the fence and I drop into it and use its depth to stalk closer to the merlin. I crawl quietly down the burn and, when I poke my head up again over the bank, the merlin is still there and I am very close to him. He is looking up at the sky, agitated. His breast is a russet-bracken colour, his back a blue-grey lead. That’s it: he is gone. The female is above us, calling to him, a sharp, pierced whistle. And then I see the merlin pair together. She is a darker shape, a fraction larger. In his description of the merlin, William MacGillivray picks out the distinction between the male and female’s dorsal colouring brilliantly. The male’s upper parts he describes as a deep greyish-blue; the female’s as a dark bluish-grey. But now I cannot make out any difference between the pair. Both the male and female merlin are gaining height, moving away from my hideout in the burn, pushing themselves into speed.
They were beautiful distractions, those Orkney merlins, pulling me after them, away from the hen harriers I was supposed to be watching. And throughout my journey, at every juncture, different species of raptor, inevitably, moved through the places I was in. So, hen harriers spilt out of Orkney and, like the Norse language, followed me across the Pentland Firth; merlins flickered through many of the moorland landscapes I visited; buzzards were present almost everywhere I went, however much I tried to convince myself they might be something else, the something that was eluding me – goshawk, honey buzzard, golden eagle … Every buzzard I saw made me look at it more carefully.
Quickly the map I had imagined for my journey became a muddled thing, transgressed by other birds of prey, criss-crossed by their wanderings. And though each staging post was supposed to concentrate on a single species, I loved it when I was visited, unexpectedly, by other birds of prey. I liked the sense that the different stops along my journey started to feel linked up by the birds, I liked the ways they set my journey echoing. Sometimes I came across a bird of prey again far from where I had first encountered it: a merlin on its winter wanderings in the south of England, an osprey on the cusp of autumn refuelling on an estuary that cut into Scotland’s narrow girth.
The great Orkney ornithologist Eddie Balfour discussed, in one of his many papers on hen harriers, the minimum distance harriers nest from each other (hen harriers, notably on Orkney, will often nest in loose communities). But in a lovely afterthought to this, like a harrier pirouetting and changing tack, he touches on the optimum distance between nests as well, the distance beyond which breeding stimuli would diminish, neighbourly contact become lost. Extending the thought outwards from hen harriers living in a moorland community, he imagines larger raptors, golden eagles, with their vast, isolated territories, living, in fact, like the harriers, within a single community that extended across the whole of the Highlands, each nest within reach of its neighbour, like a great network of signal beacons.
I was fascinated by this idea of a community of raptors extending right across the country. It touched on my experience of re-encountering and being revisited by birds of prey as I journeyed south. Balfour’s idea also seemed to challenge the notion that many birds of prey were solitary, non-communal predators, inviting the idea that even a species we perceive as being fiercely independent, like the eagle, still belongs to – perhaps needs – a wider community of eagles. It got hold of me, this idea, it got hold of the initial map I had sketched for my journey and redesigned it. Instead of moving from one isolated area of study to the next, from Orkney to the Flow Country and so on, I started to see myself passing through neighbourhoods – through communities – of raptors, the boundaries of my map – the national, topographic, linguistic borders – giving way to the birds’ network of interconnecting, overlapping territories. A journey through birds.
The first bird I see as I am walking through the forestry above Forsinard: a male hen harrier, hunting the sea of conifers. And I could still be on that hillside in Orkney, except, what has changed? The bird, the bedrock, remain the same, but the sky is different here, not always rushing away from you as it is on Orkney. The wind is not as skittish here, the vastness of the land seems to stabilise it, give it traction. On Orkney I wonder if the wind even notices the land. And what else has changed, of course, are the trees that no more belong out here on the bog than they do on Orkney, where trees don’t stand a chance against that feral wind. But still there are conifers here planted in their millions, squeezing the breath out of the bog. And today the male harrier is hunting over the tops of the trees just as I watched the Orkney harriers quartering the open moor. It is the same procedure except here, over the forestry, he is looking for passerine birds to scoop out of the trees. It is fascinating to watch the harrier hunt like this, as if the canopy were simply the ground vegetation raised up by 20 feet.
To begin with the newly planted forests would have been harrier havens, just the sort of scrubby, ungrazed zones they like to hunt, ripe with voles. But all of that is gone once the trees thicken and the canopy closes over, suffocating the bog. Greenshank, dunlin, golden plover, hen harrier, merlin, birds of the open bog, are forced to move on, or cling on, as this harrier was doing, trying to adapt to his changed world. Recently, hen harriers – always assumed to be strictly ground-nesting birds – have been observed nesting in conifer trees where the plantations have swamped their moorland breeding grounds. Hopeless, inexperienced nest builders, little wonder their nests are often dismantled by a febrile wind.
But this harrier I am watching over the forest still has its nest on the ground. From my perch on the hillside I draw a sketch of his movements over the trees. Meandering, methodical, he covers every inch of the canopy. I watch him drift above the trees like this for half an hour until (I recognise it from Orkney) there is a sudden shift in purpose to his flight. He stalls low above a forest ride, hesitates a fraction, then whacks the ground with his feet. I make a note of the time: 14.50: he lifts from the kill and beats a heavy flight direct across the tops of the trees; there is the female harrier rising towards him; 14.51: the food pass; 14.52: the female keeps on rising, loops around the male; 14.53: she goes down into a newly planted corner of the forest. The trees are only a few feet tall here and I mark the position of her nest: four fence posts to the right of the corner post, then 12 feet down from the fence.
The hen harrier is the bird that brought me to William MacGillivray. The moment came when I was meandering, harrier-like, through books and papers, field notes and anecdotes about hen harriers. Then I read this passage from MacGillivray’s 1836 book, Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain:
Should we, on a fine summer’s day, betake us to the outfields bordering an extensive moor, on the sides of the Pentland, Ochill, or the Peebles hills, we might chance to see the harrier, although hawks have been so much persecuted that one may sometimes travel a whole day without meeting so much as a kestrel. But we are now wandering through thickets of furze and broom, where the blue milkwort, the purple pinguicula, the yellow violet, the spotted orchis, and all the other plants that render the desert so delightful to the strolling botanist, peep forth in modest beauty from their beds of green moss. The golden plover, stationed on the little knoll, on which he has just alighted, gives out his shrill note of anxiety, for he has come, not to welcome us to his retreats, but if possible to prevent us from approaching them, or at least to decoy us from his brood; the lapwing, on broad and dusky wing, hovers and plunges over head, chiding us with its querulous cry; the whinchat flits from bush to bush, warbles its little song from the top-spray, or sallies forth to seize a heedless fly whizzing joyously along in the bright sunshine. As we cross the sedgy bog, the snipe starts with loud scream from among our feet, while on the opposite bank the gor cock raises his scarlet-fringed head above the heath, and cackles his loud note of anger or alarm, as his mate crouches amid the brown herbage.
But see, a pair of searchers not less observant than ourselves have appeared over the slope of the bare hill. They wheel in narrow curves at the height of a few yards; round and round they fly, their eyes no doubt keenly bent on the ground beneath. One of them, the pale blue bird, is now stationary, hovering on almost motionless wing; down he shoots like a stone; he has clutched his prey, a young lapwing perhaps, and off he flies with it to a bit of smooth ground, where he will devour it in haste. Meanwhile his companion, who is larger, and of a brown colour, continues her search; she moves along with gentle flappings, sails for a short space, and judging the place over which she has arrived not unlikely to yield something that may satisfy her craving appetite, she flies slowly over it, now contracting her circles, now extending them, and now for a few moments hovering