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Learning to Listen on the Way Up

There is a moment on almost every fell walk when the landscape seems to go silent. The wind takes over, the sheep look up, and the sense is of a place almost empty of wildlife. Then somebody stops, cups an ear, and a thin, insistent thread of sound arrives from somewhere above the heather. Upland birds are mostly small, brown and secretive, and the wind carries their voices away before it carries them to you. Learning a handful of calls changes the whole character of a walk.

Timing matters. Between March and July the fells are at their most vocally generous, and also at their most fragile. Everything below is written on the assumption that you will do your listening from the path, with binoculars rather than footsteps closing the distance.

The Meadow Pipit: the Fell's Default Voice

If you hear one bird on a British hill, it is probably a meadow pipit. Streaky brown, sparrow-sized, with a habit of flicking up from the tussocks a few paces ahead of you and dropping again just as quickly, it fills the ground between the valley fields and the summits. It is the species that everything else quietly depends on: merlins hunt them, cuckoos parasitise them, and ring ouzels often nest near them.

• Call: a thin, insistent sip-sip-sip, usually given in flight, like a fingernail tapping a saucer.
• Song: delivered on a rising, fluttering flight before the bird parachutes back down, a descending tumble of notes that stops abruptly.
• Habitat: rough grass, cotton grass, drained moorland and the grassy flanks of the higher fells.

Because it is so common, it is easy to stop hearing it. Don't. Meadow pipits nest in exactly the tussocks that walkers tread on when they step off the path to admire a view.

Wheatears, Skylarks and the Open Ground

Two more birds define the open tops. The wheatear is unmistakable in flight: a grey-and-white missile with a bold white rump that flashes as it bounds away, usually landing on a rock or a wall to bob and scold you with a hard chack-chack. It nests in holes and crevices — scree, stone walls, old rabbit burrows — which is one good reason why walls deserve admiring rather than climbing.

The skylark is thought of as a lowland bird, but it climbs just as readily above five hundred metres. Its song is a continuous, tumbling torrent delivered from a hovering speck, sometimes for several minutes at a time. On the ground it is a modest brown bird with a small crest, and its nest is a scrape in short grass: almost impossible to see, and very easy to stand on.

Higher still, and further north and east, listen for the nasal twa-ite of twite, and for the mournful, fluting pee-oo of golden plover — one of the most evocative sounds of the British uplands, and one of the most often mistaken for a distant curlew.

The Ring Ouzel: the Fell Walker's Prize

The ring ouzel looks like a blackbird dressed for the hills: dark plumage, a bright white crescent across the chest, and a habit of appearing briefly on a boulder before vanishing into a clough. It is a summer visitor, arriving in April from North Africa and the Middle East, and it nests in steep gullies, crags and scree slopes, often where bilberry, heather and a rowan or two provide cover.

Its song is like a blackbird's but wilder — shorter phrases, longer pauses, a melancholy, echoing quality that seems to belong to the crag rather than the bird. The alarm call is a sharp, clicking tac-tac-tac, like pebbles knocked together, and it is worth taking seriously. Ring ouzels are declining, and they are specially protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, along with golden plover, merlin and peregrine. If a pair is calling at you from a gully in May, the kindest thing is to walk on and leave them to it.

Reading the Habitat: Crags, Cloughs and Blanket Bog

Once you can place a bird by its surroundings, identification becomes far easier. The uplands are not one habitat but several, stacked by altitude and drainage.

• Blanket bog and wet flushes: golden plover, dunlin with its rippling trill, curlew, snipe drumming overhead, and red grouse chuckling go-back, go-back from the heather.
• Dry heather and grass moor: meadow pipit, skylark, twite, and the occasional short-eared owl hunting by day.
• Crags and cliffs: raven with its deep kronk, peregrine, kestrel, and ring ouzel in the shaded gullies.
• Scree and stony ground: wheatear, and on the highest tops in Scotland, ptarmigan and dotterel.

Altitude matters too. A walk from a valley at two hundred metres to a summit at nine hundred passes through several different bird communities, and the change is often abrupt rather than gradual.

Walking Without Disturbing the Birds

Upland birds nest on the ground or in crags, which makes them unusually vulnerable to people. A flushed bird leaves eggs or chicks exposed to cold and crows, and repeated disturbance can cause a whole nesting attempt to fail. None of this requires you to stay at home — it simply requires a little care.

• Stay on established paths in spring and summer, especially across bog, grass and scree.
• Keep dogs on a short lead from March to the end of July, and away from crags and gullies entirely.
• Never use recorded calls or playback to draw a bird closer. It is stressful and, for protected species, an offence.
• Watch for alarm behaviour: repeated chacking, a bird running rodent-like along the ground, or a feigned broken wing all mean a nest or chicks are close.
• If a bird is alarming, stop, step back the way you came, and give it a wide berth rather than pressing on.
• Use binoculars or a scope rather than your feet. Most upland species are best enjoyed at a distance anyway.

Carry a note of what you hear, too. Dates and locations of singing ring ouzels, displaying golden plover and drumming snipe are genuinely useful records, and local biological record centres welcome them. The fells reward patience more than pace, and the birds reward a quiet, unhurried walker above all.