Goshawk Feather

We whose unvarnished job it is to work with loss, and to record decline, sometimes run into bad patches. To paraphrase the great biologist E.O Wilson , you can’t un-see or un-know things that you have seen, and that you know. There are times when the Venn diagram that exists in all of us between the twin circles of hope and anger, and whose meeting point in better times becomes activism, just separates, and becomes only despair.

Into such a patch on mine, the other day, drifted a long, striped brown feather.

On Sunday, I was walking my dogs through a local wood when I noticed it lying on the ground. Maybe eight inches long and with the bold stripes that evolution has delivered on raptors to allow them, in turn, to deliver unseen death to the prey they are hunting.

Thinking it was from a buzzard, a bird that is almost comically widespread these days, I took it home to check. it wasn’t. It turned out to be a tail feather from a goshawk, a raptor whose ferocity and efficiency in the hunt probably creates the nearest thing we have on these islands to a killing machine.

I was intrigued and excited. I had seen a male knocking around the area in the spring, but never up in these thick woods, and never close by.

The following day, I found the plumage of a woodpigeon close to where I had found the goshawk feather, and visualised for a split second in my mind the silent flashing of the hawk above the understory of the beechwood, and the shock of death about which the pigeon would have probably known precisely nothing before it had happened.

On Tuesday, I went up there on my own, and just sat for a while on the steep bank from which I could see the wood slope away to my north, until the tops of the trees in the distance were actually below me. The effect of my being able to see both below and above the canopy at the same time was at once a privileged opportunity to see the evening life of the wood unfolding, and the best chance I had of spotting the goshawk.

On Wednesday, when I went up there with Caroline, and whilst we were involved in a long and companionable conversation with a neighbour, I saw a flash of brown under the canopy, long enough to know it was the right size, but too short to positively identify it as the bird I keenly wanted to be. Probably a buzzard, I thought. Can’t make it a hawk.

Then this morning, I saw him. About two hundred yards from where I had found the feather, he was flying quickly, noiselessly, almost casually, through the wood, but there was plenty of time to see what bird watchers call ‘the diagnostics’: the squared off tail, the white flashes of the wingbeats, the dark head and the unfeasible size. Maybe I watched it for five seconds, maybe a couple more, but almost as soon as I saw him, he had gone about his work in the concealed morning busyness of an ancient wood.

And sometimes, that is all you need. I never saw a single goshawk here as a child, or indeed until I was over sixty. Back in those far off days, the accumulations of DDT up the food chain softened their egg shells (those that the egg collectors hadn’t already removed) beyond use, and the rest of them would be shot by gamekeepers. Not any more. DDT is banned, egg collectors go to prison, and my friend Charlie, who keeps up on the Downs, knows that what the goshawk says about the health of his patch of ground is worth the odd grey partridge that goes missing, and he welcomes them.

E.O Wilson also said this: ‘if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.’

That goshawk was truth.