Studying nature and golf just don’t mix

THE EIGHTH tee at St Fillans, a deceptively simple par three, 167 yards, straight downwind. The seven iron is my 150 yards club, but because of the breeze and the dryness of the course, I decided I could persuade it to travel 167 yards. The left-to-right nature of most of my shots had a little too much action on it. The ball skipped right and finished just behind a greenside bunker. I chipped over the bunker okay, but my putting is as twitchy as a tiger’s tail just now and I was lucky to make four.

All that explains why, the second time round (St Fillans being a nine-hole course), I spent a little more time pondering club selection, a little more time on the tee, which is where I was still standing when a commotion of small birds broke out above and behind me and a sparrowhawk drifted overhead and down the fairway in a cloud of angry house martins, finches and other small fliers.

As I have indicated before, this golf course offers many distractions to a golfer whose day job is a nature writer. It has been suggested to me more than once that if I spent more time thinking about the next shot and less time scanning the near and far landscape for butterflies, orchids, hares, warblers, cuckoos, hawks, falcons, ospreys, rutting red deer, wild goats and assorted eagles, I might threaten 80 more often than I do. It is a fair point.

The sparrowhawk intruded on the debate about whether I should punch in a six iron rather than a full seven. As it was, the hawk had my full attention. Its flight was unhurried, about 30 feet up and more or less down the middle of the fairway.

Then it turned 90 degrees on a wingtip and unleashed a burst of speed that drew an audible grunt from me. Its quarry was hopelessly outpaced and crash-landed in the dense foliage of a tree in the rough between the seventh and eight fairways. There was a violent thud as the hawk found the tree unavoidable. A moment later, the hawk tumbled from the nearside of the tree and landed upright on the ground in the light rough 50 yards away. It stood still and looked round.

It was an adult female, dark brown back and wings, pale chest barred with black. Her white eye-stripe glowed in sunlight. Her long barred tail brushed the grass. The only part of her I could not see was her feet.

I was surprised she was alive. The speed of the impact with the tree and the brutal sound of that impact induced a reflexive twitch of the watcher’s shoulders. She stood, alive, but dead still. What now?

I looked at the golf club in my hand. I had chosen the six. I wondered if she would move if I hit my shot. There is a limit to how long you can stand on a golf tee watching a grounded sparrowhawk without incurring the wrath of other golfers who don’t happen to have my day job.

I hit the shot, struck it well, saw it bounce towards the bunker, and just when I thought it would run across the face of the bank in front of the bunker and curve round into the middle of the green (for I am a golfing optimist despite a reservoir of contrary evidence), it skipped off the grass, became airborne and toppled over the bank into the sand.

The hawk did not move. I was now so convinced that it was seriously injured that I began to devise a strategy for a rescue mission. How near could I get. I took one step in the hawk’s direction at which point it took off, curved low towards the woods from which it had first appeared, and in its talons was a very dead song thrush. It disappeared amid a renewed abusive fanfare of small bird outrage.

I chipped out, holed the putt, but I was only dragged back to conscious participation in the game by the sound of the ball hitting the bottom of the cup, for until that moment my head was full of the sparrowhawk.

The sparrowhawk is an exhilarating creature, an astoundingly accomplished flier, an exotic tormentor of garden bird-feeders (not to mention the human providers of garden bird food) and because it is good at what it does and no longer tortured to the very rim of extinction by the kind of agricultural pesticides that resulted in the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1963, it is once again widespread and doing well.

This means that, like the buzzard, it is the favourite case for the prosecution by keepers, land managers and others who think that harmony in the landscape can be achieved only with guns, traps and poisons. The buzzard that was featured in Friday’s Courier attacking osprey chicks produced one more “too many buzzards” outcry from someone whose vested interest was a camera on the osprey nest. People who run fish farms tell you there are too many ospreys. They are all wrong. You cannot have too many natural predators, because the number of predators is dictated by the availability of prey. Osprey chicks are vulnerable because of the treetop nature of osprey nests. Most osprey adults are good at protecting the nest. Some are not so good. Some buzzards fancy their chances against ospreys, some don’t.

The moral of the story is that if more people played golf on golf courses that settled into their landscape over a hundred years ago and less time trying to kill things they find inconvenient, then we would all get on with nature a lot better.

You will not be surprised to learn that on the afternoon of the sparrowhawk, I did not break 80. Again.

Sparrowhawks are very good at what they do.