Pale harrier: Someone flew over the cold winter fields

In the spring of the year 1870, when Abel Chapman Barely 20 years old, he traveled to the Costwolds region, west of London, among bucolic villages and green open fields. Its purpose was not to enjoy small towns that seemed to come out of a Shakespeare tale, but to describe the birds of prey that inhabited the English countryside. One of those cold mornings he was right to write in his field notebook, in that style typical —almost lyrical— of the naturalists of the mid-19th century:

“fly weightless without flapping, like the kites that children fly with the thread”

He was referring to the beauty of the flight of the Pale Harrier (Circus cyanians). Nearly a century earlier, Karl von Linnaeus, the man who sought to bring order to the work of Genesis, had included this species within the genus Circus, because of the characteristic circles that males and females made during the courtship and wedding stops, adding the epithet Cyaneus in reference to the bluish tone of the upper parts of his livery.

Chapman continued to cultivate his passion for wildlife with selectivity. He traveled to Spain and toured The bull's skin giving us a priceless book, Unexplored Spain (1910), an essential work for understanding the nature of our country at the end of the 19th century, and in his field notes, he continued to speak of the Pale Eagle as a faunistic symbol inseparable from open regions and northern countryside.

The windiest of peninsular harriers treasures all the enchantment and incomparable magnetism of those raptors who fell in love with Chapman. Its stylized appearance, its slow flight, the rituals of its courtship, its aquiline gaze and the skilful precision of its trophic attacks, give it the exclusive appeal of beautiful birds of prey. In our country, the Lord of the Cold Fields It flies gracefully over the northern regions of old Iberia, growing preferably in patches of natural vegetation such as sheds, heathland and mountain meadows.

But, beyond her undoubted beauty, Chapman highlighted in his field notes the respect and appreciation that English farmers had for this boy, since his diet includes rodents such as voles —especially in years of demographic explosions—mice, rats and some large insects, in particular Orthopterans, which undoubtedly makes this raptor an excellent controller of so-called pest species, which proliferate so much in the fields and can cause enormous damage to the yield and production of agricultural crops.

Despite this commendable ecological function as a natural, free and ecological 'rodenticide', the species is classified as VULNERABLE in the Regional Catalogue of Threatened Species of Castilla La Mancha and is included in the List of Wild Species under Special Protection Regime. The most important threats to the pale harrier are the destruction and alteration of their nesting habitat, a large consequence of agricultural intensification (use of pesticides, land consolidation, reduction of fallow areas, reservoirs and borders, etc.), as well as illegal hunting and the reduction of potential prey. Harvesting the crop causes the death of chickens born on cereal crops on numerous occasions.

Its conservation once again puts black on white the way in which human beings relate to nature, to ancient landscapes and the living beings that inhabit them, to that ethical and perennial obligation to balance prosperity and economic growth with respect for wildlife, so that the cold meadows and countryside of the north of old Iberia never miss the elegant and slow flight of one of the most beautiful eaglets of the European fauna, a wild and untamed raptor who in the spring of the mid-19th century dazzled the naturalistic soul of Abel Chapman himself and who today is a totem of that wild, rural and almost unexplored Spain.