The crows and the birds of prey live in a constant state of war. The instinct to mob a predator is so imprinted on birds that differing species of birds of prey will even relentlessly mob one another. In the battle between the crows and the hawks the crows will often win on tactics, for they are much brighter animals altogether. The hawks do not live on their wits; with their incredible eyesight and their bodies designed for speed and lightning-fast reactions they must live out their lives in a whirling rush of pure sensation.
That year I was doing some work for the estate in the hilltop wood, the long plantation of mainly Scots pine above my top field. The wood was twenty years old now, and it had passed the thicket stage and needed thinning out. I was to fell every fifth row of trees, stripping them of branches and foliage and leaving their trunks to be collected later. It was slow, laborious work with only my cranky old chainsaw that would keep stalling on me, but there was no rush to finish the job, I just went up there as and when the mood took me. Most days I would stroll up the hill with my saw and petrol can for an hour or two. It was peaceful up there, at least until I started my chainsaw. I began to notice that every time I felled a tree and looked up at the newly revealed patch of sky, there seemed to be a raven circling directly overhead, drawn by curiosity, I supposed, to the noise I was making. I saw the raven whenever I was out at my woodpile too. I would be out there chopping wood every day the sun shone; my fire seldom went out and I constantly needed to keep the woodshed stocked, in readiness for the long wet spells that could come at any time. Almost as soon as I struck the first blow with my axe the raven would appear overhead, circling and swooping low, and calling, calling. Not the usual cronk you hear when a raven sees you but the contact call. His bell-like ringing would echo each stroke of my axe.
I was out at the woodpile again, weighing the axe in my hands. It was not a normal chopping axe but a big heavy splitting axe. Smaller logs I could split in a single swing, but the bigger rounds from the trunk of a tree took more work. I rolled them up on to my chopping block and drove a notch into them with the axe. Then I put a thick iron wedge into the split and hammered it in using the heel of the axe as a sledgehammer. It was satisfying work. The clang it made was a surprising facsimile of the calls of the raven above. I looked up at the circling raven. He was closer than ever, swooping down to me and calling more insistently than ever, as if he were trying to tell me something. I began to wonder if he wanted me to follow him, so I lay down my axe and set off after him.
He led me right along the top edge of Penlan Wood, flying low just ahead of me, and he kept looking over his shoulder to check I was still with him. At the end of the wood I clambered over a barbed-wire fence and down into the steep fields beyond. After a short distance further the raven stopped leading me on and circled directly above me. I looked around me and finally saw a skein of white in a fold in the hillside, a long-dead sheep that I hadn’t noticed before because it was nearly hidden in the bracken. As I approached two ravens flew up, then four carrion crows. Finally, two magpies took to the trees, chattering angrily at being disturbed, and my raven flew down to the feast. I don’t know whether he was inviting me to join him for lunch, or simply using me to drive away his competitors, but either way he made me laugh. My familiar.
Unlike most birds, male and female ravens don’t differ in size or plumage, and unlike the buzzards, for example, they don’t have markings that vary from bird to bird. To our eyes they are indistinguishable. I didn’t really even know for sure that the injured bird I had found was a male, I was just making an educated guess. It was a measure of how far immersed I was becoming in this little patch of wild country that I called my own that I was no longer seeing birds as representatives of their species, but as often as not would have an idea of their histories, how old they were, where they had been born, where they were nesting, where their territories and hunting ranges began and ended. My methods may not always have been scientifically rigorous, but then I was not attempting a scientific study, rather an experiment in life.
The raven pair never came back to their birch-tree nest in the woods. It was only to be expected; this was a starter home, after all. Ravens are long-lived birds, and I like to imagine them now as a venerable old pair living in a mansion, a stately pile on a mountainside crag. The big old nest in the cedar was still used, year after year, so there were always ravens close at hand for me to watch. My world would have been a poorer place without them. And as for my familiar, well, over the course of a year he became gradually less and less familiar. His social visits became steadily more and more sporadic until the following winter when they ceased altogether. And that was as it should be; this was a majestic wild bird, a creature of the skies, not a pet. I hope and trust that he found a mate of his own in time, and I wish him a life free of persecution by marauding goshawks. And when I am out walking in the hills and a raven comes sailing by that little bit closer than usual, I like to imagine that, just possibly, it could be him.
5. Restless Creatures
Spring came to me like a liberation, the first gulp of air after diving too deep. Though I enjoyed facing the challenges that winter brought, by the tail end of the season I began to yearn for the first signs of change. I had my own personal marker for the new season; not the arrival of the summer migrants, the first swallow or the first cuckoo, but earlier than that. I waited impatiently for it. It came to me in the early dawn, a plangent peal that rippled up the hillside from the fields below, then trailed away to nothing. It was such an evocative sound for me, it transported me instantly back to when I was a boy. My childhood haunt was the local marshes, and my habit was to rise at first light to get there before the dog-walkers. In the winter vast flocks of dunlin wheeled over the mudflats, and chevrons of little black brent geese would settle on the salt marsh. In spring the hares would be boxing in the fields. But always, always, there would be the curlews.
The curlews that came to these hills each year to nest never failed me; they always returned in the second week of March. I knew that the hard times were not really over yet, and there would still be more snow, but from this point on change was in the air, there would be new arrivals almost daily. The curlews didn’t just always arrive in the same week each year, they always returned to the same place too, and on the day I first heard one I would always go to see them. Down the hill and past the old crook barn, through the woods and over the bridge. Across the overgrown fields where the winter woodcock hid I reached the lanes. By the crossroads on the lanes were a series of flat fields that once were boggy and almost unworkable. Years ago, many pairs of curlews would nest here, and many pairs of lapwings too. That was before the farmer who owned the land dug trenches and put in land drains to dry out the soil, then ploughed and reseeded these fields to make better grazing.