But the kites were silent birds, unlike the buzzards and ravens that called constantly and formed the soundtrack to my life in the hills. Both live here in population densities perhaps greater than anywhere else in the world. On clear, sunny days there would often be twelve or fifteen buzzards circling overhead, mewling and bickering like drunks at a wedding. When it was overcast or raining they would hunch in the trees or on fence posts as if sulking. Their staple diet was the carrion of dead sheep, but they were opportunistic feeders — they would eat whatever they could find. Often when I woke they would be out in the front field looking for any worms that had emerged in the night. I have seen them hovering almost like a kestrel, though with much less grace, then dropping into the grass to catch a vole; and they will kill a bird as large as a crow, and even kill a rabbit if they can catch it. I have only once seen a buzzard turn up its beak at the opportunity of a free meal.
I was sitting on my doorstep in the morning sun with my chain file, methodically sharpening my saw, when I noticed something crawling up the hillside towards me. It was a grey squirrel, but its head was swollen, its eyes bul-ging, and it appeared to be losing control of its limbs. I hadn’t realized that myxomatosis could affect squirrels; or perhaps this was not myxomatosis but an equivalent squirrel disease. It couldn’t support its weight; it was dragging itself up the hill on its belly, but it seemed absolutely determined and it never paused in its struggle. It was a pitiful sight. A buzzard flew up from the wood and perched in a tree above the squirrel, shaking its tail as it settled like they always do. I recognized this bird from its markings, it was one of the pair that nested in Penlan Wood. It flew down to the ground beside the squirrel and peered at it closely, and I thought it was curtains for the squirrel. But the buzzard lifted and flew back to the wood; it must have sensed that something was not right. The squirrel carried on, painfully slowly, irrevocably. Just over the track was an old ash, and there was a hollow in that ash right at ground level. The squirrel crawled into the shelter of that hole, from which it would never emerge.
Buzzards are raggedy, untidy birds; every time they make a move they seem to lose another feather. You could come back from any walk with a hatband full of buzzard feathers. The ravens are much cooler customers altogether. They get a bad press, because they are black and feed on carrion, I suppose, though in some cultures they are revered, as the bird that brought us the sun, or even as our creator. They are thought to be the most intelligent of all birds, as intelligent as dogs. They mate for life and have a wide range of vocalizations, the most sophisticated communication skills of any bird. The most familiar call is a deep cronk; if you see a raven this is what you will probably hear. Because if you can see a raven you can be sure it will have seen you first, and the cronking is actually a very mild alarm call. The other constant call is a beautiful bell-like ringing tone that you hear when the birds are out of sight, the contact call between a pair.
The ravens are monolithic black slabs that float across the hillside with scarcely a wing-beat; they are massive. With their straight wings, their diamond-shaped tails, their long necks and shaggy heads, they look like Maltese crosses silhouetted against the sky. As they fly they repeatedly fold their wings tight against their body, flip on to their backs and fly upside down, first one bird then the other. This stunning display seems almost joyous, as if the birds are rejoicing in the freedom of the skies. It is described as a spring courtship display, but I have seen it in every month of the year. They almost infallibly come in twos, and the pair remains together all year round, always close, always loyal. Except for when they are followed by a trail of their young they are not generally social members of the crow family, such as the rooks and the jackdaws, or the choughs on the cliffs. Although one August when I walked to the top of my mountain I found a meet of perhaps twenty-five birds above the summit, not just flipping on to their backs but performing complete rolls, then dropping like stones to the ground and swooping up at the last possible moment. This mysterious gathering continued for hours as I watched from a distance, awestruck by their total mastery of the air and wondering at the purpose of it all.
Magpies are known for these occasional inscrutable parliaments too. They are not social birds either — the rhyme only goes up to seven, after all — but occasionally they will assemble in much larger numbers for reasons not fully understood. I saw such a meeting just once in my time in the hills. There were five birds in a circle on the ground, all facing inwards and hopping around awkwardly as if they were not sure quite what to do. All around them in the trees and bushes near by was an outer circle of nearly twenty watching birds, like the audience at a gladiatorial contest.
I found the local raven nest during my first winter, before I had moved into Penlan full-time. On the steep bracken-covered eastern flank of my hill are a series of small copses. Some are natural — alder woods that follow the trickle of a stream down the mountainside — but evenly spaced between them are several small stands of ornamental conifers, planted long ago for the benefit of the view from the big house far away across the valley. The Victor-ians had a habit of introducing features to the landscape that would be seen to their full advantage only by their grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. In a way you have to admire their confidence; they must have thought their time would never end. That winter I picked my way across the hillside while the bracken was dead and brown, exploring each of the little copses in turn. And high up in the tallest cedar in the biggest of these copses I found the nest. It was vast; it looked like generations of ravens must have added to it, but in fact I later discovered that it was relatively recent. They had previously nested for years across the river and further up-valley, but the site had been visible from the road and drunks from the local pub had one night decided to take pot-shots at the nest with their air rifles.
When spring came I began to watch the birds at the nest. Ravens are among the first birds to breed; they will work on their nest through February and then begin to lay in early March, when the hills where they live are often still streaked with drifts of snow. Birds time their nesting so that the weeks when the nest is full of hungry mouths to feed will coincide with the time their food supply is at its most plentiful. For ravens this meant lambing season, when the fields would be full of stillborn lambs and afterbirths. Whether or not the increased adoption of lambing sheds will affect the density of their population remains to be seen.
From the ridge of the hill I could look straight down into the nest at the sitting bird brooding her eggs, far enough away that I did not disturb her. But I preferred to watch from below. At the track where the moorland met the highest fields, I would sit on the stile where I had seen my first polecat and look up at the nesting copse. The male would come sailing in across the valley, calling repeatedly. He was so big that his arrival seemed to make the hillside shrink around him. He would settle in a tree in the adjacent copse and the sitting female would fly out to him. And then he would sing to her, a quiet, gentle trilling song that you would never expect to hear from a member of the crow family, and they would touch beaks tenderly. After that they would launch themselves from the trees and circle together, each flipping over in turn, their calls ringing out across the valley. The pair raised their five young successfully that year. Once they were on the wing they spread themselves over the hillside trees, calling for food, but soon they began to follow their parents everywhere in a long line, a crocodile in the sky. Wherever I went I would see them trailing after the adults, trying to copy their every move, discovering their domain.