Bird of the Month: Buzzard

The buzzard ( Buteo buteo) has replaced the kestrel as Britain’s most common raptor.

There are 60,000 of them; the breeding population increased 40 per cent between 1970 and 2010. In greater London at the start of the century, there were two breeding pairs; now there are almost 100.

In a 1937 edition of W H Hudson’s British Birds, his mournful account of the buzzard’s demise read, ‘It is impossible for anyone who loves bird life to write about the buzzard without a feeling of profound melancholy.’

This was blamed on their being killed almost to extinction to protect game birds.

‘My one consolation … is that I am not writing for grown men, but for the young, who are not yet the slaves of contemptible convention.’

How happy and astonished Hudson would be. Where once the kestrel was the most familiar of raptors to be seen, now it is the buzzard. Kestrels liked motorways for their rodent-rich embankments, which soon became impenetrable scrub. Buzzards can be seen from minor roads, whether in moorland or country lanes. They can surprise by their stillness as they perch, apparent extensions of pole, trunk or branch; even more surprising when they erupt into life on a four-foot wingspan.

BB described one on the bough of a Scots fir: ‘His bright yellow, scaly claws gripped the dead branch and his handsome, spotted and barred plumage made a fine camouflage. Without the glasses, I should never have seen him.’ ( BB’S Birds, 2007.)

Hudson called them a ‘useful species’; it is often said that the buzzard’s staple diet is earthworms. ‘It does little harm to game,’ wrote the famous bird-artist Archibald Thorburn, although buzzards are certainly well equipped to do so. James Macdonald Lockhart describes the bird as ‘a static hunter, a hoverer and a low-level searcher’, capable of flying eagle-like, ‘low and fast’, or like a hawk, ‘swerving’ through woodland. ‘The buzzard seems capable of taking on the hunting guise of many different birds of prey.’ ( A Journey Through Birds, 2016.)

Yet the gamekeeper of a Scottish pheasant shoot told me he agrees with Thorburn.

The buzzard’s mewing cry, the more melancholy the wilder the terrain, is now a familiar sound more or less everywhere. Birds in passage, especially from the Continent in the peak migrating months of April and September, are frequently reported over inner London.

The buzzard is known as the ‘tourists’ eagle’ because when soaring it is often mistaken for the rare golden eagle. May is the best time to see the birds’ courtship flights at their most spectacularly aerobatic. The male is noticeably smaller, as with most raptors, and invariably soars the higher of the two, swooping on its mate and then regaining ascendancy. Serenely far, there swam in the sunny height A buzzard and his mate, who took their pleasure Swirling and poising idly in golden light. Martin Armstrong, from The Buzzards

Their mewing may attract others to form a soaring spiral.

The 2020 Bird of the Month calendar is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk