Cats or Buzzards?

Courier column for 30 January

Survival seemed as likely as a flying Moggie

I was out in the field splitting logs the other day when I heard a distinctive ‘meow’. Which was curious because I don’t have a cat. And Myrtle was with me.  Although she has nothing particularly against felines, they tend to give her a wide berth. Which may be down to her rather distinctive doggy smell. (I’ve spoken to her before about personal grooming but it doesn’t seem to have much effect.)

So I looked up and there, sure enough, was the buzzard I was half expecting. Just overhead. But not simply one; FIVE of the magnificent birds.  Swirling round and round and up and down and meowing merrily.  Never before had I seen so many so close. In fact, up until a few years ago, we didn’t see them at all. Buzzards had been all but wiped out over large swathes of the UK--by a combination of myxomatosis. organochlorine and predatory game keepers.

For non-ornithologists, the buzzard is a raptor, that’s to say a bird of prey of the accipitridae family that includes hawks, eagles, harriers and kites (but not falcons or ospreys).  They hunt animals ranging from rabbits to earthworms. In the early 1800s they were common throughout Britain, but decades of decline followed. Gamekeepers, mistakenly thinking they were a threat to shoots, killed them off in all but Scotland, Wales and a few areas of western England. Then in the mid 1950s the rabbit population, their main food source, was devastated by disease while widespread use of agricultural pesticides destroyed their ability to reproduce.

Since 2000, however, their numbers have recovered and they are now back as the most common bird of prey in Britain. I certainly remember seeing them for the first time in Kent around that date, a solitary pair, circling over the woodland at our community orchard. Since then, year by year, I’ve spotted more and more soaring over spinneys and fields. 

Yet they are still under threat from some quarters. Only last year a gamekeeper in Norfolk was prosecuted for poisoning ten buzzards and a sparrowhawk. They were found in a sack near two types of banned pesticides.  He was given a suspended sentence.

So next time you hear a meow in the sky, look up. It’s probably not a flying moggie, but one of our most magnificent birds that’s beaten off all efforts by man to exterminate it.