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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © James Macdonald Lockhart 2016
James Macdonald Lockhart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Internal illustrations taken from A History of British Birds Vol. III by William MacGillivray (William S. Orr and Co., 1852). Illustration of William MacGillivray © The Natural History Museum/Alamy Stock Photo.
Cover illustrations © Mary Evans/Natural History Museum
Cover design by Jo Walker
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Source ISBN: 9780007459896
Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780007459889
Version: 2017-01-30
Contents
By the term Raptores may be designated an order of birds, the predatory habits of which have obtained for them a renown exceeding that of any other tribe …
WILLIAM MACGILLIVRAY,
A History of British Birds, Volume III
I
Orkney
It begins where the road ends beside a farm. Empty sacking, silage breath, the car parked amongst oily puddles. The fields are bright after rain. Inside one puddle, a white plastic feed sack, crumpled, like a drowned moon. Then feet up on the car’s rear bumper, boots loosened and threaded, backpacks tightened. Wanting to rain: a sheen of rain, like the thought of rain, has settled on the car and made it gleam. When I bend to tie my boots I notice tiny beads of water quivering like mercury on the waxed leather. Eric is with me, who knows this valley intimately, who knows where the kestrel has its nest above the burn and where the short-eared owls hide their young amongst the heather. We leave the farm and start to walk along the track towards the swell of the moor.
Closer the fields look greasy and soft. The track begins to leak away from under us and soon the bog has smothered it completely. We are amongst peat hags and pools of amber water. Marsh orchids glow mauve and pink amongst the dark reed grass. The sky is heavy with geese: greylags, with their snowshoe gait, long thick necks snorkelling the heather. You do not think they could get airborne; they run across the moor beating at the air, nothing like a bird. And with a heave they are up, calling with the rigmarole of it all, stacking themselves in columns of three or four. They fly low over the moor, circling above us as if in a holding pattern. When a column of geese breaks the horizon it looks like a dust devil has spun up from the ground to whirl slowly down the valley towards us.
Late May on a hillside in Orkney; nowhere I would rather be. It is a place running with birds. Curlews with their rippling song and long delicate bills and the young short-eared owls keeking from their hideout in the heather. And all that heft and noise of goose. When the greylags leave, shepherding their young down off the moor, following the burns to the lowland lochs and brackish lagoons, then, surely, undetectably, the moor must inflate a little, breathing out after all that weight of goose has gone.
We find a path that cuts through a bank of deep heather. It leads up onto the moor and the horizon lifts. I can see the hills of Hoy with their wind-raked slopes of scree and the sea below