Later, a goshawk raced through the trees at the bottom of the front field. He slalomed around the tree trunks at waist height, using up every inch of cover. This was serious hunting flight, and at the end of this hawk’s trajectory an unsuspecting bird was about to die, but the kill was out of sight behind the corner of Penlan Wood. When I stepped outside that day, the wind was so strong I could barely stand upright. The goshawk had been flying directly into that wind, at incredible speed, as if in defiance.
After so long being unable to see, or rather to recognize, the goshawks, now I could hardly stop spotting them. They were suddenly everywhere I went. It felt like an honour that they had chosen to share my very own patch of hillside. A single crow diving wildly for cover alerted me to a goshawk flying up from the valley bottom. He was flying at tree level, thirty or forty feet up, but the hillside was steep, and he was having to work at it. With each flicker of his wings he surged forward, and then slowed with each soar. He passed close above the roof of the cottage, and I rushed to the back door to see him off. As the hillside levelled off over the pine wood he began to pick up speed, jerking to left and right and rolling as though tossed by sudden gusts of wind. But now, now there was no wind.
That day the starlings returned and began to build their nest in their favoured corner of my loft. One of them took up its place on the topmost twig of the ash tree right in front of the house, singing snatches of borrowed song. Two days later it was there singing when it suddenly broke off mid-phrase and threw itself down-valley as the black shadow of the big female goshawk cruised above my roof from behind. She effortlessly followed the twists and turns of the desperate starling, but didn’t pick up speed; this was only a matter of habit for her. She had either already fed or considered a starling too paltry a snack to trouble herself over. A minute later, the starling was back on its perch, preening itself silently. It looked decidedly ruffled.
Down the hill to collect my mail. A red kite swung over the hilltop to join the circling buzzards and ravens. Birds of prey so often seem to choose the same place at the same time. The kite was joined by a partner, and the two floated seemingly without effort over the hillside, then drifted over the streamside woods. I followed them down, walking alongside the old cart track, churned up now by cattle, and through the alder woods to the old bridge, where I paused and sat on the crumbling stone wall for a while. A goshawk careered over my head in search of pigeons. She banked, she rocked, she turned, it was as if she were flying through the trees rather than skimming their tops. She twisted so fast that her long straight tail seemed almost to lag behind her every move, as though if she went a little faster still she would have left it behind altogether. I barely had time to catch sight of the thick white eyestripe frowning like an eyebrow over a big, blood-orange eye. This was a fierce, swift, hungry bird, with killing on her mind. Down to the river, and there was the male bird, circling right above the water’s edge in the company of four buzzards. He was barely smaller than them, and seemed to be trying to impersonate them. He soared in slow, lazy circles, opening and closing his long, heavily barred tail like a fan. But he could not help himself; compared to him the buzzards looked graceless and awkward. Twice he passed directly over me, rolling his head through ninety degrees, first to the left, then to the right, and looked down at me with his huge, fiery eye. I felt as though I was being pinned to the ground.
A circling hawk is a displaying hawk, and soon I would see the female’s spring display flight too. Spring was truly here now, a clear blue sky dotted with only a few little white clouds. The first butterfly of the year, a peacock, flitted in through the open window and settled on my hand. I carried it out and went to check on the cluster of tortoiseshells that had slept the winter away in the corner of the upstairs ceiling. They were still hanging there, huddled together in suspended animation. A raven passed overhead, uttering a strangely delicate trill as if calling me, and I went outside to see. The raven pair was out too, circling over the hillside and flipping on to their backs in turn, showing off to one another, and a buzzard was soaring lazily and mewling, its broad motionless wings canted upwards. As they all drifted together against the clear blue sky, I saw another bird with them. One of the ravens made a single half-hearted pass at the slightly smaller female hawk, but she ignored it, rising above them. This was a big, powerful bird, barrel-chested like a falcon peregrine. She rose fast, turning in tight circles. Her back and tail were a dark brown, but on each turn the sunlight gleamed from her pale breast and most of all from the brilliant white feathers beneath her tail. She rose hundreds of feet, turned to the west, and briefly hung there immobile. Then she suddenly jerked back her wings and thrust herself forward. The acceleration was tremendous, like a jet plane during take-off, and instantly she was racing towards the open hills, a flicker of backswept wings, then a soar, then a flicker again, until she was nothing more than a black speck that winked out over the distant slopes of bracken.
It was not long before she was back. A pack of fifteen rooks, barefaced and baggy-trousered, were strutting around the back field. They suddenly all lifted into the air, alerting me to the arrival of a hawk — soaring then circling, masterful and elegant. She seemed to have no interest in the rooks, but the rooks were not prepared to let it go. A group of half a dozen split off and made for the trees of Penlan Wood, while the remainder, staying close together, gathered above the circling hawk and began to mob her, making a strange call that I hadn’t heard before. One by one they dived the twenty feet that separated them from the hawk, though they took great care to veer away and up again when they were two or three feet above her. This was a serious business to them, no doubt, though to me it looked like nothing so much as a game of dare. And, in the end, the rooks won; the hawk tired of the game and was driven down into the valley.
With both the male and female starting to display, my hopes were raised that they might build their nest close to hand, and I began to speculate where might be most suitable. But it was not to be. My last sighting of a goshawk that spring was at the very beginning of April. I was down at the well replenishing my water supply, and when I turned back towards home I could see a whirl of wings racing around my cottage. It was two buzzards and a goshawk, racing in tight, fast circles around the cottage at chimney height. It was impossible to say who was chasing whom; they were equidistant from one another. I had never seen a buzzard moving so quickly, and I could hardly believe they had it in them. Then the hawk suddenly shot vertically upwards, doubling its height in a moment. I don’t know how it did it; it seemed like a physical impossibility. It folded its wings and stooped, jackknifing into one of the buzzards at a forty-five-degree angle. The hapless buzzard was knocked sideways by the blow and fell to the ground like a stone, the hawk with it, carried to the ground with the impetus of its own blow. The second buzzard swung into action, and the hawk raced off along the top of Penlan Wood. The stunned bird stood there motionless just over my garden fence, its wings splayed like a drying cormorant’s, its beak wide and its tongue lolling. This had been the work of the smaller male goshawk; had it been the larger female I doubt the buzzard would have ever got up again.
The goshawks disappeared from my landscape as suddenly as the male had struck down this buzzard. I watched out for them constantly, scanning my horizons, my focus drawn by every distant crow or pigeon, but in my heart I knew that they were gone; their absence was almost tangible. All summer long, while the other birds of prey were at their most visible and active, I had no sightings at all on my hill. And then, come September, they were back, as if they had just been on a summer break. And this became the pattern; in autumn, winter and spring I had goshawks; in summer I had none. Though I never again had such a concentration of sightings as that spring when I first found them. There was a rationale for this seasonal absence: in the breeding season they needed to stay in close proximity to the nest, and they could afford to as their prey was at its most plentiful. So in summer their range contracted, just as mine was expanding.