Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve always wanted to try falconry. It is something that I have been looking at for years, but never really had the opportunity to see it at first hand. When I was kindly invited by a hawking friend in Edinburgh to spend a day with him in the hills of the Scottish Borders, I could hardly refuse. Keith flies a two year old female goshawk by the name of Ember after blue hares on a major shooting estate near Duns, and I set off to see him this morning with extremely high hopes. Noticing that the hills around the Chayne received a thin veil of snow overnight, I was hoping that I would come across similarly crisp and chilly conditions on the East side of the country. Sadly, I was wrong.

Pulling up to our meeting place high up in the rolling hills overlooking  the North Sea, a dense fog of cloud smothered everything more than a hundred yards away. Unperturbed, Keith produced a stunning and immaculately turned out goshawk from a box in the boot of his car. Within minutes, we were off over the heather.

Wet weather can gum up a hawk’s feathers, destroying the efficiency of each wingbeat and forcing the bird to work far harder. You wouldn’t have known it when, within ten minutes, we flushed a hare from a distance of less than fifteen feet. Before it had gone ten yards, Ember slammed into it from behind and they both tumbled to a standstill in the deep heather. Her talons had locked into its neck and skull, and she set about tufting away the thick white hair with a terrible precision, never breaking the skin but leaving it as bare and bald as if it had been shaved. The wind began to drive sleet at us and we headed down to a shed at the bottom of the valley.

Twice on the way down, we flushed other hares, but they turned at the last minute and slipped away uphill. The wet weather was having a real effect on Ember by this point, and while the blue hares pranced awkwardly away when they were first flushed, they suddenly seemed to realise what danger they were in and turned at precisely the right moment before it was too late. With a wet tail, she couldn’t quite turn in time to take in the sudden change in direction, and both times she landed sulkily in the heather while they bounced away unscathed.

After half an hour drying out in the barn, we pushed back to the car, flushing one or two other hares as we went. They are in the middle of the transition between brown and white at the moment, and many were various shades of grey, blue and beige.

Shortly after the break, Ember dispatched one of this year’s hares over a slight rise so that I couldn’t see, but it too was slung into the game bag on my back. On the final walk back to the car, we spotted a pure white hare lurking in the heather off to our left. Keith stalked it until he was fifteen yards away, at which point it bolted fantastically well over the long, shaggy heather. Within thirty yards, Ember had bound on it, somersaulting both of them to a standstill amongst a patch of recently burnt heather stalks. It was a fantastic burst of activity, made all the more special by the fact that we were dealing with the iconic “white mountain hare”, one of the most beautiful British mammals.

It had been a brilliant day, but given that the weather was so wet, not having a great deal of visibility was a little frustrating. Soaking wet, I drove home in a state of tremendous excitement, hardly noticing that the Sat Nav was taking me through some fantastic black grouse country. I only realised where I was when I spotted an old blackcock lurking under a fence on the verge just a few feet from the car: the cherry on the cake.