The Black Death ravaged the country in the fourteenth century, halving the population. Cultivated land was abandoned and farmers turned to raising sheep. Wool made some farmers a fortune and sheep, a walking dung cart, improved the fertility of the fields.
The Tudor Vermin Acts, initiated in 1532 and strengthened in 1566, listed the birds and mammals considered to be vermin. The list was extensive, ranging from stoats and weasels through bullfinches and kingfishers to ospreys and so-called ringtails, as the hen harrier was known. Not surprisingly, it was on the list; it has always been a controversial bird, as its name implies, and must have been a familiar sight as it hunted around farmers’ smallholdings, snatching up chicks and ducklings. Churchwardens were responsible for payments to those who destroyed vermin, although it appears that few payments were made on this account.
The Enclosures Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that the days of the hen harrier were numbered, even though they remained common enough for the poet John Clare to watch them float languidly over the fens near his home in Northamptonshire. ‘There is a large blue (hawk) almost as big as a goose,’ he wrote, ‘[that] fly in a swopping manner not much unlike the flye of a heron you may see an odd one often in the spring swimming close to the green corn and ranging over an whole field for hours together – it hunts leverets, partridges and pheasants.’
In his poem ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, John Clare paints a vivid picture of a hunting hen harrier.
A hugh [huge] blue bird will often swim
Along the wheat when skys grow dim
Wi clouds – slow as the gales of spring
In motion wi dark shadowed wing
Beneath the coming storm it sails.
One of the hen harrier’s main habitats was heathland, created when woodland was cut down. This was treated as common land, and among its uses was grazing for sheep, furze for heating – and also for burning heretics – and ling for fuel and low-quality thatch. But heathlands became increasingly threatened. In The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789, the naturalist Gilbert White raged at the senseless, illegal burning of heathland:
To burn on any waste, between Candlemass and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and confinement in the house of correction.
He takes a deep breath.
The plea for these burnings is, that, when the old coat of heath, etc, is consumed, young will sprout up, and afford much tender brouze for cattle; but, where there is large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the very ground; so that for hundreds of acres nothing is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole circuit around looking like the cinders of a volcano; and, the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vegetation are to be found for years.
In some heathlands there was no grass to bind the sand, and the land often resembled the Sahel in Africa. When there was a big ‘blow’, as in the seventeenth century in the Norfolk village of Downham, settlements could be almost buried in sand and rivers blocked. A farmer, asked where he lived, replied, ‘Sometimes in Norfolk and sometimes in Suffolk; it depends which way the wind blows.’
Gradually, much of the hen harrier’s favourite habitats – the heaths and fens – vanished as the Enclosures Acts took hold. But the face of Britain was completely altered by the Agricultural Revolution, particularly the four-course system promoted by Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend. This meant that cattle, fed on turnips and kept during the winter, didn’t have to be slaughtered in the autumn. As a direct result of this innovation, more hedges were planted to contain the cattle.
A great swathe of land from north Yorkshire to Southampton was enclosed to become highly productive farmland. The landscape as we know it today became established and hen harriers ceased to be a commonplace sight; their numbers greatly reduced, they retreated to the heather moorlands of Lancashire and north Yorkshire.
Here they found a diverse habitat. There were swathes of heather up to four feet tall – excellent cover in which to nest – whose dark understorey was rich in insects, attracting small birds like stonechats, a good, staple prey item for hen harriers. Other areas on the moorland were grassy. Hunting over these areas, the harriers caught meadow pipits and skylarks, as well as short-tailed field voles that made their burrows in these rough meadows. For more substantial fare, young rabbits and leverets could be pounced on before they were aware of the danger.
Here too were wet areas, with spongy sphagnum bogs dominating the lower reaches of the heather moorland. Along the rivulets draining into these bogs – and in the bogs themselves – harriers could catch water voles, common snipe and curlew.
And lastly, as we shall shortly find out, there were red grouse.
The sun was blood red as it broke the horizon and lit the communal roost where the female hen harrier had spent the night. She watched the other harriers as they left to go foraging for food out on the moor. She didn’t join them, for she had felt a quickening in her body, an urge to move to Mallowdale Pike, a rocky crag from where she had fledged nine months ago. After preening – getting her feathers into flying order – she lifted off from the roost and soared up over the fell.
Soon she was able to see the familiar mosaic pattern, the result of annual heather burning. She twitched her tail feathers on one side and completed her refamiliarisation with the grouse moor beneath her. But then she suddenly sheered away. There was something wrong. Smoke was billowing up and she could see men beating at the flames beneath her. Why were they destroying her birth place?
The first mention of the hen harrier was in 1544 by Dr William Turner in his Avium praecipuarum, the first bird book to be printed, during a comparison of his field observations with those made by Aristotle and Pliny.
The Rubetarius I think to be that Hawk which English people name Hen Harroer. Further it gets its name among our countryman, from butchering their fowls. It exceeds the Palumbarius in size and is in colour ashen. It suddenly strikes birds when sitting in the fields upon the ground, as well as fowls in towns and villages. Baulked of its prey it steals off silently, nor does it ever make a second swoop. It flies along the ground the most of all. The Subbuteo I think to be that hawk which Englishmen call Ringtail from the ring of white that reaches round the tail. In colour it is midway from fulvous to black; it is a little smaller than the Buteo, but much more active. It catches prey in the same manner as the bird above.
Turner treated both birds as if they were different species. All ashen-coloured harriers, the male birds, were known as hen harriers, while the brown ‘subbuteos’, with white around the tail, were called ringtails.
This dimorphism of the harrier was a riddle that was not solved for another three hundred years. Thomas Bewick in his History of British Birds, published in 1797, added a cautionary footnote to his description of the hen harrier: ‘It has been supposed that this and the following are male and female; but the repeated instances of hen harriers of both sexes having been seen leave it beyond all doubt that they constitute two distinct species.’ At around this time John Latham made an extremely sensible suggestion that would cut through all the hot air that had been generated – take some chicks from the nest and keep them in captivity for three or four years to confirm the change in plumage.
George Montagu now applied himself to solving the ‘harrier problem’. In 1807 he wrote a paper that stated two vital facts. The bird familiarly called a ringtail and given the scientific name pygargus was in fact the female hen harrier, cyaneus.