At which point do I realise I am becoming obsessed with ravens? It is the dreams, first of all. The ravens do not suddenly appear, but creep into the corners of my subconscious. I am dreaming about something else entirely and yet in my mind’s eye I am aware of the bird, watching me.
Later, the ravens come closer. I have one recurring dream where I am chasing a leathery, flapping raven around my house; its feathers fall out, one-by-one, as I try to grasp hold of the bird. I put this down to anxiety, the equivalent of those dreams where your teeth get pulled out by the roots, and you wake up full of terror then relief that you still have molars left to bite down on your breakfast.
I have more pleasant raven dreams, too, and I write them down in my notebook to remember the details. My favourite places me on a woodland path like the ones I walked along in the New Forest, one of the earliest places I travelled in pursuit of the birds. It is night, and ravens are soaring above the tree canopy through the starlit sky. Curiously, they do not make a sound, just weave about in figures of eight. It is cold and I am watching them alone, calm and full of happiness.
Some of my real life experiences border on the fantastical. The dreams fade into the reality. Early one morning, staying alone in a motel in the Mojave Desert on my way to do a story for the Telegraph Magazine about a space-flight testing facility, I am shaken out of my jetlagged sleep by a tell-tale croak. I open the curtains and stand naked in the grey, dawn light watching an endless procession of ravens flying by my fourth-floor window. They come in groups of threes and fours and I count more than a hundred swirling in. At times the incoming birds bunch so close they are almost in formation, then they break apart and shoot down and up again like a roller coaster at the fair. Some bank sideways less than an arm’s length from my window. I suppose they cannot see me behind the glass. It is as mesmerising as watching rays in an aquarium. My raven tank.
These ravens appear to be juveniles. They’re shaggy, erratic and call out at a higher timbre than adult birds. I presume they are flying in from some communal roost in the desert similar to the one I visited in Anglesey. Later when the sun is up and I am out walking, I spot them hanging around the sprawling motel complex, perching on pylons that stretch into the distance or on the top of the flat pink roofs of assorted shopping malls. I find a raven feather sticking out of an acacia bush. Holding it up to the desert sun, the colours shimmer from brown to turquoise. I take it back to the hotel with me and wrap it carefully in tissue and put it in the bottom of my bag.
Another near dream experience occurs the morning before the day of my wedding in the Yorkshire Dales. I have gone for a walk to steady my nerves and find myself standing at the bottom of a quarry face listening to a raven call. I crane my neck but cannot see the bird, only taunting glimpses of what inevitably turn out to be jackdaws. I try following the noise, and eventually stumble across the ruins of what, from the outside, appears to once have been some sort of fort. There is nobody around, but a sign tells me this was the Hoffman Kiln, built in 1873 for the Craven Lime Company. Limestone blocks from the quarry outside were barrowed in and stacked by hand in the burning chamber, where they were mixed with coal and ignited. The lime was then shovelled out and put on to railway wagons on the rusting tracks behind me.
I walk into the burning chamber – a long, seemingly endless pitch-black tunnel interrupted every 20m (65ft) by a thin shaft of light coming in from the firebrick and stone flue halls. As I pass through the chamber, nerves on edge, I hear my footsteps rapping off the ground and the cool air raises goosebumps on my skin. The September day outside fades to black. When I get to the end and step outside I am relieved to see daylight, the last fading flowers of the year and a small stream running the colour of milk.
There is one recurring dream I have which takes me back to the flooded quarry where I watched ravens in Orkney. As with when I was there in the flesh, I hear echoes of the birds’ call off the steel-grey, rippling water and watch them flying over, feathers frayed like a bin bag snared on a tree. In my dreams, however, the ravens don’t just fly but occasionally tuck in their wings and dive like gannets. They split through the surface and pierce deep down into the water, bubbles streaming from their nostrils. In my mind, I follow them. When I wake up from these quarry dreams, I am desperate to see and understand matters beyond what my imagination can conjure.
* * *
The idea of ravens in quarries begins to take root in my thoughts. These forgotten blots on the land are some of the first nesting places to which ravens returned when they began their comeback across the country. The prosaic attraction of old quarries is obvious; the isolation appeals to the ravens, so too the vantage point they offer and proximity to human settlement. But there is something beyond that which interests me. I think quarries are the perfect setting to explain our symbiotic relationship with ravens and the landscape.
We cleave great chunks out of the land, dig as deep and for as long as our machines and shovels will allow, and when the ground is no longer of use, we move on; but whatever damage has been done, the ancient rhythms soon resume. When the rock chutes fall silent wildflowers will grow, as trees and ferns unfurl their roots in old spoil heaps and lorry tracks. The raven leads the charge, assuming its rightful place in this deserted land. Seeing the birds in these forgotten hives of industry makes me wonder what will happen when humans are long gone from this earth? Will ravens fly over the ruins of our great cities or, as with the Bronze Age remains of man and raven commingled together, be buried alongside us?
A few years ago, I visited Whitwick Quarry in Leicestershire with the birdwatcher and poet Matt Merritt. We parked up on the side of a busy road and climbed over a drystone wall into another world. The old granite quarry had long been flooded with cyan-coloured water, and when we scrambled up, it was secured by a padlocked gate. Still, we could see beyond it well enough. Matt pointed to one of the quarry faces where a raven nest he had been monitoring had slipped down in a recent storm. We could hear two of the birds in the air above us, their kronks echoing as loud as horn blasts against the water and rock. Then we saw a raven and a buzzard chasing after one another in quick succession, pursued by a mob of crows. On a steel rig lighting tower on the opposite side of the quarry, Matt pointed out a peregrine poised on its perch, waiting to pounce.
These quarries are part of what the writer and conservationist Richard Mabey called ‘the unofficial countryside’: the railway sidings, towpaths and motorway verges or ‘brownfield land’ in development-speak, the human wastelands where nature still incongruously flourishes. Over the course of writing this book, I have discovered ravens nesting in the most unlovely places: the old nuclear power stations of Dungeness and along the River Avon; old warehouses, silos, gun platforms and buildings gutted by fire. The ravens move into the spaces we create; occupy the scars we leave unhealed.
After my visit to Whitwick, I decide to start monitoring a quarry of my own. I choose a working quarry not far off the A1, where I know ravens are nesting. I visit every now and then, recording the movements of the ravens and whatever else I see. As I stand on the side of the slip road to the quarry, where mammoth lorries haul cargoes of limestone back and forth, I am often glared at with suspicion by the quarrymen. On one occasion when I have stepped off the path and climbed a small hill to look out over the quarry, a furious man drives over to me in a beeping gold buggy and demands to know what I am doing. ‘Watching the birds?’ he repeats after me, his eyes glaring beneath a high-visibility helmet in a way that makes me careful not to mention ravens. ‘Well, you can’t watch them here.’
But I ignore his demands and keep him at bay by sticking to the public paths, and what marvellous sights I am treated to in return. One autumn, I arrive and park up by the HGV turning circle where split rubble bags and fly-tipped office furniture are heaped by the roadside. Here I discover redwing and fieldfare flitting between the trees munching red berries. A month or so after that, I stumble across the largest flock of goldfinches I have ever seen. I count more than 50 of them – a charm – flashing silver and gold as they fly away from a large chute depositing a pile of rubble the size of a London townhouse. Deep in winter, I watch through my binoculars as two rabbits bound across a flat bed of grass-covered landfill. They take it in turns to sprint and look, sprint and look. Perhaps I have been spending too much time in the company of birds of blood, but I cannot help but imagine them through the eyes of a predator. Another time, I watch a peregrine stoop from a treetop at the quarry edge, falling so fast and straight it looks like a zip between different worlds. The pair of ravens here are secretive and largely keep well out of sight of the road. Still, I see them every now and then, flashing over the men crushing rocks.
It is a far from peaceful site, clanking machinery and the air thick with dust all through the day. The motorway is close enough to hear a never-ending procession of traffic hurtling up and down the spine of the country. In the distance, some of England’s largest surviving coal-fired power stations pump great plumes of smoke into the air. All the same, the sky is vast, and in sharp winds, the clouds scud like racing cars across it. In winter when the sun sets, it bruises over a deep magenta and orange. There is beauty in this abused and elemental landscape.
* * *
It is curious the places we feel at home. I was born and raised in central London, and the closest thing to the countryside I can remember was the urban farm at the end of our road. My extended family, however, came from the north, and on weekend visits to see grandparents in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, I relished the freedom of those open landscapes; the feeling of being on the edge.
My paternal grandparents, Beryl and Guy Shute, lived in a village called Swainby on the western edge of the North York Moors. It is a small, traditional sort of place with a church, pub, shop and neat rows of sandstone cottages. A beck runs through the village where we used to feed the ducks. Nowadays when I visit, I sit upon a green bench by the water with a brass plaque bearing the names of my grandparents bolted on to it.
Their home was an old, white farmhouse with blue guttering on the front and stone mushrooms outside. I remember the feeling of getting out of the car after a four-hour drive up the A1 and inhaling the sweet, manure tang in the air from the farmhouse next door. It was owned by a man called Billy Bell, whose great rusting tractor my big brother and I adored.
Inside the house was a metal box of Meccano, a stuffed snarling badger and, at the foot of the bannisters, a carving of a Gibraltar ape from my great-grandfather’s time running the island’s airport during the Second World War. I used to rub its smooth head with my palm when I ran up and down the stairs. I still have that ape fixed at the foot of my own bannisters, and still rub its head for comfort.
The real treasures of that house, though, lay on the outside. Walking out of their front door and a breathless charge up a steep hill brought us to the ruins of Whorlton Castle. Here we climbed among the drained moat and old stone pits and imagined the time when it was full of knights, and fires roared in the fragmented hearths whose stones were blackened by centuries of smoke. Then there were the moors; with streams to dam and great swathes of heather so high, you could crawl through it unseen. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped was, and still is, my favourite book and I pretended to be David Balfour fleeing the redcoats. When it snowed, you could sled down a steep field next to the house on a binbag and fly like the wind.
I love those moors and still go there now. When my gran died, we scattered her ashes on the Sheepwash. Every so often I still camp out there for the night on a grassy ledge that juts out over a stream and is entirely hidden from the world. When I go with my wife or friends, we cook a stew, carry it up along with our tents and a bottle of wine, make a fire and sit out listening to the water rush by. The report of rifles from nearby grouse shoots sometimes wakes us up in the morning.
A long chain of memory and family leads me back to this part of the world, but in adulthood, I have become increasingly drawn to another wild expanse, this time on the other side of the Vale of York. I first discovered the Yorkshire Dales when I was a university student. It is infused with memories of my youth, in its crisp air, caramel-coloured streams and the smell of heather blossom and wildflower meadows, yet unlike the North York Moors there is no family history for me here. Somehow, though, the Dales is a landscape that puts me in my place. Satisfaction is always the word that springs to mind when I try and condense the powerful, conflicting emotions of excitement and nostalgia that being in the Dales provokes in me.
* * *
The bones of the Yorkshire Dales are the Carboniferous Limestone beds that were formed some 300 million years ago. The Craven Fault is responsible for the limestone pavements and sheer and sudden crags of the southern Dales, while the Yoredale Series in the north is interspersed with shale and sandstone, producing great plateaux of sweeping moorland. This is a landscape shaped and smoothed by glacial activity: potholes, waterfalls and caves as well as the gill, gorge and crag. When it rains water gushes from every available crevice.
In the uplands, the soil is acidic and poor: scrubby grasslands, bracken, moor and cotton grass bog. The only farming possible is livestock grazing, and it is this which has shaped so much of the modern Dales, alongside the pursuit for what lies under the earth, in particular, the rich lead deposits that vein through the valleys.
I can be here and watch history unravel. I look at the topography of the Dales, so different as I travel between each valley, and picture the bed of a tropical ocean millions of years ago. At natural landmarks, like the overhanging limestone lip of Kilnsey Crag, I imagine the transhumance of nomadic herders driving their flocks down to winter pasture and to trade at sheep fairs. Passing by train over the Ribblesdale Viaduct, I picture the poor nineteenth-century navvies who built it. Wandering between the old lead mines and limestone quarries that still scar the top of crags, I think of those who lived here in tent cities like men on a gold rush, but with no promise of riches at the end. Walking over the now bare hills, necklaced with centuries of drystone walls, I imagine the great forests that once grew here.
Lead was being mined in the Dales as far back as the Roman era, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the industry boomed. In Britain’s lead heyday between 1821 and 1861, more than 20,000 tonnes were extracted from Grassington Moor alone. It was bleak, dirty work. Tunnels were only a metre tall and prone to caving in. Men, women and children all spent long days on the open moors, cracking open the rocks and extracting the lead ore by hand. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industry had collapsed, but the hills are still covered with the debris left behind – the flues, smelts and mineshafts. Close to the peaks of many hills, you can still stumble across the skeletons of old lime kilns (like the Hoffman Kiln) and old limestone quarries and even some that are still in use today.
I love the Old Norse names of villages like Muker, Redmire and Hardraw and pore over Ordnance Survey maps to discover more. I have other maps, too, ones of my own creation. I have spent weeks walking and cycling across the 1,400km2 of the Yorkshire Dales. I have swum naked in the River Wharfe and bathed in a wild waterfall in the furthest reaches of Wensleydale. I have been burnt crimson in the sun and once, while cycling over a particularly exposed bit of Coverdale, was soaked by a downpour so terrible that I subsequently caught the worst bout of flu I have ever endured. I have slept out wild many times. I know of one spot, in particular, to peg out a tent, listen to the hooting owls and watch the moon glint off the silver, snaking riverbed below. From this land, I derive pure physical joy.
So, in my mid-20s, when I became a reporter for the Yorkshire Post with a beat that covered the Dales from Blubberhouses Moor in the south to Richmond Castle in the north, I thought I had the best post in journalism in the world. I wrote about sheep rustlers and planning applications, road accidents and rare orchids, public toilets and family histories, agricultural fairs and rural poverty, parish council meetings and nature. When travelling between jobs, my phone would soon run out of reception with no signal for miles to allow the office to reach me. I could vanish into stories.
* * *
One birthday, a year or so after my appointment, I received my first ever pair of proper binoculars. I was in the Wensleydale village of Askrigg and decided to take them for their inaugural outing to where the narrow main street begins to arc up and over the tops into Swaledale. Here, opposite a tree teeming with chaffinch and sparrows, I raised the lenses to my eyes and first felt that thrill of delving into another secret world.
The Dales was where I really began to fall in love with watching birds. I marvelled at curlew, lapwing, chitting snipe and oystercatchers and, one early spring morning when Wharfedale was covered with snow, spotted my first ever dipper, hopping up a riverbed towards the limestone crags of Malham Cove. So too, my first sighting of grey wagtails along the Ure and Swale.
I remember these first sightings as vividly as the ravens that stalk my dreams. People have told me they have seen ravens at key moments in their lives; births, deaths and in moments of deepest grief. The first raven I ever saw in the Dales was outside the church of St Matthew’s in the tiny village of Stalling Busk. The village overlooks Semer Water, a kidney-shaped lake, which on clear days reflects the shimmering peaks of Raydale that surround it on all sides. My wife and I were taking in this view when we heard the telltale kronks and watched as a powerful raven flew into our eyeline and rocketed down the valley with its wings tucked behind it.
We later decided to get married in that church and a few months after our wedding returned for another visit. As we stood outside waiting for the service to begin, we watched another raven appear through crepuscular rays in the clouds, this time moving with long, languid flaps of its wings. What had previously been an empty sky suddenly filled with birds. Jackdaws that had gathered in a nearby copse shot into the air in pursuit, cackling and clattering as they urged each other upwards. A buzzard also appeared out of nowhere to join the fray. The raven flew between them, twisting and corkscrewing, as one by one the jackdaws tried to jab it down from the sky, making vicious lunges that the larger corvid simply shrugged off. The raven flew over us, two or perhaps three times before uttering one last kronk and returning to where it had come from. We watched open-mouthed in amazement. That was the moment I came to realise one of the great joys of the raven that I had never fully appreciated: this supposed bird of death, in fact, animates a landscape, brings it to life.
* * *
Like me, Doug Simpson was an outsider to the Dales and somebody who discovered the joy of birdwatching late. He was in his late 30s and a keen angler when he came to realise he was taking more interest in the great crested grebes nesting on the island of the lake he fished near Leeds than he was in the fish themselves. Back then local teenagers would try to get across to the lake to steal the grebe eggs, and Doug took it upon himself stop them, on one occasion chasing a gang of youths causing them to throw away the tin in which they had stashed the grebe eggs. Eventually, he sold his fishing tackle, bought a pair of binoculars and a scope, and ended up as the protection officer for the Leeds Birdwatching Club.
He first became involved monitoring persecuted birds in the Yorkshire Dales in around 1979. Doug speaks quietly and with great precision and admits that on this occasion he cannot remember the year with any certainty. He has never left.
Back then peregrine falcons had just started to return after the boom in the use of organochlorine pesticides, like DDT, following the Second World War. They had cruelly devastated populations by thinning the walls of their eggs, rendering entire clutches unviable. The impact was so severe that the bird’s demise was almost total. When he assumed his post, Doug had never seen a peregrine before, nor for that matter, a raven, and was invited by the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union to help monitor potential sites where the birds could have returned. He can still recall the first time he spotted a peregrine on Blue Scar crag near Arncliffe. ‘Zoom zoom,’ he says with a grin.
As well as the threat of pesticides, Doug soon realised the ongoing danger from gamekeepers on the large grouse shooting estates that stretch across the Dales. ‘When nests failed you couldn’t be sure if it was a natural occurrence or somebody had been there,’ he remembers. ‘That was the fear in those days. You would visit a place, and everything looked all right, then go next time, and there was no sign of the young.’
Doug’s main cause célèbre in Yorkshire has been the return of the red kite. He led the project reintroducing the birds to the Harewood House Estate near Leeds in 1999. The scheme has proven such a success that Doug was appointed MBE. While he continues to be heavily involved with the monitoring of the county’s burgeoning red kite population, he also still focuses on peregrines and the king of the corvids that he refers to as an ‘honorary raptor’ in the Dales.
Ravens followed the peregrines back to the Dales. A lone pair nested here for a spell in the mid 1980s and then, after a few years, suddenly disappeared. Their numbers have slowly increased since. In 2008 there were nine occupied breeding sites, of which six were successful. In 2015, 10 breeding sites were occupied, in nine of which 27 young were raised.
After reading in the Yorkshire Post about his raven monitoring work in late 2016, I emailed Doug asking if I could accompany him on his winter recording of raven nests. He agreed, but only on the condition that I kept the various locations secret. The ravens, he explained, still had many enemies in the Dales.
* * *
I meet Doug at his home in Harrogate on a murky December morning, and we drive out together into the Dales. He is wearing what I later discover to be his customary bird-watching outfit, a thick brown and olive woollen coat and trousers. Ravens are the earliest nesters of any bird but still wait until the worst of winter is over before laying their eggs, in all likelihood around February. At this stage of the season we are only planning to visit a few sites where they may be rebuilding their nests. If undisturbed, pairs will return year after year to the same nest, fortifying it with new materials ahead of each annual brood.
We also want to see how the ravens are interacting with the peregrines, with whom they often share the same nesting sites. Both species favour the steep, wild, limestone crags and old quarry faces of the Dales to rear their young. While the raven builds its impressive towering nests, the peregrine normally relies on tiny depressions in the cliff face known as scrapes, though Doug tells me he has previously recorded peregrines occupying raven nests.
In a 1962 study of the breeding densities of ravens and peregrines, the ecologist Derek Ratcliffe noted a ‘proximity tolerance’ limit between adjacent nesting pairs. Famously, this tolerance is often pushed to the point of downright hostility. I have heard and read stories of vicious dogfights between ravens and peregrines. One bed and breakfast owner in the New Forest told me that she and her husband would sit out on summer evenings watching the birds compete for a pylon, going at it hammer and tongs, flipping over one another to assume aerial domination. In his journal entry for 16 March 1924, the ornithologist Ernest Blezard describes another such encounter in the Scottish Borders, where a female peregrine stooped so furiously upon a pair of ravens that they were forced to take refuge under a boulder.
After stopping off at a working quarry where ravens have been nesting for the past three years, we visit an old, long-unoccupied limestone quarry where Doug is one of the very few people to possess a key. As we open the gate and walk in, he tells me that in all likelihood he is the first person to visit since the previous nesting season.
The sense of space and isolation here is total. A moonscape overlooked by the quarry face rising hundreds of feet above our heads. Wild strawberries have sprouted all over the gravel-bed floor, which is the size of several football pitches, and young alder and older gnarled hawthorn are slowly reforesting the earth. The ravens, Doug explains as we walk, nest on one side of the quarry face and the peregrines on the other. All we can hear are jackdaws caterwauling and darting about the quarry like a Greek chorus announcing our arrival, as we trudge over the gravel to set up a scope.
Doug soon finds the ravens’ nest, expertly camouflaged in spite of its size, on the top of a triangular stone plinth set into the cliff. It appears as though fresh sticks have been added to a construction that is already the size and shape of a beach ball, but there is no sign of the pair. We watch for a bit and then decide to move on to get a slightly better view. It is then that the piercing alarm call of the falcon strikes up. ‘Peregrine,’ Doug whispers, and we both freeze on the spot.
It is the male, known as the tiercel, that has taken off and seems to be flying in an awkward, laboured manner for such a graceful bird. The jackdaws rise to meet him in black wisps and he twists to avoid their parries. We realise the tiercel is carrying something in his talons, a vole or rabbit perhaps? Certainly, something large enough to weigh him down. The female peregrine, larger and with more brown in her plumage, is suddenly also up, slicing effortlessly through the cloud of jackdaws as though she belongs somehow to a different sky. She performs one graceful pirouette above our heads and then lands back down again on a grassy ledge close to their scrape. As she does so, a mass of white feathers explodes around her. We realise now what the fresh kill was. The peregrines will be eating pigeon for lunch.
That first day exploring the Dales together we only see one raven. Close to sunset with the winter shadows already lengthening, we are tramping over bracken high over Arncliffe, named the Eagle Cliff in Norse, when I hear the raven call. The bird is already over us, coasting on thermals high up like a buzzard, with its feathered fingers extended out like saw blades. We count four different tones of calls from this single bird alone: pruks, kronks, croaks and grunts. We are breathless when the raven is there, and despite being strangers that morning when it is gone, we clap each other on the shoulders. I look at Doug and he is grinning from ear to ear. ‘Seeing a raven always brings a smile to my face,’ he says. ‘It’s one of those wonders of nature.’
* * *
Another day a few months later and we are back in the abandoned quarry. It is early spring, and a thick bank of mucky, grey cloud has rolled in, squatting like a toad over the Dales. During the course of our drive that morning, we notice the lowland fields have flooded and the rain continues to fall in squalls. It is early March, and the ravens will, in all certainty, be on their nests by now.
They protect their clutches against such cold weather by lining their nests with sheep’s wool and laying the eggs deep within them. The female normally incubates the eggs for about 21 days before they hatch. Ravens can lay four to six eggs – quite large clutches relative to most birds – and fledge about three young. The family then stays together until early summer, the young ravens learning to fly off the quarry edges, before they disperse to join flocks of other juvenile ravens. When the young have left, the adult pair will begin securing their territory before the next breeding season.
When we pull up at the quarry we are surprised to see a For Sale sign outside. The site has been closed for 10 years after decades of intensive quarrying, but is now being touted for a ‘wide range of leisure or commercial uses’. Were it to be sold under such loose guidelines then the ecosystem that has built up in that time, the breeding ravens and peregrines, would all be under threat. An entire nature reserve once more juddering apart under jackhammer and pick.
As we begin walking into the quarry the whole place today seems muffled by cloud. Even the jackdaws are uncharacteristically silent.
We climb up the same steep slope to the barbed wire barrier, beyond which there are piles of rocks that have collapsed from the cliffs above us. It is only when we set up the scope that I notice Doug has cut his thumb on the barbed wire. Drops of blood roll down his nail and drip on to the floor.
A metre or so in front us is the body of a rabbit lying on its back. It is disembowelled, with its ribcage split, and opened up like a book. There are deep slashes through the fur and down to the tendons on its haunches, which suggests that ravens rather than peregrines have been at it. That, and the fact that unlike ravens, the falcons prefer their food as fresh as possible. I am excited to see the rabbit, as it seems confirmation that the ravens are nearby, but I notice Doug is giving it a suspicious look.
We have to be careful not to disturb the birds by straying too close, but the thick cloud makes it almost impossible to see. We set up the scope on the nest we had previously recorded on the stone plinth, and after several minutes of taking it in turns to squint through the eyepiece, we think we can see a silhouette in the bottom left of the nest. Because ravens are so secretive when they are upon their eggs, it is hard to tell whether or not the bird is actually there or if it is just a trick of the light. We do not want to go any closer, so instead, we sit and wait, taking it in turns to keep an eye on the nest.
The wind has picked up cold enough to prick tears in my eyes. The jackdaws have been stirred up now too, dipping about us in and out of the fog, yaffling their displeasure at our intrusion. Or is it us? Suddenly we hear the shriek of the peregrines on the opposing cliff edge and both of the birds are above us. We have the best sight of the female who rockets down to our left, and then rises up and out of the quarry in ascending circles of ever-increasing size and speed. Before she has risen above our heads, we can see the chestnut plumage on her top, which flashes into silver breast feathers and yellow talons the colour of egg yolk.
Doug looks back through the scope towards the raven and urges me to see for myself. This time I can see the raven’s head bobbing up and down on the nest as she warms her eggs. We are delighted that, for at least another year, ravens will be able to call this quarry home. Not wishing to disturb the bird any further, we walk back down towards the car. The rain has ceased and cloud thinned a little. Among the trees, I hear dunnock and goldfinch striking up to celebrate the short respite from the gloom. When we are at the car, I look back towards the nest through my binoculars. It is only a fleeting glimpse, but I see a large black bird – far bigger than the jackdaws – slip over the top of the quarry and glide down towards the direction of the nest. Behind it a rainbow has formed.
Doug admits to me a few weeks later, when we speak on the phone, that he was worried about the body of the rabbit we discovered and has been thinking about it ever since. I had presumed it was a corpse, which the ravens had picked up and carried back to their nest, but Doug raises another possibility. There is a public access footpath over the top of the quarry and, he says, it would have been easy for somebody to bait the rabbit with poison and sling it over.
This seems overly suspicious, paranoid even, but then Doug has witnessed enough in his 35 years monitoring birds in the Dales to make him so. For the past 20 years, North Yorkshire has been the worst county in England for bird of prey persecution. Near to some grouse moors, those monitoring birds have had their tyres slashed, while not long before I contacted Doug, seven red kites had been discovered (shot or poisoned) in the space of two months. Like scavenging red kites, ravens can be tricked by poisoned carcasses. At one raven nest in the Dales a few years ago, Doug recovered the bodies of three fledgling ravens. They were at that point so badly decomposed, that the laboratory technicians who were supposed to test the bodies for toxins, merely disposed of them instead.
Incidents of poisoning remain an all too familiar occurrence here. One red kite killed in 2016 was found to have ingested eight different types of poison, three of them banned substances. Shooting is similarly common. That same week we visited the nest, Doug had been alerted to the body of a red kite discovered in Nidderdale, the first that year. Scans revealed it had been peppered with shotgun pellets. So frustrated were some in the Nidderdale community with the ongoing persecution of raptors, that a local businessman offered up a £1,000 reward, prompting contributions from others to raise the total to £4,000. Doug is resolute over where he feels the blame lies, but admits in the closed world of gamekeepers it is unlikely that anybody would speak up.
‘For the most part, we’re talking grouse shooting areas,’ he says. ‘It’s as though anything that isn’t a grouse or is a potential threat to one is deemed the enemy. So long as gamekeepers remain in that form of gainful employment they are always going to maintain that view. It’s a subject that keeps coming up in conversation. How can somebody just stand there with a gun and deliberately destroy a beautiful creature like that? But we are talking here about people quite accustomed to killing. All the time they are trapping and snaring. They either have it to begin with or develop the particular mindset which completely disregards any concern for the creatures involved.’
I want to speak to a gamekeeper in the area and ask around a few old contacts from my time working in the Dales. But I am told, in no uncertain terms, that raptor persecution is a subject nobody who works on the big shooting estates will be willing to discuss with me – on the record at least. Eventually, I try a man called Brian Redhead, the former gamekeeper of Lord Lowther’s estate, which spans 30,000 acres of the Lowther and Eden Valleys to the west of the Yorkshire Dales. Now 74, Brian retired from his gamekeeping duties to become one of the most prominent raven breeders in the country. Four of the ravens that appeared in the Harry Potter films came from Redhead’s aviaries.
He is a devout wildlife enthusiast and lover of all birds. The morning we speak he has been out in the valleys watching black grouse lekking, and he is also one of the few people I have met, aside from the sheep crofters in Caithness, who will openly admit to having shot a raven. He did so back in 1962 when he first started out gamekeeping in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland, before the birds were protected by law.
‘I was 19 years old,’ he says, ‘and back then you did what you were told to do by a head keeper. I was standing in a rowing boat and he pointed out a raven on a clifftop. I shot it off the top of a cliff 200 yards away with a 2.2-calibre rifle. I felt pretty good at the time when I saw the cloud of feathers. It was a hell of a shot. I suppose I did regret it in a certain sort of way but that was what you did. It was part and parcel of the job.’
By his 30s, Brian had moved to Cumbria and began working on the Lowther Estate, which at the time was owned by the seventh Earl of Lonsdale and with a prominent grouse shoot. Brian was charged with running the Lowther Park shoot, which took place in the surrounds of the old Lowther Castle. In the grounds, he spotted a pair of ravens nesting on a 36-metre (120ft) Scots pine. ‘On a low ground shoot, they never cause problems,’ he says. ‘Up on the moorland they would definitely predate grouse nests. Back then the principle thing was anything that was considered vermin had to be got rid of.’
This time Brian was in charge and decided to keep the ravens where they were. Different eras have different views of conservation, as the old memoirs of Victorian and Edwardian lovers of wildlife attest to. Many of the authors of these books boast of stealing rare eggs, shooting birds and having them stuffed or dissected to further their understanding of various species. In Brian’s belief, there is no dichotomy between shooting and loving birds. He took his first bird egg at the age of eight and fired his first air rifle at 14. ‘You don’t have to be a mass murderer to like shooting,’ he says. ‘It’s not strictly true that gamekeepers aren’t supposed to like ravens. They may be a nuisance at times, but it’s not like you’re going around annihilating every raven you see.’
As well as gamekeeping, he has kept and bred numerous wild animals: Scottish wild cats, pine martins, choughs and eagle and snowy owls. His first raven arrived about 30 years ago and was a 21-year-old female given to him by a local wildlife park where she had become surplus to requirements. Brian kept her in a large aviary in his back garden and soon became intrigued. The more he studied the birds, the more he became convinced that they were not really birds at all. When he racks his brain for a comparison he eventually settles on gorillas.
‘When a gorilla looks at you it eyes you up and down just like another human would. It’s almost like it’s trying to read your mind. A raven has that same potential to understand what you’re going to be doing. I don’t think you get that kind of relationship with any other type of bird. You can see their intelligence.’
It was because of the ravens’ intellect that he decided to start breeding them. He deliberately chose not to hand-rear a newly fledged raven because of the strong emotional attachment between human and bird that he knew would ensue. Instead, he took satisfaction from getting the ravens to breed – and then sold the chicks on for £400 a piece. He estimates that over the years he has probably sold dozens. He also never gave his ravens a name – even the first female he owned. If you give them names, he says, that turns them into pets and he had far too much respect for his ravens to reduce them to that.
In June 2009 after he had retired from working on the Lowther estate, Brian went out to visit the aviaries, which he kept in a field about a mile or so from his house. He discovered that three of the four aviaries – each about 7m (24ft long) – had been damaged by vandals overnight. A door to one had been kicked off its hinges and a padlock broken, as well as another side panel smashed. The culprits had also cut through two-inch wire mesh on the roof of the aviaries and peeled it back. In total, he lost five pairs in the attack, one of the female birds dying of what he believes was a stress-related condition the following week. Despite offering a reward for information in the local paper, nobody ever came forward. Nowadays Brian keeps corn bunting, cirl bunting, hawfinch, redwing and numerous other species, but never again a raven.
‘I miss them a lot now,’ the old gamekeeper admits. ‘It’s just something you can’t put your finger on. Whenever I see a raven flying in the wild, I always wish I still had my ravens. They’re always with me, and they are larger than life. I love all birds, but the raven is just like …’ he trails off trying to seek the right words. ‘It’s difficult for me to say,’ he eventually says, with emotion pricking his voice.
* * *
It is a fine spring morning, and Doug and I are stood in a farm in Upper Wharfedale watching newborn lambs gambol in the fields while two ravens soar overhead. A radio blares in a barn behind us and to our immediate right is the corpse of a young calf that has died overnight. I look at its crumpled, lifeless form and see the imposing limestone crag in front of us reflected in its glassy, brown eye, which, despite the presence of the ravens, remains intact.
The juxtaposition of lambs and ravens instantly reminds me of the crofters in Caithness I met the previous spring, who complained of being under siege by juvenile mobs of the birds, but here, Doug tells me, they happily coexist. A pair of ravens have secured the crag as their own territory and nest, leaving the livestock well alone. Lapwing and curlew nest in the fields in between, and as we watch, we see both species of bird bursting up from the pastures. Skylark, too, lend their voices to this joyful chorus. The sun is shining bright enough to pick out the intricate faults in the limestone face; worn and cracked in patches and elsewhere smooth and gleaming like a weathered piece of bone. The scene is one of harmony in the uplands, of man, beast and bird all thriving together.
There are two raven nests on this crag, both imposing almost cylindrical structures that have been a home to the birds for many years. We are looking at the one on the far left of the crag for raven activity, but instead notice a jackdaw rifling about on the stone ledge and flying off with a twig. This means the ravens have, for whatever reason, vacated it this year. We scan along the crag, probably 30m (98ft) from the top to bottom with trunks of whitebeam and hornbeam jutting out at improbable angles, and focus instead on the second raven nest built deep inside the gloomy recesses of an overhang.
As I am watching, a raven – the male we presume – slips out from the nest and takes off into the sky. It barks loud commands, which echo across the crag, and as it flies accelerates at will. It reminds me of cyclists in the Tour de France when, during mountain descents, they drop back their shoulders and pull their arms in to become at one with the bike.
Once the raven has flown in a long lazy arc around the crag (in a supremely confident manner), it settles on the bare, startled branches of an old hornbeam at the top of the cliff face, which looks like it was struck by a bolt of lightning. The raven begins to preen itself with its beak, digging deep down into the shafts of its feathers. The birds tend to moult each year after the breeding season, and as it burrows and pecks it dislodges one large, primary feather. I follow the feather through my binoculars as it slowly drifts down to the base of the crag and settles in a tuft of grass at the bottom. Were it not for the breeding birds all about us, I would be tempted to climb over the drystone walls, that separate the fields from the crag, to try and retrieve it.
A potent symbolism is attached to the raven’s feather, whose barbs are deemed interwoven with prophetic fallacy. In The Tempest, Shakespeare has Caliban curse Prospero and Miranda:
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both!
As with so much raven mythology, there is a flipside to this. In other legends, the raven feather is regarded as a symbol of great fortune. Watching the feather float down the crag face reminds me of a Victorian parable I once read called The Raven’s Feather. In it, a starving orphan is praying, on Blackfriars Bridge, that he will not die of hunger when a raven’s feather drifts to his feet. The boy puts the feather in his hat as a keepsake and soon afterwards is adopted by a carpet maker called Mr Raven. The story quotes some of the numerous Bible scriptures that make mention of the raven including: ‘who provideth for the raven his food when the young ones cry unto God?’ from the Book of Job, and in Luke XII, ‘consider the ravens; for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them’. As with the old Viking legends of warriors releasing the birds at sea, Noah sent a raven from the ark to find land after his boat was grounded on Mount Ararat.
We follow the sun around the Dales that day. When it moves, so do we, driving in Doug’s Skoda between valleys rinsed by light. At lunchtime, we find ourselves watching a deep ravine where the ravens have nested before, munching our sandwiches in the shade of a hawthorn, and looking for movement in a nest between two juniper bushes far below.
The ground is studded with bright yellow clumps of celandine, and the air carries the smell of the fresh river water of Cowside Beck, snaking along the valley bottom several hundred feet below. The sun is warm on our faces and we sit on foam mats to stop the damp leeching up from the long grass into our trousers.
Suddenly a kestrel rises up hunting. We are above the bird, which hangs still in the air pumping its wings and adjusting its splayed tail feathers through tiny twitches. The kestrel dives several times, never aware of us watching its chestnut back and pale grey head. Doug explains it is most likely hunting for voles among the scree slopes. Because of its specialist ultraviolet vision, it can trace its prey from the urine streaks left behind on the ground – in a similar manner to a police helicopter using heat-seeking sensors to track criminals on the run. Over the next half hour, the kestrel floats back and forth down the valley. Elsewhere, out of sight, we hear a succession of three loud cheeps. It is a ring ouzel, the blackbird of the uplands; Doug’s first of the year and mine in a lifetime.
We talk a lot about a ‘sense of place’. As a gift after one of our days out together, Doug presented me with an old Ordnance Survey map of Stalling Busk (where I got married and saw my first raven in the Dales). He has never been abroad in his life, preferring instead to explore the constant changes within his own immediate vicinity. Aside from the Dales, he has another even more local patch, a scrubby area of heathland a short walk from his Harrogate home, which he is attempting to get recognised as a Site of Specific Scientific Interest (SSSI). It is an overlooked part of the countryside; in the distance are the giant golf balls of RAF Menwith Hill, a US military spying station. There are also seven wind turbines and the old barrack blocks of a Leeds University building once used to study cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. This patch of fringeland – the sort gobbled up by local authorities across the country for cheap housing development – sustains rush pasture, purple moor-grass and the odd tangled hawthorn twisted by the elements. Currently, skylarks have taken it over. He has also counted golden plover, snipe and hen harriers shooting over the scrub. No ravens yet, but he thinks their slow, cautious spread across and out from the Dales will continue.
* * *
Our final nest to check, before the sun sets, is a distant and wild part of the National Park. It was the first place in the Yorkshire Dales to record the return of the ravens in the 1980s and somewhere I had never previously been. We drive up a steep, narrow track as far as we can go and park a mile or so from the raven nest. As soon as we step out of the car we hear a cacophony of noise. There are at least two ravens calling out loudly from the direction of the crag we’re heading for and jackdaws gabbling, too. We shoulder the scope and our rucksacks and strike out quickly.
As we walk, I see a blue pick-up driving across the hill below where the ravens nest. The car disappears from view as the path drops down between some drystone walls. We see it again, this time it is parked up and there are three people and two dogs walking back across the field under the raven nest. In the sinking sunlight, there is a glint of steel and when we look through our binoculars it is clear they are holding a gun.
The ravens fly up from the nest. One of the bird’s tail feathers have previously been slashed in half, trimming down its diamond shape to a far sharper angle. Still, the raven appears unencumbered by flight as it circles around the crag calling out in short grunts to its partner. We crouch behind a drystone wall with our binoculars up and hold our breath at the proximity of the birds to the shooters. Fortunately, the entire crag is ablaze in sunlight warm enough for the clutch of unhatched eggs to incubate, even if the adults have temporarily left.
The shooting party, though, appears oblivious to the ravens and seems far more interested in the rabbits. The dogs rootle low and close to the turf in the hope of flushing them out of their warrens. While the gunman keeps the weapon hooked over the crook of his arm we never hear a shot. After waiting and watching from a safe distance until the sun begins to set behind the crag, we take our leave in the hope that the ravens will return to the nest before the evening is upon us. I look back several times as we walk back to the car and still see the shadow of the birds wheeling above the crag, they appear both an integral part of the landscape and something fragile within it.
Doug emails a few weeks later to tell me he has discovered three young ravens in the nest. They are already well grown and looking healthy. The adults disturbed by the shooters that day had returned to care for their brood. It is a relief to read. For even in the wildest Dales, theirs is a hair-trigger existence.