Penlan Wood was not quite square. It had a fifth corner facing west, almost directly south of the cottage just fifty yards downhill, and right on this corner was a small fox earth. There was another earth too in the pine wood above the cottage, and the two were evidently connected as I frequently saw foxes commuting between them. A direct route between them would have taken the foxes right past the cottage, but their path always followed a loop that kept them a safe distance away. These were shy animals; country foxes are much harder to watch than city foxes, and with good reason. The hunt began in earnest every autumn. These were farmers’ hunts, not horseback hunts. They would bring the pack up the lanes in their Land Rovers, and follow them on foot with walkie-talkies. They never seemed to make it to my charmed clearing in the woods, but I would sometimes run into them while I was out walking, and they would eye me with suspicion, and after they were gone I would find the blooded corpses hung from trees. Seventy per cent of the year’s young would be killed each year; if a fox made it through its first year it was probably too wily to be caught.
One day as I was walking past the wood and took a peek over the fence at the fox earth I noticed a broken shell right by the earth, and this was how I discovered that jays were nesting in a tree directly above the foxes’ heads. Jays are beautiful birds, with their lilac breasts, barred hackles, and that incredible jolt of electric blue on their wings. They are conspicuous birds that clatter through the woods in family troupes, screeching raucously, and seem weak on the wing, loping from tree to tree as though they can barely keep themselves aloft. But in the nesting season they change completely, becoming secretive and silent and seemingly disappearing from view. I was able to watch closely as the nest site was in full view of my window. They would slip silently out of the wood almost at ground level, and dart straight for the cover of the nearest tree, like a different bird altogether.
One year rooks moved into Penlan Wood. The nearest rookery was a mile away at least, in a beech wood the other side of the river and up-valley. These rookeries are occupied for generation after generation. Some sites are hundreds of years old, so I don’t know what induced these birds to form a breakaway colony this particular year. There were six pairs nesting close together in the nearest corner of the wood. The young all left their nests before they were fully fledged, and sat in the fields close to the fence all around the wood, their heads hunched into their shoulders. It was a bonanza for the foxes; every one was doomed. I watched a fox prancing across the front field on its way to its young in the pine wood above, the young rook still flapping in its jaws, the parent birds calling in protest and diving repeatedly at the fox, but not too close. The rooks never returned.
And then there were the sparrowhawks. I saw a sparrowhawk on my very first visit, down on the lanes skimming fast alongside a hedgerow, then suddenly flipping over the hedge to surprise unwary birds feeding in the field beyond. A couple of seconds and it was gone. Here one moment, gone the next; that is the way of the sparrowhawk. There is a ferocity in their burning eyes, and they live life at a different pace to the rest of the world; they never seem to rest, not for a moment. There can be no doubt that here is a creature whose heart beats twice as fast as ours. They seemed to me to epitomize the wildness I had come to seek, and I wanted to get to know them. It would not be easy, for they have good reason to be wary. They are the least favourite bird of the gamekeeper, and an old estate rule here was that nothing could be shot on a Sunday that wasn’t for the pot, save for the sparrowhawk. I started to create a mental map of where and when I saw them, but there was no method to it; I might see them several times in a day, and then not for a week, and they could turn up anywhere at any time. My mental map was without trends, without clusters. But once I shifted my focus away from places and numbers and towards what they were doing when I saw them, it all started to make sense. I began to unlock their secrets, and eventually I would get to know every nesting site in the area. And the nearest of these was in Penlan Wood.
It was early spring and a female hawk was circling the wood. It is easy to tell the males and females apart: like many birds of prey the female is almost twice the size of the male, not in length but in bulk. The male bird is much more lightly built and falcon-like, with red barring on his pale breast and a slate-grey back, while the female is a dark grey-brown with broad short wings and a heftier build all round. There is good sense to this size difference as they don’t compete for prey. The little males tend to concentrate on small birds like finches, while the female will take on bigger challenges such as pigeons. I first saw the female from my window beating her way up the hillside close to the edge of the wood, in a flight that was utterly distinctive and quite unlike the hawk’s normal dash. Her wingbeats were slow and measured and she was just four or five feet above the ground; she looked like she had all the time in the world. Her tail was fanned almost like that of a hovering kestrel, and as she flew she rose and fell, undulating like a woodpecker. When she reached the corner of the wood she turned sharply and proceeded along its top edge, and a few minutes later, in a shaft of sunlight, she reappeared from around the bottom again, preceded by a little flock of panicking redwings. This carried on for hours, it was as if she was wrapping the wood up in a parcel. This is not a behaviour I have ever heard of before, but she did it every year without fail, and it was one of the many things I looked forward to seeing each spring. She was totally consistent, and this in a bird that I first took to be unpredictable. She always, always, circled the wood anticlockwise.
When she finally tired of beating her way round and round the wood, the birds would engage in their much more familiar spring display flight. This is highly characteristic and your best chance of watching the bird for any protracted period. They rise high above their nesting wood and fly in tight circles above the site, for once making themselves deliberately conspicuous and visible from far off, presumably to indicate their whereabouts to the birds in neighbouring territories and stake their claim. Every now and again they will suddenly plummet down into the wood, often to the exact tree where they will build their nest. And this is how I first found their nesting site, close to the north-west corner of Penlan Wood, facing out on to the moors. There were three old nests in adjacent trees, for like the buzzards they prefer not to reuse old nests but choose to build a new one next door. Having found the site I kept clear, for I didn’t want to disturb them.
The jays raised four young in their nest above the fox earth. As soon as the fledglings were on the wing, they moved down to the broadleaved woods by the stream, and reverted to their customary ways, crashing in a noisy troupe from tree to tree, announcing their presence with raucous cries. They would have done better to stay silent, for each time I saw the family there seemed to be one less, picked off by the sparrowhawks. Over the course of two weeks, I found the remains of three of them, a flash of blue among the leaf litter, a scatter of lilac down.
A sunny morning in late spring, and I was sitting on my doorstep looking out over a silent hillside. The sparrowhawk pair burst from behind the cottage, one to the left and one to the right. They were flying straight out at great speed, the ground falling away beneath them. As they reached the bottom of the front field, the little male plunged down, then turned and swooped directly up at his mate, as if he were about to attack her from beneath. As he reached her he rolled on to his back and locked talons with her, and the two birds started to tumble downwards, wings flailing wildly. Just as it seemed they were beyond the point of no return and would be dashed on the ground, they separated and raced into the woods below, their wingtips brushing the tops of the long grass. It was a breathtaking display of aerial mastery that was over in seconds but was unforgettable. As quickly as they appeared they were gone, leaving just the fields basking in the morning sunshine, and the hillside ringing with a sudden emptiness.