REWILDING is all the rage, with a welcome surge of interest in the state of our environment, understanding of what’s missing and the importance of all the component parts of our ecosystems. These of course include what have been called the lost forests of Scotland.
When you lose your forests, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you also lose a critter known to folklore as the “Phantom of the Forest”. No, it’s not the lynx.
Not this time – although like the lynx it is an apex predator, going largely unseen, but performing a vital ecological function.
What’s curious is that, compared to the lynx, this phantom receives so little attention. Especially when you consider that while you may be forgiven for having missed it, it’s back – and has been for 50 years.
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Everyone should have a spirit animal. Mine is this phantom, known to science as the Eurasian goshawk, or Astur gentilis. I spent the first half of my life living in Scotland, and what seems like a fair proportion of that time looking for the goshawk (I later wrote a book of that name).
The goshawk had been extinct in Britain for almost a century. The last pair nested in Birnam Wood, Perthshire, in 1879. Inevitably they were shot, for trophies. The hapless couple ended up in Perth Museum, after the customary period in a drawing room display case.
But 90 years on, the goshawk quietly came back. The renaissance began around the time my Irish parents were settling in Perthshire, in the late 1960s. One of the first books I could call my own was Hamlyn’s Birds Of Prey, showing raptors in all their really cool shapes and sizes, worldwide. It was the goshawk that got the cover. Enough said.
Goshawks are stunning. They inspire awe, and perhaps a little frisson of fear. They always have.
“Is it pronounced gosh-hawk?”
I am sometimes asked. Perhaps it should be. It fits. For many admirers this really is and has ever been the gods’ hawk.
Forests were reappearing, too, at the time I was finding my feet in Scotland. Not, in most cases, the Caledonian pine and other native woods that we’d removed, over the centuries, but forests nonetheless.
And it was into these swelling plantations of spruce and larch that the goshawk snuck, not as part of a carefully planned conservation scheme (although some government bodies and conservationists were involved here and there), but by escaping or being deliberately released from captivity. They became the guerrillas in our midst, lying low.
Twenty years on, my folks retired to the Borders. That neck of the woods, with its state-owned forest blocks, was goshawk country. Every time I visited I was alert to the possibility of finding a goshawk in the plantations there. That was a lot of visits, but there was never a sniff of goshawk.
The fabled phantom is like that. It’s a big part of its allure. It has learned that to stay alive it better avoid us. And then one day, boom! I’m face to face with a young female goshawk, glaring at me, her talons clamped on a magpie, her wings mantled like a cloak. I am on a ladder. She is in a glass case. It’s a junk warehouse.
“It struck fire from my mind,” as TH White (who wrote The Sword In The Stone and a less well-known book called The Goshawk) might have put it. The spell was cast, or perhaps reinforced. Who killed the goshawk? If this were Champion The Wonder Horse, I’d have whispered “I think she wants us to follow her …”
Soon after, a German colleague found another goshawk right under my nose, on his first ramble in my neighbourhood after he’d arrived to live and work here. At first, of course, I didn’t believe him. But he calmly assured me he knows a goshawk when he sees one.
They are 10 a pfennig in Berlin, for example. That’s right – Berlin, the big city. It’s about three times the area of Greater Glasgow. It now has 100 pairs. They have colonised the city since the 1980s. Half as many goshawks in one city as Scotland has in total.
I went to Berlin to find out more. “You know the goshawk is there,” Berliners say, “because you don’t see it.” I didn’t expect to, but once again, boom! Within the day I came face to face with young female goshawk, glaring at me, her talons clamped on a hooded crow, her wings mantled like a cloak.
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I didn’t need a ladder. She wasn’t in a glass case. She was in a small public park. Alive. So alive. She appeared to own the place, unfazed by the small crowd of admirers she’d attracted, on the footpath below. She even did a lap of honour, around the park’s perimeter. Unforgettable.
I took time out from work to find out more about goshawks at home and abroad, to better understand the strange case of our birds. I took the road north for a long-anticipated pilgrimage to Perth’s elegant museum, with its Roman pillars, to find that last goshawk pair whose death spelled extinction for the species in Britain.
The nature exhibits were set up as a tour through our geological and evolutionary history, through to the most familiar of modern-day Highland wildlife. I took my time, enjoying the displays, knowing there will be goshawks this time ...
Because everything was here – a rollcall of the star species – eagle, deer, wildcat, badger, hare, pine marten, capercaillie, a pair of ospreys, with chicks, at their nest. All vividly recreated, if not quite animate. But I began to I realise I was running out of cases to inspect. I looked hard at the forest one and I could see no goshawks. Perhaps they had a special plinth of their own elsewhere.
I went back to reception and explained my mission. The staff told me the goshawks weren’t on display any more, although they were still held in the archive. I would normally be able to meet them but the curator wasn’t in. I could see the ironic side of failing to find even these stuffed and mounted birds, although this was tested when I returned to the car to be greeted by a parking fine.
I don’t mean to single out Perth Museum for goshawk neglect. We’ve all been at it. I came to think of the goshawk as the “lost raptor” – lost from our cultural memory.
Not helped, I think, because some people, including ornithologists, have in the past queried whether the goshawk is native to the British Isles. It now seems extraordinary that anyone should doubt that such a mobile species would somehow fail to reach and colonise the woodlands of these isles. It speaks. I think, of our prevailing inward gaze, historically.
Archaeological digs often turn up bird bones with all the other artefacts. For many years these bones had lurked in archive drawers, gathering dust. Then one day researchers received grant funding that enabled them to sort through, analyse and identify these bones. I thumbed through the index of their resulting book – The History Of British Birds – looking for the goshawk entries.
There are many. In fact – based on numbers in the largest surviving tract of wildwood in Europe – it’s estimated that there were 14,000 pairs of goshawks here after the last Ice Age, before we came along. It could hardly be more native or more important ecologically.
The book also throws up some intriguing questions. Take Orkney’s Iron Age “Tomb of the Eagles”.
It has long been known that the white-tailed eagle (aka sea eagle) must have been of great importance to the early residents of Orkney, because eagle bones have been found buried with people here.
The birds probably had great totemic significance to have been given such a place of honour. But here’s something much less well-known: there are goshawk bones here too, at the Iron Age sites of Howe and Skaill. Am I wrong to think that even more intriguing? A graph (above right) shows the latest figures for goshawks in the four countries of the UK. At face value, the news is encouraging for the UK as a whole. But drill down a bit. Goshawks in England seem to be finally getting away in many places. But what about Scotland? A slow increase, now at around 200 pairs. That’s around a 1% per year increase in the last three decades. Meanwhile England, with a larger land area but less forest cover than Scotland, now has nearly four times as many goshawks.
Dutch conservationists told me about goshawks in the Netherlands. In the time it took Scotland’s goshawk population to reach 100 pairs, the Dutch population had reached 2000, peaked and plateaued. That’s 20 times as many, by my calculation.
The Netherlands has half the land area of Scotland. Amsterdam alone has dozens of goshawks. There are also urban populations in Brussels, Hamburg, Prague, Riga, Moscow – the list goes on. They thrive on feral pigeons, rats, rabbits, crows, gulls. The fabled phantom could not be more at home than it is in these metropolitan habitats. I’ve seen footage of a Dutch one dining on pigeon in Primark.
I had the privilege of spending time in the woods with some of the very dedicated volunteers, giving very generously of their time and knowledge, who operate as part of the Scottish Raptor Study Groups. Among them was Patrick Stirling-Aird, who passed away recently and to whom I dedicate this story.
I spent time with remarkable field naturalists, who have put rings on hundreds of fledgling goshawks in publicly managed forests. The hope is that these leg rings, if recovered, can add to understanding of where the young birds go. The problem is, so few of the rings are ever seen again.
The Scottish goshawk population has benefited from the large forests such as those owned by the forestry bodies. But there seems to have been something about private land that hasn’t suited nesting goshawks in Scotland. It can’t be lack of food. A lot of pheasants and French partridges are reared and released each year on private land – 50 million per year, UK-wide. That’s about 50,000 per brace of goshawk.
Will Scotland’s goshawks reach the relative safety of urban areas, as they have in neighbouring European countries? Will they be more successful there than remains the case in large parts of our rural environment? Is this where future population growth will come? A quick check tells me that less than 30% of Scotland’s 1.4 million hectares of forest is in public ownership.
It may not be widely discussed but it’s no secret that illegal persecution has been a limiter on dispersing goshawks in the past. If a goshawk is shot in a forest and there is no-one around to witness it, does it make a headline? The recent case of a goshawk shot in Aberdeenshire did make a headline, because someone happened to witness it.
Perhaps we can hope that things are changing in a more enlightened age, and one increasingly impatient with people abusing privilege. Scotland does at least now have laws that mean responsibility for crimes rests with landowners.
The risk of criminal conviction is hardly worth any benefit of adding a few more imported gamebirds to the shooting gallery. With camera phones everywhere, and tracking devices ever more sophisticated, the risks surely outweigh any debatable gains.
After my Highland tour, on the road south I tried again at Perth Museum. This time I was in luck.
The curator was in and he took me down to the vaults. Here, I finally met the last goshawks standing in the killing age, frozen in time.
Toe-tags record them as shot in June 1879. They are mounted, with bits of jaded scenery, and were removed from public display some years ago. Sun-bleached – appropriately enough – to ghostly forms, by earlier years in the spotlight.
I noticed another specimen here, a magnificent female, mounted on a branch, origin unknown, wearing a polythene wrapper. I hope she may have been allowed upstairs, into public view but I don’t know.
It’s time the wraps were taken off the goshawk, if we’re serious about rewilding and ecological repair, and if we care about the example we set for the watching world.
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