Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills by Neil Ansell

Author:Neil Ansell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780141961330
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2011-04-07T10:00:00+00:00

6. The Bird in the Bush

The goshawks caught me unawares. So far as I knew they had died out in Britain decades ago, and their stealthy return had passed me by completely. I don’t know how many times I must have watched them unknowingly, but it was certainly months before I gave in to the evidence of my senses, for I was watching a creature that I believed to be extinct.

This is also a notoriously elusive bird to watch; even more so than the sparrowhawk it seems to live on the very periphery of human vision, and before you can turn to look at it, it has already gone. It is particularly hard to judge the size of a bird against an open sky because you have no frame of reference, and the goshawk is fundamentally an outsize sparrowhawk, with colouring and markings almost identical to those of the female of the smaller species. The male and female differ in size too, so the two species form a size gradient, from the little male sparrowhawk, barely bigger than a mistle thrush, to the big female goshawk, the size of a buzzard. In essence they are sparrowhawks writ large. Bigger, bolder, fiercer, faster. They have all the qualities I had learned to love in the sparrowhawk, but in overdrive.

I do remember the first time I allowed the merest thought of a goshawk to enter my mind, if only fleetingly. It was during my first autumn at the cottage, and I was walking past the beech-hanger that clings on to the hillside halfway down towards the river. There had been a heavy crop of beech mast that year, and the woodpigeons had gathered for the feast. As I walked alongside the woodland edge, a bird of prey passed twenty feet over my head and into the wood, sending pigeons spouting out in all directions. Then it turned and crossed the valley ahead of me. It looked to be about the size of a buzzard, but something was not right; its tail was too long for one thing. As the bird settled into an isolated tree directly across the river from me, a dark cloud passed overhead and there was a sudden torrential shower of rain. I leaned into the broad grey trunk of the nearest beech for shelter, though I was dripping wet in seconds, and tried to keep my eye on the bird, but it was no use. Thick veils of rain gusted up the valley above the river and I could hardly make out the tree the bird had perched in, let alone the bird itself. A few minutes later, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun came out, but the bird had slipped away. I quickly convinced myself that it had been a female sparrowhawk and I had misjudged its distance and size. It seemed the only plausible explanation.

Over the course of that winter several of my sparrowhawk sightings gave me pause for thought, but it was not until the following February that the evidence became incontrovertible.

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