Flying With the Birds

Leo Jones

Since earliest childhood I had two main absorbing interests, Natural History, especially birds, and flying, in all its forms.

I grew up on the edge of a small town of three thousand people in a rural par of the English Midlands. When other kids were kicking a ball around in a field or piece of waste ground, I was wandering round the fields and woods and climbing trees looking for birds nests, not to rob them as many small boys would, but simply for the pleasure of finding them and learning about them. I was an ardent conservationist before I'd ever heard of the word. For a few years I did collect single examples of birds eggs, finding their beauty and variety hard to resist, but in my early teens I took up bird ringing, (or banding as it's called in the USA), under the guidance of a keen local ornithologist, which was a far more constructive and instructive form of "surrogate hunting".

By this time my passion was birds of prey. I was a "wannabe" falconer, and acquired several falconry books, various falconry accessories, and an amount of falconry knowledge. I never did acquire a falcon though, and when I first found a kestrel's nest with five youngsters in, I hadn't the heart to steal one of them!

My interest in birds of prey was made all the more poignant for me by the parlous state of raptor and owl populations in Britain at that time, in the late 1960s. After centuries of senseless persecution in the name of gamekeeping interests, raptor populations in Britain had begun to recover after the Protection of Birds Act of 1954, in a more enlightened climate, only to be decimated by the effects of pesticides. Organochlorine residues in dead sheep had turned up in golden eagle populations in Scotland, severely affecting their breeding success.

Ospreys, exterminated in Britain in the early part of the century, had returned to breed in the mid '50s, but the handful of pairs that had established themselves in Scotland, against the depredations of egg thieves and morons with guns, were now laying eggs with shells so thin because of DDT that the parent birds broke them during incubation. And the crowning glory of avian perfection, in my eyes, the magnificent peregrine falcon, had seen its numbers decline from over 600 pairs to less than a tenth of this, for the same reason. Even once common small raptors such as sparrow hawks, kestrels and owls were becoming increasingly scarce.

The increasing industrialization of agriculture, and the terrible outbreak of Dutch Elm disease which destroyed one of the most characteristic features of the English countryside, - the millions of hedgerow elms with their abundant nesting cavities, - were also taking their toll. For several years, until I went away to university to study zoology, I helped assess and monitor local populations of raptors, finding nests and banding hundreds of young kestrels, barn owls, tawny owls, and little owls.

One cannot be interested in birds, especially birds of prey, without wondering what it would be like to fly, as they do, and what they feel and think as they are flying. Watching an eagle or buzzard effortlessly soaring the air currents above cliffs and hills, or climbing in a thermal until it disappears into the vast empyrean blue sky, who has not wished that they could join them? I had always wanted to fly, and when I wasn't out exploring the countryside round about, I would as likely as not be either making model aeroplanes or reading about flying.

Of course as a child the more martial aspects of flying appealed to me; I read everything I could about aviation in WW1 and WW2, and Baron von Richtofen's victories and the Battle of Britain were fought out in frozen plastic miniature on my bedroom ceiling. My ambitions of becoming a fighter pilot were shot down in flames at the age of twelve when I had to begin wearing glasses, and lack of money and opportunity prevented any furthering of my flying ambitions. University and other interests came, but I never stopped looking skyward at birds and aeroplanes.

Then one fine summer's day, a few days after my university graduation, while walking along the steep grassy Malvern hills near my home, I came across several people hang gliding. I watched, enthralled, while they took off and flew, actually flew! down to the grassy common several hundred feet below. One or two even soared above the hill! No engine, no noise, no pollution, - this was flying in its purest form. I knew, right there and then, that I would have to do this.

Even a hang glider pilot requires some money however, so first a job, then travel intervened until finally in the late summer of 1979 I took lessons and learned to fly a hang glider. I was now living near the coast of North Devon, in the south west peninsula of Britain, a place of wild and rugged cliffs, secret coves and lonely beaches , battered in winter by Atlantic gales, a rural backwater whose sparse population increased several fold for a few weeks in summer when the tourists, or "grockles" as the locals call them, arrived.

This part of England was the home of my favorite boyhood author, the late Henry Williamson, who initially became famous for his animal stories, written during the 1920s. The best known of these was "Tarka the Otter", but my personal favorite was "Chak-Chek", the peregrine falcon. Williamson was an acute observer of wildlife, and observed the peregrines on Baggy Point, a wild rocky headland on the north coast of Devon, for many years. His story of Chak-Chek, and the eyrie on "Bone ledge", four hundred feet above the Atlantic breakers, is a wonderful classic, which "peregrinizes" as much as it anthropomorphizes.

I had spent many hours over the previous year sitting on top of Baggy Point, or scrambling down a precipitous trail to gaze up at that formidable cliff, watching the ravens and jackdaws (small crows) performing aerial ballet in the wind, and the familiar cast from Williamson's stories, the herring gulls, oystercatchers, rock doves and seals. The leading character however, was absent; no peregrines had nested on Baggy Point for over twenty years, and although peregrines were increasing in numbers since the banning of most organochlorine pesticides ten years previously, they remained a rare bird in southern Britain.

But one day, in late April 1979, I was sitting on a rocky promontory looking back at the cliff, when a slate gray anchor shape rose vertically in the updraft in front of me and began circling above me with loud "kek-kek-kek-kek-kek" cries. I was enthralled, it was a male peregrine, or tiercel, but clearly he wasn't happy with me there. Why? I studied the cliff face and its nooks and crannies, but could see no sign of any nest site. But this meant nothing, peregrines do not build nests but merely lay their eggs in the dirt on a cliff ledge, or in the abandoned nest of a larger bird. And peregrines do not normally get upset at humans, unless you are near an active eyrie. And Chak-Chek was making it very plain that my presence was unwelcome. I decided to leave the area quickly, If peregrines were trying to nest here I didn't want to disturb them.

Cautious observation over the next few weeks confirmed that peregrines were indeed nesting there again. I informed the local chapter of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and we monitored the nest, from which two young were fledged that summer. (Since then the peregrine population of the British has rebounded, with over 1000 pairs, probably more than there have been at any time in the last two hundred years, nearly every suitable territory is now occupied, and peregrines nest on buildings in many cities.)

In April of the next year I finally bought my first aircraft, a hang glider fittingly named a Falcon, though it was anything but falcon shaped. Nowadays it would be considered a quaint, possibly somewhat dangerous antique, but at that time it was only a couple of years from being considered the cutting edge of hang gliding technology! It had a 200 square foot single surface sail, a 90 degree nose angle, and three little straight battens in each wingtip. I flew it hanging in a seated harness with an orange plastic seat. It wasn't much, as flying machines go, but it would fly, it was mine, it only cost $250 second hand, and hey, this was pioneering aviation, hang gliding had only recently been rediscovered since the Wright brothers initial flights!

The North Devon Sailwing Club had six members, a certain amount of experience, and access to some beautiful coastal flying sites. Our prime site was Woolacombe Down, a steep, westward facing, six hundred foot high hill overlooking Woolacombe Bay and the Atlantic, with Lundy Island in the distance. (From where two cream breasted peregrines were sent every year for the Royal Mews, for the Court of Henry Ist, seven hundred years ago.)

At the foot of the hill were sand dunes and a huge broad beach three miles long, and on top were large flat green Devon pastures, bordered by drystone walls. At the north end of the beach was the village of Woolacombe, and at the south end the imposing cliff fringed headland of Baggy Point thrust a mile west into the ocean. Smooth westerly breezes blowing up the face of Woolacombe Down gave easy lift to buzzards and gulls, kestrels and ravens, and even to fledgling hang glider pilots.

The previous September I had obtained my initial pilot rating for hang gliders, having made the required minimum of fifteen flights, all beginning at the top of a hill and ending at the bottom. The highest flight was from a hill three hundred feet high. But here the people walking on the beach, a mile away and six hundred feet lower, looked like ants. I made two flights from the top of the hill to the beach, and then on my third flight, following the advice of an experienced pilot, instead of flying straight out from the hill as before, and through the great wave of rising air created by the twenty mile an hour wind being deflected upwards by the slope, I turned to remain within it, flying parallel to the hill. I flew thus for a few hundred yards before turning back, and realized as I did so, with shocked delight, that I was two hundred feet or more above my take off point. I was really flying! I was soaring, like a bird! I flew for twenty minutes above that green hill ablaze with gorse flowers, and out over the fresh and pristine beach and over the breakers a thousand feet below.

Gulls cruised by me and below me, with leisurely wingbeats they pursued their own journeys, ignoring me. I saw the world as they did in their three dimensional freedom, with distance shrunk to a glide away, and humans, confined to the earth's surface, largely irrelevant. After twenty minutes in the chill April wind my bare hands were getting too cold to continue, and so I landed, as lightly as the proverbial thistle down, on the thick green sward on top of Woolacoombe Down.

Thus I became a hang glider pilot. The ornithologist in me was thrilled. There were always birds soaring somehow on Baggy or Woolacombe, and the more soarable it became the more birds there were. Herring gulls, great black backed gulls, lesser black backed gulls, kestrels, sparrow hawks, buzzards (the European equivalent of a red tailed hawk), as well as the smaller fry such as swallows, swifts and skylarks, all would use the rising air to hunt, or to commute, or even, I suspected, just for fun. Even cormorants, more usually seen skimming the waves or sitting, wings spread out to dry, on rocks at the foot of the cliffs would sometimes come sailing along, and gray herons, heads tucked in, and wings outspread, would show that they knew all about ridge lift and soaring, and how to get from estuary to heronry on any given day with the minimum of flapping.

Not only was I up there with them but for the most part I seemed to be completely accepted by them. They seemed largely indifferent to this large strange, slow and clumsy bird. A small V formation of gulls would come along and pass twenty feet below me with barely a glance. I could hover above a hovering kestrel and be completely ignored. Sometimes a buzzard would come and fly twenty or thirty feet away from my wingtip and study me for a few seconds, before drifting away. Sometimes it would be so close that I could see the yellow eye, the tucked in feet, individual feathers. It was immediately apparent that the birds reaction to me, up here on a hang glider, was completely different from their reaction to people on the ground. Most birds are wary of people, to a greater or lesser degree. They have good reason to be. But up here in the sky, to them I seemed to be just a large, harmless, slow and clumsy flying creature. Which is exactly what I was.

If I went out of my way to be obnoxious, like diving at passing seagulls, (yes, I confess I did this once or twice, I'm sorry), they would simply do a sort of quick twist and dive out of the way, much as a cyclist avoiding a drunken pedestrian might do, then continue casually on their way. It was obvious, to creatures that had evolved in the same skies as peregrine falcons, that I was no threat to them.

One day, a few weeks later, in late May, I was sitting five hundred feet above the top of Woolacombe Down, almost motionless above the ground, as my forward speed was matched by the westerly breeze, gazing down at today's pattern of ripples and puddles in the half mile wide stretch of beach exposed by the falling tide, when a familiar gray anchor shaped bird appeared suddenly two hundred feet below, climbed with no apparent effort or movement of wings, and parked ten feet off my left wingtip.

Even as I registered the fact that it was a peregrine, another one, somewhat larger, curved up in front of me and disappeared above my wing. The tiercel, just off my wingtip, held station and looked at me. I looked back at him in wonder and disbelief, saw his dark eye and bright yellow feet, the creamy barred breast and black moustachial stripe. I could see the allula, the feathered "thumb" of a bird's wing, automatically popping out, working to keep the wing from stalling, exactly as slats do on the leading edge of some aircraft wings, and individual feathers lifting on his back in the tiny turbulent eddies produced as he slowed to near stall to match my speed.

All this I took in as he hung there, a scant twenty five feet away for a few seconds, before smoothly and effortlessly he climbed up and above me. I saw the pair briefly, as they cruised away down the ridge towards Woolacombe, the female markedly bigger than her mate. I felt privileged beyond words. How many people had ever done this, flown with peregrines? Few indeed, I knew, because hang gliding was so new. And while a pilot in an aeroplane or glider might have glimpsed a peregrine, he could not experience what I had. Only in a hang glider could one do this. And it was obvious that the birds were curious, but neither afraid nor upset. I only wished that they had stayed longer, or that I could follow and somehow keep up with them, but I also realized that the experience was all the richer for being on their terms.

This proved to be the first of many similar experiences that summer. Nearly everyone who flew hang gliders there saw peregrines at very close quarters, and whenever I flew I was almost disappointed if the birds didn't put in an appearance. Of course it was very likely that they saw me far more often than I saw them. You cannot see upwards through the sail of a hang glider, and I often saw a peregrine flying just above another glider, its pilot oblivious to the company. We did not, of course fly very often, hang gliding is dictated by weather and time available, and hang glider pilots are remarkably few in number, (it seems to us), but it almost seemed that whenever we flew, the peregrines would speed over from their nesting area on Baggy, a mile away, to look at us. To them, casually cruising along at 60 mph or more, it was a mere minute away.

Flying with them made me realize how vast an area of sky is available to them on a casual daily basis; perhaps Williamson had been right when he wrote about Chak-Chek racing across to Lundy, fifteen miles away, "because he fancied the blood of a sea parrot (puffin)". Why not? It must be simple enough for them. The very name peregrine, after all, means "wanderer".

I learned to distinguish between the male and female quite easily, not only was she larger but much darker. The male was also much more curious, often coming extremely close, while she seldom came closer than fifty feet or so. They never showed any signs of aggression or alarm, and I had seen the treatment meted out to ravens, buzzards, and gulls that strayed into the airspace near their nest, and witnessed the falcons' obvious and very vocal alarm when humans got too close. I had the feeling, (and though I realize that this sounds very anthropomorphic, other hang glider pilots who had flown with them said the same thing), that they found us somewhat intriguing and entertaining. Perhaps this sounds far fetched, but playful behavior has been observed in peregrines many times. Meinertzhagen in his classic book on predatory birds, "Pirates and Predators", recounts the story of a wild peregrine regularly playing with a kite being flown by a person. However we wondered how they would react to us if we flew along the cliffs of Baggy near to their nest. In a suitable northerly wind, when Woolacombe was unflyable for us, this was also a very soarable site.

Although we couldn't fly right over the cliff where the nest was, we could fly to within a couple of hundred yards of it. The RSPB was already having problems with rock climbers on the cliffs, and we didn't want to add to the disturbance. Hang glider pilots are nearly always strong environmentalists. But there was a mile of cliffs to fly without going near the nest site, so we decided that we could fly and avoid that end of the cliffs, and watch for any signs of distress from the falcons. Happily and predictably perhaps, there was none; they continued to come and go amongst us as before. I am quite certain that they realized that we were no threat to them.

Later in the year five peregrines paid me a flying visit one afternoon as I soared above the cliffs, three of them with brown feathers and streaked breasts, the young of that year's brood. They joined me briefly , staring curiously at this huge inoffensive flying creature, before climbing past me and disappearing. I knew that they would disperse that winter and travel who knew where. I hoped that they would come back to Devon and reoccupy other cliffs where their kind had been missing for so long, and that perhaps I would get to fly with them again one day.

I flew with the peregrines the following summer, they nested in the same spot, an old raven's nest on a ledge a hundred feet below the clifftop, beneath an overhang, three hundred feet above a sea cave filled with crashing Atlantic breakers. It was a formidable nest site, but easily observable from a rocky promontory, reached by a scramble, not for vertigo suffers. The cliff formed a great amphitheater, into which the sea crashed relentlessly. The air was always full of birds, large numbers of herring gulls bred on this headland, and flocks of jackdaws, as well as ravens, cormorants, shags, great black backed gulls, fulmar petrels, black guillemots, swifts and rock pipits. But the peregrines were the absolute masters, nothing moved without their let, no other bird was their equal in their utter mastery of the air. Surprisingly, though they would frequently make it clear who ruled the place to the pair of ravens who nested less than two hundred feet away, and to errant buzzards and gulls who might venture too close, they were not tyrants, and I never saw them make a kill in the vicinity of the nest. The clifftop above the nest provided clear evidence of their efficiency as killers though, being littered with the feathers of many species of birds, both large and small, partly plucked here before being taken to the young.

That was fifteen years ago, but I still fly hang gliders, and I still watch birds, and since those days I have had many memorable aerial encounters with them. In Britain the bird most commonly met with while soaring is the common buzzard, (Buteo buteo). They too display the same lack of fear, and sometimes curiosity, towards hang gliders. I am fairly sure that this is because they do not associate hang gliders with humans, as a rule. One summer's day I had taken off from a hill in central Wales and had worked my way cross country towards the Severn estuary, forty miles or so to the south. When I arrived there I was faced with a four or five mile glide across mud flats and water to reach the other side, but I was down to less than 2000 ft above the ground, - not enough to glide across. I hunted around for a thermal, but to no avail, and I continued to descend until at less than 1000 ft I spotted a buzzard circling a few hundred yards away. I flew over to join it, and sure enough there was a thermal and up we went together.

The buzzard didn't seen to object to my presence at all, and round and round we went, for the most part less than fifty yards apart, until we were almost up to cloudbase at 5000 ft, giving me plenty of height to glide across the river and continue my flight. I was so pleased that I called out, "Hello, Buzzard", as it came past. Poor bird!

What a shock I must have given it, for it instantly closed its wings and dived vertically away, only checking its dive briefly a thousand feet or more below me before continuing until out of sight. It was a sad comment, I thought, on the human race.

I had reason to be grateful to buzzards for finding thermals for me on many occasions, but one stands out. I was in the Alps, in the south of France, about to take part in a hang gliding competition. It was a practice day, a few days before the start, and we were trying to get used to the geography, terrain, and conditions, all of which were very different from that which we were used to in Britain. I had taken off at 5000 ft, and quickly found a thermal up to nearly 10,000ft. I'd never been that high before, and was admiring the incredible view across snow capped peaks, as I flew along the ridge, high above it. After a few miles I decided to turn around, as the landing field was back the other way, near the little town where we were staying. As soon as I did so the abundant lift changed to abundant sink. My sink alarm sounded continuously, - 700ft/minute down! I flew faster to get through the sinking air as quickly as possible, but there seemed to be no end to it.

The trees on the ridge, which had seemed so far below a few minutes earlier, were rapidly getting closer, even as the landing field, still several miles away, seemed to get further away. The sink went on and on, I sank below the top of the ridge and had to fly around trees as I hugged the side of the valley, desperately searching for lift. The few fields along the valley floor all seemed horribly small and sloping and dotted with tall trees and strung about with power lines. Suddenly a large brown bird, wings half folded, shot underneath me so close that I heard the "whoosh" of air as it passed. It was a buzzard, and it was hurrying to join half a dozen others which were climbing in a thermal not fifty yards off my left wingtip. I lost no time in joining them and up we all went together, back up to 9000ft, me breathing a huge sigh of relief and blessing my feathered saviour!

I count myself immensely privileged to be able to experience birds in their element like this. I have flown with turkey vultures, those consummate soaring masters, on many occasions, and with rare red kites in Wales, (one of the shyest and most easily spooked of all birds of prey, they show no fear of hang gliders). I have soared ridges alongside migrating ospreys, harriers and scores of kestrels. Experiences like this are common, but sometimes there is an encounter so special that it is like a rare gift from the gods, and you are ever after touched by it. Recently I had a flight from Mt. St. Helena, at the north end of the Napa Valley in California. This is a beautiful place to fly, and one of the better sites in the region. But conditions there are fickle, and only suitable for hang gliding a few times a year, mostly in the spring. The air currents around the mountain top can be unpleasantly turbulent, so hang gliders avoid flying close to the mountain, but head further out over the valley, where the air is smoother. I had taken off in company with four other gliders, but lift was scarce and we were all slowly sinking towards the landing field.

A few hundred feet above the ground I found a thermal and began circling in it, eventually climbing to cloudbase at 4500ft, drifting slowly downwind as I did so. As I headed back to the landing area I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. To my right, a few hundred yards away and a hundred feet lower was a large bird. I turned towards it, thinking it was a red tailed hawk, but as it rapidly closed upon me it didn't look like a red tail. It climbed towards me even with its wings half closed, then suddenly spread them wide and zoomed up, passing under me no more than 15 ft away with a rush of wings, a huge bird, an adult golden eagle. It swung around behind and above me, perhaps ten feet away. I looked back and our eyes met across fifteen feet of space; I took in the brown eye and slate beak with yellow cere, the gold brown nape feathers, the feathered legs slightly hanging as it slowed down to look at me, the wide spread tail feathers with white markings underneath, the eight foot wing span. It was so close that for a few seconds I was alarmed that it might be annoyed and dive on me, perhaps tearing my sail, but it slid under my left wing and curved around in front of me, displaying no sign of aggression. It was inscrutable, other worldly, yet up here our separate worlds touched, and I could not help but feel that in some way something unnameable and unknowable connected us for a few moments. Twice more the eagle circled me, before drifting off, its curiosity satisfied. I tried to follow, but eagles are not prone to the same effects of gravity as hang gliders are, and it disappeared towards the south.

Long after I landed part of me was still up there with that eagle. Was it a local bird, or had it journeyed here from the far north, had it ever encountered hang gliders before, did it know that I was a man, did it know of men at all? Who knew? I only knew that for a few brief moments I had flown with an eagle, on equal terms, and it was not afraid of me, and I had seen and felt the world perhaps as it did, and I was humbled, and yet immensely richer for the experience.

Anyone who watches birds must conclude that apart from those species that dwell mostly upon the ground, they derive immense pleasure from flight, if not joy, just as dogs do when they run and dolphins do when they swim and leap. Flying with birds does everything to confirm this impression. What, one asks, is a buzzard or red tailed hawk doing at cloudbase, several thousand feet from the ground? It's not hunting, or defending territory, or displaying to its mate, or migrating for much of the year. I suspect that they are up there for the same reason as hang glider pilots like to be up there. And that's a difficult thing to express in words.

And one more question that I do not believe science has answered. How are birds so expert at soaring? If this sounds like a dumb question, (100 million years of evolution, stupid!), let me elaborate. A glider will only stay up if it flies in air that is going up faster than the glider is coming down. And while strong surges of rising or sinking air can be felt as changes in momentum, air with more gradual or smooth vertical movement, cannot be felt, and cannot be detected by a pilot without instruments once he is more than a few hundred feet from the ground. Glider pilots use instruments called variometers, which detect minute changes in air pressure, to tell them when they are going up or down. Even so, the air is often a confused mass of turbulent rising and falling air, and much of the skill in flying a glider is making sense of this and flying in the best lift. Soaring birds are always in the best lift though. How do they do it with no altimeters and no variometers? I suspect that the system of air sacs which ramify through a bird's body as extensions of their lungs may have something to do with this, but the way in which birds such as turkey vultures soar effortlessly, near to the ground in strong winds and turbulence, also suggests that they feel the air, and every gust, eddy and bump, through all their feathers, and especially through their main flight feathers, as a cat feels its way with whiskers. Some day biologists may know the answer, but however much we learn through science, nothing can compare with how it feels to fly with the birds.