It was a hot, sunny day, and the walk had been arduous, so I decided to see if the tarn was deep enough for swimming. The water was icy cold, and the lake bed was soft and spongy apart from a few scattered boulders. It had been impossible to see the bottom through the peat-tinged water but it was just deep enough for a swim, and it was like bathing in red wine. After I had dried myself in the sunshine, I took a circuit of the lake. As I picked my way through the peat at the far side, there was a single call of alarm from right by my feet, and a bird ran off, then stopped, then ran again, trailing a convincingly broken wing. A classic distraction display that could mean only one thing — that a plovers’ nest was not far away. It was four eggs in a little scrape; just like the curlews’ only smaller. It was a beautiful site, in miniature, at the very tip of a little grassy promontory that protruded far out into the black sea. Having established that golden plovers were nesting here and that I had not simply stumbled on a party lost in the fog, I called it a day and set off back to Penlan. As I crossed the glacial ridge on my way home, the curlews were in the air and calling repeatedly, locked in battle with the crows from the nest of bones.
Back home on the hill, this was a time of visitors, of trips out with friends to places I would never otherwise see; to far hills and lakes, and to the coast. A time of making use of people’s transport to stock up with cans and bottles in preparation for leaner days to come. A time of cooking outside, of long summer evenings sitting out as the sun set and the bats began to emerge from under the gables. My garden, all yellows in spring, was a riot of pinks and purples from the mallows and foxgloves that were in full bloom. The summer silence was beginning to fall as the chorus of birdsong was snuffed out, one species at a time. Eventually, only the last chiffchaffs were calling in the woods, and the last yellowhammers on the hill, and then they lapsed into silence too. In June, the woods had been hectic with birds hunting food for their young, and in July there had been newly fledged young birds everywhere earning their wings, but as summer began to peak, the birds vanished into the depths of their annual moult. Even birds that were a constant presence in the spring, such as the pied flycatchers, seemed to disappear into thin air. August is notoriously the quietest month of the year for birdwatching; it is perhaps ironic that in the weeks when most people have the chance to get out into the countryside, there is less to be seen than at any other time of the year. Fortunately the birds of prey came into their own on these late-summer days; with the exception of my missing goshawks they seemed more active, more visible than ever. In part it was the dearth of most other birds that brought them to the fore, that made their presence more conspicuous, and in part it was that, as their prey hid itself away, they had to spend more and more time out hunting.
Some birds of prey tend to breed late. Like all birds they try to make the period when they have a nest filled with hungry mouths to feed coincide with the time when food is most plentiful. While for the ravens this meant breeding early to catch the lambing season, for the sparrowhawks this meant waiting for the bonanza of newly fledged birds in the early summer. As the summer wore on and so many birds disappeared into the thickets for the moult, the hawks struggled to find enough food for their young, pushing the young hawks to leave the nest. By August, overcrowding and the young birds’ impatience to be the first to be fed had led to them all abandoning their home. They hadn’t gone far though; they still weren’t ready to hunt for themselves and would wait in the woods in the vicinity of the nest, calling their hunger, over and over. I would listen out for them; the call was instantly recognizable once you knew it, the sound of an oversized squeaky toy. One August I found three new nesting sites by tracking down the relentless squealing coming from deep within a wood. The young birds would be scattered among the trees surrounding the nest, hunched up and cross-looking, all trying to ignore one another. Near by would be the plucking post, a drift of feathers around a tree stump that was the hawks’ midden and would show you precisely what the birds had been catching and killing.
It was time for a final trip to the quarry, to try to catch sight of the peregrines one last time before they abandoned the hills for the winter season, so I set off over the ridge on a short cut to the north. I was barely halfway there when I surprised the tiercel from a trackside oak. He alighted from the tree and circled above me, winnowing his wings and screaming beautifully, and I wondered if this sighting meant that they had already left the eyrie. When I finally reached the quarry, a light drizzle had begun, and I was even less hopeful. But there was the falcon, soaring in the rain in front of the high crags, racing after a passing swift. Right behind her was her youngster, just the one, working hard to copy her every move. The two birds began to make false passes at one another, then little dummy stoops. It was a flying lesson.
On my way back, the drizzle stopped and the sun came out, so I took a break by the riverside, north of my usual beat. There was a long sweeping bend in the river here, and the water ran slow and deep. Dragonflies hovered over the stands of rushes and yellow flags that fringed the opposite bank, and on the grassy slope that led down to the water bounded a mink, a dark chocolate-brown female, spiky from the wet, which looked like a cross between an otter and a stoat. Normally when I saw them they were in the process of disappearing from view, but not this one; she scampered back and forth, back and forth, as if she were looking for something she had lost.
Leaning from the bank at the furthest reach of the river’s curve was a dead tree, and on a branch of it that overhung the slow-moving water was perched a falcon, a hobby, my first here. It had the crimson thighs and rump of an adult, but not the black chevrons on white that make the adult bird look almost like a miniature peregrine. Instead of white, its breast was the russet of an autumn leaf. This bird’s plumage was midway between that of a juvenile and an adult; it was a wandering first-year bird that had roamed far north of its usual haunt. Soon it would have to turn its face back to the south, for these are migratory falcons and it would have an unguided journey to Africa ahead of it. It slipped off its branch and darted low across the water towards me. Over the bankside rushes its talons snapped at a dragonfly like it was plucking a flower. It ate the insect in flight as it circled around and flew back to its perch, but not before it had snipped off the wings and discarded them. The diaphanous wings of the dragonfly floated down to the water below and drifted slowly past me. The hobby flew again and again, and never missed; it would take a lot of these insects to satisfy its hunger. But eventually it was found on its perch by a pair of magpies, and they began to mob it so relentlessly, so unceasingly, that it admitted defeat and flew on round the river’s bend, and was lost to view.