in the air.
Pandionidae
Osprey
Accipitridae
Honey Buzzard
Red Kite
Sea Eagle
Marsh Harrier
Hen Harrier
Montagu’s Harrier
Goshawk
Sparrowhawk
Buzzard
Golden Eagle
Falconidae
Kestrel
Merlin
Hobby
Peregrine Falcon
Fifteen birds of prey, fifteen different landscapes. A journey in search of raptors, a journey through the birds and into their worlds. That is how I envisaged it. The aim simply to go in search of the birds, to look for each of them in a different place. To spend some time in the habitats of these birds of prey, hoping to encounter the birds, hoping to watch them. Beginning in the far north, in Orkney, and winding my way down to a river in Devon. A long journey south, clambering down this tall, spiny island, which is as vast and wondrous to me as any galaxy.
Rain over the Pentland Firth. The cliffs of Hoy streaked with rain. The red sandstone a faint glow inside the fret. The low cloud makes the cliffs seem huge, there is no end to them. We could be sailing past a great red planet swirling in a storm of its own making. I am on the early morning crossing from Stromness to Scrabster. Light spilling from slot machines; the bar opening up; breakfast in the ferry’s empty café. Through the window: an arctic tern, so beautifully agile, it seemed to be threading its way through the rain’s interstices. Then a couple from Holland come in, hesitate when they hear themselves in the café’s emptiness. They have been walking for a week through Orkney and their faces are red with wind-burn. They hunch over their breakfasts and I see how we do this too: mantle our food, like a hawk, glower out from over it. We are passing The Old Man of Hoy and all three of us shift across to the port side for a better view. We see the great stack in pieces, its midriff showing through a tear in the cloud. Then the rain thickens like a shoal and The Old Man, the cliffs of Hoy, dissolve in rain.
The way I’d pictured it, back home, doodling over maps, Orkney would be all hen harriers. Then the ferry, the train from Thurso, a request stop and stepping off the deserted platform into the blanket bog of the Flow Country. Then the vast, impossible search for merlins. I knew the birds were out there somewhere, not in large numbers, but I had seen a merlin once before, a skimming-stone, hunting fast and low far out on The Flows, the peaks of Morven, Maiden Pap and Scaraben on the southern horizon, a patch of snow on Morven’s north face like the white dab on a coot’s forehead.
All of that happened as best it could. On the crossing over from Orkney I thought of home – ached for it – for my family there, and thought of the fishermen out of Wick and Scrabster who, should they dream of home, hauled in their nets and headed back to harbour, not willing to tamper with a dream like that. I shared a taxi with the Dutch couple from Scrabster into Thurso. They were tired and polite and wanted to pay, Orkney’s wind still rushing in them. They sat in the back of the cab, their faces glowing like rust.
Waiting for the train at Thurso, a slow drizzle, the rails a curve of light, glinting like mica in the wet. The last stop, as far north as you can go. Buffers, then a wall and then another wall because, if you did not stop, the train would slip like a birthing ship down through Thurso’s steep streets, past her shops and houses and out into the frantic tides of the firth, rousing wreckers from their sleep who go down to poke about the shore like foraging badgers.
Then the warmth of the train, people steaming in their wet clothes. The start of my long journey south. All the staging posts between the moors of Orkney and the moors of Devon lying in wait for me. Reading the maps of each place obsessively, thinking the maps into life, imagining their landscape, their weather. The more I read the maps the more I imagined
