Level Crossing

Maybe if birds of prey were as common in Ireland as blackbirds, their beauty would be dimmed. For whatever reason, I find they exert a special allure, possess a vivid, untamed handsomeness unrivalled by other Irish birds. They seem wired to a higher voltage, to burn more brightly, even than kingfishers or goldfinches. Raptors, as T. H. White puts it in The Goshawk (1951), “are the nobility of the air.”

My interest in birds, particularly birds of prey, predated my friendship with Arnold Benington, but he was undoubtedly responsible for nurturing and developing this indigenous passion. I had the good fortune to have him as my biology teacher at the first school I attended, Friends’ School in Lisburn. As the name suggests, it was a Quaker school and Arnold was an active and committed Quaker. He lived only a few minutes’ walk from us, so before encountering him in the classroom he was a known figure—a regular port of call if we found an injured bird, or an interesting caterpillar, or a bird’s egg we couldn’t identify. By the time I was fifteen, we were regularly going birdwatching together, usually on the trail of sparrow hawks or owls. I didn’t know it then, but this familiar figure was one of Northern Ireland’s most eminent naturalists. He broadcast regularly for the BBC, was instrumental in setting up the Copeland Islands’ Bird Observatory, led ornithological expeditions abroad, and published pioneering articles in the Irish Naturalists’ Journal about the disastrous impact of pesticides on local sparrow hawk populations. Arnold died in 1982, at the age of seventy-nine; his achievements have recently been celebrated in Arnold Benington: Adventures of an Ulster Naturalist (2009).

It was Arnold who introduced me to gyrfalcons. They are not native to Ireland and rarely venture there, though there are occasional sightings. Guide-books to British and Irish birds described gyrfalcons as “irregular winter visitors to north and west Ireland and the Scottish islands.” I’ve never seen one in the wild. Arnold had studied them in Iceland. He shared his delight in these magnificent birds, the largest of the world’s falcons, by showing photographs from his Icelandic expeditions to the school’s Natural History Society, of which I was an enthusiastic member. His slides were large glass plates, expertly colored in by hand—evidence of the artistic flair with which his scientific expertise was paired. The ancient, gigantic slide projector cast striking close-ups of these fierce looking predators at their nest, near which Arnold had erected a blind. The chicks, fluffily grotesque and clumsy, were caught open-beaked in their ceaseless clamoring for meat.

For years, those images were all the word “gyrfalcon” meant to me. Say the name, and I’d picture larger-than-life sparrow hawks based on Arnold’s slides. No doubt I’d also have somewhere in mind a slew of muddled memories about the Natural History Society at school, about boyhood birdwatching in the County Antrim countryside, about time spent in Arnold’s company. One thing always leads to another; thoughts and memories are embedded together in the dense chain-mail of time—even if we come to remember them in apparent isolation. Essentially, though, whatever chain of association they belonged to, whatever trail of linkages they might spark, gyrfalcons were an ordinary enough element in my consciousness. Then I discovered something about these birds that made me see them completely differently. Sometimes I think a fast-flowing river snakes treacherously through all our rock-hard certainties. Mostly we ignore it, preferring their lithic illusions of solidity. But sometimes—and this was one of them—its acid waters touch us and our usual assumptions dissolve.

Though Arnold had watched gyrfalcons in Iceland, they are by no means confined to that country. The species’ distribution is described as “circumpolar,” but unlike its smaller relatives—the peregrine and merlin—gyrfalcons prefer the arctic and subarctic regions of the far north: Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Russia. A few birds fly south in winter to more temperate zones—thus the occasional Irish sightings—but essentially, the gyrfalcon resides in the frozen north...