With my back to an oak tree in the last copse below Carneddi's fridd wall, I focus my glass on a low branch where a tree pipit is feeding a young cuckoo. Pale green caterpillars dangling from the pipit's bill contrast neatly with the pink of this foster parent's lower mandible. The cuckoo, plump and ungainly, gorges itself and looks for more. The pipit flies up into the foliage to oblige, and swiftly returns with another neat rack of fuel for the immense journey to sub-Saharan Africa on which this youngster will soon embark.
As I watch, the fledgling drops from the branch. With wings acutely angled downwards, its barred form flies strongly down-valley, heading across tawny grass and heather before careering back to the oak branch again. It alights awkwardly, the pipit once more in rapid attendance.
I traverse the moor towards Craig y Dyniewyd, leaving chick and provider to their imminent farewell. On the cliff above, nothing moves. I plod on, hopping from tussock to tussock, pondering the mysteries of bird migration. A whistling causes me to glance up. A corona of downy feathers drifts across the westering sun. There's a thud. The cuckoo's severed head bounces on the hard earth. Ten yards away, a tiercel fixes me with fierce challenge. His talons in the cuckoo's breast, he rips out strips of bloody flesh, swallows them down, lifts the limp corpse and flies back to the vantage point from which he'd been watching before his deadly stoop.
In which eyrie was he fledged? The long-established nest on Craig Cwm Trwsgl is likeliest and nearest. I'd love to have discussed this with Derek Ratcliffe (1929-2005), whose work on the effects of organochlorine pesticides on eggshell-thinning and brood failure among raptors began in Bangor, where he studied for a doctorate on mountain vegetation. Derek knew every peregrine site in Eryri (Snowdonia).
I swing my glass back to the copse from which I came. Nothing moves. All is silent across the moor, the birdlife of mountain and woodland as oppressed by the raptor's presence as the English electorate is by that far tawdrier and less environmentally friendly creature, its rapacious and brutal government.
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