Raptor: A Journey Through Birds

James Macdonald Lockhart

4th Estate, £16.99

Review by Brian Morton

BIRDS of prey fascinate even those who take no interest in birds generally. Visitors here run in excitedly to tell us that an eagle has just passed overhead. We run out jadedly to identify the inevitable buzzard. Even the hens know the difference, pausing mid-scratch to give the latter bird a jaundiced glance, but huddling and freezing for a full minute when the local eagle overflies, albeit 200 feet higher.

The same visitors invariably miss the thrush-like dash of ‘our’ merlin, and don’t notice that the greyish lump that appears on the power pole on the hill is actually a peregrine. We rashly promise glimpses of a hen harrier pair that patrols the glen, the raptor of raptors if you’re not a gamekeeper. and down to single figures in England now, but have yet to deliver. Some consider our fine intuitive distinctions pretentious, as if being able to specify a juvenile eagle or a first summer ringtail harrier is as esoteric as proclaiming wine vintages or complaining that one of the violas is a quarter-tone sharp.

So, Lockhart is a kindred spirit when it comes to birds rather than wine or orchestras. His aim in this lovely, poetic book is to explore the lives and landscapes of our 15 diurnal raptors. Not all owls by any means are nocturnal, but they deserve a separate book. Lockhart’s attempt to place each bird within a specific location, from Orkney to the English west country, is both logical and doomed to failure, since birds triumphantly transcend mere topography. Scheduling merlins for the Flow Country is gazumped by better sightings in Orkney. And so on. The joy of bird-watching is its unpredictability.

Lockhart’s early inspiration was twofold. He has long relied on the writings and illustrations of William MacGillivray, an Aberdonian friend of Audubon who, like most of the naturalists of his day, used the shotgun as well as the telescope; and he grew up with the pioneering bird photography of his own great-grandfather Seton Gordon. MacGillivray once dumped a shot eagle on a village midden, having carried it home rucksack-style to show off and study. We shrink from this, now that we’re armed with GPS and fibre-optic technology, but we owe two centuries of knowledge to the close scrutiny of bird skins, brought in by naturalists and gamekeepers alike.

Lockhart, like all serious naturalists, has something of the hunter about him, but no buckshot about his person. Like his ancestor he knows how to work close-in, which is why he’s able to distinguish between “deep greyish blue” and “dark bluish grey” in a plumage, which will seem like north-side-of-the-vineyard talk to non-imbibers.

His sense of overlapping bird communities and the human ecologies that interact with them is based on many years on the hill and much reading in the history of his subject. He features, but does not major on, our three raptor returnees: the poster-bird osprey, the sea eagle and the more controversial red kite. Even knowing that these are conservation success stories hardly prepares one for the impact of a first sea-eagle sighting; like a flying door or magic carpet, it’s easy to see how such a bird would be at the forefront of our ancestors’ mythologies. He gives equal weight to the beautiful but rare goshawk, the appropriate hunting bird for a yeoman according to the so-called Book of St Albans, the Montagu’s harrier, which once featured in an Archers story line, and the mysterious honey buzzard, which provides an answer to that old New Scientist question: Does anything eat wasps?

Like any good naturalist, Lockhart relies on his ears as well as his eyes. He gets down the different calls of each bird – ttch-yup-yup, tee-yup is just right for the begging call of a young eagle – but he also gets the rhythm of each bird life and bird landscape into his prose, which is a yet more difficult achievement. In my desk I have a cracked glass case packed with crumbling bird’s eggs collected by my great-grandfather. It includes a brown speckled oval with a copperplate label that reads “Hobby, Lamlash, Arran, May 1878”. Are there hobbies on Arran now? I doubt it but not because our grandparents took their eggs. They’re so named because hober is the Old French for restless movement. They hawk for dragonflies and are the answer to the question What eats swallows? And here’s Lockhart’s description of Falco subbuteo: “The hobby is the most kinetic bird I know. It is all zip and dash and rushing speed, like a whirligig of the heath.”

You probably haven’t seen one, but now you have its essence.

James Macdonald Lockhart is appearing at the Glasgow book festival Aye Write!, for which The Herald is media partner, on Sunday March 20. See ayewrite.com