Wild Hares and Hummingbirds by Stephen Moss Page B

through the dense grassy verges, they leave a constant trail of urine to mark their tiny territories. But this convenient messaging service has deadly consequences. The urine is visible in ultra-violet light; and kestrels, like other birds, are able to see light at wavelengths invisible to us. So the hovering kestrel isn’t simply watching for the voles to move, but can also follow their telltale urine trails, and use these to locate its prey.
    Once it has spotted the vole, the kestrel folds up its wings in an instant and drops like a stone to the ground, feet first, to grab the unsuspecting rodent in its needle-sharp talons. Using this hovering technique to hunt may be highly effective, but it also takes up precious energy resources. So during the winter months these little falcons employ a different strategy. Instead of hovering, they perch on the many telegraph poles that line the back lanes of the parish, and simply drop down onto their prey.
    The kestrel’s main hunting method gave it the folk name ‘windhover’, made famous by the nineteenth-century Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Characteristically, the rhythm of the verse appears to mimic the actual movement of the bird:
    I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
    his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
    High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
    In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, As and gliding a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
    and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind .
    Dedicated ‘to Christ our Lord’, the poem is perhaps the best-known example in the English canon of a wild creature being used as a religious image. But whatever your own beliefs, surely no one can fail to be stirred by the sheer energy and power of the verse.
    As a devout Catholic, Hopkins might have been shocked by an even older name for the kestrel: the wind fucker, as in this observation from the late sixteenth century:
    The kistrilles or windfuckers that fill themselues
    with winde, fly against the winde euermore .
    In The Oxford Book of British Bird Names , Professor W. B. Lockwood discusses the origins of this apparently vulgar folk name. He explains that when it was first used, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the word was only just beginning to acquire its modern connotations. So it is simply being used in its original sense, meaning ‘wind beater’.
    But whatever we call this stunning bird, for the next few months, motorists here and across the whole of the country will enjoy a fleeting glimpse of this most effective hunter, hovering above the byways and trunk roads of lowland Britain.

    I HAVE, ON my bookshelf, a small, squat volume entitled A Field Guide to Birds’ Nests . Published in 1972, and written by the late Bruce Campbell and the doyen of living ornithologists, James Ferguson-Lees, it has long been out of print. Which is a pity, for this is the bible of the long-forgotten art of nest-finding; a skill that, having been built up over hundreds of years, vanished in a couple of decades. This was thanks to the Bird Protection Acts, which meant the death knell for egg-collecting.
    Of course, collecting birds’ eggs is not only illegal, it is immoral too. To interfere with nature’s most important process – the ability of a wild creature to pass on its genes to future generations – is not something anyone can or should condone. Thanks to our bird protection laws, egg-collecting is now dead and buried, apart from a tiny hard core of obsessive and misguided individuals who continue to rob the nests of rare birds.
    But sadly, the opprobrium heaped on egg-collecting had unintended consequences for the innocent pastime of finding birds’ nests. This now is not just deeply unfashionable, but has disappeared off the radar of almost all birders and naturalists, including myself.
    It wasn’t always so. Mine was the last