conorjameson

[conorjameson]

The fugitive

The Goshawk can cast a spell on you. I know this because it happened to me, and to some others I’ve met. Something in the penetrating gaze of the bird stays with you. It is a kind of hypnosis, reinforced with each rare encounter.

I can trace my love affair with the Goshawk to a picture in a book. Or rather, on a book. Goshawks made the cover of the first book on birds of prey that I saw, as a young child, in the early 1970s. It was a pair at the nest, all red-eyed rapaciousness, female brooding a downy chick, male grasping a song thrush. I was smitten. I loved everything about this bird, even the drama in the name –Goshawk. That glare.

Back then, Goshawks were in the first stages of reclaiming our remoter forests. Bar the odd escaped pair here and there, Goshawks had been effectively absent as breeding birds from the UK since the early 1880s.

Growing up in Scotland, I heard about these fugitive goshawks, escaped and unofficially released birds, apparently gaining a toehold. In my forest rovings, I always had half an eye – and ear - open for Gos, and once or twice even fancied I might have glimpsed one. But of course I couldn’t be sure. Like anyone else, through those years I was witnessing with pleasure the return of the Sparrowhawk, Peregrine and Buzzard. Somehow the Goshawk lagged far behind, out of sight, out of mind. No one, and few books, seemed to have much to say about the mysterious Gos.

I found one man who did: T H White. The author of The Sword in the Stone, White was also moonstruck by this bird. The Goshawk is regarded as a classic of its kind. I unearthed it in an antique bookshop some years ago. The prose is dense, intense, and a revelation. Here was a man who could articulate his fascination with this enigmatic bird. But he was also fixated with mastering it. I had no such aspiration, although I appreciated the insight on its character provided by White’s up-close and personal involvement with this often wretched, furious, bating hawk.

White was writing in the 1930s, in a Gos-free Britain. He had walked away from his job as an English teacher at a private school. He rented a keeper’s cottage and attempted to master the bird using the medieval method by which he was also intrigued. He sought with his Goshawk ‘to revert to a feral state’. Predictably, perhaps, the hawk beat him to it.

It was clear. Goshawks are wilder than most birds, you might say; highly strung, high maintenance, compulsive. Falconers I meet now tell me they can’t or won’t keep the species. They never show them at public demonstrations. Goshawks have a tendency to mania, to buggering off, to dropping dead. Even captive Goshawks, it seems, are hard to see.

But not everyone loves the Goshawk. And I’m not just talking about the usual suspects in the murky world of raptor persecution. There are a few birders out there who are at best ambivalent about the species. You may know some.

It is accepted wisdom that our UK Goshawk population today originates from absconded birds, and deliberate releases. Although Goshawks from the continent do move through these islands on passage, this appears not to happen in significant numbers, and they are believed strongly tied to home. The Goshawk is a fully protected species here. But even so, to some conservation-minded people it has only a faintly legitimate status, as though it has yet to be universally accepted. I know one birder who regards Goshawks with the same disdain he does Canada Geese.

In addition to being, in some eyes, ‘semi-feral’, the Goshawk’s rapaciousness can also lose it friends. It can alienate not just game-rearers, but enthusiasts for other bird species. The Goshawk tends not to like having other raptors, and corvids, around when it is breeding. It can also kill and eat anything up to the size of a Capercaillie. We don’t have many of those to spare, in the end.

It is also a difficult bird to get to know, to watch and enjoy. It has not been championed in the way enjoyed by our other renascent raptors – the eagles, kites, harriers, ospreys and falcons. It has almost as little visible presence as a nocturnal predatory mammal. It is, in the end, hard to sell what we cannot see.

The Goshawk has always been greatly valued as a falconer’s – or more properly an austringer’s – bird. The French call it the ‘cuisinier’. It may lack a Falcon’s exhibitionism in the sky, but for sheer muscularity, dexterity, focus and lethalness in a short chase, for game as large as adult hares, the Goshawk was the connoisseur’s choice. It was the choice of Attila the Hun, King John, Frederick the Great, and not just of the yeoman, as is popularly held. Accipiter gentilis was long beloved of falconers across Europe and Asia. In repose, it oozes nobility, gravitas, courage.

But they are difficult to captive breed. A male Goshawk knows better than to be around his much larger mate when she is hungry, or irritable. She makes a fickle cellmate. For centuries, captive Goshawks were traded across Europe, set free to breed, and the young harvested from tree nests. These birds were hard currency. When land was sold, rights to Hawk nests might be negotiated – or not – separately. Our Goshawk population today may have mixed Finnish, German and Czech origin, but so too do Spain’s smaller, darker wild Goshawks today produce genetic throw-backs to these larger, paler northern races.

Some may regret the somewhat ad hoc provenance of our Goshawks today, and the haphazard nature of their re-establishment, but this reflects the wider history of our relationship with the species. It is not, for me, a reason to devalue the bird. If anything, the opposite is true.

Given this trade, movement and ‘farming’ of Goshawks since Saxon times, there are those who have queried whether we can be sure it was originally a native UK species. Max Nicholson was one: ‘The Goshawk, often counted among the lost, was probably never indigenous,’ he wrote in 1926. ‘But’ he noted, ‘the evidence is bewildering’.

More recently, scenting a possible loophole in wildlife law to exploit, some game-rearing interests have challenged the Goshawk’s status. So can we be sure it was here without our help? Quite apart from the free-range ‘harvesting’ of Accipiter gentilis, early written records are unreliable because of possible confusion with the Peregrine, in particular.

Happily, the recently published History of British Birds by Yalden and Albarella presents conclusive evidence on the matter. There are scattered bone deposit records of Goshawk since the post-glacial, even more than for Peregrine. It was here, ok. The authors estimate a UK population of Goshawks in the ‘pristine Mesolithic forests’ of pre-human Britain touching 14,000 pairs. They base this on extrapolations from Bialowiecza Forest in Poland, Europe’s largest intact fragment of this ancient woodland.

Even without this hard evidence, it would be hard to conceive of the Goshawk absent from our wildwood. My instinct is it was probably pre-eminent. In the absence of the Eagle Owl, the Goshawk must have enjoyed alpha predator status among the oaks, limes and pines that cloaked mainland Britain. It’s an interesting thought that this forgotten, fugitive, poorly understood and occasionally resented species might once have lorded it over our wildwood landscape.

The Goshawk re-cast its spell on me two years ago. I found one in Yorkshire. I came face to face with the most vivid specimen: a first-year female, all subtle saffron tints and chocolaty arrowheads, talons clamped on a prone magpie, glaring at me as I teetered on a ladder. I was in a junk shop. She was in a glass case. Stuffed. As she fixed me with that glare, she fixated me with these questions about what we did to her kind, and to ourselves in the process. 

The Goshawk was the first of the raptors we wiped out in Britain. We usually call this persecution, but looking at this bird in the case, it occurred to me that admirers played their part in the extermination process. We killed beautiful things the better to look at them. I’m not judgmental about the trophy hunters of the killing age. Any of us might have done the same thing, in their position.

Our last Goshawks are said to have bred near MacBeth’s Birnam Wood, Perthshire, in 1883. But there is another troubling question. Can we be sure they were completely extirpated? Given the secretiveness of the species, it seems feasible that some might have held on, in a quiet corner somewhere.

I spent a few weeks in spring 2010 with Goshawk experts in the remoter forests of Britain where Goshawks survive today. Mick Marquiss, whose study area covers north-east Scotland, is in no doubt that the Goshawk was exterminated by the end of the 19th century.

‘I used to think that maybe they had held on,’ he told me. ‘But I don’t believe that now.’

There is one clinching reason, for Mick: ‘They may be hard to see, but they are very easy to trap,’ he says.

Writings by the Victorian naturalist W H Hudson leave us a vivid idea of what Goshawks were up against in the period.

‘I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey (Wiltshire). Nobody could say what this wandering hawk was – it was very big, blue above with a white breast barred with black – a ‘tarrable’, fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot pursuit of it for several days, until someone fatally wounded it, but it could not be found where it was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk.’

You can only imagine how demoralised Hudson and others like him felt in that era, when a wandering Goshawk would face such overwhelming odds. A century further on, he might be minded to ask if the Goshawks are back. We could tell him the apparently encouraging news that the UK Goshawk population can now be estimated at around 400 pairs, thanks to data compiled by the Rare Breeding Birds Panel, from information provided in large part by the Raptor Study Groups. But he might be slightly puzzled that it hasn’t changed much since the Atlas of 20 years ago. It is quite likely, we could suggest, that there are more Goshawks out there than this, but probably not many more. ‘Although they are cryptic what’s clear from our work is that there’s no large population sitting there undiscovered,‘ say the experts (Rutz et al).

Until recently, we might have concluded that the lack of large-scale coniferous forest was the limiting factor for Goshawks in Britain. But just across the North Sea in the Netherlands, for example, Goshawks have reclaimed the landscape, from lowland farmland to urban centres, exploiting the corvids, pigeons, thrushes, gulls, rabbits and rats that proliferate across these habitats.

‘Goshawks in The Netherlands tell a complicated story,’ says Rob Bijlsma, who has studied them there for many years. ‘A story of huge successes and spread into densely populated areas, followed by demise more recently.’

It seems reasonable to wonder why our Goshawks haven’t done something similar. Mick Marquiss and fellow Raptor Study Group researchers are in no doubt that illegal killing is the main reason.

’Goshawks, for all their prowess as hunters, cannot resist an apparently free meal,’ he says. ‘Their foraging areas overlap, and they wander a lot outside the breeding season. One trap with a live crow or pigeon as bait can draw in Goshawks from a wide area, and act as the ‘plug-hole’ down which a local population can vanish. Easy to catch, and easy to hide: so proving the true scale of this crime has been difficult – at least up to now.‘

Advances in technology and tracking are helping us to understand the Goshawk better, and work is now being done to get a better handle on the Goshawk’s situation in the UK.

My search for this bird has left me convinced that there could be a Goshawk-shaped hole in our world. This incredible animal remains AWOL in much of our landscape — spinneys, parks, towns, even cities — and largely absent from our consciousness. The Goshawk isn’t out of the woods yet, but it might be if we’d let it. The shackles have not yet been broken. And nor, for me, has the Goshawk’s lingering spell.

Conor Jameson

This article was first published in Birdwatch magazine.

Photo of a male Goshawk taken in the Scottish borders by Chas Moonie. 

#goshawk #Looking for the goshawk #Looking for goshawks #Birds of Prey #birds #birdwatching #The Goshawk

[conorjameson]

Finding J A Baker

It was with a degree of trepidation that I travelled across East Anglia to attend the launch of the J A Baker Archive at the University of Essex, through the sunlit woods of breckland. I was honoured to be invited, of course, having in a sense earned a place at this altar by virtue of having written a little bit about Baker and his fabled book The Peregrine (1967). Trepidation because what I’ve written has addressed – I hope sensitively - the tricky question of why it is that many birdwatchers have been critical if not outright dismissive of what Baker described. On the opposite pole, Baker devotees have eulogised the man, and taken his descriptions of the eponymous bird as, effectively, gospel.

Looking at the agenda I imagined that the event might be populated with representatives of the latter camp, gathered cult-like at the altar of an author whose sacred text may not be questioned. Least of all on this day. I might have to sit rather quietly and respectfully at the back, like an atheist at church, hoping no one would ask me what I really think.

What I really think about The Peregrine is nuanced. A third way, if you like. While I appreciate the richness and visionary quality of the author’s prose, I do in a number of places through the text feel an eyebrow raising. Not only are some of Baker’s facts demonstrably wrong (a Peregrine’s eyeballs aren’t bigger than yours or mine, for example), his descriptions of the birds and their behaviour are unlike anyone else’s, before or since. What was he seeing? It’s an intriguing question.

My attempts to add some further fuel to the debate led me to conclude that Baker had indeed seen his fair share of Falco peregrinus, in the gentle landscape of 1950s/60s Essex. There weren’t many around, at that time, for well-rehearsed reasons, but there were some. How he then translated these observations to the page, how much poetic licence he deployed, is up for grabs.

A little bit like the birds themselves, for whose future he so feared, Baker disappeared from view between the time of his second and last book The Hill of Summer (1969) and his death in 1987, aged 61. In another parallel with the birds, he had been ill, and it is said that his eventual passing was precipitated by the medication he had to take to relieve the discomfort of arthritis, with which he had battled since school age.

Film-maker David Cobham looked into making a film of The Peregrine, and interviewed Baker’s widow Doreen. She passed to him Baker’s notebooks and diaries not long before her own death in 2006, and it is these materials that made possible and now reside in the newly opened archive.

The archive was launched in early July. I needn’t have worried about the cult thing. Although not billed as such on the agenda, the discussion was wide-ranging, and full and frank about the ‘veracity’ issues surrounding The Peregrine. I felt emotionally drained by the end. Relieved. In the context of a country coming to terms with its decisions based on misinformation, trite assumptions, lack of foresight, the ‘lullaby language of indifferent politicians’ as Baker put it in a Birds magazine essay in 1971 (I think it’s the last thing he ever published). I would have struggled if, here in the bosom of academia, an honest assessment of truth were not on the table.

Interest in Baker resurfaced with the new nature writing movement, and a NYRB edition of The Peregrine (2005) with an effusive preface by Robert Macfarlane. One way or another I’ve accumulated several editions of the book, including one that I opened again on the eve of the Essex event, to find a receipt from the Oxfam bookshop in Cambridge, where I purchased it for £1.25 within a month of arriving there to live, in summer 1993.

In spring I went to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative’s new HQ to talk about my book Looking for the Goshawk. On my walk from the station I paused at Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church to look upwards, squinting through chill rain at the wheeling gulls. Suddenly – for it is always sudden with Peregrines – a female swung into view, a few storeys below the attentive gulls. They looked elegant, floaty, capable, and beside them she looked motorised, charged. She disappeared into the architecture of the spire. I felt that old visceral thrill that I cannot fully explain. I tried nevertheless to explain it to a passer-by who asked me directions I couldn’t help with, so I pointed in the direction of the bird. He seemed genuinely intrigued. I think by me.  

When I bought that book in Cambridge I had no idea Peregrines might 20 years later be nesting within a few hundred metres of the Oxfam bookstore. I have made it a mission in life to persuade others that Goshawks Accipiter gentilis can one day do the same, and that they haven’t already is an anomaly.

Baker aspired to be a poet. He has been a spirit guide in my search for the Goshawk, or rather the reasons why the Goshawk has yet to ‘do a Peregrine’ in these islands. I liked the challenge of exploring why raptors have this significance for us, even without close Goshawk encounters (you have to go abroad for that) or the birds themselves giving up their secrets.

I like birdwatchers’ concern for objective, verifiable facts. Goodness knows the world needs to base its decisions on more of that stuff, and plans based thereon. A typical reaction among ornithologists who doubt Baker is that he seems in places to be describing the appearance if not the behaviour of a Kestrel Falco tinnunculus. There’s a lot of hovering going on, for example, so it’s understandable. I proposed a different solution, that the ‘golden tiercel’ he describes in such intimate detail towards the dream-like conclusion of the book sounds most of all like a Saker Falcon Falco cherrug, or some hybrid variant thereof. Apart from anything this ‘lion-coloured’ bird chases Kestrels – so there goes the Kestrel theory...

Baker saw unusual things, in unusual ways. He describes Peregrines as ‘yellower’ than Kestrels. If that’s how he saw the world, then that’s how he saw it. I believe these lines from The Peregrine contains the key to his modus operandi:

“Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.”

There is surely more to find out about this intriguing, mysterious, enigmatic author, his reasons for withdrawing from the spotlight, his humour, his pain. A biography is being lined up for 2017. Daylight may now be cast on magic. Baker inspired many. But whatever else he did he caught a moment, and helped draw wider attention and concern to the insidious threat of agrochemical misuse. He led me to Rachel Carson, through the bird corpses he found and itemised, and which I think tell us more about the deadliness of dieldrin and heptachlor than of raptors.

Film maker Werner Herzog is an avowed Bakerphile. I studied him at University, among theories of realism. I rediscovered Herzog when I visited Amazonia, where he made some of his most powerful films, and where he drew inspiration from local belief in the ‘reality of dreams’. He is another proponent of dramatic, even religious intensity. Maybe Herzog can be persuaded to pick up the idea of a screenplay of The Peregrine.  

In his essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes argued: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”

Reader responses are facts too. The world needs some devotion to hard facts, but it also needs imaginers.

 Conor Jameson

 Footnote – we hope to install at Peregrine nest box at the University of Essex to mark the 50th anniversary of The Peregrine, in 2017.

[conorjameson]

Animus reveretendi - the intention to return

I’m used to Pheasants playing chicken on local roads, especially in autumn when 35 million of these hand-reared birds are released from nursery pens country-wide, to take their chances in the ‘wild’. I have just had a narrow miss, this time with a male Pheasant. He was standing in the road, catatonic. I had time to stop, get out, take a box from the boot and lift him into it. He looked alert, unscathed; in pristine condition, even. Like most of his kind this is a hefty bird, weighing about a kilo, with stout legs for sprinting and raking. But he made no complaint or struggle. I guess he has been dealt a glancing blow by a passing vehicle and was concussed. He’s been lucky. Three million or more just like him are not so lucky in their vehicular collisions each year. That’s a lot of collateral damage, and not just to the birds.

It occurs to me that I’ve not really been this close to a live Pheasant, or properly studied one. These are spectacular birds, with plumage, as John Ruskin described it, “inlaid as in a Byzantine pavement, deepening into imperial purple and azure, and lighting into lustre of innumerable eyes”.

Dusk is gathering, so Fester (he needed a name) is kept in overnight for observation. Perhaps he’ll perk up by the morning.

Writing a hundred years ago, W. H. Hudson had a name for the Pheasant. He called it the ‘sacred bird’. He did this, he explained, “to express condemnation of the persons who devote themselves with excessive zeal to pheasant-preserving for the sake of sport”.

He detested a Pheasant in what he called “the preserves”. “One odd result of this over-protection of an exotic species and consequent degradation of the woodlands is that the bird itself becomes a thing disliked by the lover of nature.” But his view would change when this native of Indian forests earned its place in our great outdoors, when “the sight of him affords me keen pleasure”.

I have read that game birds like these aren’t categorised as livestock, which means that they aren’t subject to the same legal guidelines as are in place to protect chickens. Nor, technically, are they property, I think because they are routinely released into the environment and can wander – these birds hand-fed in confined spaces since hatching – where they like: into neighbouring estates, dual carriageways, this garden. Nor are they wildlife. It is illegal to release non-native species into the wild.

Saturday

Early this morning Fester has had a sudden moment of lucidity, recognised his situation, seized his moment, and bolted for freedom from the basket while Sara is taking his picture. We now have a photograph of him hot-footing it across the garden pond in a bee-line for the hedgerow. We hope that he is still out there, integrating in a way that might have pleased Mr. Hudson.

Sunday

We get a visit from a Peacock which lives on a farm down the road. I watch from bed as he struts down the field margin opposite, swishes into the paddock through the open gate, climbs on to a fence post, and gives his foghorn ‘cah-haarrk’ (get me!) in the direction of the spinney, no doubt hopeful there might be Peahens in there, of course oblivious to just how far from home he actually is. This has all the hallmarks of a land grab. Of course no Peahens respond, but a male Pheasant not unlike Fester appears, clearly startled, from the hedgerow beyond, and promptly legs it down the street, Roadrunner style.

What must the sudden arrival of a shrieking Peacock look like to a Pheasant up to now thinking itself the cock of the block?

Not much has been done to assess what impact on the ecology of these islands the annual release of 35 million Pheasants might have been having. Add to that another five million French Red-legged Partridges. Both species certainly hoover up a lot of grain when they visit our garden. There is no licensing system for shooting estates so no need to apply or qualify, or to worry about losing the right to put Pheasants out. Nor is there any obligation to protect the birds from airborne predators by putting roofs on enclosures. A tall, stout mesh fence dug a few feet down might be just about enough to protect the Pheasant poults from Foxes and other ground-living threats, but of course it won’t keep wild birds out. We know that a Goshawk can make short work even of adult Pheasants, so it’s not hard to imagine what they must make of a herd of flightless immature Pheasants cornered in a thicket. Is it humane to ignore the consequences of setting up this scenario in woods and spinneys the length and breadth of the land?  

One gamekeeper has told me that nowadays there’s little work for him to do on killing Magpies and Carrion Crows. His dealer rears the Pheasants to sufficient size that by the time they reach the open air they are beyond the scope of corvids. They do cost £3.50 each, though, and the husbandry involves simply putting these well-grown poults into the pen and feeding them for a few weeks, as might be done for any other poultry.

The Pheasant-shooting season begins at the start of October. Another keeper reports that the presence of Buzzards can actually be helpful, as they aren’t particularly adept at catching well-developed Pheasants: even cornered, institutionalised ones. Their soaring presence is thought to be enough to keep the Pheasants – when released – herded under cover of the wood, and to discourage them from straying into open country. He didn’t mention any direct personal experience of the Goshawk. I didn’t press.

I’m not the only one who’s been taken by surprise as the Government announces it is going to fund a study that would involve destroying Buzzard nests and taking some of them into captivity, to see whether this might result in even more Pheasants being reared in these open-to-the-air pens. Hard to believe there is a need or justification for legally culling birds of prey like Buzzards in order to preserve a few more Pheasants to be shot at, if not run over. And if this is their attitude to Buzzards, what does this say about the prospects for the returning Goshawk? I wonder at the relative cost of this research, versus the cost of putting mesh roofs onto release pens. If the Government were testing the water with this announcement, they were rapidly blown out of it by the vehemence of the public reaction.

 On the point that it is illegal to release non-native wildlife into the environment. I’m not sure how the Pheasant industry circumvents this basic law, every year, on such a scale. If we are to continue to tolerate the manufacture and shooting of Pheasants at its current, unlimited level, perhaps we should be calling for better regulation, if only for the well-being of the Pheasants themselves. While we may have become somehow desensitised to them through their apparent domesticity and abundance, like any animals they deserve respect, and better conditions. The mistreatment of animals is ultimately degrading for us all.

If it could become a basic requirement of Pheasant and Partridge rearers to ensure young birds confined in pens are protected from aerial attack, there would be less pressure on keepers to kill or mistreat avian predators and the decoy birds and other live baits they use to lure them into traps. I take no pleasure in seeing a modestly paid working man or woman criminalised or even jailed for trying to do the job expected of him by their boss. If all release pens were required to be secured, and numbers of poults limited, they would be easier to inspect, licence, and close down if standards aren’t met. Landowners would  have to make the funds available for roofing. This would create rural employment. Young Goshawks and other raptors and owls would have to forage elsewhere, and learn how to catch other prey, like woodpigeons, squirrels, corvids. Estate workers would keep their jobs.

“The great soaring bird is nowhere in our lonely skies, and missing it we remember the reason of its absence and realise what the modern craze for the artificially reared pheasant has cost us.” It’s W. H. Hudson again, all those years ago. He’d be pleased I’m sure to know that the Buzzard is more or less back where it belongs. But he might also wonder why our Goshawk isn’t yet right here with it.

“The soaring figure reveals to sight and mind the immensity and glory of the visible world,” he adds. “Without it the blue sky can never seem sublime.”

On the legal ambiguities surrounding Pheasants I have checked with my barrister friend, who specialises in property law. It has crossed my mind I might have been poaching, when I brought Fester home. My friend has consulted the relevant literature.

“I think I can address the point on ownership,” he writes back, in due course. “The case law concerning ownership of animals in this area is old and the language archaic. The ownership is described as ‘qualified’ as the ownership can be lost if, for example, the animal escapes and has no animus revertendi (intention to return).”

I don’t know if Fester had an animus revertendi, but I’m pretty sure the Goshawk does. It belongs, in the end, to all of us, and to none who has the right to kill it. It can go where it pleases. I envy it that.

 Conor

Image: Sara Evans 

#pheasant #pheasants #goshawk #goshawks #lookingforthegoshawk #conorjameson #conormarkjameson #birds #birdsofprey

[conorjameson]

Following the Goshawk

Five young goshawks were tagged in East Anglia this summer, in the hope that some light might be shed on what happens to them when they make their way in the world. In this extract from Looking for the Goshawk I explain the need for this research.

A young Sparrowhawk has become a regular visitor to the garden. I’ve seen various of its inexpert, sometimes desperate and even reckless attempts to make its way in the world. It occurs to me that all across the land – or the parts of it where Goshawks survive, at any rate – young Goshawks are doing something similar.  

Consider the figures. If there are, as is currently estimated, up to 500 pairs of Goshawks nesting in the UK, averaging somewhere between two and three fledged young per pair, then somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred young Goshawks are jumping off their nest platforms, learning from their parents that food comes mostly from somewhere beyond the wood, and setting forth into the world beyond their natal homes. Let’s go for the bottom end of this range: a thousand young birds. About this many have fledged annually since the 1990s, when the Goshawk population was first calculated to have reached 400 or more pairs.

On top of that thousand young birds newly produced each year, there are 800 to one thousand parent birds, also roaming, some more than others, but by no means especially or necessarily attached to the nesting area. They can go where the food is; which, when food means crows of all kinds, pigeons, rabbits, rats, thrush species, gulls, squirrels, ducks, pheasants – means pretty much anywhere. These prey sources (or biomass) can be measured by the ton in our landscapes. Assuming a reasonable survival rate of hawks, in this food-filled, vacant environment, the Goshawk population might have expected to recover to thousands, if not tens of thousands of birds today.

I had hoped to have the science to back up the theory. I am not a qualified scientist – I got out of science after less than a year of it at university – but I have spoken to a number of colleagues and friends who are. I have sketched out with them how we might approach the scientific paper that could support (or otherwise) the theory. In the end, there hasn’t been time to do it, because there are higher priorities than crunching Goshawk numbers to work out what probably happens to our Goshawks. But I hope that this may change, that there might yet be time found, that someone will take up the cause. I might get my name on the paper but in all honesty that isn’t important to me. I would be content just to see the work done by reliable authorities.

Some colleagues have suggested the following approach: modelling suitable available places for Goshawks and prey to get an idea of what the limits might be on numbers. Correlates, I think they call them. But my sense is that this would be based on an old idea of Goshawks: the myth – for I believe it is a myth, an artefact of our own making – that they are birds of a particular kind of habitat; namely vast, remote, coniferous forests – the places in which they currently survive, which isn’t the places that they need to be, so much as the places where they are permitted to be.

Goshawks aren’t necessarily birds of remote forest. Like many species of higher-end predator they are simply birds that need food, and not to be killed; a tree to nest in, even sometimes in an isolated clump. If we can leave ourselves aside for a moment, Goshawks don’t have any regular enemies here, when they get to adulthood; nothing that can easily catch and subdue a healthy mature Goshawk. In the absence of the Eagle Owl, they are the top avian predator of all but the mountains, where the Golden Eagle holds that title.

Not much is going to kill them, except their own desperado behaviour. I have no difficulty believing that they are regularly, suicidally reckless, especially when young. But the evidence of their likely mishaps is a little thin on the ground. We would find more of them. The same with disease, to which they can be susceptible. We would find the bodies. I suspect they are dying somewhere else, unreported.

My instinct is to look at a neighbouring country – namely the Netherlands, just across the North Sea – with a comparable environment and situation; to see how the Goshawk population is faring there, relative to numbers of other species such as we also have here – raptors, primarily – then work out how many Goshawks we might reasonably be expected to have.

The Netherlands is largely suburban. Like our own situation, its rural areas comprise farmland with scattered and fragmented broadleaved and mixed woods. To all intents and purposes it resembles lowland southern England. Perhaps my own part of England is the closest to it in terms of geography and appearance. In Britain, both Sparrowhawk and Buzzard are around a hundred times as numerous as the Goshawk. If we had similar ratios to those in Netherlands raptor guilds we might expect to have thousands of Goshawk territories, rather than several hundred in the UK. There is some secrecy about Goshawks nests in certain areas, but that doesn’t explain the vast gaps in distribution.

Clearly these are ‘back of a fag packet’ calculations., but I have done another simple bit of arithmetic. Goshawks produce almost as many young as Sparrowhawks. Although they are very large birds, they are sexually mature and can breed at just one year old. Assuming a survival rate among young Goshawks comparable to that of young Sparrowhawks, and that there really isn’t a habitat constraint on the species, how much might we have expected the population to grow since it reached 400 pairs in 1994? Growing at the rate of just one new Goshawk per pair, per year, it increases like this: 400 pairs, 600 pairs, 900, 1,350... etc.

Even if these figures are optimistic, the question is worth asking: why hasn’t the Goshawk population grown at all? Another question, almost as intriguing: why is no one bar a handful of dedicated, knowledgeable and courageous raptor conservationists asking the question?

I can’t be sure of the answer, but what is clear is that hundreds and quite likely thousands of young and some seasoned Goshawks are disappearing every year, without trace. Where can they be going? The bodies of large birds, and especially birds of prey, are eye-catching. You don’t have to be an expert to notice them, or to think of reporting them or even bagging them up and handing them in (although it is always safer not to touch, and to take photographs and submit details of location instead). A large proportion of these young Goshawks have rings on their legs, mostly put there by Raptor Study Group volunteers: all the more reason for someone to report the birds and or their rings when found. The rings have a code and address on them.

“For all the time I have been ringing Goshawks, only two rings have been recovered,” Malcolm Henderson has told me, from his Scottish Borders study area. “I have ringed 486 Goshawk chicks. One bird [that was recovered] had been shot and I suspect that had it been shot dead then picked up by the shooter it would have been disposed of, and no ring recovery recorded. However, what is likely in this case is that it had been shot and wounded, then managed to fly away, before dying. The other ring recovery is still under investigation.”

Conor

 Footnote

Three years since the publication of my book Looking for the Goshawk, you can imagine that I’m very keen indeed to know what has become of the five young birds tagged in the Breckland of East Anglia, not far from where I now live. A report is expected soon.

More on the project here, including some early findings:

https://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/tagging-goshawks-brecks

#LookingForTheGoshawk #goshawks #The Goshawk #sparrowhawk #birdsofprey #birds #tagging

[conorjameson]

Return of the native

The following article was published in Birdwatching magazine, March 2016.

Goshawks are said by some to be reclaiming parts of the UK. But what do the stats say, and are they getting any easier to see? Conor Mark Jameson has been investigating.

The idea of ‘re-wilding’ is very much in vogue. So too is the concept of ‘trophic cascades’: that is, the effect that extirpated alpha predators have when reinstated, and resume their place in food webs. The Wolves of Yellowstone National Park are the poster boys for this discussion. It’s said that since they were brought back, interesting and unexpected effects have been observed on the ecosystem, and even the visible landscape; not because wolves eat things, so much as because the things they eat now have to make different life(style) choices.

The re-wilding discourse in the UK has centred a lot on charismatic mammals like Lynx and Beaver. It’s curious that within this discussion little mention has been made of the Goshawk, when you consider that Accipiter gentilis would have been the alpha avian predator, a keystone species, of much of our wooded landscape up to the modern era.

A central thesis of my book Looking for the Goshawk is that while the Goshawk remains rare (there are almost as many Golden Eagles north of Glasgow as there are Goshawks in the UK), it could, theoretically, live across many types of habitat, taking prey species that are super-abundant in town and countryside. It might even be the most important missing species of all, the one which would have the most pervasive trophic effects.

Scarce resources for research mean that science has been unable to champion the cause of the Goshawk the way that other raptors have been championed. We have oft-cited government statistics for how many Hen Harriers are scandalously missing from England’s treeless uplands, for example. The equivalent stat for England’s Goshawks would be interesting to work out.

The continued absence of Goshawks from most our lives and landscapes feels like an anomaly, and - though there are informed and evidence-based opinions on the matter - a largely unexplained one. Judging by the ecology of the species in neighbouring European countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, we could, in theory, have Goshawks not just throughout woodland habitats but also parkland, agricultural and even our urban environments. Goshawks have adopted the spinneys of Dutch farmland, and thrive among the tower-blocks of several German and other north European cities.

While we appear a long way from such a scenario, recovery is being witnessed in some UK locations. Dramatic increases have been noted in the New Forest in Hampshire, for example. At the turn of the millennium, there were just a couple of pairs. Today there are around 35 territories in and around the National Park. This has implications for other species. In the same period, nesting Sparrowhawks and Hobbies may have been displaced. A relative scarcity of corvids is also anecdotally noted by local researchers. This may have local knock-on benefits for smaller birds. Dr Geoff Mawson, monitoring Goshawks in Derbyshire, has reported Firecrests appearing to nest in a cluster close to the raptors.

People often ask about the relationship between Goshawks and Common Buzzards. Like most things ecological, it’s complicated. In Kielder Forest, for example, researcher Sarah Hoy has told me that Goshawks were well established 20 years before the Buzzards returned, and while Goshawks predate them, we have seen the widespread settlement of Kielder by Buzzards – to 80 pairs today.

Few raptors are as versatile in their choice of prey as the Goshawk. They are as adept at tackling medium-sized to large avian prey as they are mammals such as Brown Rats and Grey Squirrels. At one nest observed in Sussex observer Paul Marten counted 21 squirrel tails beneath the perch used by the male Goshawk in the preparation of the meals the hawk delivered to his mate at the nest. The Grey Squirrel is just one of the species for which the return of Goshawks presents a whole new set of considerations. 

Some recently published research from Finland * has shown that Goshawks may even increase the numbers of prey species like Black Grouse. This study produced indirect evidence that Goshawks may create a protective effect for one of its main prey. Where Goshawks nested within a study area 12 kilometres in length, the proportion of Black Grouse females with a brood was 20 % higher than in situations where Goshawks nested between two and three kilometres from the centre of the study area. 

Opinions differ on how many Goshawks are out there, now. The latest Atlas of Breeding Birds (2014) suggests that there are widespread Goshawk increases going on, alongside population statistics that are curiously at odds with that conclusion. It’s intriguing that the population hasn’t increased more, given that this is a species that can breed in its first year, that inhabits a landscape packed with prey, can nest in small stands of mature trees, and produce clutches of several or more eggs, and two to three young on average. Where are all those young Goshawks going each year? 

I asked Mark Holling of the Rare Breeding Birds Panel. “Data submitted annually in the last 40 years show consistent increases until the mid 2000s but relative stability or only a minimal increase since then,” he told me. 

“Each year the Panel reports the mean of the maximum number of pairs reported over the most recent five-year period, and since 2009 this has only increased from 431 to 469. The RBBP believes this figure to be an underestimate because of under-recording but there is as yet little evidence available to suggest a population greater than 500 breeding pairs. There has not been an apparent expansion of range in that period either.”

For a Scotland perspective I asked Mick Marquiss, who has studied the species in north-east Scotland since the first birds returned in the early 1970s. “The short answer is I think that they are both increasing in abundance and expanding their distribution - but only in some places.”

The situation in Wales is interesting. More than one authority suspects that the Goshawk is doing well there. Iolo Williams is in little doubt. “The Welsh population is almost certainly 250-plus pairs,” he says.

However many Goshawks have been missed historically, the official figures are largely stagnant. Holling again: “The minimal range expansion in the last decade is probably a reflection that the species is still not tolerated in game-rearing areas; young birds trying to move to and establish new territories are routinely and illegally killed.”

Whatever the explanations, the Goshawk is ‘good to think’. I’m pleased to report that the prodigal raptor is now receiving more attention, and more minds are focused on answering the tantalising questions posed by the fabled Phantom of the Forest.

Origin of our Goshawks The Goshawk is a Schedule 1, fully protected UK bird species. The birds set free in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s were mainly escapes or deliberate falconer releases. There were also informal reintroduction schemes carried out with the involvement of statutory body representatives.

Had the conservation community and others not done it then, there would have been a conservation obligation and moral imperative to reintroduce the Goshawk later, as has been done for other extirpated species.   Yalden and Albarella (2009) estimated that pre-human Britain had room for 14,000 pairs of Goshawks.

The lost raptor The Goshawk was comprehensively removed from the landscape of Victorian Britain by collectors and trophy-hunters, often on the pretext of game preserving. These hunters were operating in a different era, within the law, often wanting the bird on their wrists or in display cabinets, because of its appeal, as well wanting it out of the way, because of the threat it was perceived to pose to game and poultry.

Despite their prowess and versatility as hunters, Goshawks will gravitate to where the prey is abundant and easy to find. Unroofed pheasant pens are an obvious magnet, especially for young Goshawks. So too are moorlands, where grouse are reared in large numbers and can be easy to see where cover is lacking. Goshawks are vulnerable to crow traps, as some recent court cases have demonstrated.

How to see a Goshawk The literature usually recommends that the best way to see Goshawks is by visiting a watchpoint in a large plantation forest on a bright day in early spring, when you might get distant views of displaying birds.

You might find it just as easy to visit any of a number of north European cities, where Goshawks have found sanctuary among us. You may encounter them sitting in the park alongside you, going about their business of reshaping the food webs we so thoroughly dictate. Look out for them in, for example, Helsinki, Moscow, Prague, Hamburg, Riga or Amsterdam.

Conor Mark Jameson Conor’s book, Looking for the Goshawk (Bloomsbury, 2013), was published in paperback in May 2015.

#goshawk #lookingforthegoshawk #birds #raptors #hawks #goshawks

[conorjameson]

Note on the paperback edition

Paperback edition published by Bloomsbury, 21 May 2015

I wrote Looking for the Goshawk because I was seeking answers to questions, prompted by an unexpected Goshawk encounter. I thought I knew this bird, but this incident challenged me. My mind raced with questions.Why was I so drawn to this animal?

Image © Chas Moonie

Why has it been less celebrated by conservationists than other less charismatic species?

Why do certain people love it, as I do, and others hate it, with most people having formed no view on it at all?

How can such a large, dramatic species be so secretive?

Why has its population growth apparently stalled for many years, with little or no comment made on this? Or could there be many more out there than we think?

How can the Goshawk inhabit European city centres, when we have always told ourselves that it is a bird of remotest conifer forest in the British Isles and North America?

Above all, perhaps, why had no one written about this before?

I became fixated with these questions, and the idea that the Goshawk could and should be anywhere, at any time, in the environment around me. Why was I not seeing it? What does its presence or absence tell us about us?

The Goshawk is arguably the finest, best adapted, most versatile and rapacious bird we have; the apex, alpha predator of our landscapes, whether forested or not. And we aren’t even missing it. This was once the bird they measured a man or a forest’s value by. Today, it has vanished from the cultural memory. I set out to try to change this.

I wanted the book to be raw in feel. There are sub-texts, detours, periods when not much happens other than in my thoughts. I want to convey the idea that seeing the bird isn’t really the point, for me. Understanding the bird, and our attitudes towards it and its environment, are always the most important thing. Its elusiveness is its very essence.

I use a real time, journal format, wanting the book to be true to events, and to present the facts in the order that I discover them, each time prompted by encounters and discoveries; aiming to share my findings with the reader as they happen. I don’t know where the story is heading nor how it will end. Wild nature and fate hold the map.

The Goshawk is my search focus and around it pivot other themes: of history, literature, wilderness, wildness, repression, politics, ownership, freedom, how we see, how we know what we see, the distorting lens of wishful thinking, cultural memory and amnesia, religion. By the end, the Goshawk has become, for me, the gods hawk, as I believe the Astor - the bird of the stars - may have been for others in the distant past, who revered its nobility and ferocity, and its prowess as a provider of food, of life.

This book is, in the end, a book about us. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to share my journey, to address the questions above. I hope I have done them - and above all this extraordinary bird whose life history is so wrapped up in our own – the justice they deserve.

 Conor Mark Jameson

#Looking for the goshawk #Goshawk #The Goshawk #Goshawks #birds of prey

[conorjameson]

Remembering T H White

This weekend, 7/8th March 2015, a plaque is being unveiled at the Archives of Falconry, Boise, Idaho, to commemorate the life of writer and falconer T H White, half a century after his death. Why here? Why now?

A short story.

It was the northern goshawk, Accipiter gentilis, that led me to fully discover T H White. I had spent most of a lifetime half-looking for this bird, in my native Scotland, and where I live now in England, and sometimes in my parents’ homeland Ireland, and on holidays abroad, and even on the couple of occasions I’d been lucky enough to visit the USA.

So I noted that there are American northern goshawks there too, and I half-looked for them while exploring New England, and out west, in the forests of Arizona.

Several years ago my search for the goshawk turned into a proper investigation, and ultimately a book, Looking for the Goshawk (Bloomsbury, 2013).

The species was restored to the British Isles landscape mainly by escaping or being deliberately released by falconers around 40 years ago. It has remained peculiarly elusive since then, despite flourishing even in urban habitats in northern Europe. In the course of my search, in lieu of the bird, which I was struggling to find in Britain and desperate to understand, to know everything about, I found myself on something of a detour. I was now looking for T H White.

Terence Hanbury White, to give him his full name, produced the only book published in Britain about the species in the 20th century. The goshawk had become extinct in these islands in the late 19th Century, shot, trapped and collected by the Victorians until there were none left. After that, it became a footnote in the ornithological literature.

I searched high and low for goshawks in the library of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB, the Audubon Society’s partner) where I work, opening old books – which felt like splitting rocks looking for fossils - often turning up little captured fragments of the bird.

My attention turned to T H White’s book, published in 1951, called simply The Goshawk. He wrote this in the late 1930s, having abandoned his career as a teacher of English at a private school, and rented a keeper’s cottage in a wood - hoping, with his hawk, to ‘revert to a feral state’.

He chose to train the bird using the medieval method of ‘watching’ it, staying awake for days and nights on end, in a trial of endurance, to deprive the bird of sleep until it submitted through fatigue to somehow trust him. White was fascinated by the medieval period, as the themes of his most famous books, including The Sword in the Stone, make clear.

What happens next makes for an extraordinary, intense narrative. Most people love The Goshawk, but it is fair to reflect that some falconers have been critical of it. White dared to document his fallibility and failures, leaving himself open to the opprobrium of the purist. American falconry expert Steve Bodio is well placed to explain White’s relevance in a falconry context. He told me this:

“Readers, especially falconers, seem to misunderstand the nature of the book. White wrote, some time later: “I had never trained a serious hawk before, nor met a living falconer, nor seen a living hawk being trained.” Worse, there were no real beginner’s texts in the 1930’s. He had only a book about Peregrines, a 19th century manual, and a copy of Edmund Bert’s 1619 handbook on Goshawks, in period English. Oddly the last might have done him the most good had he not been reading the books against each other and changing his mind every time he failed to get immediate results. Falconry is almost impossible to learn without a human mentor, though White didn’t have one. He started alone.

Of course, disaster lurks around every corner. Early on, Gos escapes in the barn with his leash attached; of course, he ends of hanging upside down. White muses “Why the leash had not been tied to a perch, thus preventing his escape, I am not able to remember. Probably I had no perch, and anyway I was in the position of having to discover all these things by practice.”

He makes these mistakes throughout the whole book, and writes each one down. Admissions like this drive experienced falconer’s fury. We forget that we all made similar mistakes when we trained our first birds. Such heartbreaking and hilarious self-recognition must have been difficult for his later, more experienced self. White presents himself as a beginner: enthusiastic, furious, terrified, and ignorant. Perhaps falconers dislike The Goshawk book because it is like re-living a hopeless, youthful love affair. You feel each mistake, each stupidity, each irrevocable slip as if you just performed it and could not call it back. They should remember that it was White, not some falconry guru, who realized the hard-earned irreducible core of falconry: “The thing about being associated with a hawk is that you cannot be slipshod about it.”

In Looking for the Goshawk, my search focus turned to finding the cottage where this hawk ‘seduction’ drama unfolded. If I couldn’t find the bird locally, I might at least plug some gaps in its natural history as an artefact of British culture. Finding that cottage was harder than it ought to have been. White has been to a large degree airbrushed from the collective memory. A misfit. The school had little to say about him, perhaps because the high-camp flamboyance of this brilliant, inspirational man, with his menagerie of pets, and his racy novels written under an assumed name, threatened to bring the institution into disrepute.

His life was chequered and often unhappy, afflicted by a traumatised childhood and brutalising experiences at boarding school. He spent the war years living in Ireland, flying falcons and becoming more expert at the art. Fame and fortune finally came, when his books were discovered by an appreciative American public, Disney bought the rights to his Arthurian novels, and Broadway shoe-horned them into the hit musical Camelot.

White visited the US to receive the accolades, mingling with Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and cast on the big stage. By this point in his life he cut an imposing, Hemingway-esque figure, with his tall, bulky frame and grey beard. In the Fall of 1963 he embarked on a gruelling, three-month lecture tour of the States. He recorded this in a travelogue later published as America At Last, an evocative series of snapshots of the country at a turbulent but exciting time in its history. The civil rights movement was grinding into gear, Kennedy was assassinated. White described a culture in renaissance, alive with opportunity and possibility and a far cry from the repression he’d endured back home. The diary is punctuated with touching observations of what little nature he was able to glimpse as he was ferried from one campus to the next, between open air stadia and audiences of thousands, eager to hear his views on whatever subject happened to take his fancy.

White left America by boat. He hated flying, and was keen to explore the Greek capital Athens en route home to England. His ship docked there on the morning of January 17, 1964. White was found dead in his cabin, slumped on the floor. Cause of death was recorded as massive coronary heart failure. He was 57 years old.

White had no close family, and a decision was taken that he should be buried where he had been found, in Athens, in the corner of a vast cemetery there.

Finding White’s grave became another search focus for my book. I was in Athens on conservation business, talking to a Foundation there about projects in Europe. I took an afternoon, and then another, to pick my way slowly through this sprawling forest of tombs, mausoleums, statues, photographs, wreaths, celebrations of love and life, all very Greek and touching, colourful. Windfall oranges and darting hoopoes added more colour and life to the scene.

When I finally found White it was upon the realisation that there was a corner of the cemetery set aside for ‘Protestants’. And there, by the maintenance yard, the barrows, paints, concrete blocks and buckets, was White’s modest, flat slab. The inscription says that he ‘from a troubled life brought pleasure to others’. A sword is etched faintly there too.

“I expect to make rather a good death,” White had written in a 1960 diary. “The essence of death is loneliness, and I have had plenty of practice at this.”

The 50th anniversary of White’s death prompted me to make enquiries about marking the occasion in some way, perhaps in part to correct the fact that there is no focal point for this drifting man in his homeland. These efforts came to nothing. There was support for the idea, there just wasn’t an obvious place.

Then events took an unusual turn. In the Fall of 2012, on the final leg of research for my book, I had visited Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, to witness the southward migration of raptors there. I didn’t see one of the occasional goshawks that grace this procession, but I did get chatting to someone who was helping to point out and identify passing birds for the banks of spectators perched on the rocks above the mountain pass. She introduced herself as Stacia Novy, well known in US falconry circles, and an authority on raptors.

In later correspondence with Stacia about my book, goshawks and T H White, she suggested a fitting place to commemorate the author/falconer would be the Wall of Remembrance at the Archives of Falconry, Boise, Idaho. This, in the Archive’s own words, is “established to honor those of our comrades no longer with us. This monument, The Wall of Remembrance, serves as a permanent location where friends, fellow falconers, and family of the deceased may honor the memory of a departed falconer among those others who shared his or her passion for hawking.”

I thought this some kind of solution. America has White’s archive (at the University of Texas) so why not his memorial? We just needed to raise the small matter of a thousand dollars. Stacia would lead the fundraising effort in the US, and I would ask around, here in the UK. Between us we managed to raise the money needed. The donors are listed below. I thank them again for their generosity in supporting this initiative.

Conor Mark Jameson

Dr. Marc Adams         Stephen Bodio Steve Jones Stacia A. Novy            Marie Winn Laura Hazelett            Jose Edrich Conor M. Jameson     Richard Hines

http://www.peregrinefund.org/falconers-wall

[conorjameson]

The day of the vole

Sister-in-law Carrie has come to visit us at our new home. We’re giving her ‘the tour’, and are paused by the ornamental fish pond of which we are now custodians. It’s an elegant circular mossy stone construction, complete with fountain, and three gracefully swishing fish, in varying shades of not-very gold. I’ve been pondering subtle ways of naturalising the pond, as a future project, when I’ve finished drilling holes in things elsewhere.

“Is that a rat?” says Carrie, gesturing casually in the direction of the opposite rim of the raised perimeter. It’s almost as though she’s enquiring about a feature we’ve put in, a conversation piece. “Oh yes, Carrie, that’s our rat – do you like it?”

Perched on the wall there, sitting still, in full view, and sniffing in our direction, is a rat-sized rodent. It immediately calls to mind the biscuit tin scene at the climax of that classic episode of Fawlty Towers, when the health inspector comes face to face with the other ‘Basil’. This moment pondside has some of that surreal quality.

It must be a rat, surely... perhaps a poorly, half-poisoned one, to be sitting there so brazen? But no, there’s something more cuddly about this critter. It’s hamster-like, with its blunt nose and roundness, its lack of obvious ears. The shorter and less scaly tail would be another clue, but we can’t see that. It’s a water vole. How odd, and delightful.

Ponds are a great way of giving nature a home, but you don’t usually expect a water vole to be in residence. Surely you need a nature reserve for that? It’s like having an avocet on your peanuts. A little ostentatious, perhaps.

Three hours later and I’m sitting by the pond. The water vole is still right here. It has now had the good sense to move a foot or so to the side, to conceal itself under a parasol-like leaf, which shakes when the vole moves, or scratches, or cleans itself, which it does a lot. It seems well aware of my presence, nose regularly twitching in my direction, chin raised to reveal the pale underside.

From time to time it takes a dip in the pond, torpedoing round the edge and spooking the fish and frogs, or crossing the surface, floating high in the water, to squat in the middle. There, it nibbles kingcup leaves and peers myopically in my direction, nosing the air, looking generally bewildered, like it has just woken up. I’m so close to it I can see it blink its beady eyes, note its nostrils not quite flaring.

I’ve been able to send texts about this unscheduled vole, take photos, get the notebook out, pull up a chair. The first photo I took was a snatched, blurry effort, when I assumed the vole would soon scarper if I dithered. My later pics are much sharper, of the vole looking damp and spiky, post-swim, slightly dishevelled.

I’ve even got the mammal guidebook out, to read up on the vole’s lifecycle, to work out what it might be doing here. Visiting, or resident? How abnormal is this, or have I made false assumptions the vole’s lifestyle? Young males disperse when they are about four months old, but they aren’t usually born till March/April, and this is early May. That doesn’t fit.

Five hours later. I’m getting seriously behind with the drilling of things, but it’s not every day you get to hang out with a water vole. The doors and gutters will still be broken tomorrow. The vole must surely be gone. It doesn’t seem to have much to eat here. They like grass stems. Nothing too fancy. At one point it dismantles the very parasol under which it’s been sheltering, almost as a displacement activity, an act of self-defeating delinquency. The large leaf drops upside down on to the pond surface, revealing its purple stem and veined underside.

A wasp and then a great tit pop in for a drink, and the latter seems to spook the vole into falling in. It climbs straight back out again. It has become more animated as the afternoon has worn on. Next door’s cat peers out at me from the outhouse windowsill. I left the door open; the one that I’m supposed to be fixing.

I check again at 4 pm. No sign. The vole has moved on.

It’s been a strange day, spent mostly with a vole. I’ve been left with the sense that this was a refugee rather than a resident. Its behaviour made me wonder if perhaps a cat had brought it in, and it had escaped, unharmed but disoriented. That might explain not only its presence in an unusual place but also its strangely subdued behaviour, its reluctance to leave the pond despite our presence, its gradual recovery from apparent trauma. Perhaps those circuits of the pond edge had been efforts to explore ways to tunnel out, thwarted by impenetrable walls below the surface.

The following day is vole-free too. I hope it might have found its way to the river, which is about 100 metres away. The unexpected guest has made us feel very welcome. In a sense this curious encounter has helped give us a home too.

  Conor Jameson

[conorjameson]

A Minute’s Not-So-Quiet Reflection

I've written a guest blog for Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon, Chief Executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation, Compassion in World Farming and a prominent commentator on the effects of industrial farming.

You can read my guest blog, about Rachel Carson, here.  

[conorjameson]

Inspired by "Silent Spring" and "The Peregrine"

I am extremely honoured to have a guest blog from Philip Lymbery, Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming, and author of Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat.

 We have discovered a shared love of two books. The following extract from Farmageddon explains all...

 “For more than three decades, I harboured a nagging sense of inadequacy, a puzzling feeling that I just couldn’t see things in quite the same way as others. I remember how it started. It was the late 1970s when, as a young teenager, I read a book that would fire my imagination for the rest of my life. It led to years of gazing out of windows, a habit that got me into trouble with a string of teachers.

It was a Sixties wildlife classic called The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker. I was enthralled, inspired, filled with a sense of nervous wonder. As I read his vivid and meticulous descriptions of the falcons he watched near his home in Essex, I dreamed of seeing them too. With eyes filled with wonder, I scrutinised every kestrel I saw, just in case.

  It would be some years before I saw my first peregrine. Majestic, enthralling, and when they close their wings in a stoop, said to be the fastest animal on the planet, hurtling at speeds of 200 kilometres per hour. Since then I’ve seen many all over the world, as well as on my very doorstep at home in the South Downs of England.

But that sense of inadequacy never quite went away. You see, after countless encounters, I’ve just not been able to see them so vividly, so close or for so long as Baker did. What was the matter with me? Was I doing something wrong? For thirty-five years that question remained unanswered; until now.

  I was on my annual winter trip to North Wales with my wife, Helen. We love to call in at the wonderful RSPB reserve at Conwy. Situated on the banks of the estuary, with magnificent views of Snowdonia and Conwy castle, it’s a spectacular place to while away an afternoon.

  The weather was foul, so more time in the shop and café surrounded by wildlife paraphernalia. Out of the bookshelves a title leapt out at me: Silent Spring Revisited, by Conor Mark Jameson. It explored the legacy of Rachel Carson, who first raised the alarm over the perils of pesticides sweeping across Britain and America and the demise of songbirds.

  Standing, book in hand, I started to read: “In a book about the dawn chorus, about songbirds and birdsong, the Peregrine Falcon might not be the obvious place to start, but bear with me.” I had to agree, and was intrigued. Turns out both the writer and I had a love affair with that bird and that book by J. A. Baker. Both bird and Baker were described as having achieved “almost mythic, prophet status”.

  Memories came flooding back of how much better, faster, closer, the peregrines looked through the lens of Baker’s eloquent prose. But then a twist: what I hadn’t quite appreciated was that others were quietly questioning what Baker really saw. Through forensic analysis, the author suggested that Baker might not have been looking at wild peregrines, but instead at escaped falconers’ birds, hence why they were so tame. Indeed, in some cases, they might not even have been peregrines at all, but some closely related escapee!

  Okay, it’s only a theory, but in that moment, decades of inadequate feelings, of wondering why I couldn’t quite see what he saw, were lifted from me. The relief was so real that I ran round the shop telling anyone that would listen!

  You see, way back in the 1960s, when Baker was writing in southern Britain, peregrines had pretty much been wiped out. Agrochemical pesticides were poisoning wildlife, including those at the top of the food chain like birds of prey. People still remember how chemicals persisted in the food chain, accumulating in predators like falcons, causing nests to fail. What is less well remembered is how the countryside was littered with dead or dying birds. Foxes were affected by a mysterious illness where they lost their fear of people. Those were extraordinary times in the countryside on both sides of the Atlantic; a time of dramatic demise.

Rachel Carson’s legacy, thanks to Silent Spring, has been reform of some of the worst excesses of farming’s chemical age. Buzzards, Sparrowhawks and the like have recovered. The powerful pointed wings and black ‘moustache’ of the Peregrine have once again been restored to the skies over much of Britain.

  But the truth is that industrial agriculture still has devastating effects on once common farmland birds. Turtle Doves, Skylarks, Corn Buntings to name but three have seen their populations crash in Britain over the last 40 years, with little sign of recovery.

  When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, the US had given birth to techniques that treated the countryside like an industrial site, with unforeseen but devastating consequences.

  Half a century on, history is repeating itself; mega-farms using the latest industrial practices pioneered in the US and now being exported to Britain and beyond. In this, the 50th anniversary year of Carson’s untimely death, there is every reason to both remember her legacy, and to emulate her determination, her public spirit; to save our countryside again, for future generations.”

 Philip Lymbery

  Philip looking for peregrines on Lundy island.

Philip is a life-long wildlife enthusiast. He lives in rural Hampshire, amongst the South Downs, with his wife, stepson and rescue dog, Duke. Farmageddon is co-authored with Isabel Oakeshott.

  I am also honoured to make a guest slot this week on Philip’s website: www.philiplymbery.com

[conorjameson]

Advance praise for Shrewdunnit: The Nature Files

“Shrewdunnit is a delightful read, wonderfully crafted by a writer and naturalist at the top of his game. Conor Jameson takes us through the seasons in his own inimitable way, introducing us to an array of wild characters, at home and abroad. This is a lovely book, something to dip into at leisure or, as I did, to read cover to cover in just a few days. It's a must have for anyone with a passion for the countryside and an appreciation of great writing.”  Lolo Williams

  "A wide-ranging, warm-hearted and generous love-letter to wild things, near and far, Shrewdunnit is a delightful and beguiling collection in the great tradition of local naturalists. It is alive with the mysteries that surround us, while showing us how nature is something cherishable and very close to home."  Helen Macdonald

  "Conor’s stories are gently beguiling, strikingly original. They speak from his heart to our souls and carry the profound wisdom of a thoughtful and perceptive observer." Derek Niemann

  “Conor Mark Jameson is one of those people who, if they didn’t exist, would have to be invented by SOMEONE in a world which so desperately needs his profound knowledge, his wise and amusing observations and his tireless campaigning on behalf of the natural world.”  Esther Wolfson

  “Conor is a man who hears cuckoos breathing. That should tell you all you need to know about this book. For most people, hearing that bird’s unforgettable spring call would be thrill enough, but Conor’s unquenchable curiosity is satisfied only by getting closer, seeing more and understanding better than your average wildlife enthusiast. Like a magpie, Conor has collected an assortment of stories that sparkle with insight, imagination and affection. Nothing escapes his all-seeing eyes.” Sophie Stafford

  “A delightful diary of ‘everyday Britain’, seen through the eyes of one of our most perceptive nature writers.”  Stephen Moss

  “A wonderful collection by a gifted and thoughtful writer: a delight both to dip into and reread for insight and enjoyment…”  Jonathan Elphick

  “Conor's is a rare talent, one that seems so simple, but that he works on long and hard to perfect. This new book is a joy, and we can all feel grateful that he has given us the opportunity to benefit from his wisdom and his delight in the natural world around him.”  Rob Hume

"This is a fantastically detailed and very visual diary of British natural history. It’s a journey through the colourful landscape of Conor Jameson’s countryside." The Urban Birder

    Shrewdunnit is published in April 2014 by Pelagic.

[conorjameson]

Looking for T H White

The following article was published in British Birds and the journal of the North American Falconers Association. As a result, an initiative has been launched to provide a fitting memorial to T H White.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of author T. H. White, probably best remembered by bird enthusiasts for his mini epic The Goshawk (1951), and by the general public for The Once and Future King, his Arthurian novels, and the blockbuster Disney and Broadway spin-offs that ensued. Like J. A. Baker, author of The Peregrine (1967), White’s work has inspired a number of prominent naturalists, and writers. J.K. Rowling, for example, acknowledges White’s character Wart, the young King Arthur as depicted in his novels, as the ‘spiritual ancestor’ of Harry Potter. It seems timely to remember the man, and reflect on his life and influence.

White was born in 1906, in India. He was a prolific writer, and some authorities – his agent David Garnett included – consider The Goshawk to have been his best book. It has featured on the recommended reading lists of many literature courses, and no doubt influenced J. A. Baker himself, as it is known to have been on his bookshelf. Intriguingly, White himself considered as a failure the hawk-taming saga described in the book.

White wrote The Goshawk in the mid 1930s but hid the manuscript until Garnett chanced upon it more than a decade later. Garnett managed to convince White that it should be published, even though the writer was sheepish about the various personal and practical imperfections his words lay bare. For if White was no expert ornithologist at this stage of his life, he was no expert falconer then either. But he did love birds, and animals in general, probably more than he cared for the grown-up world. ‘I had only just escaped from humanity’ wrote White of his captive. ‘The poor gos had only just been caught by it.’

White was an enthusiast – a ‘smatterer’, as his biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner put it - and an avid learner of new skills. He was driven by a need to preoccupy himself, his discontent stemming from a traumatic childhood. ‘Everything collapsed at a critical time in my life and ever since I have been arming myself against disaster,’ he once confessed to Garnett in a letter. By the mid 1930s White had given up a teaching career to rent an old keeper’s cottage, and he wrote to Germany for a goshawk. Weary of society, he hoped to ‘revert to a feral state’ – thinking that somehow winning over the hawk might give him this.

He sought to train the bird using medieval methods, and make a living from his account of their relationship. But he had overestimated his ability to do this single-handed. The archaic method usually involved more than one person ‘watching’ the bird – staying awake for days and nights while the hawk repeatedly ‘bates’ from the wrists to which it is tethered, until finally it must sleep, and thereby submit to its captive state. And maybe he underestimated the brute intransigence of the bird, taken as a well-grown nestling and already wired with a detestation of the human form.

The modern method of manning a hawk is much gentler on both parties, and takes longer, with the bird gradually accustomed to the proximity of humans and their paraphernalia, steadily overcoming its innate suspicion. But that wouldn’t have made such a compelling tale, or involved such an intense battle of wills. While the book tells us little or nothing about the goshawk in its wild state – it was extirpated from the UK by the Victorians and only the occasional escapee was at large in the landscape here – it tells us much about the relationship between people and birds.

In later life White gave up field sports and contented himself with watching instead. He birdwatched across North America between stages of a three-month lecture tour in winter 1963-64. He kept a journal of the tour, later published as America at Last, a revealing snapshot of the nation through a turbulent period in its history – encompassing the Kennedy assassination – and decorated with descriptions of birds and other natural features seen.

On the tour he lectured about his work and his inspirations, sometimes to audiences of thousands in open-air stadiums. He was ‘box office’ in America. The Arthurian legends played well here. The Disney deal had made him wealthy at last. This often shy, prickly and reclusive man had probably never been happier, appreciated and liberated in that vast continent beset with social problems but so alive, he discovered, with openness, optimism and possibilities.

Tour over, he said his tearful goodbyes. He returned to Europe by ocean liner, partly because he hated flying (despite having trained as a pilot to learn another new skill and to attempt to overcome his fear) and partly so he could visit Athens. His ship docked in Piraeus harbour there, and it was on the morning of January 17 he was discovered dead in his cabin. The cause of death was recorded as heart failure. He was just 57 years old.

He never made it home. With no family in England, it was decided that he could be laid to rest in the corner of an Athens cemetery, within view of Hadrian’s Arch. The Emperor Hadrian was one of his passionate interests. Within White’s oeuvre is a treatise on field sports called England Have My Bones. He would have enjoyed the irony that England never got them. Nor did England get his archive, which is housed at the University of Texas. It seems that even in death he was ill-fitted to this country: a misfit, much like the bird of which he wrote so vividly.

In part to correct this estrangement it struck me that this year’s anniversary of his passing might be formally recognised in some way, perhaps with a modest plaque or sculpture installed at one of White’s many stopping off points here in a nomadic life. Maybe Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where he taught, and near where he took the keeper’s cottage and did his best work. Or Doolistown in Ireland, where he spent the war years. Or the Channel Island of Alderney, where he lived last. But my enquiries and promptings have left me with no strong sense of a lasting appreciation of White here, or much appetite for resurrecting him.

If his literary legacy is not quite assured – I’m guessing because his most famous work was written for children – perhaps his contribution to natural history, albeit by an unorthodox route, can be recognised now. The Goshawk may not add much to the sum of knowledge about the species’ conservation status, but it is the only British book written in the 20th century devoted to the bird. For The Goshawk alone we might doff our caps to Terence ‘Tim’ Hanbury White, and acknowledge the place - and the lasting legacy - of the misfit.

Conor Mark Jameson

Thanks to Jon D'Arpino for permission to show these images from the NAFA journal.

I'm delighted to report that following on from this article and another by Steve Bodio which makes the case for White’s contribution to falconry as an art there's now an initiative to recognise T H White, in the USA, on the 50th anniversary of his death.

The initiative to install a memorial to T H White at the headquarters of the North American Falconers Association at Boise, Idaho has been launched by Stacia Novy. 

I'm copying the link to the donation page below in case you'd like to share or make a donation. Only $1,000 - or £600 - needs to be raised.   

Thanks and best wishes, on behalf of Stacia Novy, Steve Bodio and me.

 1.  Click on this link: https://my.peregrinefund.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=352

2.  If the address menu doesn't have the state or foreign country listed, select "N/A"

3.  Fill in tribute name: "Terence Hanbury White"

4.  Click the square "Donate Now" at the bottom of the screen

5. An e-mail confirmation will be sent as a record of your donation

Thank you.

The memorial ceremony to honour White will be held in Spring 2015 in Boise, Idaho. 

[conorjameson]

A place for the misfit

This Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of author T. H. White, probably best remembered by bird enthusiasts for his mini epic The Goshawk (1951), and by the general public for The Once and Future King, his Arthurian novels, and the blockbuster Disney and Broadway spin-offs that ensued. Like J. A. Baker, author of The Peregrine (1967), White’s work has inspired a number of prominent naturalists. J.K. Rowling, for example, acknowledges White’s character Wart, the young King Arthur as depicted in his novels, as the ‘spiritual ancestor’ of Harry Potter. It seems timely to remember the man, and reflect on his life and influence.

White was born in 1906, a year before British Birds. He was a prolific writer, and some authorities – his agent David Garnett included – consider The Goshawk to have been his best book. It has featured on the recommended reading lists of many literature courses, and no doubt influenced J. A. Baker himself, as it is known to have been on his bookshelf. Intriguingly, White himself considered as a failure the hawk-taming saga described in the book.

White wrote The Goshawk in the mid 1930s but hid the manuscript until Garnett chanced upon it more than a decade later. Garnett managed to convince White that it should be published, even though the writer was sheepish about the various personal and practical imperfections his words lay bare. For if White was no expert ornithologist at this stage of his life, he was no expert falconer then either. But he did love birds, and animals in general, probably more than he cared for the grown-up world. ‘I had only just escaped from humanity’ wrote White of his captive. ‘The poor gos had only just been caught by it.’

White was an enthusiast – a ‘smatterer’, as his biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner put it - and an avid learner of new skills. He was driven by a need to preoccupy himself, his discontent stemming from a traumatic childhood. ‘Everything collapsed at a critical time in my life and ever since I have been arming myself against disaster,’ he once confessed to Garnett in a letter. By the mid 1930s White had given up a teaching career to rent an old keeper’s cottage, and he wrote to Germany for a goshawk. Weary of society, he hoped to ‘revert to a feral state’ – thinking that somehow winning over the hawk might give him this.

He sought to train the bird using medieval methods, and make a living from his account of their relationship. But he had overestimated his ability to do this single-handed. The archaic method usually involved more than one person ‘watching’ the bird – staying awake for days and nights while the hawk repeatedly ‘bates’ from the wrists to which it is tethered, until finally it must sleep, and thereby submit to its captive state. And maybe he underestimated the brute intransigence of the bird, taken as a well-grown nestling and already wired with a detestation of the human form.

The modern method of manning a hawk is much gentler on both parties, and takes longer, with the bird gradually accustomed to the proximity of humans and their paraphernalia, steadily overcoming its innate suspicion. But that wouldn’t have made such a compelling tale, or involved such an intense battle of wills. While the book tells us little or nothing about the goshawk in its wild state – it was extirpated from the UK by the Victorians and only the occasional escapee was at large in the landscape here – it tells us much about the relationship between people and birds.

In later life White gave up field sports and contented himself with watching instead. He birdwatched across North America between stages of a three-month lecture tour in winter 1963-64. He kept a journal of the tour, later published as America at Last, a revealing snapshot of the nation through a turbulent period in its history – encompassing the Kennedy assassination – and decorated with descriptions of birds and other natural features seen.

On the tour he lectured about his work and his inspirations, sometimes to audiences of thousands in open-air stadiums. He was ‘box office’ in America. The Arthurian legends played well here. The Disney deal had made him wealthy at last. This often shy, prickly and reclusive man had probably never been happier, appreciated and liberated in that vast continent beset with social problems but so alive, he discovered, with openness, optimism and possibilities.

Tour over, he said his tearful goodbyes. He returned to Europe by ocean liner, partly because he hated flying (despite having trained as a pilot to learn another new skill and to attempt to overcome his fear) and partly so he could visit Athens. His ship docked in Piraeus harbour there, and it was on the morning of January 17 he was discovered dead in his cabin. The cause of death was recorded as heart failure. He was just 57 years old.

He never made it home. With no family in England, it was decided that he could be laid to rest (grave pictured above) in the corner of an Athens cemetery, within view of Hadrian’s Arch. The Emperor Hadrian was one of his passionate interests. Within White’s oeuvre is a satire on field sports called England Have My Bones. He would have enjoyed the irony that England never got them. Nor did England get his archive, which is housed at the University of Texas. It seems that even in death he was ill-fitted to this country: a misfit, much like the bird of which he wrote so vividly.

In part to correct this estrangement it struck me that this year’s anniversary of his passing might be formally recognised in some way, perhaps with a modest plaque or sculpture installed at one of White’s many stopping off points here in a nomadic life. Maybe Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where he taught, and near where he took the keeper’s cottage and did his best work. Or Doolistown in Ireland, where he spent the war years. Or the Channel Island of Alderney, where he lived last. But my enquiries and promptings have left me with no strong sense of a lasting appreciation of White here, or much appetite for resurrecting him.

If his literary legacy is not quite assured – I’m guessing because his most famous work was written for children – perhaps his contribution to natural history, albeit by an unorthodox route, can be recognised now. The Goshawk may not add much to the sum of knowledge about the species’ conservation status, but it is the only British book written in the 20th century devoted to the bird. For The Goshawk alone we might doff our caps to Terence ‘Tim’ Hanbury White, and acknowledge the place - and the lasting legacy - of the misfit.

 Conor Mark Jameson

Published in British Birds, January 2014.

#T H White #The Goshawk

[conorjameson]

Southill Park revisited

While doing some research for my book Silent Spring Revisited, I came across a 1963 issue of the Bedfordshire Naturalist journal that included an account by Bruce Campbell of a nesting bird survey that he and the (then) British Birds editor James Ferguson-Lees carried out that year. They were repeating a survey first conducted sixty years earlier.

  Campbell takes up the tale: ‘On June 4th, 1903, Jannion Steele-Elliott, the great Bedfordshire naturalist and his friend Ronald Bruce Campbell, my father, spent the day at Southill Park and found nests with eggs of 27 different species of bird, a feat which can have few parallels in British field ornithology.’ Sixty years on: ‘On June 5th, 1963, Jannion’s nephew, Dennis Elliott, James Ferguson-Lees, like my father a Scoto-Bedfordian... and I celebrated the diamond jubilee of the 1903 visit.’ Nothing was published at the time of the 1903 visit, but Campbell had his father’s diary of the event for reference.

  In 1963, the three searched from mid morning till around 9.00 pm, and only just failed to emulate their predecessors: ‘Allowing ourselves the Blackcaps [fledged young rather than the nest itself], our tally was 60 occupied nests of 26 species. Considering the effect of the previous winter and that none of us knew the area well, whereas Steele-Elliott was certainly familiar with it, we felt we had not done too badly.’

  With the 50th and 110th anniversary of this unusual and occasional survey approaching, I felt that it ought to be repeated. Richard Bashford, Barry Nightingale and I approached the estate; the necessary permission was generously granted by the Whitbread family and we did a dry run in June 2012. It was clear that the emphasis of our informal survey would not – indeed should not – be on locating the actual nests of many of the species likely to be present and breeding, to avoid risk of causing disturbance. Times and of course ornithological conventions have changed.

  And so, on 9th June 2013, the three of us met at 6.00 am on the edge of the Park. In common with 1903 and 1963, our spring followed a hard winter, although not on the scale of 1963’s fabled three-month freeze. ‘From a general comparison of the two days,’ wrote Campbell, ‘it [1903] must have been a late season, whereas 1963, in spite of the famous cold spell, had by June become rather an early one.’

  A cold wind from the east made for thinner pickings than we might have expected at the Keepers Warren, where we set off. It was evidently heathland and not long planted, in 1963. The predated Wood Pigeon fledgling we found on the track may have been evidence of Sparrowhawk, absent 50 years ago. We found some other signs of life, such as the Muntjac Deer that trotted calmly across the track up ahead of us. The one that Campbell noted in this very part of the estate he described as his first glimpse of this recently introduced species in the wild.

  At a clear-felled area we speculated on the species that might have occurred in days gone by – Nightjar, Woodlark, Whinchat, Tree Pipit– but we found nothing. We did pick up half a white eggshell, which looked good for Tawny Owl. I popped it in my bag for later verification.

  The ’63 group had gone first to the lake, and enjoyed early success. ‘The boathouse gave us our first score, a House Sparrow with 4 eggs on a beam; there were several others to which we did not climb,’ Campbell reported. The boathouse is still there, crowded by trees, but the House Sparrows are long gone. The lake covers around 20 ha and remains a place busy with waterfowl and other wetland specialists. In 1963, Campbell recorded that ‘... herons lumbered off the tall trees on the island. The heronry was not in existence in 1903, so this gave us one species in hand for a start.’ We too were able to add Grey Heron to our list.

  The 1963 search became ‘amphibious’ – the two men were equipped with gumboots and a mirror on a stick. They found Sedge Warbler and – curiously – a Bullfinch nest in sedges over the water. ‘The colony of Reed Warblers was known to Steele-Elliott but no nests were recorded on the 1903 visit... we tallied eight Reed Warblers with eggs.’

  In 1963, the Turtle Dove accidentally flushed from its nest and young as the men returned to shore we could only dream of nowadays. They also stumbled on a Common Whitethroat nest nearby. We found a pair not far away, but only derelict nests were apparent.

  For all their abundance over the lake we could add no hirundines to our list of breeders. The lake gave us one notable record – Egyptian Goose with goslings – and also something that our predecessors had noted, but of which we were unable to prove breeding on the day: Mute Swan and Great Crested Grebe.

  Things improved after lunch, as we found Green and Great Spotted Woodpeckers attending nest holes, Eurasian Nuthatches with a brood of five, and family groups of Eurasian Treecreeper and Goldcrest (‘a rarity in 1963’). Perhaps best of all were the Marsh Tits feeding recent fledglings.

  The arable fields added little to our list, the winter wheat no doubt too high and dense already for ground nesters. The lack of hedgerows here ruled out several others. One real bonus was our discovery of the return of Spotted Flycatchers to the vicinity of Gothic Cottage. They were missing in 2012.

  Ten hours in, and flagging, we went in search of what would have been number 26, returning to a Stock Dove nest hole we’d identified on our recce last year, but without success. We looked instead for Song Thrush, but chanced on a Common Chiffchaff gathering food. A pleasing one to end on.

  What was most enjoyable was reflecting, as we strolled between habitats, on what these surroundings might have looked and felt like to our forerunners. Am I right to imagine that what has changed most is the general abundance of life?

  It’s tempting to believe that there was just more in the way of life forms present, fifty years ago. Notwithstanding our competence, there is the definite sense that nests were easier to find, back then, presumably because birds were simply much more abundant. Perhaps insects were too. Campbell describes Ferguson-Lees being bothered by midges as he tried to locate Willow Warblers in a patch of Ground-elder. I wonder if this snapshot alone reveals a lot about the contrasting world they inhabited. We didn’t hear a Willow Warbler all day, and saw nothing resembling a midge. I don’t think we saw more than a single butterfly all day either, even after the sun broke through towards the end. What is perhaps more troubling is that this didn’t even occur to me as odd until I thought about it later that evening.

  It also then occurred to me that I still had the eggshell in my bag, and towards midnight I checked it against the book. It made a perfect match with the Tawny Owl egg depicted there. So this gave us number 27, the same score as the class of 1903. And one more than in 1963.

  So we could say that we matched their feat, more-or-less, though we did re-write the rules. In fact, the only intact eggs we saw all day were those of Common Coot, which would have been impossible to miss. What seems clear is that, not only were our predecessors’ nest-finding techniques greatly superior to and much less trammelled than ours, it also seems likely that there were, in all likelihood, many more nests to find.

  Really, we can’t claim to have emulated the feat but that was not really the point. What is much more instructive is the glimpse the outing has given us of what has changed, and the pleasure of walking this interesting and varied landscape and imagining it five and eleven decades ago, our counterparts in tweeds or khakis, with their basic optics and much closer search focus. The need to prove nesting was novel for us. ‘It really changed the way we birdwatched,” Richard later reflected. It also gave us some life firsts – the family parties of some of the species, in particular. The Red Kites, Buzzards and Ravens that we saw would also have gladdened our fore-runners, I am sure.

  So how will it be, 50 years hence, in 2063? One thing’s for sure, we won’t be the ones doing the 10-hour trek.

    The year that was

1903  British Birds journal was still three years from its inception, but in spring 1903 the Society for the Protection of Birds (its Royal Charter was still a year away) was launching Bird Notes and News – the precursor to Birds magazine – to provide ‘news of the doings of the Society’ to its members. The first issue spoke of the challenges of tackling the ‘conspicuous brutality’ of the plumage trade – the absence of herons from the 1903 Southill survey may reflect a wider depletion of the heron family – and the practices of caging and often blinding songbirds.

  1963  In spring 1963, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in the UK. The perils of which it warned were only just dawning on a wider public. And while we have no record of Southill Park being affected, estates not too far away had been reporting dead and dying birds (and other species such as Foxes) in great numbers. The RSPB, BTO and Game Research Association had formed an alliance to mobilise volunteer support and quantify the carnage. On top of this, resident species were recovering from one of the harshest winters on record. Barry Nightingale can himself recall field edges littered with the corpses of Wood Pigeons. Bird Notes was still two years from evolving into Birds magazine. It reported that National Nature Week had just been held.

  Footnote  In July 2013, while browsing once again in the file of Bedfordshire Naturalist journals, I discovered that the 1963 group repeated the survey two years later. It is worth adding this for the record, and to pick out a few of the noteworthy aspects of that visit. They returned on 1st June 1965, a ‘dull but promising’ day, and the promise was fulfilled as they racked up 100 nests of 35 species, way in excess of their 60/26 score of two years earlier. It supports the theory that there were many more nests to find, half a century ago – even more so perhaps as bird numbers recovered in the wake of the big freeze of winter 1962/63. There are some other poignant reflections: ‘The Muntjac was certainly not dreamed of at Southill in 1903 nor, probably, was the Grey Squirrel,’ wrote Bruce Campbell. ‘Another striking change, we reflected, was in the variety of noises which have invaded the countryside. At least during working hours, tractors, aircraft, bird-scarers and a power-saw reminded us of the age of technology. Perhaps in another 60 years science will have conquered noise and our successors will not strain to catch the off-nest calls of Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler.’

  It may be that there was more human activity and therefore more noise then than now. But I think Campbell may have been especially surprised to learn that, 48 years on, there are no Willow Warblers left to hear.

  Conor Jameson

  With thanks again to the Whitbread family and Southill estate staff for their kind permission to repeat this historic survey, and of course to Barry and Richard for their vital contributions.

  First published in British Birds, December 2013.

[conorjameson]

Keeping it real

My copy of Bird Atlas 2007-11 has arrived. I pre-ordered, along with thousands of other eager recipients. It’s a must-have book, in ornithological terms. Production of these tomes is a once in 20 years event. Needless to say I have lost no time in finding the entry for Goshawk (pages 304-305, if you are behind me), for the latest word on the population status of the species.

  The new Atlas speaks of ‘large scale increases in range’, with the gos population now estimated at 435 pairs in the British Isles. ‘A marked population increase is likely to be underway in many areas,’ we’re told. I like the optimism of this. But is it right? I think it depends with which previous period you compare it.

  For sure, 435 pairs looks good against the first Atlas, 1968-71, when the goshawk was first reclaiming these islands, and there were just a handful of pairs. But what are the more recent trends? The UK population of goshawks was estimated at 410 pairs* 15 years before this current Atlas period. The official gos population has effectively flat-lined for the past decade. We have more golden eagles, which are currently restricted to huge territories in remote parts of Scotland. Twice as many hen harriers, now virtually absent from England. I’m still trying to share the optimism, but I’m not seeing the claimed large scale increases.

  Consider this. Every year, at a conservative estimate, 1,000 young goshawks (not to mention the 800-plus adults that produce them), venture forth from breeding sites into our landscape, presumably to attempt to reoccupy vacant space. It’s a landscape stuffed full of goshawk-ready prey items – game birds, pigeons, crows, gulls, rabbits, squirrels, rats.

  These young gos, says the Atlas, provide just ‘a scatter of winter records beyond the key breeding areas’. That’s another of the great mysteries of the goshawk – why so few of these itinerant birds are ever recorded, in a leafless landscape. Adult goshawks are known to wander widely too. There is much more to eat in the farmed lowlands than in spruce plantations, particularly in winter. That’s why they ought to wander.

  So where do all these large, bold, hungry raptors go? In some of our neighbouring UK countries, they pitch up anywhere, and inhabit even major cities. Where are ours? We seldom see them, and almost never recover them, dead or alive – and most of them are ringed as nestlings. I’d love to know, and I’d love science to be trying to find out.

  Another thing. It’s received wisdom that the goshawk was extinct in the British Isles by the end of the 19th Century. I queried this once, wondering how we could be sure. People who know and have thought more about goshawks than anyone else are convinced the birds were gone. They are simply so easy to catch, with a baited cage. Keepering was even more comprehensive in its coverage, back then. This Atlas introduces an element of doubt again on the extinct question, with the caveat ‘or almost so’. Are we going to be similarly quizzical about the four other raptor species believed to have been wiped out?

  And, not untypically of the literature, the new Atlas says that the extirpation (or near) of goshawks was due to a combination of deforestation and persecution. For sure removal of woodland resulted in a decrease of goshawks over time, but like many birds of prey they are adaptable. Systematic killing was the reason for their loss. Without that they would have survived.

  Twenty years ago we had about half a percent of the European population of goshawks. Ten years later we had about the same proportion. We still do. Whatever way you look at it these are not large-scale increases. In fact it points more towards continued systematic removal.

  Goshawks are alpha predators. They are versatile, adaptable, generalist feeders. The new Bird Atlas is a phenomenal body of work and a credit to all involved. But where goshawks are concerned in my humble opinion we ought to start telling it like it is.

  *British Birds Vol 99, 2006.

[conorjameson]

Silent Spring Revisited – the song list

 As I wrote Silent Spring Revisited, marking the 50 years since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had rocked our world, I chose a song for each year. The criteria were loose, but the main guiding principle was to choose a song that marked time, that spoke of the year, that related to the environment or was otherwise anthemic or poignant in some way. Of course this is a very difficult and personal thing, but fun to do. I’d recommend it as a process to go through. I chose a lyric from each song as a chapter opening, although for copyright reasons it isn’t possible to publish these in a book (even though entire song lyrics are nowadays freely and widely shared online), even if that had been a good idea, which it probably wasn’t (books can get pretty cluttered with quotes like these).

  Anyway, I’ve reproduced the list of lyrics below (you can play ‘guess the song’ if you like), and the list of titles/artists below that, in case you need to check any...

  It starts with a bit of poetry, from the Four Quartets:

  Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

T S Eliot

    The Sixties

  1961

Oh the birds and the bees

In the cigarette trees

By the soda water fountain

Where the lemonade springs

And the bluebird sings

On the big rock candy mountain

    1962

Two drifters, off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

    1963

Why do the birds go on singing?

    1964

Anyone who had a heart could look at me

And know that I love you

    1965

All my senses have been stripped

And my hands can’t feel to grip

    1966

‘Fools,’ said I, ‘You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you.’

But my words like silent raindrops fell

And echoed, in the wells

Of silence

    1967

There’s a whole generation with a new explanation

People in motion, people in motion       

    1968

I see trees of green

Red roses too   

    1969

I can’t pay no doctor’s bills

And whitey’s on the moon

  [I went for two songs, this year]

  Like a bird on a wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

    1970

They paved paradise  And put up a parking lot

    The Seventies

  1971

Where did all the blue sky go? Poison is the wind that blows   

    1972

Smelled the spring on the sulphured wind

Dirty old town, dirty old town

    1973

Grow apple trees and honey bees

And snow white turtle doves

    1974

Got fleas in my bedroom, got flies in my bathroom

And the cat just finished off the bread

    1975

I am flying, I am flying

Like a bird, ‘cross the sky

    1976

Rise up this mornin',  Smiled with the risin' sun,  Three little birds  Pitch by my doorstep 

    1977

Becalmed again

My heart is the sea

I sit and wait, but in vain

For the doldrums are me

    1978

Birds singing in the sycamore tree

Dream a little dream of me

    1979

How can the light that burned so brightly

Suddenly burn so pale?

    1980

Love is like a butterfly

As soft and gentle as a sigh

    The Eighties

  1981

The rain it never stops

And I’ve no particular place to go

    1982

Shakes his hand, turns away

Earth that you walk upon

    1983

The gift you gave is desire

The match that started my fire

    1984

Well, you didn’t wake up this morning

Cos you didn’t go to bed

    1985

I loved you a long time ago, you know

Where the wind’s own forget-me-nots blow

    1986

Throughout the dark months of April and May

    1987

Under the April skies, under the April sun

Sun grows cold, sky gets black

You broke me up, and now you won’t come back

    1988

Dragons blow fire, angels fly, spirits wither in the air

I’m just me I can’t deny, neither here, there or anywhere

    1989

Fly like birds of a feather

Drugs are like pleather

You don’t wanna wear it

    1990

I’m gonna take the song from every bird

And make em sing it just for me

Birds got something to teach us all

About being free

    The Nineties

  1991

Restless lovers, spread your wings

As the day begins                                                                                     

    1992

It’s only springtime

Hey, you’re too young to say you’re through with love

    1993

And then he’ll settle down, some quiet little town

And forget about everything

    1994

Oh is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel

Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?

    1995

I feed the pigeons I sometimes feed the sparrows too

It gives me a sense of enormous well-being

    1996

Bird on the horizon sitting on the fence

He’s singing his song for me at his own expense

And I’m just like that bird oh

Singing just for you

    1997

I’m sitting in the stranger’s room

Playing at the stranger’s table

    1998

And the songbird keeps singing like he

Knows the score

    1999

Everybody’s got a bomb

We could all die any day

    2000

Fools in their madness all around

Know that the light don’t sleep

    The Noughties

  2001

The birds in your garden

They taught me the words to this song

    2002

Just bees and things and flowers                        

    2003

Talking to the songbird yesterday

Flew me to a place not far away

    2004

You’ll spend the end of your days

Gently smiling, like a newborn

    2005

You can fly away, in the sky away

You mo’ lucky than me.

    2006

Life is good, and the sun is shining

Everybody floods to their ideal place

    2007

Look at all the people like cows in a herd

But I like ... birds

    2008

A small bird sang on an ivy bunch

And the song he sang was the jug of punch

    2009

But in my dreams begin to creep

That old familiar cheep cheep cheep

    2010

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen

Across the ocean wild and wide

To where your heart has ever been

Since you were first my bonnie bride

    2011

Voices heard in fields of green

Their joy, their calm and luxury

Are lost within the wanderings of my mind

    2012

How can ye chaunt, ye warblin’ birds

And I sae weary, fu’ o’ care.

Ye’ll break my heart, ye warblin’ birds

That wanton through the flowery thorn

Thou mind me o’ departed joys

Departed never to return.

  Postscript

  The birds are the keepers of our secret

As they saw where we lay

    Musicography

  1961 Harry McLintock (after Dad), Big Rock Candy Mountain

62 Danny Williams, Moon River

63 Skeeter Davis, The End of the World

64 Burt Bacharach, Anyone Who Had a Heart

65 The Byrds, Mr Tambourine Man

66 Simon and Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

67 Scott McKenzie, Are you going to San Francisco?

68 Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

69 Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire/ Gil Scott Heron, Whitey on the Moon

70 Joni Mitchell, They Paved Paradise

71 Marvin Gaye, Mercy Mercy Me

72 Euan McColl, Dirty Old Town

73 The New Seekers, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

74 Brian Protheroe, Pinball

75 Rod Stewart, Sailing

76 Bob Marley and the Wailers, Three Little Birds

77 Greenslade, Doldrums (from the album Time and Tide)

78 Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Dream a Little Dream of Me

79 Simon and Garfunkel, Bright Eyes

80 Dolly Parton, Love is Like a Butterfly

81 Japan, Ghosts

82 Simple Minds, This Earth That You Walk Upon

83 Style Council, The Paris Match

84 The The, This is the Day

85 This Mortal Coil, Another Day

86 Cocteau Twins, Throughout the Dark Months of April and May

87 Jesus and Mary Chain, April Skies

88 Felt, Primitive Painters

89 De La Soul, Say No Go

90 Gil Scott Heron I Think I’ll Call it Morning

91 Beloved, The Sun Rising

92 Saint Etienne, Spring

93 Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street

94 Pulp, Sorted

95 Blur, Parklife

96 Bob Dylan, You’re a Big Girl Now

97 Dougie MacLean, Garden Valley

98 Eva Cassidy, Songbird

99 Prince, 1999

2000 David Gray, Silver Lining

01 Pulp, The Birds in Your Garden

02 Roy Ayers, Everybody loves the sunshine

03 Oasis, Songbird

04 Elbow, Newborn

05 Yellow Bird, Caribbean folk song

06 Paulo Nutini, These Streets

07 The Eels, I Like Birds

08 Tommy Makem, The Jug of Punch

09 Florence and the Machine, The Bird

10 I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, Irish ballad

11 David Sylvian, Nostalgia

12 Robert Burns, Ye Banks and Braes

PS Elbow, The Birds

[conorjameson]

Ghosts

It has some of the hallmarks of a Conan Doyle murder mystery, complete with period costume, a shooting, a body, a fairytale Victorian Highland setting, suspects, big city and small town locations, journeys in between, and – for good measure and Hollywood appeal – a strong American angle. In fact the central character is a ‘Yank’ – Accipiter gentilis atricapillus to be precise – the fabled Northern Goshawk.

  It’s spring 1869 and there is unrest in the British Empire – Canada, this time. The finishing touches are being put to the Cutty Sark in a Glasgow shipyard. She will be one of the last of the tea clippers built, as the age of sail gives way to steam power. The journal Nature is also launched, and the People’s Friend. A gamekeeper called Stewart is patrolling the slopes of Schiehallion – the ‘hill of the fairies’, some say – in Perthshire. Spying a bird of prey, in the tradition of the day he shoots it dead.

  By and by, he gets into conversation with a road surveyor called Menzies, who relieves the keeper of the bird, which has been crudely gutted. Menzies takes it to the town of Brechin, on the east coast, and a shop owner there by the name of Lyster. Lyster can turn his hand to taxidermy, and sells many things, chief among which are fishing lures, for which Red Kite Milvus milvus feathers are particularly suited. But the skin he is presented with is no kite, or gled, as they were then known. In any event he has better things to work with, and puts it aside.

  Some time later a man called Gray drops in. He’s a keen ornithologist in his spare time and an inspector of banks by day. It’s not in great nick by this time but he recognises the bird skin as that of a Goshawk. He takes ownership of the specimen, and arranges for it to be sent on to Glasgow. There, he has another taxidermist clean, stuff and mount it. Goshawks were by this time rare, even in Scotland. It would be extinct as a breeder in Britain in little more than a decade. Having collected his order from the stuffer, it is only now that Gray realises there is something particularly unusual about this Goshawk. It is of the North American race atricapillus. At face value, this is the first record of its kind for Britain. The record is generally accepted. Gray later becomes a renowned and respected ornithologist and author of books on the subject.

  Fast-forward a century, and cutting a long story short, this American Gos is dropped from the Scottish list. No one today seems very sure why. By this time there were several records of American Goshawk from Ireland and one from England (Tresco, Scilly, 28th December 1935). In each case the birds were evidently shot, enabling close inspection.

  Forward again, this time to the present day, when the Perthshire record is reviewed once more, and officially rejected. Over at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, experts are once again peering at the mummified corpse. The identity of the bird is not in dispute, but there is apparently sufficient doubt over provenance, with the possibility that a different (American) Goshawk skin replaced that deposited by Gray in the Glasgow shop.

  The verdict suggests a general doubt over the American Goshawk’s ability to cross 5,000 km of ocean, a doubt in which it is easy to share. Even with a hurricane at its tail (there was such a weather event and a major fall of Goshawks in the USA in the late 1860s) and/or with the help of a boat, believing the gos can achieve this feat assumes a voyage of weeks or even months rather than days, and a diet of seabirds caught on the wing, over the waves, en route... unless Roger the Cabin boy had taken pity on the stowaway in the rigging, and was bringing it ship’s rations, or rats.

Some ornithologists I’ve spoken to have shrugged at the idea of atricapillus being capable of crossing the Atlantic. ‘Northern Harrier Circus cyaneus hudsonius and American Kestrel Falco sparverius can do it,’ they’ll say. But this is to equate the talents of Mo Farah with those of Usain Bolt. The Gos, we know, is a bird that will spend most of an average day loafing, waiting for prey to come within ambush range: a sprinter, not a distance runner. They are three times as heavy as harriers. We know they can cross the North Sea, but show a peculiar reluctance to do so, if the low number of records for Shetland, the oil rigs and coming in off the east coast are anything to go by (one Scandinavian ring recovery, ever).

  But is it any more feasible that a Victorian trader would import such a specimen, and not label or market it for maximum value as an exotic? That it would be so casually or carelessly switched by a professional taxidermist for no apparent additional fee?

  In the end, we can only speculate. Despite some of the finest minds having been trained on it, the Perthshire Goshawk saga will probably remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of ornithology, and just one of the many riddles surrounding the enigmatic, spectral, much-studied yet poorly understood and dare I say widely overlooked Northern Goshawk.

  Conor Mark  Jameson

  Footnote – the Irish goshawk records are also currently under review. The fact that two of the Irish records occurred within days of each other (both birds shot), and within weeks of the Perthshire gos, merely adds further intrigue to the overall tale.

  Conor’s book Looking for the Goshawk has recently been published by Bloomsbury.