‘Hi, yeah, I’m on the train? Argh – I’m going into a tunnel … hang on –’. It was mid-April. As I waded into an erratic phone call with Mum, I was heading north again. Sheffield, South Yorkshire’s metropolitan polestar, was my checkpoint before a 26-mile spin on the Trans Pennine Cycle Trail to a town bordering the Peak District National Park. I felt like an old hand now – a public transport veteran and proud of it! Grey herons had become a surprisingly reliable sight from the train window, bagging me regular spotter points.
Birmingham New Street Station gleamed urban and futuristic through my window. Reflections warped and ballooned across its enormous stainless-steel panels. Between Tamworth and Derby, I donned a cycling jersey in an attempt to summon the mood for a hot, hard ride across the Peaks. In the spirit of blending in, this jersey was neon pink with neon orange sleeves. And still I wonder why, despite my best intentions, wildlife often eludes me.
Sheffield’s tram network and pedestrianised geography provoked a tussle between me and its cycle route signs, of which there were many. Part of Sheffield’s revamp into an edgy northern hub has been to make it very bike-friendly. And to be fair, they’ve done a brilliant job, making much more of an effort for cyclists than most UK cities I’ve visited. Here’s hoping Sheffield has set the trend. But whether it was from hunger, fatigue or both, as far as I could see, the signs to the trail all seemed to contradict one another, and I found myself looping circles around a giant Primark, KFC and Wilko, dodging traffic cones and roadworks.
Portions of the Trans Pennine Trail and National Cycle Routes 6 and 67 would pull me where I needed to go, and the elevation profile confirmed a cut-glass shape of ascents and descents. No choice but to get on with it. Rucksack laden, massive and heavily provisioned as always. I had hills to climb and a bird to find.
November 2019 saw near-biblical rains lash Sheffield’s city centre, leaving shoppers stranded and roads submerged as the River Don breached its banks. Meadowhall, the retail hotspot of the region, was particularly badly hit. Subsequent storms intensified the fallout, and as I meandered along the banks of the Don, the diversity and sheer volume of litter, plastic and debris in and around the flow were overwhelming. With local authorities still reeling from devastating floods, parts of the cycle path closest to the river remained cordoned off and re-routed. A surprise lump of riverbed had been vomited onto the path, nearly throwing me off my bike, as a descent ended abruptly in piles of filthy sand. Skidding around and back up onto the road, litter dominated the view. It had been this way for a while. Flimsy strands of stringy bin bags draped over branches and choked banks, catching the wind like streamers after some parade.
Feral pigeons sprung into a frenzy as I tried to stuff some cider cans and crisp packets into my rucksack. I soon had to give up – there was just too much. Towels, a fridge, even a mattress had all ended up in hedges and on the banksides at such impossible angles that you couldn’t help but stare in amazement. The river did well to chart routes around it all, but its course was interrupted by objects that shouldn’t have been there.
Flooding events cause mayhem, especially in a city like Sheffield that hugs a large river. Clean-up operations are often lengthy, complex and expensive. In South Yorkshire alone, the latest flood defence scheme cost upwards of £12 million. I cannot even begin to imagine the distress flooding has triggered within affected communities here. Unfortunately, however, widespread conscious littering appears to be symptomatic of a bigger problem across the British Isles.
Recent psychological studies have shown that the more rubbish persists in an area, the more people tolerate it. During 2020 especially, the threat of Covid-19 plunged most of us into denial and polarity. Sure, many of us sought the healing power of a leafy park, but the physical condition of it was likely the last thing on our minds.
I was pleased to leave Meadowhall and Sheffield and continue towards the moors, but the litter I encountered on most of the cycle trail was astonishing. It felt like the aftermath of an illegal rave that had gone on for weeks. But later, I discovered a wonderful thing. Sheffield Litter Pickers is a volunteer collective with a mission to outnumber those who are littering their communities. Nearly 3,000 people gather every week in Sheffield to respond to this growing problem alongside the city council. Groups are coordinated across social media, showcasing photos of smiling people next to bin bags, lifting litter pickers high to the sky.
A few weeks before this trip, I phoned a lady called Sara, whose B&B was ideally located at the foot of the Pennines. I always find Yorkshire accents soothing, don’t you? Hearing a buttery Yorkshire voice makes me feel like I’m about to be ushered in to partake of a warm brew and some moist cake. England in April 2021 was still navigating its way towards easing lockdown during the vaccination roll-out, and finding accommodation of any kind was a bit of a task.
The market town of Penistone was my destination, and, posing as ‘Most Agreeable Guest’, I made the immortal mistake of emphasising the wrong half of ‘Penistone’ over the phone. Take my advice: if you ever make it to this beautiful part of the world, observe the correct pronunciation – it’s ‘Penniston’ – not ‘Penis-stone’, OK? Cool. Sitting at well over 200 metres above sea level, Penistone is England’s highest market town, and my legs certainly felt this for most of the ride, which was one of many contrasts. The urban blended with the suburban and the rural, swirling together as milk does with tea. Leaving Sheffield’s confusion behind, I got a distinct feeling of early Yorkshire. I passed through Ecclesfield and Chapeltown, followed by a few miles of high, open road outlined by dry-stone walls and tremendous views. The distant city sprawl gleamed like pale lakes. It was a good ride.
However, one recurring theme was the enormous potholes, which I avoided with terrifyingly close swerves. After manoeuvring my way around many of them, an unexpected (or perhaps by now to be expected) navigational error had me bumping up the wrong track through Greno Woods Nature Reserve, a green triangle of ancient woodland managed by Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust. Although the Trans Pennine Trail passes through the woods, I later discovered I had gate-crashed part of the Enchanted Forest Trail, a designated footpath. Occasional bumps were soon upgraded into a full-on rock garden, forcing me to dismount.
As I trudged towards a road I had spotted on my map, breathing heavily and praying I didn’t have a puncture, a jay flew across my handlebars in a flash of blue and white. Non-native conifers shaded the forest floor in a hangover from the 1950s. It was quiet, and nobody was about. A chiffchaff jostled its song up the playlist. I felt something brush my left forearm and realised I had been dragging a massive spiderweb along for the ride. God knows for how long. Humming city streets had long since faded. The forest ushered me into the fold. An enchanted trail, indeed. The final swoop into Penistone was a glorious few miles of flat, disused railway, around quiet farms and more woodland. Many people were out enjoying themselves, and it was genuinely lovely to see. My eyes streamed in the wind as they guided me to the B&B. With aching shoulders and tired legs, I emerged from the trail looking like I had delivered about 20 calves in a remote field.
Penistone is strategically parked between the urban triangle of Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds, with 555 square miles of Peak District National Park surrounding it as a buffer. The Peak District’s vast moors are within an hour’s journey for more than 20 million people, making it one of the busiest green spaces in the UK. Crowned the UK’s first National Park in 1951, figures estimate more than 13 million visitors pass through here every year.
Open-access moorland, public footpaths, off-road cycling and disabled access, rolling between limestone dales, farmland, barren moorland and reservoirs is a reasonably accurate summary of the Peaks. Don’t be fooled by their name, though: ‘peak’ stems from an Anglo-Saxon tribe thought to have settled here rather than any actual mountains. Yet even the most experienced walkers can run into trouble on these moors where the weather can change as swiftly as a mood, so maintaining a foundation of respect for the elements up here is always a good shout.
A multitude of wildlife calls these lands home, including more than 160 ‘priority species’ for the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), the futures of which are all a little delicate. The Peak District pie comprises three contrasting regions. White Peak is perhaps the favourite – an undulating limestone plateau with dales, limestone rivers, meadows and grassland supporting thousands of insects and birds – wholesome. Then South West Peak is a bit of a patchwork, with small sections of moorland interspersed with pasture, hedges, that sort of stuff. Finally, the Dark Peak is the lonely, barren land of vast gritstone plateau, peat and acid grassland. A bit of a wild land if you like, but under the proviso of there being more human than beast – at least in some parts. It was to head towards this lonely, barren land that I awoke at 5.30 a.m. folded inside my duvet like a samosa. My friend Jack lives locally, and he had gallantly agreed to my lassoing of his help. He would be arriving soon. Far from the Saturday ideal, we were embarking on a 12-hour traipse across desolate Dark Peak, hoping to coax the UK’s smallest falcon into the skies.
You may as well strap yourselves in for a bit because I’m about to try and fix merlin firmly in your mind. For those of you (I’m guessing, a minority) who already know this fierce little bird, you’ll appreciate the task ahead. The other day I typed the word ‘merlin’ into Google, and it became a sad little game of hide and seek. I tried to find any reference to birds in between Merlin Entertainments (with the world’s First! Standalone! Peppa! Pig! Theme! Park!), and the 2008 TV series Merlin (a thrilling drama of the teenage woes of young King Arthur and Merlin the wizard – televisual gold for me and my brother, Tom.) What a time to be alive.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Which came first, though? The wizard or the bird? Some friends and I exhausted this puzzle over a few drinks before I left for the Peaks, hypothesising an array of grand, mystic ideals where writer T. H. White invented the bird itself. Slightly dull conclusion, however – their shared name is merely coincidental. Nowhere on the first page of web searches for ‘merlin’ are we told it is a bird, let alone the UK’s smallest falcon and probably our rarest. Nothing. Nada. Only at the very bottom of page two does its life finally surface – two sentences sitting atop a picture of TV’s Merlin, actor Colin Morgan.
Further into my investigation, I realised the merlin’s sheer famine of celebrity also extends to the research department. Various scientific papers from the 1980s and 90s detail observations about merlins. A handful of reasonably up-to-date studies followed those, but friends, it’s been an absolute mare trying to find out much about them. During a particularly low week, I even considered ditching the merlin to write about another climate-threatened species. I should be ashamed for such near-betrayal. Even the experts I will introduce you to shortly acknowledged that the merlin tends to hide beneath people’s radars. Compared with His Royal Highness, the Peregrine Falcon or Sir Hen Harrier, the merlin is a bit of a mystery.
I was amused (annoyed) because nearly everyone I spoke to about the merlin asked, ‘sorry, can I just ask why you’re writing about merlins? I’m not sure they’re an obvious choice.’ Case in point, Your Honour. Not one to shy away from a dare, I decided that I liked this about merlin. Brits love an underdog. And, as you’ll come to appreciate, so do those who know the merlin: Falco columbarius – the tiny, silent assassin of British uplands. I dare you to love it.
Before we get mad for merlins, allow me to zoom us out to a wider view for a moment. I’ve been trying to pin down what our problem is with birds of prey. We seem to have a real issue with them. Birds of prey are collectively described as ‘raptors’, which stems from the Latin rapere meaning to ‘seize’ or ‘capture’. Our merlin is one of these. But here comes the sauce: we’ve simultaneously idolised and persecuted raptors for centuries. And thinking about birds generally, UK skies host 40 million fewer birds than they did only 30 years ago. That’s a rapid exit! Forty million birds gone – within my lifetime. Such colossal declines are hard to dissect. Yet what is easy to see is that our relationship with birds of prey needs an aggressive makeover if we are to avoid further losses. Makeover scenes are always the best part of the film, right? And the good news is that this is one of the simpler things we can change, and we can start right now. Seeing a bird soaring above you is a good part of your day, is it not? Well, making that happen as much as possible is a rare and straightforward case of us truly having the power. But we’ve sprung ourselves a trap by failing to commit to an attitude. Big mistake.
Take eagles, for instance, of which the UK is lucky enough to have two species – the golden eagle and the white-tailed eagle. Held in worldwide regard as symbols of freedom and power, eagles are a timely reminder (for some) that humans are indeed connected to the divine, so high do we soar on our little attempt to stay at the top. The idea that an eagle is an all-knowing, all-seeing oracle was a key angle of ancient Greek mythology. So much so that Zeus – the bearded god of the sky – enlisted an eagle as his divine messenger and was rumoured to have transformed himself into an eagle when he fancied it. I fancy it.
To appreciate that the eagle has established itself as a pretty global asset, one only has to consider the Aztecs, the Native Americans, the US dollar, and Barclays Bank. Eagles and other raptors are also often among the answers to those online quizzes like ‘What’s my spirit animal?’ I’ve had a go. In one quiz, I am a kitten, and in another, I am a snake. My point is that time and again, across literature, folklore and society, we have selected hawks and their cousins to represent our most treasured ideals – leadership, strength, spiritual awareness, courage, progress, transformation – to the point where every single bird of prey today embodies a living paradox. We’ve borrowed or even stripped these birds of their most iconic attributes, cloaked ourselves in the values we’ve ascribed to them while leaving them exposed and fragile. How very rude of us.
By now, you’ve probably noticed our track record of damaging the things we don’t understand. It’s ageing poorly. Over the years, killing raptors has become established as a bit of a hobby (as it were). Records from the Edwardian and Victorian eras (though I fear the timeline stretches way back) would have us believe that predators existed to be killed, and killing is what thou shalt do, Your Grace! At some point during this period, governments were placing bounties on the heads of certain raptor species. For instance, the red kite, a legally protected and cherished street-cleaner during the Middle Ages (scavenging dead things), entered the sixteenth century as ‘vermin’ with a hefty bounty on its head. They killed them because they were a bit too big for their liking and thus a certified ‘menace’. Yet the devastating truth is that a red kite could barely kill a frog, so weak are its legs and feet. Centuries later, populations are still recovering, but only through intervention and reintroductions. There are parts of the UK to which this species has yet to return.
It wasn’t just a British thing either. Raptor persecution was common worldwide – confirmation of the raging storm humans cause when they’re at the helm. Shootings. Poisonings. Trappings. The hen harrier is still the UK’s most persecuted bird of prey, despite being legally protected. Some conservationists risk their lives in pursuit of justice for Britain’s raptors. Bird crime is a grim truth.
One more snack for thought. Whether humans have evolved to thrive on slaughter and violence continues to divide anthropologists. We may possess some biological imperative for violence that we instigate, but we cannot bear to know when wildlife does the same. It frightens us, and that’s when we lash out at the natural world. For we want nature to be adorable, cute, cuddly – a comfort! We find the very thought that an animal might need to rip another to shreds to feed its young most distressing. A friend told me recently about an exchange on Twitter. Someone posted a picture of a ring-necked parakeet (not native) ripped apart by a peregrine falcon (native). Then some salad informed the rest of the Twittersphere that he would unfollow the person who posted it for promoting such horrific content. Raptors are carnivores. Raptors eat other animals. Nature is brutal. Nature is sinister and indelicate. It wants to survive too. Can we please just get over it?
I’m told that people like a merlin’s legs, that they have a bit of a thing for them. I think it’s fine to objectify nature. Large, yellow and flashy, merlin legs are of a similar vintage to the black guillemot’s red pins, but the merlin wouldn’t care less about this and most likely would have a tystie for dinner. Bless you, tystie. I was thinking about all this while I was waiting outside Penistone train station for Jack. You may know him because, aside from being a talented naturalist and podcast host, Jack Baddams’ videos of long-tailed tits have catapulted him to mild social media fame, especially among a fan base that South Americans surprisingly dominate. Jack grew up in ‘the North’, and I trusted his birding wisdom to deliver me some Saturday merlin.
However, I knew our chances were slim, and various colleagues warned me to lower, if not quash, my expectations. Merlins are the kind of bird that even birders forget about until they see one. They are British residents. Migrant visitors that often breed in much chillier northern European latitudes boost our winter population. For visiting merlins, the UK lies towards the southern edge of their range, and so they prefer sticking around on the British uplands, loving a moor, enjoying a hillside. Our breeding merlins are known to nip down to southern coasts to spend the winter, often joined by others popping south from Iceland.
A devastating mix-up with organochlorine pesticides like DDT1 plunged the merlin into near extinction in the UK during the 1960s and 70s. Although merlins are making progress, their recovery has been painfully slow. Since the 1960s, people have realised that spreading clouds of chemicals over the land is a tad counter-productive.
Like all predators, merlins have a seat near the top of the food chain. When toxins accumulate among species lower down that chain (like the insects, small birds, and small mammals that merlins eat), those toxins have stockpiled to lethal concentrations by the time they reach the merlin. Like many of the species we’ve explored together, this historic hardship has at least afforded room in the filing cabinet for some protective merlin paperwork. Merlins are classed as a Schedule 1 species under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act and the 2004 Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act. Unsurprisingly, any nest disturbance, injury or egg-stealing is a criminal offence.
I was pleased to discover that the merlin has mostly escaped the targeted persecution from which other raptors suffer. One of the main reasons for this is that it is too small to hunt red grouse (yeah, them again!), so it doesn’t have cause to rile grouse estate owners in the Peaks and parts of Scotland. Phew. Although conservationists are happier with merlin numbers now, they are still a red list species in the UK. As I write this in 2021, current figures estimate around 900–1,500 breeding pairs. But, like train fares, this status changes every year. Nothing is certain. Standard assessment seems to conclude British merlin populations are relatively stable but vulnerable to local declines. Interestingly, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) has popped them on the list of species of ‘least concern’ globally, showing how important it is to get things right at home.
‘Pigeon hawk’ is how the Americans describe the merlin. Flattering? I can’t decide. Although very similar to the American subspecies, our little Brit is heavier, stockier and hasn’t quite conquered the urban niche to the same extent. Please note a merlin’s density. I come with a similar warning: much heavier than I look. Like Tom Cruise, Her Majesty, the Queen of England or your white blood cells, our smallest falcon demonstrates brilliantly that size really does not matter. Often, the smallest of things are the most tenacious. The mere thought of a merlin offers us wise counsel indeed.
Males have dark slate-grey upper feathers and a brown chest. Slightly larger, females weigh up to 300 grams, with browner outer features and a creamier chest. It also means that the males are the UK’s smallest falcon. A merlin’s black tail band offers a tidy aesthetic. A single white stripe of feathers above each eye fashions a glorious brow. Overall, they’re striking little birds. Sexual dimorphism is common in raptors as it opens up a more varied prey selection. Differently sized males and females hunt slightly differently, and combining different predatory techniques works a territory more efficiently. Male merlins are also known as ‘the jack’. My Jack for the day had arrived on time, and we drove to a merlin-y region of the Dark Peak where bird ringers have monitored nests for more than 30 years. Wheeling a bike across that part of the moor is not allowed (merlins are ground-nesting birds, and my trip was at the start of their breeding season). And to be honest, as I was slightly saddle-sore from the day before, I was delighted to play enthusiastic passenger for a short drive.
‘This …’ Jack’s voice trailed off as he glanced beyond the windscreen, ‘… this is a black hole for birds of prey,’ as we dipped down an open, steep hill. ‘I love the Peaks, I really do.’ he told me, ‘Objectively, they’re beautiful, you drive through with blissful ignorance, but it’s also as artificial as a golf course.’ Fair enough. A good chunk of the Dark Peak is privately owned for driven grouse shooting. Like in the Cairngorms, open heather moorland is vital for ground-nesting birds, provoking similar tensions. Jack explained we were nearing the worst 10-kilometre spot for raptor persecution. ‘Birds come in, and they just don’t go out.’ But what’s puzzling is that merlins do OK here.
Parking shortly after 7 a.m., we climbed a rough track that widened quickly to reveal our height above the small valleys and reservoirs below. Wind turbines stood across distant hilltops, whirring about half-heartedly, as though they were unsure if they’d turned up to the right event. ‘When you’re tracking merlin, there’s a lot of walking,’ Jack laughed. Fine by me. The day was looking lush already, and Jack was already regretting his layers of thermals under his outer clothes. Soon I, too, was shining like a disco ball. Grouse were everywhere, laughing at the same joke as their cousins in Scotland only a few weeks before. Dry-stone walls zipped up vast drapes of threadbare moorland. Dry heather crunched loudly at each step. Those swathes that had been routinely burned for grouse management even more so. ‘A low diversity of plants means there’s barely any seed bank up here,’ Jack remarked. ‘The land is being pushed to within an inch of its life.’
Sponging up the vast space around us, I was reminded that we were looking for a bird that’s about the size of a blackbird, flying a distinctively fast, energetic flight low to the ground in a landscape with a matching colour scheme that will swallow it. I sighed as I also remembered those recent figures and recalled that we were looking for one of just 30 known merlins across this entire Dark Peak desert. Fat chance. But we threw the day at giving it a go.
Years of practice and patience has gifted Jack with the ability to see things that I cannot. A golden plover, for example – a pretty little wader I wasn’t sure I had seen before – busy performing its noisy display flight and wheeling above us just like any other bird. I quickly learned to get excited when Jack got excited. To fall quiet when he fell quiet. When Jack’s binoculars lifted and scanned fence posts, mine followed suit. Like most raptors, merlins tend to time their nesting a little later than other birds to monopolise as many fledglings from other species as they can in early spring. ‘The merlins are not quite settled in their nests yet,’ Jack told me, ‘so they may well perch on these boundary posts on lookout.’ Jack could have told me anything in that moment, and I would have believed it. We had every chance of seeing a merlin. I crossed my fingers tightly at my side.
Something upset the line of heather not far from where we were walking. Large, white and distinctly mammalian. ‘I don’t bloody believe it …’ I muttered. Jack laughed, ‘Ha! There’s your hare, alright.’ FFS. There it was, lighting up the heather with its arrogant little arse. All that frolicking up to the Cairngorms and the mountain hares were here in England all along. Clearly, this hare was a descendent of the hares translocated from Scotland as game to English uplands during the early 1800s.
We ended up seeing more hares that morning than I ever did on their native slopes. Greyer and more mottled, but they still stood out like little beacons against a haze of heat that already shimmered above the ground. Don’t get me wrong, though. Seeing hares felt like bumping into old friends. The swathe of monotone Dark Peak we were hiking across housed the most bizarre assortment of species.
Few physical barriers limiting birdsong and animal movement exist here, which shifted the boundaries of what we could see, smell and hear. Gamekeepers ensure a stark lack of crows and foxes, meaning waders and plovers get more of a say in things. Every cloud, I guess. A curlew, the largest wader in Europe and one of Britain’s most-threatened, cried high above us, its calls stretched by the wind. A very wild sort of mood descends when that happens.
The lapwing – another plover (from another mother?) associated with wetlands and farmland across the UK – is also in decline, and yet I saw more of them than I ever had that one day. Merlins have a taste for lapwing, so our eyes were officially peeled. The first time I ever saw a lapwing, it took me a good while to realise that the police car siren that was harshly blaring across the road was a black/white/iridescent bird performing an unbelievable air tattoo above my head. Its scientific name Vanellus vanellus means ‘little fan’ – a nod to its iconic, flappy flight. Its rounded, paddle-like wings allow it to tumble, ripple and corkscrew through the air. A lapwing gives its entire body to the sky, pouring itself through invisible cracks and tunnels. It is dizzying and hypnotic to watch. (Can recommend.) But be prepared for any sort of meaningful moment here to be interrupted by greylag geese – loads of them. Their clumsy honks and squabbles signalled flustered indecision about whether to hang out on the moors today or on the reservoir. ‘Should’ve written a chapter about them instead,’ Jack chimed in. Cheers, mate.
Earlier, I told you some conservationists had risked their lives to seek justice for birds of prey – justice in all senses. Enter Dr Ruth Tingay, one of those people who undersell their achievements by describing themselves as a ‘conservationist, researcher, blogger’. Friends, she is so much more. You may have gathered that tracking down merlins is hard. And tracking down humans who have worked with merlins, let alone finding a woman operating within the ‘raptor’ space, is a challenge too. But as I was doing some pre-trip research, Ruth’s name kept cropping up in various circles: ‘Wait, you haven’t spoken with Ruth yet? You must.’
With a global career spanning five continents, Ruth is a leading voice on raptors and their persecution. She was an international director of the Raptor Research Foundation for six years, followed by four years as its president. Her blog, Raptor Persecution UK, has been influential for its value to science, policy and the law. Ruth has written countless papers and campaigned relentlessly. She has been seriously threatened directly – multiple times – for giving a shit. She was also instrumental in securing the grouse moorland licensing I mentioned in the mountain hare chapter. ‘It’s a big deal, but it’s not over yet,’ she admitted over Zoom.
Ruth is risk-ready and considered one of the UK’s most important conservationists.
George Orwell told us in Animal Farm how, although equality prevails in the animal kingdom, we cannot deny that some species will always rise above others. I believe this also applies to humankind. Ruth stands taller than most people (she’d never agree with me, of course).
‘Raptors have just always been better,’ she smiled over the screen. She exudes warmth yet is as hard as nails. I’m not sure you’d commit years of service in a battle for raptor rights and not develop some sort of armour. Ruth regularly speaks publicly about a concept known as ‘wilful blindness’ – a term often batted about in legal settings, describing a conscious avoidance of the truth. Although commonly mentioned in the context of illegal raptor persecution, the concept of wilful blindness applies to British conservation as a whole. ‘It’s a dangerous mindset,’ Ruth said darkly.
Still keen to uncover why our national attitude towards raptors is so polarised, I asked Ruth what they do for her. She laughed, shrugging, ‘They completely dominate my world … I still don’t really know how to answer that question properly.’ A debut rendezvous with a sparrowhawk in Windsor Great Park – ‘doing a bit of rhododendron bashing’ – during her time as a volunteer sealed her fate with birds of prey. ‘I was transfixed. I had no idea we had birds like this in the UK. When I realised a lot of people want to kill them, it became obvious to me that I would study these species.’ Not studying for the sheer hell of it, but so her knowledge might contribute to the protection of raptors.
While the merlin hasn’t been a direct species of focus for Ruth, as it (so far) largely escapes persecution, she has studied merlin populations in the Western Isles of Scotland and is aware of the merlin’s fragility. ‘An increase in heather burning on the Scottish moors is stealing the merlin’s nesting habitat,’ she told me, describing how long, bushy heather – waist height in places – makes for a better quality nest, not only for the merlin but also for its favourite prey like skylarks and meadow pipits. Imagine the turmoil that would ensue upon trudging up to bed, exhausted, only for you to meet with a charred heap? Now imagine you had offspring that had perished along with your organic linens? Grim.
Back to Ruth. ‘Merlins can nest in old crows’ nests, which is smart. It protects the nests from stoats and weasels, and the high aspect affords a view to spot prey.’ But, recycled nests are not a reliable alternative any more. Sheltering belts of trees lining the edges of moorland were once commonplace on grouse moors. Crows would roost, then move on, leaving their former refuge up for grabs. Too quickly, though, these corridors have been felled – replaced by swathes of heather seed. And grouse.
Ruth told me about a 30-year-long study of breeding merlins across four grouse-shooting estates in Scotland’s Lammermuir Hills, which reported this trend. Over three decades, the researchers measured a decline in merlins and other birds as grouse moorland management intensified. Beginning field observations in 1984 offers an unprecedented window into how these birds have coped with some extraordinary shifts in pressure on the landscape. And while this study focused on Scottish birds, and here I am telling you about my spree in the English uplands, it is all related. This 30-year Scottish dataset provides us with a rare gift of foresight. One only has to look up and down the Lammermuir Hills to note the stark similarity of their tessellated, burnt hillsides to those of the Dark Peak. ‘You can’t not be concerned,’ Ruth observed.
When 10 a.m. in April feels like 2 p.m. in late July, you know something is not right. Poor old Blighty doesn’t weather temperature swings quite as elegantly as the Algarve. As with most species we’ve considered so far, the climate change link to merlins is annoyingly murky. But only deniers would keep their heads in the (potentially increasing) sand. Cambridge University led a study in 2020, which found that recent UK summer droughts are worse than any of the past 2,000 years. Yet on average, each person in the UK blithely uses up to 140 litres of water every day, most of which then runs down the drains, never to be thought of again.
The researchers from Cambridge were able to gather data so deep into the past thanks to a ground-breaking technique. Careful analysis of the carbon and oxygen fingerprints left on European oak trees revealed a startling timeline of the UK summer climate. Dry weather and drought have become less of an anomaly and more of a trend, steadily increasing in frequency and intensity since 2015. The study concludes with strong suggestions that human-induced climate change is the antagonist, alongside extraordinary forest dieback.
Turning the pages back to 2003, research into the record-breaking European heatwave found that human activity more than doubles the risk of such events repeating themselves. At the time, 2003 was the hottest recorded summer since 1500. I have hazy memories of this – of hot, stuffy classrooms and teachers badgering us to drink more water. I think even my parents ventured into the river in their underwear once or twice. Safe to say, it was a year of extremes. According to Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, there were 2,234 human deaths recorded during this heatwave in the UK alone. The researchers estimated at least 1,117 of these deaths could be directly linked to human-induced climate change. Scientists will need to do much more work to confirm the exact causes of death, but more and more, it’s becoming possible to attribute weather-related deaths to climate change. Given our general aversion to ‘the death thing’, I’m not sure we want to see these data. But if it shocks us into sorting out climate change, so be it.
Mike Price – a local Peak District raptor worker and bird-ringer with a keen interest in all-things-merlin – has done some probing into whether the merlin, as a falcon, should fear the UK’s weather rollercoaster – dry or wet. Other raptors are already finding the ride nerve-wracking, and seeing how they’re affected can give us an indication of how others might fare. In Spain, nesting close to some springs that flooded proved an utter disaster for some pairs of peregrine falcons. Chicks became saturated and developed dangerously low body temperatures as a result of torrential, unseasonal rains. But as always, with merlins, there’s more to it.
Mike admitted the complexity of it all. ‘The timing of wet weather seems far more important than the amount,’ he said, referring to a wet period during 2019 that affected the breeding success of other species in the Peaks, but didn’t affect the merlin. Remember, we are at the southerly edge of a merlin’s range (they’ve evolved to exist within slightly cooler climes), which makes me wonder whether it’s these looming droughts and heatwaves that may prove to be a merlin’s Achilles heel.
Merlins were the focus of an article in The Times in 2015 by Jim Dixon (former CEO of the Peak District National Park, aka ‘Peak Chief’) entitled ‘Hot weather could make the merlin disappear’, casually linked their weak numbers in the Peaks with a warming world. Dodging weak conclusions (tricky in science, eurgh), I posed a slew of messy thoughts to Dr Matt Stevens, a conservation biologist at the Hawk Conservancy Trust, a few weeks after my trip. ‘It’s a difficult one to call and link to raptors,’ he wrote back over email, ‘most of the species occurring across the UK have ranges that extend beyond our shores in all compass directions and will be exposed to milder, colder, wetter and drier climates. Would this not suggest that the overall populations may be able to cope with the expected temperature increases?’ I guess. But everything has its limits.
One other curveball for merlins to dodge is the geography of the Peak District itself – an epicentre of green space for millions of people in northern England’s urban centres – ‘England’s megalopolis’ as it’s sometimes known. Intense industrialisation during the Victorian era – coal mines, textile mills, railways, canals, shipyards, ports, international trade – made these cities officially big. Putting aside the routine burning of heather for grouse for a minute, Ruth Tingay also mentioned how, along with people pressure, incidences of wildfire and arson are mounting on the moors. Five thousand of the 350,000 acres (141,640 hectares) of the Peaks were burnt to a crisp in the spring of 2003. It was a challenge to find out the exact cause. Not only was this a living nightmare for wildlife, but a colossal dislocation of peatlands relinquished carbon from its burial chambers, discharging it back into the atmosphere. Remember, peatlands are our largest natural terrestrial carbon store, and damaging them releases around 6 per cent of global human-induced emissions annually.
Saddleworth Moor was on fire for more than a week in the summer of 2018 – a fire believed to have been started by a group from Manchester seen lighting a bonfire on the Pennines. High winds, unusually hot temperatures and the severe absence of rain that summer prolonged the Saddleworth blaze for days. And in January 2021, five men in Derby were charged with arson after losing control of a campfire while camping near the moors, engulfing a Peak District woodland. In the open countryside, the ‘accidental’ can so easily spark disaster, and as many parts of the UK experience hotter, drier conditions, that’s only going to increase.
The way a merlin moves might interest you. The opening steps of any predator-prey waltz are still largely unknown to most of us, but I reckon you’ll enjoy learning about this one. Jack compensated for the lack of anything merlin-related on our walk by telling me everything a merlin would be doing if we were to see it. ‘Live fast, die young’ is a merlin’s mantra. ‘Hard on them mentally, I suppose, killing something every day,’ he mused. Our tiniest falcon lives for around three years on average, has a wingspan of 50–62 centimetres, and is an absolute unit of a hunter. Any human encounter with a merlin is best recounted in a superlative firework, so they are typically described as ‘thrilling’, ‘terrifying’, ‘furious’ and ‘exciting’. It is pretty much the only way to depict how they move. Exploding from their lookout post, a merlin hunts with immense purpose and hustle – rarely will it glide like a buzzard or hover like a kestrel. Instead, the merlin uses fast, powerful wing beats, interspersed with short, precise glides, to help it stay fiercely loyal to a low airborne course while it scans for prey. As a rule, all hawks have incredible vision. A kestrel can spot a dor beetle 50 metres away. It (and many other species, too) can detect ultraviolet light, invisible to the naked human eye, affording it a window into the urine trails of small mammals. Handy, if a vole is their snack of choice! Merlins hold their wings close to their bodies in flight, often hunting at less than a metre above the ground. They capture most of their prey in the air, and alarmed birds on the ground are ‘tail chased’. If the catch is successful, they will carry their prey to a ‘plucking post’ – the top of a fence, a stone wall or heathery hummock – where it will be meticulously plucked (if feathery). Breeding pairs often work together, but during early spring, the male is the more frequent hunter of the pair, delivering a plucked, beheaded dinner back to the nest to feed the female while she incubates the eggs.
Some birders claim a merlin’s aeronautic agility while hunting can outmatch its larger hawk counterparts. Watch a video of them doing their thing and you can’t help but applaud their sheer versatility. Their hooked bills with tiny serrated edges assist the talons at the end of their sunshine legs as they rip open their meal. When a breeding pair hunts together, one may flush a terrified meadow pipit towards its mate, which makes the capture. Because those who flush together stay together.
During our call, Ruth Tingay reminisced about her time studying merlins on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, between 2003–2005. I gather the Island has quite the winter to endure. ‘Fucking freezing – you’d have twenty layers, six hats and a sleeping bag while sweeping the horizon every minute looking for them.’ For Ruth, the drama of witnessing a day in the life of a merlin made it bearable. ‘As soon as anything came into their airspace, the merlins would be up like a shot,’ she laughed, demonstrating rapid swoops with her arms over the camera, ‘literally vertically, shouting and screaming, buzzing at whatever species was there, be it raven or golden eagle.’
A merlin’s motto is simple: ‘Don’t even start with me, because I WILL have a go.’ Ruth said watching a merlin buzzing a golden eagle in this way was like watching a mosquito nipping at the eagle’s heels, ‘dive-bombing, mobbing, in a ferocious, funny kind of way. You have to hand it to them – they’re bloody feisty!’
I wanted these anecdotes. I wanted my own merlin story. As I wandered the Peaks with Jack, he told me about merlins’ fearlessness around bigger raptors. He said to keep an eye out for a buzzard or a crow because the likelihood is they’ve spotted something to eat, and a merlin may come along and start mobbing them, driving them off their territory – ‘they literally don’t give a shit’, he told me. Hearing this reminded me of a now-famous photograph taken in July 2020 on the Dark Peak by Steve Gantlett. It shows a visiting (massive) bearded vulture2 being hounded by a merlin. Look it up and you’ll see how perfect Ruth’s mosquito analogy is.
During my campaign to Find Out Anything About this Bird, I discovered that noble folk also appreciated the fun in a merlin’s flight. I haven’t mentioned ‘falconry’ yet, the art of using a trained raptor to pounce on unsuspecting wild food or ‘quarry’, or simply just keeping said birds at your leisure. As Helen McDonald so beautifully recounted in H is for Hawk, falconry has experienced a bit of a renaissance. Thought to have originated somewhere in the Far East, falconry made its way to British shores around ad 860, sparking a person-plus-hawk situation that has stayed in vogue through the ages. In 1066, William the Conqueror, heady from his Hastings win, assumed the throne as King of England. Norman castles pocked English landscapes, and with them came intense privatisation. It was then that falconry shifted from an everyman’s pastime into an elitist sport. Until then, anyone could train a bird, but soon only the privileged – Henry, Son of Kingsley, Son of Bertram, Son of God – could qualify to ‘hawk’.
The 1468 Book of Saint Albans ranked British raptors into a social hierarchy. Society had truly embraced social delineation by then, so why not also apply that to birds? For instance, a female peregrine, the world’s fastest animal, is dubbed a ‘prince’ in the book. The male, an ‘earl’. The hobby3 , a ‘young man’. A sparrowhawk is doing very well, classed as both ‘priest’ and ‘holy water clerk’. But what of our merlin? Mercifully, The Book of Saint Albans ranked the merlin a ‘lady’. It contains a trio of essays on hunting, hawking and heraldry, and it’s probably fair to assume that this publication was written with a more gentrified reader in mind than I can claim to be.
Further reading led me to discover that a female merlin (m’lady) was deemed a noblewoman’s most fashionable falconry accessory. How chic! Merlins were flown in stunning displays by ladies of the court, who were more able to handle their small, compact size. The merlin was the preferred bird of prey for Mary Queen of Scots, who enjoyed hawking them at unsuspecting skylarks – no doubt a diversion from tumultuous sixteenth-century life. Some records relate that she continued to enjoy this pastime during her infamous periods of imprisonment.
Back to the Peaks. Jack and I found a beat on our quest for a merlin, with periods of slow walking and talking alternating with silent vigils over an outlook, scanning different portions of sky. Squinting in the sun, we debated at length about what animal we would be at a dinner party, concluding that a herring gull and raven would both have good stories, eat anything and have the ovaries to tell any annoying diners to shut up. We mused the ridiculousness of a sweet wren having the throaty, smoker’s croak of a raven. We wondered whether a merlin might be watching us from a perch, mocking our feeble attempts at tracking it. Imaginations ran easily out here.
Thanks to local raptor workers like Mike Price, merlins have been monitored in the Peak District for a long time, although some debate remains as to how well they’re actually doing. A thread on Twitter in April 2021 disputed the context around which merlin breeding success is reported. Take, for instance, a retort from our friend Ruth who, as you may gather by now, knows what she’s talking about: ‘Yes, approximately 50 merlin fledglings from 15 pairs in 2020, but that is well below the target set by the Bird of Prey Initiative (37 pairs), and in an area of 196 square miles of moorland, 15 nests is pathetic.’
Dr Alex Lees, a senior lecturer in biodiversity at Manchester Metropolitan University, followed suit by citing data from the report Ruth was quoting from. Lees wrote that claiming merlins’ success on driven grouse moors risks being ‘fast and loose with the truth’, explaining how their nests’ ‘repeatedly fail’ across some parts of the Peak District. ‘From my desk, I can see a driven grouse moor where there are currently a pair of merlins nesting,’ Alex messaged back when I probed further. ‘But just south-east of me on moors near Glossop, territories have a high failure rate and some traditional sites are unoccupied.’
I find this particularly interesting given that there have been repeated confirmed cases of raptor persecution in the area around Glossop. An osprey was found dead in a sprung trap in 2015, and in May 2020, a buzzard was found that had been shot twice. Alex concluded that merlins do well on driven grouse moors ‘if they are left alone. But that isn’t the case in many places.’ Indeed, Mike Price explained that merlin abundance here peaked in the 1990s and has been in slow decline ever since – saying that they have been, ‘just about holding on for some time’. He told me that the birds appear to be shifting north. The local Raptor Monitoring Group has recorded nests further north. ‘But that is not the full story,’ he said because that 30-year Scottish study I mentioned earlier told us that reduced merlin numbers were more often related to pressures the birds faced on the breeding grounds themselves rather than on any external factors (like survival over winter).
Anyway, let’s forget driven grouse moors for a bit (happily!) because, as Mike tells us, there’s more to it. Quite a lot more. The availability of good nest sites for them and their favourite prey are also crucial. All the experts I spoke to about merlins strongly advised me to go down ‘the food chain route’. To investigate that, we need to get up close and personal with heather.
The dramatic-sounding notion that the UK supposedly holds ‘75 per cent of the world’s upland heather habitat’ is batted across the internet from time to time. There is no doubt that between Great Britain and Ireland, we can be confident of claiming a very generous slice of the global heather pie, but accurate figures remain vastly inconclusive. A healthy heather upland or woodland understorey is far from a purple monoculture. Wet and dry heath, blanket bog, peat bogs and mosses have meshed together over 5,000 years. Not only does this act as a vast natural reservoir, feeding fresh water into tributaries and rivers and housing the nests and nurseries of countless species, but heather has served humans well, too. The Vikings concocted a prized heather ale, finding heather’s twiggy stems to make excellent thatch, broom bristles and mattresses. If we so please, we can soothe stressed nerves, tickly coughs, rheumatism and arthritis by drinking heather tea. Today, we probably aren’t making heather mattresses, but we do enjoy high-quality honey, thanks to the rich nectar of our heather flowers.
Taking another loop around our barren portion of the Dark Peak had Jack declaring that ‘some birch would be nice, or just a couple of oaks?’ The thing about birds of prey is that they will only show up if the species ‘below them’ are also in good health. Raptors, including merlins, are an exciting thumbs up that an ecosystem is functioning as it should be. Like sharks, whales, lions and leopards, the presence of top predators brings a sigh of relief. A simple, ‘Don’t worry! The web is intact. We are resistant to the enemy!’ So the fact that we didn’t see any, and I heard of no sightings reported leading up to my visit, was unsettling. Because as lovely as the lapwing, curlew and meadow pipit are, the overall biodiversity in the Peak District could be so much more.
Remember, the rich geology underlying the Peak District has the potential to support exemplary natural wealth. But the failure for such wealth to be realised is what experts fear will hammer our merlin. We know that they can fashion old crows’ nests to suit their own, and some research has found merlins nesting in bracken, suggesting adaptive flexibility, or plasticity, to a changing habitat. But what of their prey? Are they as resourceful? As resilient? Some figures estimate that a single merlin will eat up to 900 small birds a year. Such fuel must be essential in powering their launch and fiery orbit across the moors.
One of the most thorough investigations into the Peak District’s merlins was published by Bird Study in 2009, led by author Ian Newton. In Newton’s study, around half of the observed hunted birds seemed to be pipits. Two other comparative studies that followed noted a disproportionate preference for meadow pipits in a merlin’s diet. A flurry of terrified pipits suddenly erupting from a bank of heather could, therefore, indicate a merlin is in hot pursuit. These pipits are small brown, drab little things, and their sweet song is the most common across the uplands. Yet overall, UK numbers have been in a steady decline since the mid-1970s, placing them on the amber list of species of conservation concern as of writing this book.
Meadow pipits are strongly associated with heather moorland and underlying acid grassland, and they rely on a rich invertebrate menu for survival. They’re not the only ones, of course, for skylarks – one of the most endangered upland icons – need to rely on invertebrates too. Whenever I hear the chaos of a skylark’s tune, I’m thrown back to waking up at dawn on Dartmoor a few years ago following a summer solstice bivvy with my dad. A skylark sang me out of a dream. Trying to dissect the countless lyrics in its song was a tall order at 5 a.m., but it’s hard to forget this bird’s victorious ascent high above my sleeping bag against a lilac sky. These are the moors I want for the Peaks.
Survival expert and official Channel 4 hard man Bear Grylls regularly reminds humans what we need to survive: food, shelter and water. Simple. Food and water security are always a top priority in the UK Parliament’s various revisions of its Agricultural Bill. Yet, the public health issue of malnutrition continues to cost the NHS nearly £20 billion per year in England alone.
It occurs to me that the inhabitants of our uplands could file similar reports. Crane flies – or ‘daddy longlegs’ – are upland dietary staples for meadow pipits, skylarks, golden plover, stonechats and many other songbirds. As #basic as bread. Their long spindly legs and dense, slender bodies make for a hearty snack. Part of the ‘true flies’ group of insects (as is a housefly), crane flies are among the most ancient of flies. When I typed ‘crane flies’ into Google, it asked me if I meant to write, ‘should I kill crane flies?’ But whatever you think of them, keep in mind that it’s only when tiny herbivores like crane flies are farming our undergrowth that the rest of nature can truly begin.
Thinking about it, what alarms me is how defenceless crane flies are in the face of drought. Their larvae, known as ‘leatherjackets’, fizzle and dry (desiccate) when temperatures are too high and soil moisture is too low. (Perhaps they look like tiny rolls of leather when this happens?) Data from a PhD thesis from the University of York in 2012 elegantly showed how adult crane fly numbers increase with soil moisture and decline alongside a falling summer water table. Data aside, all you need to worry about is that upland bird survival directly depends on that of insects. With drought exerting a growing annual influence across the UK, this desertification of the supplies that feed the vital links in the food chain poses a severe threat.
‘It’s already happening,’ Ruth Tingay stressed. ‘Changes in temperature are affecting insect populations, which is knocking on to the pipits, the skylarks … the merlin.’ But we know this. We’ve played this domino game before. Warmer springs are causing woodland birds like great tits and pied flycatchers to miss the peak of caterpillar prey to feed their young, because the caterpillars have emerged earlier. Under the water, we are also seeing this kind of de-coupling of seemingly indestructible predator-prey relationships between zooplankton (the equivalent of insects in the sea) and fish. As always, the top predators will eventually lose out. Everything will lose out; it’s just that the top predators get blasted by the accumulation of hurt up the chain. Buses continue to be missed, leaving isolated passengers stranded. With all the issues it’s facing: drought, wildfire, potential persecution, starvation … maybe the merlin should quit while it can.
It’s easy to get lost in all this. I get it. Despite its tiny size, the problems facing our smallest falcon feel enormous, don’t they? But it’s reassuring to hear researchers asking questions too. ‘My concern is that we won’t notice a significant change and will continue with business as usual – while the changes gather even more momentum,’ said Matt Stevens from the Hawk Conservancy Trust. Once they had tried to talk me out of writing about the merlin, all the people I spoke with stressed the simplicity of the main concerns facing merlin populations. ‘We’re not learning fast enough.’ ‘What if nothing changes?’ ‘The government isn’t listening.’ ‘If we know what to do, then why aren’t we doing it?’
Further studies investigating crane fly vulnerability to drought, for instance, demonstrate how simple peatland management strategies can quickly switch their fortunes. Blocking drains can return moisture to the soils. Restoring water retention republishes the story of heathland as a vast natural reservoir, preventing the desiccation of those insect larvae and bolstering the food and water security of upland birds for pipits and merlins alike. May 2021 saw new legislation banning peatland burning across protected areas of England. However, it wasn’t welcomed by everyone, with many conservationists challenging its lack of clarity on what peatland is and what protection it needs.
Perhaps it may help to imagine all this as though we are fitting our uplands with bulletproof vests, tucking a fire blanket around them, and backing up their aeons worth of data to the cloud. Whatever analogy works for you, deceiving ourselves has to stop. We’ve got to do something.
Overlooking birds of prey – be they peregrine, osprey or merlin – should startle us. Birds of prey aren’t going to solve climate change by any means, but they can tell us about our relationship with nature. If we leave them to get on with their lives, they will more than likely bounce back during difficult times. Talking of which, a few days ago, Mike sent me an email with a photograph of three merlin chicks huddled in a fuzzy feather ball in their nest. I stared at it for a long time. I zoomed right in on it until feathers filled my screen. In a world that’s increasingly terrifying to predict, we should embrace merlins fiercely.
My day on the Peaks was drawing to a close, and this time the merlin stayed true to itself. If one did escape our gaze, we’d never know. Our merlin continues to elude. And I think I like it that way. Ruth likes it too. She wrote back to me after I got home, and I love her response:
Sorry you didn't see any merlins...but secretly pleased, because a big part of the enjoyment of this species, for me at least, is having to work hard to find them! They'll be all the more enjoyable when you DO see them, and I have no doubt that you will.
R x
On the train home, for the first time that day, I caught sight of my reflection as we went through a tunnel. Half of the Peak District’s heather was decorating my hair. I looked like a sunburnt medieval washerwoman with a tinny G&T and an iPhone. Wow, get it together, Soph, I thought. After all, who knows when one might get the chance to dress up and partake in a spot of hawking with a merlin like a proper lady? Finally, back in Exeter, I rode along the River Exe in a trance, and it was past midnight by the time I crept through the front door. I had barely been away more than a day and a half, but being home again felt so good. I needed spring to advance a few more weeks before I crossed that threshold once again. A bee was about to wake up from hibernation, and I wanted to greet it. Come on, then.
Notes
1 Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Infamous for grim environmental impacts until, its UK ban in 1986. If you want to learn more about this, you must read Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic, Silent Spring. (And good luck in the Spelling bee.)
2 One of Europe’s most impressive and rarest birds graced Yorkshire’s skies from her home in the French Alps, grabbing headlines around the world. With a wingspan of more than 2.5 metres, the bearded vulture is bigger than the white-tailed eagle. Unforgettable.
3 Not, as you may first think, knitting, cycling, gaming or baking, but rather, another small and exciting British falcon – conservation status: green.