Raptors above the Semois: wings filling September's sky

The sky empties, then the sky refills

Around the twenty-fifth of September, a small habit settles in the villages perched on Gaume's limestone slopes. You stop in the yard, squint south-west, and start counting. Not the hens, not the cows. The wings. Common buzzards trace their first lazy circles above slate rooftops, and the black kite, tail forked with surgical precision, glides across without a single beat.

This is the post-breeding migration. Raptors that nested in northern Europe and Germany are heading south toward France and the Iberian Peninsula. The Gaume, Belgium's southernmost tip, sits squarely on their route. Not a massive corridor like the Pyrenees or the Bosphorus, no. More a continuous trickle, sometimes sparse, that the distracted walker misses entirely.

The Semois, a channel of wind and thermals

The river snakes in tight loops between beechwoods and shale cliffs. That erratic course creates valleys facing every direction, and above all, rising air currents. Heated on south-facing slopes, air climbs in invisible columns. Raptors exploit them. They do not flap to gain altitude; they let themselves be carried in broad spirals, then shoot from one ridge to the next with almost no effort.

At Bouillon, at Vresse, near La Forge, you can watch a common buzzard follow a meander for several hundred metres before lifting off above the crest. The lesser kestrel, humbler, stays perched on a fence post, scanning for voles in the short grass. The honey buzzard, rarer still, arrives late, often in early October, a kite with the silhouette of a tall sailing ship.

Open your eyes, tilt your neck back

It takes very little to see. An open field, a dry-stone wall, a sloping meadow above the woods. Sit down. Wait twenty minutes without talking. Scan not one fixed point but the whole sky, from the zenith down to the ridgeline. The common buzzard reveals itself by its pale abdomen marked with a broad brown crescent, its wings that seem twice too long for its body.

The kite announces itself through its deeply forked tail and its rust colour. In flight it rocks from side to side like a tightrope walker. These are birds that measure their energy by the gram of wind available, and they read the Gaume sky better than any topographic map.

Ending September in the Gaume also means accepting that summer did not close with a thunderclap. It dissipated, slowly, in the silence of a wing that no longer beats. You hear nothing. You see everything.