This is also a notoriously elusive bird to watch; even more so than the sparrowhawk it seems to live on the very periphery of human vision, and before you can turn to look at it, it has already gone. It is particularly hard to judge the size of a bird against an open sky because you have no frame of reference, and the goshawk is fundamentally an outsize sparrowhawk, with colouring and markings almost identical to those of the female of the smaller species. The male and female differ in size too, so the two species form a size gradient, from the little male sparrowhawk, barely bigger than a mistle thrush, to the big female goshawk, the size of a buzzard. In essence they are sparrowhawks writ large. Bigger, bolder, fiercer, faster. They have all the qualities I had learned to love in the sparrowhawk, but in overdrive.
I do remember the first time I allowed the merest thought of a goshawk to enter my mind, if only fleetingly. It was during my first autumn at the cottage, and I was walking past the beech-hanger that clings on to the hillside halfway down towards the river. There had been a heavy crop of beech mast that year, and the woodpigeons had gathered for the feast. As I walked alongside the woodland edge, a bird of prey passed twenty feet over my head and into the wood, sending pigeons spouting out in all directions. Then it turned and crossed the valley ahead of me. It looked to be about the size of a buzzard, but something was not right; its tail was too long for one thing. As the bird settled into an isolated tree directly across the river from me, a dark cloud passed overhead and there was a sudden torrential shower of rain. I leaned into the broad grey trunk of the nearest beech for shelter, though I was dripping wet in seconds, and tried to keep my eye on the bird, but it was no use. Thick veils of rain gusted up the valley above the river and I could hardly make out the tree the bird had perched in, let alone the bird itself. A few minutes later, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun came out, but the bird had slipped away. I quickly convinced myself that it had been a female sparrowhawk and I had misjudged its distance and size. It seemed the only plausible explanation.
Over the course of that winter several of my sparrowhawk sightings gave me pause for thought, but it was not until the following February that the evidence became incontrovertible. It was a dull, overcast day, one of those days when the birds seem to go into hiding, when even the ever-present buzzards stay in the trees listlessly, and it feels as though the whole world is still and poised, waiting for the sun to shine again. In the field at the edge of the pine wood, on the hillside above my cottage, a flock of around twenty-five woodpigeons was feeding in the grass. This was about as large as pigeon flocks got here in the hills; you would never see the flocks of hundreds that you get in the lowlands on arable farmland. They all suddenly took to the air, in close formation and mounting fast, and I stopped dead in my tracks, for I knew that something exciting was about to happen. These birds had been spooked, and not by me; I was too far off.
I didn’t have to wait long. A hawk burst over the top of the wood with quick, flicked-back wingbeats, and set off in pursuit of the fleeing pigeons. This rowing motion of the wings is distinctive, and immediately separates hawk from falcon, with even the briefest of glimpses. The flock was flying close and fast over the oak wood. Pigeons are no slouches on the wing themselves, but the hawk closed the gap in seconds. Right above them, it suddenly dropped. The cluster of pigeons momentarily spread out, then reformed. The hawk seemed to fall through a hole in the middle of them, and for a second it was surrounded by pigeons, all just out of reach, and then it was beneath them, empty-handed. It turned to resume the pursuit, but its one chance had been missed, and the element of surprise had been lost. It abandoned the chase, flew a single tight circle, and set off back over the wood. But there was no longer any denying it: this was a goshawk. It was too big to have been anything else.
I checked at the field centre and found that, yes, it was true, the goshawks had returned, and there was even a suspected nesting site a few miles down-valley. If the red kite had been brought back from the brink of extinction, the goshawk had long ago flown all the way over that brink and disappeared into the distance. While sparrowhawks are happy with our traditional rural landscape, the chequerboard of fields and hedgerows and copses that make up the vast bulk of our countryside, the goshawks need relatively large tracts of undisturbed woodland to live in. This was not a problem here as the valley was heavily wooded; in fact trees were the main source of revenue for the estate, more so than the rents of the tenant farmers. Long, long ago, when Britain was entirely covered with dense woodland, the goshawks would have been numerous, the pole predator among the birds, but as the woods were hacked away over the centuries these birds were pushed back into the ever smaller and remoter pockets of remaining woodland. And persecution finished them off. For decades there were no breeding records of goshawks in Britain. Perhaps a tiny handful clung on unnoticed; as I had found myself this was an incredibly easy bird to overlook. What is certain is that their revival depended in part on birds that had escaped from falconers, or even been deliberately released, perhaps in combination with a few strays that had drifted over from the continent. The landscape they found was marginally more hospitable than it had been when their predecessors had died out; gamekeeping was in decline, the pesticides that threatened the future of so many of our birds of prey had been outlawed, and most importantly vast swathes of our uplands had been planted with huge tracts of conifer plantations. These alien forests of spruce may have caused a habitat loss that was hugely detrimental to many of our upland species, but for the goshawk they were a godsend.
As soon as I knew I had goshawks on the hill they became my holy grail, the bird I most hoped to see each new day as I woke. And I was amply rewarded. I saw them almost every day that spring. There was a pair of them, or at least there was a male and there was a female; I never once saw the two birds together. I kept a meticulous record of every sighting, savouring every moment, and formed a mental map of the flight path of each bird as I saw it, just as I had with the sparrowhawks when I first arrived here. Now that I had found these birds I wanted to understand them too, read the auspices, unlock the mystery hidden behind the turn of each bird’s wing. The world I knew was a ball of wool, criss-crossed with a network of invisible pathways, like the gossamer that would be revealed only on a dewy morning. And I wanted to unravel it. If only the birds would leave contrails in the sky for me to follow, so that I would not always be left behind.
It was the time of year when my sparrowhawks became more active too, or at least more visible, beginning their spring display flights and staking their claim on Penlan Wood. That spring there was one gale after another, the westerly winds blew at fifty miles an hour, but still the hawks were out. Early one morning I was watching the birds on the bird table when the male cruised past just outside the window, sending the nuthatches and the tits dashing for cover. He was without intent; if he had been determined he would not have been cruising. As he reached the front corner of the cottage he was hit by the wind from the west, and for a few moments the two opposing forces were equally matched, so that the hawk hung motionless just two feet above the ground. At this range and in this light the bird’s upperparts no longer looked a uniform slate grey, but were flecked with gold. I could pick out every individual feather, the paler tip of each one making the bird seem mottled, somehow more complicated. He didn’t need to fight back against the wind; he looked about him, tilted his wings ever so slightly, and slipped across and down the hillside until he was lost to view.