THE LOST RAPTOR

Rewilding projects are happening across the land, but there's one species on a quiet rewilding mission of its own

- By CONOR MARK JAMESON

FOR AS LONG AS I COULD REMEMBER, the northern goshawk had been elusive, existing just at the edge of everything.

This ‘grey ghost’ haunted my imagination. In the early 1970s - which was just as I was beginning to fall in love with nature, and with birds of prey in particular – the goshawk made a clandestine return to Britain’s most remote forests. From the age of five I had a treasured possession, a Hamlyn paperback titled simply Birds of Prey, which highlighted these birds in all their wonderful variety. A pair of northern goshawks at their nest graced the front cover, glaring and red-eyed. It's clear that even in the company of other great raptors, this species, Astur gentilis, was always special.

Yet at the edge of things the goshawk would remain, the fabled 'phantom' apparently incapable of surviving outside those distant, undisturbed forests, on which, I was repeatedly told, it depended.

As I grew older, I searched those places whenever possible, particularly Kielder in Northumberland. Kielder is Europe's largest plantation of trees and a reputed goshawk stronghold, where the fugitive had established a reasonable population. I passed through many times and always stopped for a recce. I liked the idea that this forest held goshawks, even if I never saw them myself.

Then, one day in 2008, my horizons broadened. After a lifetime of estrangement, I finally came face to face with a goshawk. I was on a tall stepladder, peering into the dingy recesses of a junk warehouse in York. The unmistakeable glare of a goshawk greeted me from a glass case, and the surprise nearly knocked me off my perch.

Two years later, I finally encountered the real thing, in a small public park in east Berlin. This time, the goshawk was alive, vividly alive, even glowing, it seemed. The haunting had become a spell.