I have the moor to myself. It’s a clear, cold day, the hard overnight frost beginning to yield, the sky a vitreous blue. A kestrel hangs up there, hovering, higher than I’ve ever seen a kestrel hover – skylark height. I clamber up the cropped grass slope that will take me to the moor proper.
A first-winter gull – a common gull, I think, but I am a bad guller – quarters the territory with extraordinary concentration, methodically, studiously. Every now and then it stoops to take something from the grass, but I can’t see what. I can only think it’s after worms or other soil fauna turned up by moles – there are molehills, dozens of them, all over these fields.
A stonechat pair zip across my path – they, too, are on molehill patrol – and I watch for a while as they flit among the knees of the sheep in the next field.
A red kite is following me. It stays over my shoulder, riding the light wind deftly if not elegantly, all the way up the slope and across the moor; it’s still with me, tacking watchfully to the south-west, when I stop by a grouse butt to eat my sandwich. On my way down I find scraps of grey fur beside a stone waypost. They’ve been neatly plucked; that is, something has been deftly eaten. A squirrel. I don’t think a kite could easily take a squirrel. A buzzard, I bet, or possibly a tawny owl.
Raptors are always the most visible living creatures up here, besides the heather and moss, the dog-walkers and livestock (by which I mean the grouse as well as the sheep). There’s one more for me on the path back down. I’m watching what might be a robin in the middle distance but it seems too jumpy, too furtive to be a robin, when something brown and fiercely no-nonsense rockets out from behind the drystone, cuts across my shadow, and makes for the copse across the quarry. A female sparrowhawk.
The robin turns out to be a robin.
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