In the opening chapter of Raptor, the author describes a Neolithic chambered tomb found on South Ronaldsay, Orkney. Among the remains of 340 people were the bones of 35 birds, two thirds of which belonged to white-tailed eagles. Archaeologists have concluded that the human corpses had been exposed so that they could be stripped of their flesh. The most likely agents of that cleansing, before the spirit could be set free and the bones interred, were the eagles found in the tomb alongside them.
The Isbister cairn on Orkney is 5,000 years old. At Catalhoyuk in Turkey there are images of vultures – the oldest recognisable bird paintings on a prepared surface – that are about 8,500 years old. At Shanidar, Iraq, the white-tailed eagle remains are 3,000 years older still. Humans have probably involved raptors in their rituals or funerary rites ever since they acquired language. Ethnic Tibetans still practise rituals with birds today: so-called “sky burials” in which the dead are consumed by vultures.
All this history indicates how long birds of prey have captivated the human imagination. And it continues. If you sift the flags and coats of arms of the world’s nations you find more representations of eagles and falcons than of any other living entity, vegetable or animal. However, we should not confuse cultural veneration of the symbol with affection for the living birds themselves. I was recently in Serbia, where the national flag includes a double-headed eagle. At the roadside one day we found a live buzzard that had had its legs chopped off, after which it had been dumped to die with agonising slowness.
Regardless of these contradictions, when James Macdonald Lockhart plumped for birds of prey as the subject of his book he knew that he was on to something. He serves up our British raptors in 15 chapters – a species for each section. In turn, they serve him as stepping-stones on a journey through Britain that begins in Orkney and ends in Devon.
He is a wonderfully modest presence in his own narrative, often to be spotted hiding in a hedge or crushed into a hilltop cleft, where he can rest unseen but watch his beloved birds better. He has the distinctive charm of an enthusiast. When he first glimpses a hobby, a gorgeous little summer-visiting falcon, he shouts out as if we are there with him: ‘Hobby! At last! Shooting low over the heath, long sharp wings a hundred times faster than a kestrel.’ A hundred? Really?
Yet Lockhart generally sifts his facts carefully. And he has mastered an engaging present-tense prose that brings out both the birds’ ecstatic gifts of flight but also the tragedy and triumph of their predatory lifestyle. For the raptor that is less than perfect in ear, eye and aerial skill is, by definition, a dead raptor. It is perhaps this precarious power of the birds that is at the heart of our wider preoccupations.
Lockhart undoubtedly has favourites and his chapters are of uneven length and insight. In his section on the goshawk – a subject that has perhaps been completely captured by Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk – his own bird barely takes wing. This is despite the fact that Lockhart sees this extremely elusive raptor well at its stronghold in Kielder Forest in Northumberland. Somehow he cannot bring himself to try to evoke it.
He is strongest of all on the harriers. They practise an oddly wandering style of low-level reconnaissance that looks both effortless and without clear purpose. His descriptions of it are as precise as they are inventive. Take this passage on the hen harrier: ‘A slow, tacking flight: float then flap. Then a pirouette and it has swung on to a different tack, following another seam through the moor as if it is tracking a scent. It is like a disembodied spirit searching for its host...”
It seems noteworthy that like the bird he conjures best, Lockhart has a wandering eye. The key distraction in Raptor is his preoccupation with William MacGillivray, the 19th-century Hebridean who supplied many of the words in John James Audubon’s more famous volumes of bird paintings. MacGillivray was a naturalist of massive erudition and legendary for walking 838 miles from Aberdeen to London just to visit the British Museum’s natural history section. But Lockhart fails to mesh his recreation of his hero’s journey with the central theme of the book.
However, the biggest problem with Raptor is not what is included but what has been left out. Birds of prey are both richly numinous and highly contentious. Of all the cultural and social controversies concerning British wildlife, those that involve raptors are the most heated. The hen harrier, which is functionally extinct in England because of persecution by grouse shooters, is today’s issue-in-chief. And there are many others. Red kites and buzzards are illegally shot and poisoned throughout the UK. There are membership societies devoted to the restoration of the legal right to kill sparrowhawks. Why?
In the early part of this century a project to restore white-tailed eagles to East Anglia aroused opposition from wildlife enthusiasts as well as pig farmers. Yet this species occurs throughout the coastal areas of the North Sea and Baltic. Why can all those lowland nations tolerate these magnificent birds but the English cannot?
The issues that Lockhart ignores are not all negative. The major political story that unites all raptors is that they have greatly increased in the past half century in a way that is out of kilter with the rest of British nature. Flower-rich meadows have declined by 99%. Insect populations – moths, butterflies and bumblebees especially – have slumped catastrophically. Songbirds declined by 22m pairs during the late 20th century. All the while, raptors have gone on increasing. There have probably never been more peregrines in Britain since the 17th century. They nest now in inner London. How come? What, precisely, is happening here?
Lockhart knows all of this. He says: “The story of birds of prey in these islands is the story of the birds’ relationship with humans.” His refusal to engage properly with these modern, muddy controversies and his preference for the time-capsuled world of William MacGillivray starts to seem like a preference for private rapture before public raptors. Yet it is in this territory that we can discover the true meanings for us of birds of prey. That he does not engage with all this “stuff’’ means that his book, though it certainly contains beautiful writing and great promise, is a task only half completed.
Birds and People by Mark Cocker is published by Jonathan Cape (£40). Raptor is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
