John McEwen

Raptor rapture

With eagles now apparently the our best defence against drones, James Macdonald Lockhart’s Raptor is a timely survey of Britain’s elusive birds of prey

The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk swept all the prizes; and James Macdonald Lockhart has already won a £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Award for Non-Fiction to fund research for his debut. It is of the quest variety, recently popularised by William Fiennes, Horatio Clare, Mark Avery and others.
J.A. Baker, who wrote the one-hit Sixties wonder The Peregrine, is modern father of the genre.

Macdonald Lockhart describes his aim:

Fifteen birds of prey, 15 different landscapes. A journey in search of raptors, a journey through the birds and into their worlds. That is how I envisaged it. Beginning in the far north, in Orkney, and winding my way down to a river in Devon. A long journey south, clambering down this tall, spiny island, which is as vast and wondrous to me as any galaxy.

He is coy about his travel arrangements but seems mostly to have driven, then hiked and camped. Raptors have enjoyed a modest revival since the ban of certain insecticides, but by their nature they are scarce and extremely elusive. Of Pandionidae (osprey), Accipitridae (broad-winged harrier, eagle, buzzard, red kite) and Falconidae (peregrine, sparrowhawk etc.) only widespread buzzards, kestrels and kites are easily seen. ‘Most of the time out looking for the birds was spent not finding them,’ Macdonald Lockhart confesses. In the case of the wasp-grub-dependent summer migrant, the honey buzzard, he drew a complete blank; but then there are only 60 breeding pairs in the whole country. Even so, that is more than another summer migrant, the Montague’s harrier.

To redress this lack of material he has tacked on the north-south journey of his hero, the 19th-century Scottish naturalist and artist William MacGillivray (1796–1852), to his own.

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