The curlews, the biggest of our waders, with their impossibly long decurved bills designed for finding food in deep mud, didn’t much like this improved grassland, and usually just one pair would remain here to breed, and one pair of noisy lapwings too. Yet still the curlews came here to gather each year before they dispersed to the hills, and I could expect to see twelve or fifteen of them together, taking turns to rise into the air and display, making their curling calls and that liquid song so beautiful it can bring a tear to the eye. And as for the many lapwings that used to come here to breed, each year fewer and fewer of them seemed to come. At first there might be perhaps fifteen of them displaying among the curlews, but now, apart from that last remaining pair that clung on here to breed, they hardly came at all. I knew of nowhere else in the area where they remained. They are one of the farmland birds that have been worst affected by agricultural changes, a creature rapidly disappearing from our landscape.
Long before the international migrants began to appear, while the winter parties of redwings and fieldfares were still moving north, our own internal migrants were returning from the low ground and the coast. The hills, desolate all winter, were suddenly filled with an abundance of skylarks and meadow pipits. It would be months before the moors fell silent again. And the peregrines were back on their eyrie. They used to frequent the steep hill directly across the river valley from me, whose crags I could see looming above the oak wood. It was an unusual nesting site; the crags were too accessible for the falcons’ tastes and they preferred to make their home in an old ravens’ nest in the plantation below. If the peregrines had still nested there I would have seen them daily, but now I would see them from the cottage only a few times a year. When the big commercial quarry up-valley was abandoned, the pair moved straight on to the high cliffs there, less convenient for me, but much more suitable for them.
It was about a two-hour walk for me to go and visit them, but for peregrines it was worth it, and all through spring and right into summer, when the young took to the wing, a weekly walk up to the old quarry would be a part of my routine. Sometimes it is enough just to wander aimlessly, but sometimes it is good to have a destination in mind. On the hill alongside the crags was a large plantation and I would approach through the dense cover of the trees, crossing a stream that fell through the wood in a series of wild cascades. I would position myself just inside the wood and level with the eyrie, far enough away that I would not disturb them. In fact they never gave any sign of even having noticed me, as I was too far away to constitute any kind of threat. The male, the tiercel, would nearly always be in place, motionless on his buttress like a gargoyle, looking out intently over the valley far below from beneath his black helmet. Occasionally he would light out and turn a few graceful circles, his wild keening call echoing on the rocks. Immediately, the throng of jackdaws that nested at the far end of the crags and in the abandoned quarry buildings would take to the air in a cacophony of alarm. A pair of kestrels lived on these crags too, well away from the much larger peregrine falcons, and they would slip out from their nest with the utmost caution.
Whenever a bird passed close by, the peregrine would launch himself from the cliffs in pursuit. An incautious woodpigeon flew up the valley and he raced after it, following every twist and turn as it tried to make its escape, before circling back to his perch. He was not hunting, it was just a reflex. A raven loomed over the top of the crags, and the tiercel caught up with it in seconds; he flew directly beneath it, rolled on to his back, and tapped it repeatedly on its breast with a single talon. It was done with balletic poise, the peregrine seems incapable of a clumsy move. At last the female burst from the nest and raced across the valley for the hills, her wings winnowing in her hurry to find food. The tiercel circled and took his turn at the nest, and my watching was over for the day unless I decided to await the falcon’s return.
A sparrowhawk raced up-valley across the river from where I was watching, near to home, and settled in the crest of a fully grown Scots pine directly opposite me. It began to drizzle with rain as I waited for her to emerge from cover. Eventually she left her perch and started to rise, to where a group of four buzzards was circling over the hillside. The hawk circled higher and higher, bypassing the buzzards and climbing far above them. The sparrowhawk’s nesting display is typically associated with sunny spring mornings. It was late afternoon and it was raining, but I had seen enough of sparrowhawks by then to know that they can be relied on to do the unexpected.
The next day I set off across the footbridge over the river to take a look at the suspected nesting site. Parties of black-headed gulls drifted far above me, all headed north, on their way from the sea to their breeding grounds in the hills. As I crossed the road I found a dead polecat, roadkill. I was surprised it hadn’t been cleared away by the buzzards and crows; it looked like it had been there for a while. The place I was headed for was a pretty spot: a rocky outcrop of the hillside flanked by larch woods and capped by a little copse of mature Scots pine. As I clambered up the hillside through the greening larches I found a recently killed crow, only half-plucked, and saw the hawk soaring above the pines, her tail broadly fanned, her breast delicately barred in brown and white. After making a few circuits she folded her wings and swooped down towards the trees, then rose, then swooped again, five or six times. Eight buzzards soared over the treeline. One seemed to be trying to impersonate the hawk in its own untidy fashion, folding its wings and plunging down fifty or a hundred feet. The difference was that at the bottom of each dive was a second buzzard. The first few times the attacking bird swung away at the last moment, but finally it reached out a claw and struck home. I scrambled up rocks the last few metres to the stand of pines. It was too early in the year for nest-building, but I found two old nests in adjacent trees: broad, flattened tangles of sticks high up and close to the trunk. The purpose of the hawk’s spring display is to ensure that nests are evenly distributed across the available range; this site was only half a mile or so away from the nest in Penlan Wood, and beyond Penlan the next site I knew of was a scant five hundred metres further west. It showed just how many of these hawks the hills could support. As I left, a pair of crows was relentlessly mobbing a buzzard, driving it almost to the ground. Above them all circled the sparrowhawk, watching.
On my way home I decided to take a long cut up the hill, on a well-worn sheep trail across the moor. The first pale green tendrils were emerging from the thick chestnut mat of last year’s bracken. I rubbed my fingers on one of the delicate coils for that distinctive musty smell, the smell of spring on the moor. When I was halfway up the trail, a male sparrowhawk shot over the hilltop and hurtled down the sheer hillside a few feet above the ground, crossing the track just ahead of me. His wings were not outstretched but folded almost to his sides like those of a stooping peregrine. He raced down into the valley at great speed, compact and bullet-like, without apparently moving a muscle. This was not so much flight as controlled freefall. I couldn’t help but note his trajectory, which led him by the shortest possible route from Penlan Wood towards the new site I had identified earlier that day. I knew that a male sparrowhawk had recently been found dead near by in the valley, beneath someone’s French windows, and my suspicion was that the Penlan Wood male had filled the vacancy, and was supporting two females.