Well, if it doesn’t take too long, I may be able to show you a very remarkable sight.” So said Mr Nesbitt, and he showed them all right. Mike and Chips were in raptures. So was I, as I turned the pages of The Young Bird Watchers, eaten up with envy and wonder.
Buzzard! Imagine seeing a bird as rare as that. A buzzard was a fabulous exoticism, a throwback to better times, a great soaring predator that told us of times long gone, times when life was wilder and less circumscribed, times when fabulous and ferocious creatures played a real part in our lives. How I longed to see one.
“Right,” said Chips. “I’m ready. Get a move on, Mike. There’s a spiffing lunch in the basket.” It was just after a spiffing lunch that I saw my first buzzard. It happened not long after I had read of Mike and Chips’s epiphany. I was 10. We had eaten on a beach, a lunch no doubt accompanied by lashings of Tizer or Corona cherryade, and then proceeded by boat up the Fal Estuary. And then we saw them.
I can’t remember who first noticed them. These days I am inclined to give my father credit for them, out of simple politeness. But no matter: there they were, high in the sky, gliding with the same impossible insouciance that so thrilled Mike and Chips.
For the first time, I was a real birdwatcher. I had seen a real buzzard.
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All this will come as a matter of hilarity to anyone who is both young and tuned in to nature. You see buzzards all the time these days. Common as sparrows. At my sister’s place near the Forest of Dean there is almost always a buzzard in the sky. You can hear their wild, high, mewing cry without feeling that you are on the edge of the impossible. I have seen 70 buzzards roosting in one of the fields; nobody but me felt it necessary to pass a remark.
But I have seen two buzzards this week, and you will forgive me if I do pass a remark. Because it really was amazing, thrilling, startling. It was at least some of those things I felt on the Fal all those years ago. Because, you see, I was at home. I was in Suffolk. And here, a buzzard is still an event.
I saw a buzzard on the western side of the county, from that peerless hide, the back of a horse. And then, a couple of days later, I saw one above my own place. Both gladdened the heart, but there was a proprietary feeling about the home bird. I sent out an urgent radio message: stay! Breed! Raise more buzzards! Gladden my skies, eat the bunnies that have taken over my top paddock; but spare the chickens — is that a deal? The buzzard flicked a wing, made a stall-turn, resumed its dihedral and cruised on. Message received and understood; or perhaps not. Never mind. Great to see them.
Buzzards have had a weird history in this country. Humans did their best to wipe them out in the 19th century as part of the all-out war on predators that raged for almost 200 years. It was thought that the countryside would be a better place if there were no predators at all, and eventually the object was very close to being achieved.
Buzzards had a bit of a let-off during the two world wars, when ammunition and men tended to be used for purposes other than slaying birds. But by the beginning of the Fifties buzzards were reduced to relict populations in Scotland, Wales and the wilder part of southwest England — places such as Dartmoor, where Mike and Chips saw their buzzards, and so joyfully identified them on page 118 of the Observers’ Book of Birds.
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From there, things got very much worse. The great myxomatosis outbreak of the early Seventies almost wiped out the rabbit population, and rabbits are the buzzard’s food of choice. After that, as pesticides entered the food chain, the alpha predators suffered and were unable to breed. Small wonder, then, that Mike and Chips were so excited; small wonder that I was so delighted. Buzzards were heading towards extinction. To see a buzzard was a real privilege.
But now this is a privilege anyone can share. They are back. Since 2000 buzzards have resumed nesting in every county in England. The rabbits have recovered (tell me about it), and harmful pesticides have been made illegal in this country. (They are still widely used across the world, though.) Gamekeepers are now fewer and wiser.
There is a growing awareness that buzzards eat bunnies and carrion, and that they don’t affect pheasant numbers. Their illegal persecution slowed down, and the buzzards began to spread from their ancient fastnesses and move east — towards Suffolk. It took longer than expected. This was partly because the exploding rabbit population meant that the land could carry more buzzards, so there was no initial need for them to spread.
But it was also because the chain of keepered estates that divides the West from the East created a kind of dam. Birds of prey are still persecuted: there were 210 reports of this crime last year, and that is obviously just the tip of the iceberg. But all the same, the buzzard’s spread has continued. Ten years ago, there was the first breeding record in Suffolk since 1922.
The buzzard’s existence in Britain, and in Suffolk, in particular, is a triumph of resilience. Their resurgence shows a measure of newly acquired human wisdom. I look forward to the days when a buzzard above my rooftops no longer excites me. I look forward to being blas?: oh, how dreary, another buzzard. Now for a spiffing lunch.