Raptor: A Journey Through Birds

The hardest thing to do was to leave the moor in the evening. I walked down through the restless geese and kept turning round in search of one last glimpse of the hen harriers. Sometimes I would follow a male harrier down off the peat moss and watch him quartering the marshy borderland between the fields and the moor. Much of Orkney’s moorland has been reclaimed by agriculture. Only the difficult land remains as moor, but even this is sometimes coveted: there are hills on Orkney with strips of neat green fields dissecting the moor. In places it looks like the hills have been scalped. But in the borderlands between the moor and the fields there seemed to be a tussle between the two spheres so that it was unclear which was reclaiming the other. What had been tidied from the fields seemed to have been swept to these edges. And hen harriers thrived in these places, hunting voles along these tangled, unkempt margins.

I met hen harriers in unlikely places on the island. Far away from the moors, around the backs of houses, through the engine-ticking quiet of a farmyard. The birds seemed to slip easily between spheres, between the hills and the farmland below. In an evening field behind a white hotel, I watched a great commotion of oystercatchers and curlews dive-bombing a female harrier. She was slow and huge amongst the shrill wading birds, like some wandering beast come down out of the hills to forage.

Driving across the hill road to Harray in the early evening, I came down off the moor towards a farm and there was a male hen harrier swimming in a pool of wind. I stopped the car and watched him swirl through the farmyard, low over a hedge and into a back garden. He drifted up over a washing line and, for a moment, seemed to join the garments there, a blue-grey shirt flapping in the wind.

This morning the wind has shed some of its weight. The curlew’s song has more reach. A male harrier is coming in from the west, lucent against the heather. He is flying more quickly than usual, keeping a straight line, heading for the nest that sits in the lap of a hill amongst thick tussocks of moor grass. Now the female is up and rising to greet him, rushing towards the male. She is so much larger than him, her colours so markedly different, her tawny browns set against his smoking greyness. For centuries the male and female hen harrier were thought to be a different species, and this morning she might have been a larger hawk about to set upon the smaller male. But, at the last moment, she twists onto her back beneath the male and their talons almost brush. The male releases something from his feet and she seizes and catches it in mid-air. All of this happens so quickly and the movement is astonishing for its speed and precision. I cannot make out what it is the male has passed to her but the female has flipped instantly upright again and is rising towards the male once more. Again, at the last moment, she twists onto her back but this time nothing is passed between them. I’m puzzled why she repeats the manoeuvre like this. Perhaps the male still has something in his talons? But I am lucky to witness it again, it is like an unexpected echo and gives me the chance to replay the whole extraordinary exchange. I stay with the female and watch her drop into the heather, where she begins to feed.

Why do hen harriers make this beautiful, acrobatic food pass? When she is incubating, then brooding and guarding the young at the nest, the female is dependent on the male to provide food for her and the chicks. Later, when the chicks are closer to leaving the nest, she will resume hunting. But until then the male must work overtime to provide for the brood and his mate. Polygamous males, common on Orkney, are required to ratchet up their hunting, providing for two, sometimes three, separate nests (the record on Orkney is seven). Nesting in tall dense vegetation on the ground, the food pass is the most efficient way of securing the exchange of prey whilst also distracting from the precise location of the nest, the pass often taking place some distance from the nest itself, which helps to avoid drawing its attention to predators. I wonder if the female ever drops the pass from the male. The hen harrier is so supremely agile, their long legs have such reach, it seems like the male could lob the most awkward pass at his mate and she would still pluck the prey out of the air with all the time to spare.

On Orkney, the Orkney vole (twice the size of the field vole found on the British mainland) is a crucial prey species for the hen harrier. The relatively high numbers of hen harriers on the islands (on those islands in the archipelago that have voles) is attributed to the abundance and stability of the vole population. Many hen harriers overwinter on Orkney and voles are the principal reason these birds are not forced to migrate further south. In addition to voles, young curlews and starlings are frequently taken on the islands, as well as meadow pipits, skylarks and lapwings. Rabbits, too, are predated by the larger female harrier. Where voles are absent, hen harriers are able to breed as long as there is an abundant supply of passerine birds. But on Orkney, and over much of the hen harrier’s range, avian prey is, on the whole, secondary in importance and preference to voles and other small mammals, so much so that a scarcity of voles can impede the hen harrier’s breeding success. In Gaelic the hen harrier’s name is Clamhan luch (the mouse-hawk).

Midday and the moor is quiet, the slackest time of the day. The harriers are sitting tight. At Lammas time, under a full moon, people used to go up to the moors on Orkney to cut the stems of rushes to use as wicks for fish-oil lamps. And they went to the moors to gather the wiry cowberry stems to twist into ropes. The moors were a busier landscape than they are today, more interacted with. There was a steady trafficking of peats from off the moors: all the different grades of Orkney peat, peats that smelt of sulphur when they burnt, heavy yarpha peats with the moss and heather still on them, peats that burnt too quickly and left behind a bright creamy ash in the hearth. Geese (an important part of the economy on Orkney right up till the mid-nineteenth century) were brought down from the moors when they became broody and taken into people’s homes. Most houses on the islands were designed to accommodate the geese, with a recess cut into the wall beside the hearth where they were lodged to incubate their eggs in the warmth.

I get up to stretch my legs and go for a wander through the network of peat hags. I liked the notion of geese being ‘let in’ to people’s homes, of the architectural twist made to houses to accommodate the birds. In the Hebrides, if someone had an especially lucky day, it was said that they must have seen the Clamhan luch. In Devon the hen harrier was known as the Furze hawk; in Caithness the Flapper; Hebog llwydlas (the blue-grey hawk) in Wales; Saint Julian’s bird in South Wales; in the English Midlands the Blue hawk … We ought to let these birds back in. Today you can count the number of hen harriers nesting in England on your hand. And each year lop another finger off. They are not where they should be and their absence in the English uplands is shameful, a waste. A landscape devoid of hen harriers is an impoverished one. Hen harriers do predate red grouse – young grouse and weaker adult stock are the most vulnerable. But management of grouse moors and protection of hen harriers should not – does not need to – be incompatible. We need to let the harriers back in. Because a bird like this can change the way you see a landscape. Because (I promise you this) these birds will astonish you with their beauty. I wish others could see what I saw over Orkney, how the harriers made a ballet of the sky. I wish more people had the chance to see how the black wing tips of the male hen harrier are offset – made blacker – by his pearl-grey upper wings.

Some of the peat hags are so deeply cut into the moor it is like walking through a trench system. I can move across a flank of the hill without being seen. Except, of course, the short-eared owls have seen me. One of the adult birds has swum over to hover above my head. I can see the flickering gold and black patterns of its plumage, the gold like a dusting of pollen over its feathers. I sit down on the peat bank while the owl’s shadow grazes over me. Earlier, I watched one of the owls and a male hen harrier hunting over the same patch of moorland. The owl seemed to hold something back. At least, the owl was not quite as fluid as the male harrier, who appeared to give himself over completely to the wind, like an appendage of the wind, sketching its currents and eddies, its tributaries of warm air.

Later: the moor is woken by a loud clapping noise. I peer over the trench and an owl is spiralling downwards, ‘clapping’ his wings together as he descends, signalling, displaying to his mate, bringing his great wings down beneath him as if he were crashing a pair of cymbals, whacking the air to show how much he owns it.

I follow the line of an old fence across the hill. Beneath one of the fence posts I find a small pile of harrier pellets. They look like chrysalids, parcels of hair wrapped around hints of bone as if something were forming in there. I can make out the tiny jawbone of a vole with a row of teeth along its edge, like a frayed clarinet reed.

The quiet ran on through the early afternoon. I hadn’t expected this, that the moor could shush itself and doze in the day’s thin warmth. How does a bird that was once seen as a harbinger of good fortune in the Hebrides become so reviled? Three hundred and fifty-one hen harriers are killed on two estates in Ayrshire between 1850 and 1854; one keeper on Skye kills thirty-two harriers in a single year in 1870; another, on the same island, accounts for twenty-five hen harriers in 1873. An article on Highland sports in The Quarterly Review of 1845 illustrates the attitudes of the day:

Hawks of all sorts, from eagles to merlins destroy numbers [of game]. The worst of the family, and the most difficult to be destroyed is the hen harrier. Living wholly on birds of his own killing, he will come to no laid bait; and hunting in an open country, he is rarely approached near enough to be shot: skimming low, and quartering his ground like a well-trained pointer, he finds almost every bird, and with sure aim strikes down all he finds.

Though not so difficult to be destroyed as this article posits. The hen harrier, in fact (as Victorian game-book records testify), made an easy target: a large, slow-flying, ground-nesting bird with a tendency, amongst the females especially, to be fearless around humans when defending their nest. Female hen harriers are not unknown to dislodge hats, even scrape a person’s scalp with their talons, should they venture too close to the nest.

A male harrier drifts along the horizon. He lands on a fence post and begins to preen. The fence follows the horizon and the harrier, perched there, is silhouetted against the backdrop of sky. He glimmers there. Then he drops, pirouettes, hesitates a few feet above the moor and lunges into the grass. It is a quick, purposeful drop, not like the half-hearted pounces I have seen. I know straight away he has killed. I can see him in the grass plucking, tearing at something. After this, he feeds for several minutes. Then he is up and carrying the prey in his talons, flying direct to the nest site. And there is the female rising, making straight towards him.

My last day on the islands. I decide, reluctantly, to leave the Orkney Mainland and its hen harriers and travel to the southernmost isle in the archipelago, South Ronaldsay. I have heard about a place on the island called ‘The Tomb of the Eagles’, a Neolithic chambered cairn overlooking the cliffs at Isbister. And, well … the tomb’s name is enough to make me want to visit.

Late morning and I am walking out across the fields towards the cliffs at Isbister. The heath shimmers in the warm air. In the distance, a broken farmstead surfaces out of the heath like a whale. When I find the tomb I lie down beside the sea pink and begin to crawl along the narrow tunnel that leads into the tomb’s interior. Inside, it is a nest of cool air. The stone walls are rent with algae sores, green and verdigris capillaries. I make my way to the far end of the tomb and duck into a side chamber; it has a moonscape floor, sandy, strewn with pebbles. I sit down inside the cell with my back against the rock.

In 1958, Ronnie Simison, a farmer from South Ronaldsay, was walking over his land looking for stone to quarry for use as fence posts. He walked along the sea cliffs at the eastern edge of his farm. Below him fulmars were nesting on sandstone ledges, a seal was berthing in Ham Geo, curlews moved amongst marsh orchids and eyebright. Perhaps it was the pink splash of sea thrift that caught his eye and drew him to the arrangement of stones the weather had recently exposed, a grassy mound peeled back to reveal a sneak of wall. A spade was fetched and Simison began to dig down beside the wall. As he dug the stones spilt things about his feet as if his spade had disturbed a crèche of voles. He picked each object up and laid it out beside him on the grass: a limestone knife; a stone axe head; a black bead, polished and shiny, that stared back at him like an eye. Then his spade had found an opening and darkness was spilling out of a doorway like oil. He fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a cigarette lighter, stretched his arm into the darkness and flicked the lighter’s wheel. The bronze shapes he saw flickering back at him must have made him nearly drop the lighter. Certainly, the story goes, Simison ran the mile back across the swaying grassland to his home where, breathless and sweating, he picked up the telephone and called the police.

Inside the tomb I can hear a curlew trilling above the heath. I crawl back down along the tunnel and out into the bright sea glare. My trousers are covered in dust from sitting on the cell’s floor and, as I walk along the cliffs, it looks like my legs are smoking as the breeze cleans the dust from my clothes.

The darkness Ronnie Simison’s spade had cut loose from the mound that summer’s evening was 5,000 years old. The mound was a Neolithic chambered cairn, and staring back at Simison when he sparked his lighter into the dark hole was a shelf of human skulls, resinous in the flickering light. There might have been a second or two when Simison mistook the bones’ bronzed colours for a cache of treasure before he realised what they were, grabbed his spade, and ran.

When the tomb came to be excavated, amongst the human bones it was discovered that there were many bones and talons belonging to white-tailed sea eagles. In all, seventy sea-eagle talons were found and, in some instances, the birds’ talons had been placed beside the bones of human individuals (one person had been buried with fifteen talons and the bones of two sea eagles). It is estimated that there were thirty-five skeletons of birds of prey in the tomb and of these two-thirds belonged to sea eagles.

The sea eagle was clearly a bird of totemic significance for the people living in that part of Orkney at that time. Presumably the bird performed some sort of funerary or shamanistic role for the community, perhaps in accompanying the dead on their journey to the afterlife, perhaps in assisting shamans in their magico-religious ceremonies. The importance of birds in shamanistic rituals is well known and there are archaeological examples from different cultures around the world of birds being involved in ceremonial and mortuary practices. In Alaska archaeologists unearthed a grave from a proto-Eskimo settlement at Ipiutak in which an adult and a child had been interred alongside, amongst other artefacts, the head of a loon (a species of diver). Strikingly, the diver’s skull had lifelike artificial eyes (carved ivory for the white of the eye inlaid with jet for the black pupils) placed in its eye sockets. It’s possible these ivory eyes served as a prophylactic to ward against evil (some human skulls from the settlement also contained artificial eyes). Equally, the eyes may have been placed in the diver in recognition of the belief amongst circumpolar peoples that the loon, a totemic bird for these cultures, was a bird with the power to both restore sight and also assist shamans with seeing into – and travelling through – different worlds.

In the museum a mile from the tomb some of the skulls have been given names: ‘Jock Tamson’, ‘Granny’, ‘Charlie-Girl’. Beside the skulls there were pieces of pottery, fragments of bowl decorated by the imprint of human fingernails. The nails had scratched the wet clay and left a pattern like a wavy barcode around the bowl’s rim. I picked some of the sea-eagle talons out of their case and held them in my palm, running my fingers over their blunted points. They were smooth to touch, like polished marble, their creamy colours flecked with rust.

The human bones, in contrast to the eagle and other animal bones in the cairn, were found to be in poor condition, noticeably bleached and weathered. This weathering suggests that the human dead were excarnated, given ‘sky burials’, their bodies exposed to the elements on raised platforms to be cleaned by natural decay and carrion feeders like the sea eagle. Besides the eagle bones, which were by far the most numerous, there were also bones of other carrion-feeding birds inside the tomb: two greater black-backed gulls, two rooks or crows and one raven. Once the excarnation process had been completed, the human skeletons – their bones scattered by carrion birds and bleached by the sun – would have been gathered up and interred inside the tomb.

That the sea eagles were involved in the excarnation of the human dead on Orkney is almost certain given that the bird is such a prodigious carrion feeder. Excarnation: the separation (of the soul) from the body at death, the opposite of incarnation, where the soul or spirit is clothed, embodied in flesh. Excarnation is not just a method for disposing the dead (to excarnate means to remove the flesh). It was also, for some societies, the process by which the spirit or soul could be released from the flesh. Tibetan Buddhists believed that the vultures summoned to a sky burial were spirits of the netherworld come to assist the soul on its journey to its next incarnation. In parts of the Western Highlands of Scotland it was unlucky to kill seagulls because it was believed the birds housed the souls of the dead. For what better, more natural place to rehome the soul – the restless, fidgety soul – than a bird, whose shape and movement, whose own restless flight, could be said to resemble the soul? Perhaps the Neolithic peoples of Orkney believed something similar, that when sea eagles, this great totemic bird, cleaned the bodies of their dead, the person’s spirit, which after death still lived on inside the flesh, was taken in by the eagle. The spirit or soul transmigrated to the bird, lived on inside the bird. Human and eagle fusing – literally, ceremonially – each one inhabiting the other.

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