But as I followed the hawk’s traverse of the hillside, I noticed something else too, a familiar-looking mound of earth protruding from the flattened remains of dead bracken, and decided to go down for a closer look. The sett was bigger and older than most others in the area, with five holes in regular use, and two more that looked abandoned now. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t found this sett before; it was incredibly close to home, and it made me realize how easy it is to become a creature of habit, always following the same paths and keeping the same times. The sett I had been using for badger-watching was much further along the hill, over past the ravens’ nest in the cedar, and was hard to get close to without drawing attention to myself. This would be much more suitable; I needed to cross only one field to look down over it from a distance, and if I wanted to get up close, there was a clump of alders on a patch of level boggy ground just twenty feet away which would almost always be downwind of the sett.
The badgers around here fed mostly on the farmland, but their setts were on the moor. I knew of only two setts down on the farmland, both in impenetrable thickets, while on the east and north sides of the mountain where the bracken grew tall there were setts every couple of hundred yards, all at the same altitude, about fifty yards above where the topmost fields turned to moor. They were wary animals here, and with good reason. In the wild valley to the north of my hill, I found a sett that had been recently dug out. On the mound of earth beside it was the skull of a badger cub, unmistakable from the thick bony ridge down the centre of the cranium. And walking on the lanes one day, a Land Rover had pulled up alongside me; a huntsman late for the hunt and asking if I had seen or heard it. We got to chatting and the conversation turned to badgers. Badgers were beautiful, harmless creatures, he told me, and he liked to kill them too. This was a country matter; townsfolk didn’t understand these things.
I didn’t visit the sett that night — the scent I must have left around their home during my inspection would have made them too cautious — but soon I returned, approaching from behind the cover of the alder wood. I positioned myself at the edge of the copse looking down over the sett, my back to the trunk of a tree so that my silhouette wouldn’t stand out against the sky. Badger-watching is a good test of one’s ability to stay still. It is harder than you would think; we are restless creatures by nature. After the sun had set, but well before dark, a striped muzzle emerged from the underground lair and tested the air. It disappeared again, and I thought at first that I had been rumbled, but then a big boar badger came barrelling out of the sett, closely followed by two sows. They remained around their heavily trampled arena for a while, scratching and sniffing. Badgers move with a sinuous roll that belies their bulk. As darkness began to fall, the boar and one of the sows set off on separate trails, to search for earthworms in the fields below, while the second sow remained behind and made a great show of collecting up dead bracken as fresh bedding, dragging bundles of it backwards into the sett. When she too had left the area I slipped away unnoticed. With luck I would get to see this year’s young emerging for the first time before the end of May. By then the whole hillside would be deep in bracken, and the badgers’ trails would be green tunnels that would render them as unwatchable above ground as below.
But the badgers had competition for their share of my spring evenings. Just as often I would head to my spot down the hill and over my stream. These fields had a life all their own: untrodden and ungrazed, they were rapidly returning to their natural state. There were plenty of kestrels in the hills, but I never saw them hovering over the farmland elsewhere; the close-cropped grass simply didn’t support enough small mammals for them. These overgrown fields, though, were like an island of plenty for them. Cuckoos came here too, drawn I think not only by the availability of caterpillars, their preferred food, but also by the plenitude of tree pipits that launched themselves from their song posts in every scrubby tree. The call of the cuckoo can be heard for miles around, and they are much less common than it might seem. You will hear them often but see them seldom, even with their voice to guide you. Think what a rare sight they would be were they silent.
Barn owls hunted here too, attracted by the multitude of voles that tunnelled their way through the long grass. No barn owls nested on this side of the river, though I knew of two nesting sites across the valley, one in an old hollow oak and one in an abandoned barn. This was the only place they would cross the river for, and sometimes their unearthly screeching would drift up to me at the cottage from these fields. Barn owls have a completely different breeding strategy from the tawnies. The tawny will adjust its clutch size each year according to the availability of food, while the barn will produce four or five young each year without fail. In an exceptional year, all the young will survive, but in most years only the biggest and strongest will make it. My farmer’s nephew once found a young owl down on the edge of these fields. He took it to the rescue centre but it was dead on arrival. It was just feather and bone, starved to death.
Now that spring had come the vast majority of the winter woodcocks had already headed back to Scandinavia for the season, but a handful remained here to breed, and it was the wondrous roding display of the woodcock that I had come here to see. I arrived at my bench earlier than I needed so that I could first listen to the evening chorus. The thicket across the clearing was dense with life; there was a whole symphony of birdsong there, an invisible orchestra. As darkness began to settle over the land, the birds started to fall silent one by one, until none was left save for the last mistle thrush. And just as he too fell silent, the male woodcock emerged and began his flight. He circled the clearing with a slow, moth-like fluttering flight. Round and round he went, flying low at about treetop level, silhouetted against the sky and continually making his twin roding call, a low frog-like croak followed by a high-pitched chirrup. He would do this every night for months, and every morning too, in his efforts to attract a mate. Unlike the Penlan sparrowhawk, he was a strictly clockwise bird. Sometimes, as he flew over the alder copse to the east of the clearing, he would pass by a second displaying bird, also travelling clockwise. This fringe of alders must have marked the territorial boundary. As well as having a subtle beauty, this bird has a mystique to it that drew me back again and again. Victorian naturalists reported that the woodcock, unlike any other bird, would transport its young to safety by carrying them between its thighs. For generations this was thought most probably to be a myth, until a century later it was reliably observed and found to be true. After watching this bird’s display many times, I finally saw something that, while perhaps not as dramatic as the way it carries its young, was extraordinary enough for me. He was mid-circuit when a second bird suddenly rose from the long grass and flew straight up to him, pulling him up short. For a short while the pair danced together in the air, breast to breast, claw to claw, then they fluttered down to the ground to mate.
Not long after the curlews returned to the hills, the first of the international migrants started to arrive too. Earliest of all was the chiffchaff, arriving back before the last of the redwings and fieldfares had even set off for their nesting grounds in the countries of the north; and then the wheatear, returning to the drystone walls that flank the moor, and to the cairns on the mountaintops. There are one or two types of bird that wait until May — the swift, for example, and, last of all, the spotted flycatcher — but almost all arrive in quick succession throughout April. Their consistency over the years was astonishing; not only could they be relied on to arrive in the same order, they would also consistently arrive within a day or two of the previous year’s arrival date. If the first wonder of migration is how birds manage to navigate thousands of miles back to the same tiny copse they were born in, the second is how they manage to time their journey so that they arrive back on the same day their parents did the previous year. Most of them, the woodland birds at least, I would see first in the trees along the stream on my way to my postbox, often in large groups. It would be like welcoming back old friends: the confiding pied flycatchers; the almost tropically exotic redstarts; and a whole raft of warblers. Some of them, the garden warblers and blackcaps, I would rarely see at any other time, for they are retiring birds of thick cover, the location of their territories best found by people better than me at picking out the song of individual birds from the cacophony of the dawn chorus. And once the migrants were back, there was no rest for them, it was now that the race for life truly began; to establish terri-tories, protect them, find a mate, raise a brood. These were hectic times.