Hawkwatching

A kestrel hovering is a marker on the sky. Perhaps one thrown arbitrarily, or perhaps an “X” for treasure. Either way, the map of the clouds is written on, inked by the bird’s silhouette.

But also the kestrel is straining all the time against catastrophe, against folding like a bag of twigs, falling back and falling down onto the field with a snap of bone. Of course, this never happens, though the idea of its possibility is part of the thrill of watching, like the tiny chance Mitsuko Uchida will hit a wrong note on stage.

More watching gradually reveals the careful adjustment that goes into every instant disaster is averted, that the bird remains marked against the sky. It takes a while for the eye to begin to understand – just as it does to see a fencer’s feints or follow the line of a cricket ball from a fast bowler’s hand. The head, a little turned. The tail, a little spread, or narrowed. This wing higher, this a little closed. The body itself rises or drops. Each change is tiny, but over a minute the kestrel’s “X” has altered again and again, is now quite different from when I first saw it, but also recognisably the same.

Over time, too the size of the “X” changes as the bird rises over its chosen spot, or descends gradually as its dark eyes follow a promising ripple in the grass below. Suddenly concluding that the trail is false, it sweeps up, as if in disgust, the white-brown flecking of its flanks briefly visible in sunlight – then the arc is cut short, the hovering starts, the beak is angled down towards what prey there is, the flight feathers streaking out in the wind.

Another day, another place, the marker on the map may be a buzzard or, most commonly where I live, a red kite. These signs are more declarative, thick lines drawn by a muscled hand. The kite has more angles – a kink in the wings, a “V” in the tail, and black and red are the colours first glimpsed. A buzzard seems to spread its fingers out against the clouds (in fact the widely spread primary flight feathers). It has a palette of brown on its underwing, and all down its back when it perches on a fence post. Once in a while both species are on the wing in the same place, taking difference circles through the air. When they call, the high, long note fills the space below.

One outstanding memory of kites dates from the early days of their spread from reintroduction sites in the Chilterns. My wife and I were travelling on the top deck of a London-Oxford bus. As it made the drop-off at Lewknor just off the M40, two kites flung themselves together above the farmland. They hooked their talons, spun, the reds of their wings barely controlling the speed, then loosed and climbed up again to cruising height. We sat there in silence while the bus got into gear again.

Apparently this was mating behaviour – I imagine that it’s quite good at forming a bond with your partner. We’ve never seen it since, though as kites have become more common we’ve noticed some seeming to be working up that manoeuvre, tentatively drawing close in flight, one flipping upside down as if in preparation – but contact was not made. It does make kites’ occasional backflip to snatch at harassing jackdaws over our back garden less surprising to us, if not to the bird’s pursuers.

These common birds of prey don’t have the breathless impact of, say, a peregrine falcon on the chimney of the Tate Modern or rising from a sea cliff in North Devon. They don’t have the mythic feel that the sight of a golden eagle or white-tailed sea eagle would have. Once I saw a hobby haunting a flock of swifts, and each spring there’s at least one sparrowhawk that powers through the garden – memorable moments. But kites, buzzards and kestrels are regulars.

A teacher once told my class that if starlings were rare everyone would coo about their astonishing plumage. (Well, now they are becoming rarer, and I really do notice the stars on their wings.) In the same way, the ubiquity of these three species could dull their impact.

But their ubiquity is contingent. Kestrel numbers have been falling in recent years, perhaps because of a scarcity of prey in intensively managed farmland. When I was young, my family were so unconvinced when I told them I’d seen a buzzard near Standon in Staffordshire that it was the subject of jokes for years. Red kites were exterminated in England, clinging on in Wales and written about in anguished pieces in the wildlife magazines I read as a child. They were reintroduced to the Chilterns from Spanish and Swedish stock in the 1990s, and have now spread along the whole M40 corridor – a big conservation success.

But still, there’s a long history of fear and dislike of birds of prey among humans. Raptors are frequently poisoned, most notoriously recently driving the hen harrier to the edge of extinction in the UK. Others argue that the increase in predator numbers threatens songbird populations, as though habitat destruction and the decreasing availability of insect and seed food sources were irrelevant, and robins et al were incapable of dealing with species they shared territory with long before humans started to change the landscape.

The one paper I’ve read that dealt empirically with this question found that just two of the many bird species assessed were detrimentally affected by raptor predation. (Interestingly, the same study indicated that domestic cats, often fingered as the real culprits were having no measurable effect.) Even in these cases, the impact wasn’t big enough to provoke proposals on controlling hawk and falcon numbers.

The best response to all this I’ve heard was given in a lecture by Alan Larkman, an extremely rigorous farmer, conservationist and scientist in Oxfordshire and elsewhere: “I often hear people say there are too many of them [red kites]. I always answer, ‘Too many for what?’”

Hating a bird of prey seems like hating a hillside – it is what it is, it is part of the world. Whenever I see a red kite drifting over my garden, and especially when it’s low and its colours are crisp against a cold blue sky, I am thrilled by my proximity to something so strong and untamed. And each sighting of a kestrel hones my appreciation, as the tips of its wings sharpen away into the wind.