The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker
Mark Cocker
J. A. Baker
J. A. Baker’s extraordinary classic of British nature writingDespite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J A Baker spent a long winter looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands – peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them.Including original diaries from which The Peregrine was written and its companion volume The Hill of Summer, this is a beautiful compendium of lyrical nature writing at its absolute best. Such luminaries as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion have cited this as one of the most important books in 20th Century nature writing, and the bestselling author Mark Cocker has provided an introduction on the importance of Baker, his writings and the diaries – creating the essential volume of Baker's writings.Papers, maps, and letters have recently come to light which in turn provide a little more background into J A Baker’s history. Contemporaries – particularly from his time at school in Chelmsford – have provided insights, remembering a school friend who clearly made an impact on his generation.Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader who praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article – entitled On the Essex Coast – appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the agreement of the RSPB, it has been included in this updated new paperback edition of Baker’s astounding work.
The Peregrine
The Hill of Summer & Diaries
The Complete Work of
J. A Baker
Introduction by Mark Cocker & Edited by John Fanshawe
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
The Peregrine © J. A. Baker, 1967
The Hill of Summer © J. A. Baker, 1969
The Diaries © J. A. Baker, 2010
On the Essex Coast © J. A. Baker, 1971. Published in RSPB Birds magazine 3 (II) (Sept/Oct, 1971): 281–283
Introduction © Mark Cocker, 2010
Diaries edited by John Fanshawe, 2010
Notes on J. A. Baker © John Fanshawe, 2011
Cover photographs © ImageBroker/Imagebroker/FLPA; Foto Natura Stock/FLPA; Malcolm Schuyl/FLPA; Dietmar Nill/naturepl.com; ImageBroker/Imagebroker/FLPA
Cover designed by Lee Motley
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
THE PEREGRINE. © Mark Cocker, 2010. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007395903
Ebook Edition © MAY 2011 ISBN: 9780007437382
Version: 2017-08-03
Contents
Cover (#u5eb38d0e-3179-524c-ad2c-b7b653ccdff0)
Title Page (#uc887cef6-17e4-5346-8c82-bd269c53b932)
Copyright
Introduction by Mark Cocker
Notes on J. A. Baker by John Fanshawe
The Peregrine
Beginnings
Peregrines
The Hunting Life (#ulink_45896771-3f2b-5f51-95ec-796a92da4c7d)
The Hill of Summer
April: Woods and Fields
May: A Storm
May: The Pine Wood
May: A Journey
May: Downland
June: Beech Wood
June: The Sea and the Moor
June: Midsummer
July: A River
July: The Heath
August: Estuary
September: The Hill
The Diaries
Introduction by John Fanshawe
1954–1961
On the Essex Coast
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Introduction by Mark Cocker
J.A. Baker (1926–1987) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important British writers on nature in the twentieth century. When his first book, The Peregrine, appeared in 1967 with all the unexpected power and vertiginous daring of its eponymous bird, it was instantly recognised as a masterpiece. Today it is viewed by many as the gold standard for all nature writing and, in many ways, it transcends even this species of praise. A case could easily be made for its greatness by the standards of any literary genre.
It is more than 20 years since his untimely death in 1987, aged just 61, and more than four decades since the publication of his last and only other work, The Hill of Summer (1969). For much of the intervening period, neither of the books has been in print. Yet, if anything, Baker’s stock stands higher today than at any time. His writing has been intimately associated with the resurgence of literature on nature and landscape, the so-called New Nature Writing of authors like Tim Dee and Robert Macfarlane (the latter, in fact, has played a key role in Baker’s rediscovery). His books are studied as set texts at university. Major modern poets, from Kathleen Jamie to the former laureate Andrew Motion, acknowledge Baker’s poetic genius. Commentators of various stamp, from the film maker David Cobham to the TV presenter and wildlife cameraman Simon King, hail his influence upon them.
All of this is a remarkable achievement, particularly in view of Baker’s personal circumstances. He was an Essex man born and bred, living all of his days in what was then the small rural town of Chelmsford, largely at two addresses – 20 Finchley Avenue and 28 Marlborough Road. His parents, Wilfred and Pansy, were what might be called lower middle class; his father a draughtsman with the engineering company Crompton Parkinson. The formal education of their only son at Chelmsford’s King Edward VI School ended in 1943, when he was just sixteen years old. His abiding love for poetry and opera were perhaps exceptional in one of his social background, but Baker junior seems to have had little or no contact with other writers and artists. His only literary connections flowed from Collins’ eventual decision to publish The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer.
It is, in many ways, confirmation of his extraordinary talent that the author’s reputation rests entirely on two works – 350 published pages of prose – and in spite of their extremely narrow geographical focus. They describe a roughly rectangular Essex patch of just 550km
, which includes the Chelmer Valley from the eastern edge of Chelmsford as far west as Maldon and the confluence of the Chelmer and Blackwater Rivers. At its heart lies Danbury Hill, the highest ground in Essex, with its glorious ancient woodlands of coppiced hornbeam and sweet chestnut. Baker country then runs down Danbury’s far slope and on to the southern and northern shores of the Blackwater Estuary, there to be extinguished in the dark silts at the North Sea‘s edge. Most of this countryside now lies within a commuter belt less than an hour from central London, yet in Baker’s day it was a deeply rural district. Residents of the beautiful village of Little Baddow recall how their doors were left unlocked at night until at least the 1970s. Between the dawn and dusk of a single winter’s day, Baker could traverse the whole area via a network of quiet country lanes. Throughout his life a bicycle was his only means of transport. He never learnt to drive a car.
This concentrated focus on one patch reminds us very much of the life and work of a historical writer such as Gilbert White, or perhaps the poet John Clare. Yet, simultaneously, the strict limit to his geographical explorations marks Baker out as a singularly important modern figure. In The Peregrine he wrote: ‘Before it is too late, I have tried to … convey the wonder of … a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa.’ That he achieved this so brilliantly and excavated prose of such quality from what seems, on first acquaintance, a modest landscape, throws down the gauntlet to our own age. For a society now deeply sensitive to the issue of carbon usage, Baker is surely a shining example. His bicycle-bounded territory is a model for future writers. His books strip back from the word ‘parochial’ its accreted, pejorative associations of narrowness and conservatism. He is parochial only in its truest sense. He illuminated the rich mysteries to be found in every parish in these islands.
His two books on Essex landscape and wildlife are intimately connected with one another in terms of their style and content. They are, in some ways, very simple. They are books of encounter. They describe the wild animals, particularly the birds, that Baker saw and heard when he was out. They both draw upon his relentless foraging across the same landscape. However, while The Hill of Summer is a generic description of all his wildlife encounters between the seasons of spring and autumn, The Peregrine is distinguished by its close focus on one species, the fastest-flying bird on Earth.
During Baker’s life this glorious creature was no more than a rare winter visitor to his portion of Essex. Worse still, the raptor had endured a catastrophic decline in the second half of the twentieth century. Fortunately in recent years peregrines have reversed the trend, climbing back to a population level probably not seen in Britain since the seventeenth century. It is, once more, a breeding bird even in Essex. Today it is extremely difficult for us to recover fully the sense of crisis prevailing in 1960s Europe or North America. Yet to understand this book and its impact, we must remind ourselves how one of the most successful predators on the planet – exceeded in its transcontinental range only perhaps by ourselves or the red fox – was then so stricken by the toxic effects of organochlorine-based agrochemicals, it was considered at risk of global extinction.
It was that anxiety which charged Baker with his deep sense of mission as he tracked the falcons across the wintry landscapes of Essex. ‘For ten years I followed the peregrine’, he wrote, ‘I was possessed by it. It was a grail for me. Now it has gone.’ This sense of the bird’s impending doom supplies the book, not only with its emotional rationale, but also its thematic unity and burning narrative drive. However, those elements are far less apparent in The Hill of Summer which is, in truth, a more difficult and elusive text. It has almost no plot, the author never seeks to explain any overall shape or intention, except to hang each chapter loosely around a separate habitat: beech wood, estuary, etc. Without having first read The Peregrine and appreciated how the latter supplies a context for the second book, a reader of The Hill of Summer might easily find it a meandering, slow-moving account of rather random encounters with nature. It is, in truth, far more than that. There is writing of the highest order on every page.
Nevertheless the overarching structure in The Peregrine leads many people to conclude that this is the finer of his two books. The inference is that Baker drew together his richest material and poured into it deeper editorial effort. It was claimed in the blurb to a later edition that he rewrote it five times. The almost inevitable speculation is that his constant rewriting arose from an attempt to find some means of fusing into a coherent whole his quest for peregrines over ten separate winter periods. I emphasise the word speculation, because truthfully we have no real understanding of Baker’s methods. Not only does he appear to have destroyed each successive manuscript, he even discarded many of his own daily handwritten notes. About one third of the surviving diaries are now published for the first time in this book.
Baker’s work presents other problems for readers because in the text itself he was extremely reluctant to reveal his own personality or his private views. These do intrude in places but, by and large, as Baker himself asserted, The Peregrine is an objective account of what he experienced: ‘Everything I describe’, he writes, ‘took place while I was watching it.’ The lack of any detailed self revelation by its quiet, unassuming author creates a partial vacuum at the heart of the book, into which commentators have felt almost impelled to pour their own theories and ideas. A fact that was little appreciated even relatively recently was Baker’s full name: J.A. stands for John Alec. Another mystery solved only in the last decade was the identity of the obviously patient and understanding woman behind the dedication in The Peregrine. ‘To My Wife’ referred to Doreen Grace Baker (née Coe), who died only in 2006, more than a quarter of a century after her first husband. They had been married for 31 years.
It is perhaps the perverse fate of a deeply private person to find that the thing he or she wishes most to withhold or deems least important, becomes the stuff of widest speculation. In the absence of hard fact, a range of myths and half-truths have regularly added themselves to the Baker story like barnacles catching on the hull of a boat. A classic example is the idea that he was a librarian, perhaps because of an assumption that only a bookish person could have produced such a literary work. In fact Baker was the manager of the Chelmsford branch of the Automobile Association (odd, perhaps, in one who never drove), then later the manager of a Britvic depot.
Another typical conjecture was that he wrote The Peregrine after the diagnosis of a serious illness and therefore the text is stained by the dark, mordant tones of the invalid. There is at least a germ of truth behind this suggestion. However, Baker was not seriously ill until after he had finished The Peregrine. In the ten main years of his wildlife forays (1955-1965) which supplied the raw material for his writing, Baker led a relatively normal life. By day he worked for the AA or Britvic. In his spare time he cycled out along the banks of the Chelmer to birdwatch. Yet throughout this period he did suffer increasingly from rheumatoid arthritis and by the time that The Hill of Summer was published he was seriously incapacitated. It was this disease, in fact, which eventually brought about his premature death: the cancer that killed him was triggered by drugs prescribed for his condition.
By far the most challenging and difficult speculation to address, is the claim that Baker made up parts or even all of the contents of The Peregrine. It has long been a response, particularly among readers who are knowledgeable about birds. These doubts cannot simply be dismissed as the kind of pettifogging scepticism that sometimes seems indivisible from the science and pastime of ornithology. There are serious issues that all informed readers of The Peregrine have to face. One is that Baker was finding his falcons in and around the Chelmer Valley, where few or no other fellow observers managed to see them. At that time the editors of the Essex bird report expressed their barely concealed incredulity by suggesting that Baker was seeing peregrines of non-wild origin (i.e. falconers’ birds).
One specific concern centres on Baker’s assertion that he found, over a ten-year period, 619 carcasses of other birds that were killed by the wintering falcons. Anyone who walks regularly in the countryside will recognise how unusual it is to see dead birds of any kind. So the author’s claim to have located the remains of so many corpses eaten by individual peregrines does seem remarkable. Baker then faced a series of smaller-scale questions. How come he saw peregrines eating worms unearthed by a tractor and plough, when nobody else had? The translator of the Swedish edition of The Peregrine, an experienced birdwatcher himself, questioned Baker’s assertion that the species ever hovers. Yet Baker insisted that an exact translation of that word (ryttla) be used. One notable peregrine expert even went so far as to claim that Baker could not tell that species from kestrel.
There are several forms of response to these suspicions and doubts. The most obvious is the counter-assertion that Baker was absolutely fixated with peregrines. His excursions into the Essex landscape were driven by a single search image. He acquired intimate insight into the personalities of individual birds and over the years he built up an understanding of where they would be and when. It was, therefore, ever likely that he would regularly see the falcons where others did not, and also find the remains of peregrine kills because he knew exactly their preferred haunts.
Another key point is that if you watch peregrines long enough they will do things that other people do not normally see, and even things that no one else has seen, such as eating worms. Recent research has just disclosed behaviour not widely recognised – namely that peregrines hunt and kill during the hours of darkness (Baker, incidentally, noted that the birds are active after sunset). Clearly no one would judge the recent nocturnal observations as untrue simply because they are without precedent. (At least they would find it difficult, given that the bird, an individual roosting on Derby Cathedral, was filmed eating a live woodcock, and is shown on YouTube.) Why should Baker be less trustworthy? Peregrines, however well-studied, are birds of mystery still. That, surely, is the allure of all field study.
A second partial explanation of why Baker has generated such suspicion or scepticism relates to his openly declared method in writing The Peregrine. The book is framed as a diary account of a single winter, but its author clearly specified that this was a way to distil all ten years of his experiences into a narrative whole. To read the book as a blow-by-blow series of genuine journal entries is to fail to appreciate the difference between the literal truth of a notebook and the literary truth as expressed by Baker. In fact if a reader of either of his books persists in this particular false assumption, then they will face ever-deepening problems. Baker not only compressed and manipulated the time frame of both books, he stripped out the names of places or references to identifiable land features. In The Peregrine he writes of ‘the ford‘, or the ‘North Wood’ or ‘South Wood‘, but nothing more explicit that would enable the reader to fix the text easily in an actual moment or location.
For Baker devotees this compositional device has given rise to a kind of sport, as they try to tease out a real geography behind the otherwise anonymous descriptions. Some landmarks are just recognisable. A reference in The Peregrine (24 October) to a ‘two-hundred-foot chimney’ where the falcon roosted is almost certainly an old brick tower, now demolished, for a steam pump attached to the waterworks in the parish of Beeleigh, just west of Maldon. On 25 January he saw a ‘wren creeping over the sloping roof of a wooden church tower.’ This is probably the beautiful little church by the River Chelmer at Ulting, one of the famous wooden-towered churches of Essex. Perhaps the most important geographical feature that one can identify with some certainty is ‘the ford’, a place where many of his observations are rooted and where peregrines came to bathe regularly. The most likely candidate is the spot where Sandon Brook flows across Hurrell’s Lane just west of Little Baddow.
A rough sense of Baker’s real time frame can also be teased out from internal evidence. The inferential details that help us to anchor the work in some genuine calendar is the extreme weather he described in his single winter of observations. It is without doubt the extraordinary winter of 1962–3, that Arctic season when snow – more than at any time for 150 years – lay thick on the ground for months. It was the coldest period recorded in southern England since 1740 and long stretches of the coast froze into solid sheets with incipient ice floes. Baker’s description of an Essex landscape snowbound from 27 December right through until the first week of March fits closely with the meteorological pattern of that period.
While these details may suggest a rough template for the book’s time and place, Baker felt in no way bound by it. The fact that he opted for this degree of freedom in his treatment of the material has led some to suggest that The Peregrine could be read almost as a novel. With more certainty we can see how the device created not just the layer of ambiguity troubling his more literal-minded readers, it also conferred a remarkable universality. If not quite timeless, the book certainly seems to move with the reader, each new generation finding the text as accessible and as meaningful as the one before. Similarly by refusing to yoke the birds to one identifiable locale, he allows the falcons in his book to become almost as wide ranging as the real species. The glorious landscape he explored could almost be any landscape. The reader is at liberty to transfer imaginatively ‘the ford’ or the ‘North Wood’ of Baker country to Skåne, or California or Quebec, or even Queensland. By stripping away so much, what Baker left us with is a mythic story of quest for a mythic bird that is magically unconfined and yet simultaneously authentic.
In a way the deepest irony about the suggestions of fraud or deception on Baker’s part is not just their irrelevance to his project. It is that he answers the charges himself in almost every sentence he wrote. The whole of his work is shot through with an almost forensic concern for truthfulness about his encounters with birds, nature and landscape, that has few rivals not just among British writers but in the entire English-speaking world. When he looks, for instance, into the piercing lemon eyes of a little owl he notes that ‘the black pupil is the same width as the vivid yellow iris.’ He finds the freshly killed body of a common shrew and notes how the ‘impressions of the kestrel’s gripping toes still showed on its soft grey fur’.
In many ways his concern for veracity is even more abundantly clear in The Hill of Summer. Its structureless format seems to emphasise how the author has pared everything down to one goal: how can a naturalist capture in words what he or she sees and experiences. It is his faithfulness to this enterprise, at the expense of all else, which probably explains why The Hill of Summer has been virtually forgotten. Yet simultaneously it is his uncompromising quest for an authentic language which supplies its curious but undeniable magic.
In The Peregrine he wrote: ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.’ That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy that informs all his work. It is notable that Baker never validates his own observations, thoughts or feelings by reference to those of other authors. There are no intermediaries. Instead he drills down into the moment to haul back to the surface a prose that is astonishing for its inventiveness, yet also for its clarity and precision. Sometimes it is the sheer simplicity with which he finds ways to note the most subtle register of change that is so compelling. On 2 April in The Peregrine he writes: ‘Spring evening; the air mild, without edges’. On 27 March he sees a ‘grazing rabbit that was big with disease’; and on the same day he describes the sunlight as ‘quiet’. The full sentence reads: ‘Quiet sunlight gleamed the falling tide.’ The line typifies Baker’s delight in playing with the function of words. So verbs that are traditionally intransitive are suddenly made to take a direct object (‘They shone frail gold‘). He converts nouns into verbs (‘Starlings … sky up violently’; ‘every twig seemed to vein inwards’), adjectives into nouns ‘Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud’) and then turns full circle to make nouns out of verbs (‘a seethe of white’). Sometimes it is simple juxtapositions that create the startling energy. A classic example is, ‘gulls bone-white in ashes of sky‘, or this description In The Hill of Summer for the hard, nasal, invertebrate call of a willow tit: ‘a narrow parsimony of sound. ‘Finally there are neologisms of almost Shakespearian daring. Perhaps the most famous is his sentence: ‘I swooped through leicestershires of swift green light.’
Occasionally it is not the language, but the structure of the sentences which is so inventive. A classic example is the way he finds a means to express the mesmeric effect created by wader flocks on tidal mud and also their random, chaotic shapelessness.
The faint, insistent sadness of grey plover calling. Turnstones and dunlin rising. Twenty greenshank calling, flying high; grey and white as gulls, as sky. Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone; seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water.
As the passage demonstrates, Baker was never afraid of brevity, repetition or stating the obvious. One of my favourite sentences in The Peregrine is, ‘Nothing happened.’ In The Hill of Summer he varies this nullity to: ‘Nothing happens.’ No naturalist-writer has ever been more honest about, or lovingly attentive to, the real patience required in the enterprise of watching wildlife. His writing is in many ways the antithesis of wildlife television, which is always to cut to the chase. Baker is the master of emptiness and no action.
A falcon peregrine watched me from posts far out on the saltings, sitting huddled and morose under darkening rain. She flew seldom, had fed, had nothing to do. Later, she went inland.
While he might convey the emotional flatness or neutrality experienced during long passages of his wildlife excursions, Baker is never dull. In fact if there is any criticism, it arises because there is so little down-time in the prose. It is all highly distilled, highly concentrated. The reader is being challenged with virtually every sentence. So much so, that it is sometimes easier to consider his prose as poetry. A page or two at a time can occasionally feel like enough. Indeed, it is remarkable how easily his writing can be framed as verse. Take this sentence:
Spring dusk;
Creak of bats’ wings
Over the steel river,
Curlew-call
Of the lemuring owls.
Or this paragraph:
A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees
Stands sharply up along the valley skyline. The cold north air, like a lens of ice,
Transforms and clarifies.
Wet plough lands are dark as malt,
Stubbles are bearded with weeds
And sodden with water.
Gales have taken the last of the leaves.
Autumn is thrown down. Winter stands.
If one had to name Baker’s most extraordinary gifts as a writer then I would isolate two qualities. One is a capacity to convey the otherness of wildlife through reference to objects of domestic and human function. The risk he runs is the charge of anthropomorphism, into which he almost never descends. It sounds paradoxical, but he somehow makes the animal or plant instantly accessible through the familiarity of his imagery, yet without diminishing its separate non-human identity. Here is an extended example:
A dead porpoise was humped upon the shingle, heavy as a sack of cement. The smooth skin was blotched with pink and grey; the tongue black and hard as stone. Its mouth hung open like the nail-studded sole gaping from an old boot. The teeth looked like the zip-fastener of a gruesome nightdress case.
More perfect, perhaps, is his description of golden plovers in their summer plumage:
Their black chests shone in the sun below the mustard yellow of their backs, like black shoes half covered with buttercup dust.
The other ability at the heart of his achievement is what I call – though it is not completely adequate – his ‘synaesthesia’: a capacity to experience and express information derived from one sense as if it were encountered by another. For example, he interprets sounds as if they could be seen or tasted. In The Peregrine he writes of the crepuscular churring of the nightjar:
Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out and none of it is lost.
This capacity for synaesthesia is seldom expressed in this clear and unambiguous form. More usually it is blended into his wider perception in smaller, subtler gestures that comprise a single word or phrase. Here are four sentences from The Hill of Summer:
The pure green song of a willow warbler descends from a larch
A moorhen calls from the smell of a pond.
The churring song of a nightjar seems to furrow the smooth surface of the silence.
One by one the calls of stone curlews rose in the long valleys of the downs, like fossil voices released from the strata of the chalk.
The last two quotations are particularly important and exhibit the same sensibility manifest in that line already quoted about ‘leicestershires of swift, green light.’ Note how the light is experienced as ‘swift’. These three examples emphasise how my word, ‘synaesthesia’, is not quite enough to encompass all of this facet of Baker’s genius.
For I mean, in addition to the standard definition of that word, his ability to make what is immaterial and without physical form somehow concrete and solid. He reifies the invisible. His prose puts flesh on the white bone of light, space, time, gravity and the physics of movement. It is as if he encountered the air as the material element that we know, from chemistry – oxygen, nitrogen, etc. – that it is, but which we seldom, if ever, truly experience. It was an art that seems almost ecologically adapted to capturing the fastest flying bird on Earth. Baker and the peregrine were a perfect consummation. Yet this special gift is everywhere in Baker’s writings. Here is how he sees a group of greenfinches:
Frequently the flock flew up to the trees with a dry rustle of wings, then drifted silently down again through the dust-moted trellis of sun and shade. The yellow sunlight flickered with a thin drizzle of bird shadow.
In The Peregrine the ability to envision the heavens as something solid leads to a whole sequence of metaphors in which the air and its inhabitants are described in terms of marine life. As Baker looked upwards, so he seems to peer down into the ocean depths. Most beautifully, towards the end of the book, he imagines the falcon ‘Like a dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus.’
Elsewhere as Baker muses on the fluidity and apparent joyfulness of a seal’s motion at sea he speculates:
It is a good life, a seal’s, here in these shallow waters. Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.
Here Baker edges towards a remarkable revelation about the whole nature-writing genre. On reading the passage one thinks of the specific creatures (as well as their most devoted author/admirers) that have made the deepest appeal to the modern British imagination: the otter (Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell), whales and dolphins (Heathcote Williams and the whole New-Age fixation with cetaceans) and birds, particularly birds of prey (W.H. Hudson, T.H. White and J.A. Baker himself). If we cannot move between the elements like these wonderful animals, then humans can at least imagine what it is like to be an otter or a peregrine. But no writer I know has taken us deeper into the life of another creature and allowed us to experience how that elemental mastery might possibly feel than John Alec Baker.
Mark Cocker, March 2010
Notes on J. A. Baker by John Fanshawe
When the Penguin paperback edition of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine appeared in 1970 – with a striking, black and white cover design by Brian Price-Thomas – the biographical sketch revealed little: ‘John A. Baker is in his forties and lives with his wife in Essex. He has no telephone and rarely goes out socially. Since leaving school at the age of seventeen he has had some fifteen assorted jobs, which have included chopping down trees and pushing book trolleys in the British Museum and none of which were a success. In 1965, he gave up work and lived on the money he had saved, devoting all his time to his obsession of the last ten years – the peregrine. He re-wrote his account of this bird five times before submitting it for publication. Although he had no ornithological training and had never written a book before, when The Peregrine was published in 1967 it was received with enthusiastic reviews and praise for his lyrical prose. Later that year he was awarded the distinguished Duff Cooper Prize. He was also awarded a substantial Arts Council grant. His second book, The Hill of Summer, was published in 1969, and was also received with universal praise by the critics.’
Between the first publication of The Peregrine in 1967 and the spring of 2010, when Collins republished it in a single volume with his other works, The Hill of Summer and Baker’s edited diaries, the man remained an enigma. In 1984 Penguin re-issued The Peregrine in the Country Library series with a new cover from the illustrator Liz Butler, but the introduction remained much the same. After another twenty years, in 2005, The Peregrine reappeared as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series with a fine introduction by the author Robert Macfarlane, who argued that the book was ‘unmistakably, a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction’. Yet the NYRB editors were unable to reveal much more of the man whose style Macfarlane describes as, ‘so intense and incantatory that the act of bird-watching becomes one of sacred ritual’. They simply concluded that, ‘Baker’s second book [The Hill of Summer] was his last, and that he appeared to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life.’ ‘Little else,’ they admitted, ‘including the exact year of his death, is known about this singularly private man.’
Those lucky enough to own an early copy of The Peregrine treasured it. In The Running Sky, Tim Dee writes: ‘the peregrine in my young mind was built by J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. I read it when I was eleven, it stole into my head and stayed there, and then I reread it compulsively.’
What was it about the enigmatic Baker’s writing which so captured the imagination of later writers like Macfarlane and Dee? These were the years following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and, as Baker concluded in his own introduction, ‘Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching inanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’
Without doubt, Baker would have been amazed and delighted that peregrines have recovered so successfully, returning to many traditional sites, as well as breeding in cities and towns around Britain, including London, not least the celebrated pairs that are nesting on both the Houses of Parliament and Tate Modern. This recent recovery was in no way apparent in Baker’s lifetime or to a generation of writers growing up in the 1960s. Tim Dee writes that he ‘grew up thinking of Peregrines as sickly’. ‘The magnificent hunter, the apotheosis of the wild, the falcon on the king’s gloved fist, was becoming as helpless as a spastic battery hen, a bird that broke its own eggs.’
In the nineteenth century, peregrines had suffered from a host of troubles; notably persecution by gamekeepers and pigeon fanciers, but also the depredations of egg collectors. Though numbers had stabilized by the 1930s, the Air Ministry authorized widespread culling to save carrier pigeons at the outbreak of WW2, and several hundred birds were exterminated. By the 1950s, numbers had started to recover, but then a new and catastrophic decline began. As Baker lamented, it was the chemical ravages of organochlorine pesticides that killed adults and thinned their egg shells into fracturing. The story is now well known, and related by the late Derek Ratcliffe in his epic monograph on the peregrine, but when Baker was walking the Essex countryside, persistent pesticides were still paramount in the minds of the newly emerging conservation community as a threat to the birds that occupied the land and seascapes he loved and celebrated in all his writing. Peregrines were totems of a wilderness under siege.
In 2009, as Mark Cocker and I prepared the new edition of The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer, and the edited diaries, growing interest in J.A. Baker had revealed a little more about his life, and in Mark’s introduction, and my own introduction to the diaries, we outlined the new material that had come to light when the film-maker David Cobham visited Baker’s late widow, Doreen, and was given his diaries. This began a process that has already and will, we hope, continue to reveal insights into the author’s life and influences. Chief among these have been meetings with his school contemporaries, and the discovery of a small collection of letters. In the longer term, we hope to establish an archive of these papers, but, in the meantime, and with the arrival of this paperback edition, there is a chance to reveal a little more of what has been learned.
John Alec Baker, only son of Wilfred and Pansy Baker, was born on 6 August 1926. His father worked as a draughtsman for the engineering company Crompton Parkinson and, we believe, spent time as a borough councillor, and later mayor of Chelmsford. The family lived at 20 Finchley Road, and Baker attended Trinity Road Primary School nearby from 1932 to 1936.
One of the first signs that Baker was a bright child appeared when he won a Junior Exhibition to the King Edward VI Grammar School. Details of his early days there remain hazy, but three of his close friends from this time, Edward Dennis (who became Baker’s best man), John Thurmer (who went on to become Canon of Exeter Cathedral), and Don Samuel (who became an English teacher), have provided further insights into Baker’s later school life. It has emerged that in 1942, after he had completed his General School Certificate, he stayed on an extra year. It was wartime, so the school was often disrupted, and only four other boys were studying the arts at that time. Baker joined them, and although he did not study for the Higher School Certificate, he enjoyed a year of ‘supervised’ reading under the wing of a charismatic English teacher, the Rev. E.J. Burton.
Exactly why Baker was allowed this apparently unusual extra year is unknown, though Thurmer recalls that he was often absent from school with ill heath, including glandular fever, and early bouts of the arthritis that crippled him in later life. Possibly staff at KEGS – as the school was known – were sympathetic to this, and felt Baker deserved some more time.
Other scraps of information have emerged. Nicknames were commonplace and Baker was known as Doughy. This was a play on his name, of course, but he was stocky, and, it seems, someone with whom you’d be unlikely to pick a fight. Despite his bouts of ill health, and disarming short-sightedness, Baker did play cricket. A school magazine report describes him as: ‘an erratic bowler, whose chief fault is an inability to maintain length. He is lacking in confidence, but shows great promise.’ Still, his friends all remembered him being keenly anti-establishment, and rather obsessive. No-one could remember an interest in birds at school – which accords with Baker’s own admission that ‘I came late to a love of birds’.
Bright enough to be allowed to stay on into the Sixth Form, given to bouts of ill health, with a passion for reading, and a little rebellious, Baker is remembered very warmly by his friends. At the end of his time at grammar school, John Thurmer recalls, the Sixth Form master said that Baker had ‘enjoyed some general reading, but had not exerted himself’. Don Samuel goes as far as to describe him as talented, though bone idle, but notes that he was an avid reader, and literally, to quote Samuel, ‘sated himself in books’. He also recalls that Baker loved Dickens, and liked to genuflect light-heartedly before his novels in the Sixth Form library.
In 1943, his contemporaries left school to join up, a fate which Baker’s short sight ruled out. It appears that this might have been the period when, as the original biographic sketch suggested, Baker undertook the earliest of his unsuccessful ‘fifteen assorted jobs’. Information is scant but Samuel says that Baker liked to work outside – the best environment for his health – and recalls him apple picking in the orchards around Danbury Hill, east of Chelmsford.
All three friends remember that Baker was a keen correspondent while they were overseas in the forces, regularly sending them letters full of news, and examples of his writing – including early poems. With great prescience, Don Samuel had kept some letters and these, largely written between 1944 and 1946, provide new insights into Baker’s development. They also confirm that he did, indeed, work behind the scenes at the British Museum (although he left after just three months). Most are written from his parental home in Chelmsford, but they include letters written from North Wales, Cornwall, and Oxfordshire, revealing a first-hand knowledge of land and seascapes that appear in both The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer. In August 1946, for example, he writes to Samuel: ‘On Monday, I took trains from Paddington for Stow-in-the-Wold, and I have started enquiries concerning farm-work. I have arrived a little too early for the harvesting, but I have persevered, and obtained several half-promises from the landed-gentry’.
Critically, these letters reveal the extent to which Baker was determined to write. In one penned from Chelmsford on 25 April 1946, Baker declares: ‘I must confess that I occasionally despair of my capacity as a poet, solely because I have so few people whose opinion I can obtain. I am however, confident of ultimate success and that, as you [Don] say, is very important.’ And in his next on 5 May: ‘In the Observer this morning, I came across an extract, in a book review, from a poem by the ultra-modern poet, Dylan Thomas. Thomas is a very original writer – some of his poetry I like very much.’ He goes on to describe how the poem in question, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘epitomises the happy summer days of our childhood – the love of the woods and the rivers and hills’.
The young man revealed in these letters accords well with the boy recalled by his school friends. Indeed, in the first letter that survives, written from Llandudno, North Wales, in August 1944, Baker writes: ‘I have a book with me on my holiday, the only book I ever take with me everywhere I go; yes, you’ve guessed it – Pickwick – yet again do I marvel at the great Dickens’ mastery of the art.’
A year later Baker expounds at length his admiration for another author, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, who, renowned for The Playboy of the Western World, drew his inspiration from visits between 1898 and 1901 to the remote group of three Aran Islands that lie west of Galway Bay, open to the full fetch of the Atlantic. Synge’s The Aran Islands notebooks were published in 1907. As Baker explains, they ‘give a faithful and vivid account of the people and their ways’. Baker argues that ‘it was Aran, that cradled his lovely, cadenced phraseology,’ and that ‘for me they [the islands] will be a point of pilgrimage in my journeying through the countries of the mind’. All this was perhaps an influence on Baker’s acute and vivid style, and on his sustained interest in the wilderness and potential for solitude within his own home country.
On the last page of the same letter, Baker’s love of the Essex landscape is already clear and, long before he is following peregrines, he is rehearsing some of the writing that appears in his later work: ‘The loveliest country of all lies between Gt. Baddow and West Hanningfield. Green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms – all these combine and resolve into a delicately balanced landscape that can never become tedious to the eye. One cannot get far from people – from the little rustic cottages that huddle in the winding lanes. Yet the very proximity of these dwellings seems to give an impression of remoteness. / As you walk across these fields – Danbury stands all green and misty blue in the late afternoon of declining summer. Ever-changing – sometimes assuming truly mountainous grandeur – it fascinates the eyes and brings an exaltation and a faith. / These last days of summer are delicate poems in green and gold – the clouds unfurl in unsurpassed magnificence and move me to tears for their passing. / This country with its little fields and murmuring streams that basks in its waning summer gold will still be there when you return – it is for you and all men, for it is beauty.’
Along with these letters, another recent revelation has given us some insight into Baker’s personal library. Following David Cobham’s interest in making a film of The Peregrine, Baker’s brother-in-law, Bernard Coe, took a series of photographs of the bookshelves in Doreen Baker’s house. Given that this was twenty years after Baker’s death, some books may have been lost, but the spines reveal titles on birds and nature, geography, geology, travel, aerial photography, atlases, cookery, cricket, opera, and, of course, many volumes of literature, both prose and poetry. Poetry collections include Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell, Richard Murphy, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Charles Causley, and Ted Hughes.
In May 2009, when the author, Adam Foulds, reviewed The Peregrine in the Independent, he argued that Baker’s writing most resembled Ted Hughes: ‘the harsh vitality of the living world is perceptible at every point.’ In 2005, the environmentalist Ken Worpole wrote that Baker, was, ‘if anything … more ferocious in his identification with the animal world.’ Baker owned several collections of Hughes’s poetry, including Crow, Lupercal, Wodwo, Moortown Diary, Season Songs and his 1979 collaboration with the photographer Fay Goodwin, The Remains of Elmet.
Introducing The Peregrine, in his Beginnings section, Baker talks of writing honestly about killing. ‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word “predator” is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that spring carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ And consider too Hughes’s poem ‘Thrushes’, from the collection Lupercal, published in 1960, just when Baker was preparing to write The Peregrine: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs / Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab / Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. / No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares. / No sighs or head scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab / And a ravening second.’ And, in The Peregrine, on 20 December, Baker writes: ‘Song thrushes bounced and sprang to spear out the surfacing worms. There is something very cold about a thrush, endlessly listening and stabbing through the arras of grass, the fixed eye blind to what it does.’
With the end of J.A. Baker’s letters to Don Samuel in 1946, we enter another period of silence, although it appears that in 1950 Baker decided to train as a teacher. He would have been 23, and mentions the college in his bird-watching diary four years later on 4 April 1954, but only as background to an observation of tree creeper: ‘Mousy little bird, with sharp call. First seen at college in 1950 from library window, intent on its own business.’ His contemporaries cannot remember the name of the teachers’ training college he attended, but all recall that it was not a success. Apparently, he loathed teaching practice, and dealing with children.
Soon after this, Baker joined the Automobile Association. His friends connived to get him the job. John Thurmer’s father was Regional Manager, and Don Samuel was already working in the Chelmsford office. Both agree it allowed Baker a chance to settle into some sort of stability.
At about this time, Baker met and fell in love with sixteen-year-old Doreen Coe. Ted Dennis remembers that they met when Baker found her bereft at missing a late bus, and gave her a ride home on his crossbar. Doreen’s father forbade her from marrying Baker before she was 21, so she waited, sticking with him, and they married on 6 October 1956. Baker was 30, and Doreen was 21 years and a month – almost to the day.
By then he was bird-watching regularly, crisscrossing the Chelmsford area on his bicycle. The diaries begin on 21 March 1954 and the last extant page is 22 May 1963. They run to 667 hand-written pages – all in a small stitched school notebook. Doreen told David Cobham that Baker’s habit was to retire to his study each evening, and write up his diaries. It is hard to believe that he took no notes at all in the field, though there is no evidence that he did so. [Note: A detailed account of how the diary is edited, and it contents, is given in the original introduction (see p.277).]
As is known, Baker became progressively crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and was, by the early 1970s, seriously incapacitated. Close friends obviously knew of Baker’s growing ill health, but another contemporary, Jack Baird, who remembers meeting Baker at a rare school reunion in the early 1980s, says he did not complain of it at all. Latterly, Doreen learned to drive, and bought a car, and would take Baker out to favourite haunts leaving him to walk and sit a little and watch birds before collecting him in the evening. Certainly, John Thurmer says he remembers not a note of self-pity. Baker died on 26 December 1986. He was just 61.
Among fragments of letters to Baker, was one from a reader, which praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. This essay formed part of a Birds issue dedicated to fighting against a proposal for a third London airport, and a deep-water port on the Maplin Sands, off Foulness. The article is entitled ‘On the Essex Coast’. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, we reproduce it here in full (see p.426).
‘On the Essex Coast’ also spawned an RSPB film, Wilderness Is Not a Place, produced by Anthony Clay, and filmed by Alan McGregor. The film did the rounds of the popular RSPB film circuit alongside three others, entitled High Life of the Rook, Avocets Return and Adventure Has Wings. The title and spare commentary are drawn directly from Baker’s text, which also begins with an editor’s note: ‘The Essex coastline is threatened by development. J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, shows that it has aesthetic as well as scientific value.’
‘On the Essex Coast’ appeared a year after Collins published The Hill of Summer, and is full of the passion Baker feels for his county, and the frustration that lay behind his anger at peregrines killed by the ‘filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. The essay describes the Dengie, a fist-like wedge of coast that stretches north from Foulness to Mersea. An outcry ensued over the plans for development, and they were finally shelved, in part because of the oil crisis in 1973. It was an early conservation campaign, and Baker’s article clearly contributed positively. Indeed, in his use of what is now a potentially offensive phrase, a ‘Belsen of floating oil’, perhaps we get a sense of his despair. The infamous 1967 Torrey Canyon super-tanker disaster was still fresh in the memory. When the ship broke up on the Seven Sisters, flooding oil into the sea, and onto the Cornish coast, the government decided to bomb and napalm the oil, creating a hellish scene that would have seared itself into the minds of many people, including Baker. It was a less politically sensitive time, and perhaps, in using the image, he intended to shock.
The Birds article reveals a man who was willing to harness his powerful writing to support the emerging environmental movement. Had Baker remained well, surely he would have written much more. Indeed, were he alive now, like so many of his octogenerian contemporaries, he would still be fighting for Essex and for many other wild places, and urging us not to be ‘soothed by the lullaby language of indifferent politicians’.
John Fanshawe, February 2011
THE PEREGRINE
BEGINNINGS
East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Above it, the eastern sky is bright with reflections of distant water, and there is a feeling of sails beyond land. Hill trees mass together in a dark-spired forest, but when I move towards them they slowly fan apart, the sky descends between, and they are solitary oaks and elms, each with its own wide territory of winter shadow. The calmness, the solitude of horizons lures me towards them, through them, and on to others. They layer the memory like strata.
From the town, the river flows north-east, bends east round the north side of the ridge, turns south to the estuary. The upper valley is a flat open plain, lower down it is narrow and steep-sided, near the estuary it is again flat and open. The plain is like an estuary of land, scattered with island farms. The river flows slowly, meanders; it is too small for the long, wide estuary, which was once the mouth of a much larger river that drained most of middle England.
Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious. One part of England is superficially so much like another. The differences are subtle, coloured by love. The soil here is clay: boulder clay to the north of the river, London clay to the south. There is gravel on the river terraces, and on the higher ground of the ridge. Once forest, then pasture, the land is now mainly arable. Woods are small, with few large trees; chiefly oak standards with hornbeam or hazel coppice. Many hedges have been cut down. Those that still stand are of hawthorn, blackthorn, and elm. Elms grow tall in the clay; their varying shapes contour the winter sky. Cricket-bat willows mark the river’s course, alders line the brook. Hawthorn grows well. It is a country of elm and oak and thorn. People native to the clay are surly and slow to burn, morose and smouldering as alder wood, laconic, heavy as the land itself. There are four hundred miles of tidal coast, if all the creeks and islands are included; it is the longest and most irregular county coastline. It is the driest county, yet watery-edged, flaking down to marsh and salting and mud-flat. The drying sandy mud of the ebb-tide makes the sky clear above; clouds reflect water and shine it back inland.
Farms are well ordered, prosperous, but a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass. There is always a sense of loss, a feeling of being forgotten. There is nothing else here; no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of the earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterise all sorrow.
I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.
I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.
The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it. Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness, between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently away. In pictures it seems to have a frog-like despondency, a mournful aura, as though it were sepulchred in twilight, ghostly and disturbing. It is never like that in life. Through the dusk, one sees only its shape and its flight, intangibly light and gay, graceful and nimble as a swallow.
Sparrowhawks were always near me in the dusk, like something I meant to say but could never quite remember. Their narrow heads glared blindly through my sleep. I pursued them for many summers, but they were hard to find and harder to see, being so few and so wary. They lived a fugitive, guerrilla life. In all the overgrown neglected places the frail bones of generations of sparrowhawks are sifting down now into the deep humus of the woods. They were a banished race of beautiful barbarians, and when they died they could not be replaced.
I have turned away from the musky opulence of the summer woods, where so many birds are dying. Autumn begins my season of hawk-hunting, spring ends it, winter glitters between like the arch of Orion.
I saw my first peregrine on a December day at the estuary ten years ago. The sun reddened out of the white river mist, fields glittered with rime, boats were encrusted with it; only the gently lapping water moved freely and shone. I went along the high river-wall towards the sea. The stiff crackling white grass became limp and wet as the sun rose through a clear sky into dazzling mist. Frost stayed all day in shaded places, the sun was warm, there was no wind.
I rested at the foot of the wall and watched dunlin feeding at the tide-line. Suddenly they flew upstream, and hundreds of finches fluttered overhead, whirling away with a ‘hurr’ of desperate wings. Too slowly it came to me that something was happening which I ought not to miss. I scrambled up, and saw that the stunted hawthorns on the inland slope of the wall were full of fieldfares. Their sharp bills pointed to the north-east, and they clacked and spluttered in alarm. I followed their point, and saw a falcon flying towards me. It veered to the right, and passed inland. It was like a kestrel, but bigger and yellower, with a more bullet-shaped head, longer wings, and greater zest and buoyancy of flight. It did not glide till it saw starlings feeding in stubble, then it swept down and was hidden among them as they rose. A minute later it rushed overhead and was gone in a breath into the sunlit mist. It was flying much higher than before, flinging and darting forwards, with its sharp wings angled back and flicking like a snipe’s.
This was my first peregrine. I have seen many since then, but none has excelled it for speed and fire of spirit. For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For ten years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawk’s eye swings and dilates to the luring food-shapes of gull and pigeons.
To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable. Enter and leave the same fields at the same time each day, soothe the hawk from its wildness by a ritual of behaviour as invariable as its own. Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree. A peregrine fears nothing he can see clearly and far off. Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.
Hawk-hunting sharpens vision. Pouring away behind the moving bird, the land flows out from the eye in deltas of piercing colour. The angled eye strikes through the surface dross as the obliqued axe cuts to the heart of the tree. A vivid sense of place glows like another limb. Direction has colour and meaning. South is a bright, blocked place, opaque and stifling; West is a thickening of the earth into trees, a drawing together, the great beef side of England, the heavenly haunch; North is open, bleak, a way to nothing; East is a quickening in the sky, a beckoning of light, a storming suddenness of sea. Time is measured by a clock of blood. When one is active, close to the hawk, pursuing, the pulse races, time goes faster; when one is still, waiting, the pulse quietens, time is slow. Always, as one hunts for the hawk, one has an oppressive sense of time contracting inwards like a tightening spring. One hates the movement of the sun, the steady alteration of the light, the increase of hunger, the maddening metronome of the heart-beat. When one says ‘ten o’clock’ or ‘three o’clock,’ this is not the grey and shrunken time of towns; it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and that place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium. As soon as the hawk-hunter steps from his door he knows the way of the wind, he feels the weight of the air. Far within himself he seems to see the hawk’s day growing steadily towards the light of their first encounter. Time and the weather hold both hawk and watcher between their turning poles. When the hawk is found, the hunter can look lovingly back at all the tedium and misery of searching and waiting that went before. All is transfigured, as though the broken columns of a ruined temple had suddenly resumed their ancient splendour.
I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word ‘predator’ is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.
In my diary of a single winter I have tried to preserve a unity, binding together the bird, the watcher, and the place that holds them both. Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.
For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.
PEREGRINES
The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. Books about birds show pictures of the peregrine, and the text is full of information. Large and isolated in the gleaming whiteness of the page, the hawk stares back at you, bold, statuesque, brightly coloured. But when you have shut the book, you will never see that bird again. Compared with the close and static image, the reality will seem dull and disappointing. The living bird will never be so large, so shiny-bright. It will be deep in landscape, and always sinking farther back, always at the point of being lost. Pictures are waxworks beside the passionate mobility of the living bird.
Female peregrines, known as falcons, are between seventeen and twenty inches long; roughly the length of a man’s arm from elbow to fingertip. Males, or tiercels, are three to four inches shorter, fourteen to sixteen inches long. Weights also vary: falcons from 1¾ to 2½ pounds, tiercels from 1¼ to 1¾ pounds. Everything about peregrines varies: colour, size, weight, personality, style: everything.
Adults are blue, blue-black, or grey, above; whitish below, barred crosswise with grey. During their first year of life, and often for much of their second year also, the younger birds are brown above, and buff below – streaked vertically with brown. This brown colour ranges from foxy red to sepia, the buff from pale cream to pale yellow. Peregrines are born between April and June. They do not begin to moult their juvenile feathers till the following March; many do not begin till they are more than a year old. Some may remain in brown plumage throughout their second winter, though they usually begin to show some adult feathers from January onwards. The moult may take as long as six months to complete. Warmth speeds it, cold retards it. Peregrines do not breed till they are two years old, but one-year birds may select an eyrie and defend territory.
The peregrine is adapted to the pursuit and killing of birds in flight. Its shape is streamlined. The rounded head and wide chest taper smoothly back to the narrow wedge-shaped tail. The wings are long and pointed; the primaries long and slender for speed, the secondaries long and broad to give strength for the lifting and carrying of heavy prey. The hooked bill can pull flesh from bones. It has a tooth on the upper mandible, which fits into a notch in the lower one. This tooth can be inserted between the neck vertebrae of a bird so that, by pressing and twisting, the peregrine is able to snap the spinal cord. The legs are thick and muscular, the toes long and powerful. The toes have bumpy pads on their undersides that help in the gripping of prey. The bird-killing hind toe is the longest of the four, and it can be used separately for striking prey to the ground. The huge pectoral muscles give power and endurance in flight. The dark feathering around the eyes absorbs light and reduces glare. The contrasting facial pattern of brown and white may also have the effect of startling prey into sudden flight. To some extent it also camouflages the large, light-reflecting eyes.
The speed of the peregrine’s wing-beat has been recorded as 4.4 beats per second. Comparative figures are: jackdaw 4.3, crow 4.2, lapwing 4.8, woodpigeon 5.2. In level flapping flight the peregrine looks rather pigeon-like, but its wings are longer and more flexible than a pigeon’s and they curl higher above the back. The typical flight has been described as a succession of quick wing-beats, broken at regular intervals by long glides with wings extended. In fact, gliding is far from regular, and at least half the peregrine flights I have seen have contained few, if any, glides. When the hawk is not hunting, the flight may seem slow and undulating, but it is always faster than it looks. I have timed it at between thirty and forty miles an hour, and it is seldom less than that. Level pursuit of prey has reached speeds of fifty to sixty miles an hour over distances of a mile or more; speeds in excess of sixty m.p.h. were only attained for a much shorter time. The speed of the vertical stoop is undoubtedly well over a hundred miles an hour, but it is impossible to be more precise. The excitement of seeing a peregrine stoop cannot be defined by the use of statistics.
Peregrines arrive on the east coast from mid-August to November; the majority reach here in late September and the first half of October. They may come in from the sea in any weather conditions, but are most likely to do so on a clear sunny day with a fresh north-west wind blowing. Passage birds may stay in one area for two to three weeks before going south. Return passage lasts from late February to May. Winter residents usually depart in late March or early April. Juvenile falcons are the first peregrines to arrive in the autumn, followed by juvenile tiercels, and later by a few adult birds. Most adults do not come so far south, but remain as close as they can to their breeding territory. This order of migration, which prevails along the European coastline from the North Cape to Brittany, is similar to that observed on the eastern coast of North America. Ringing recoveries suggest that immigrants to the east coast of England have come from Scandinavia. No British-ringed peregrines have been recovering in south-east England. Generally speaking, all the juveniles that wintered in the river valley, and along the estuaries, were paler in colour than juveniles from British nests; they had a distinctive wing pattern of light reddish-brown wing coverts and secondaries contrasting with black primaries, similar to that of a kestrel. The territory in which my observations were made measures roughly twenty miles from east to west and ten miles from north to south. It was hunted over by at least two peregrines each winter, sometimes by three or four. The river valley and the estuary to the east of it are both ten miles in length. Together they formed a long narrow centre to the territory, where at least one peregrine could always be found. Why these particular places were chosen it is difficult to be sure. Most parts of England, including towns and cities, could provide a winter’s keep for a resident peregrine, yet certain areas have always been regularly visited, while others have been ignored. Peregrines that have a definite liking for duck of shore birds will obviously be found on the coast, at reservoirs and sewage farms, or in fenland. But the birds that wintered in the valley took a wide range of prey, in which woodpigeons and black-headed gulls predominated. I think they came here for two reasons: because this was a wintering place that had been used for many years, and because the gravelly streams of the valley provided ideal conditions for bathing. The peregrine is devoted to tradition. The same nesting cliffs are occupied for hundreds of years. It is probable that the same wintering territories are similarly occupied by each generation of juvenile birds. They may in fact be returning to places where their ancestors nested. Peregrines that now nest in the tundra conditions of Lapland and the Norwegian mountains may be the descendants of those birds that once nested in the tundra regions of the lower Thames. Peregrines have always lived as near the permafrost limit as possible.
Peregrines bathe every day. They prefer running water, six to nine inches deep; nothing less than two inches or more than twelve inches is acceptable to them. The bed of the stream must be stony or firm, with a shallow incline sloping gradually down from the bank. They favour those places where the colour of the stream-bed resembles the colour of their own plumage. They like to be concealed by steep banks or overhanging bushes. Shallow streams, brooks, or deep ditches, are preferred to rivers. Salt water is seldom used. Dykes lined with concrete are sometimes chosen, but only if the concrete has been discoloured. Shallow fords, where brown-mottled country lanes are crossed by a fast-running brook, are favourite places. For warning of human approach they rely on their remarkably keen hearing and on the alarm calls of other birds. The search for a suitable bathing place is one of the peregrine’s main daily activities, and their hunting and roosting places are located in relation to this search. They bathe frequently to rid themselves of their own feather lice and of the lice that may transfer to them from the prey they have killed. These new lice are unlikely to live long once they have left their natural host species, but they are an additional irritation to which the hawk is most sensitive. Unless the number of lice infesting the hawk’s feathers is controlled by regular bathing, there can be a rapid deterioration in health, which is dangerous for a juvenile bird still learning to hunt and kill its prey. Though there can be many variations, a peregrine’s day usually begins with a slow, leisurely flight from the roosting place to the nearest suitable bathing stream. This may be as much as ten to fifteen miles away. After bathing, another hour or two is spent in drying the feathers, preening, and sleeping. The hawk rouses only gradually from his post-bathing lethargy. His first flights are short and unhurried. He moves from perch to perch, watching other birds and occasionally catching an insect or a mouse on the ground. He re-enacts the whole process of learning to kill that he went through when he first left the eyrie: the first, short, tentative flights; the longer, more confident ones; the playful, mock attacks at inanimate objects, such as falling leaves or drifting feathers; the games with other birds, changing to a pretence or attack, and then to the first serious attempt to kill. True hunting may be a comparatively brief process at the end of this long re-enactment of the hawk’s adolescence.
Hunting is always preceded by some form of play. The hawk may feint at partridges, harass jackdaws or lapwings, skirmish with crows. Sometimes, without warning, he will suddenly kill. Afterwards he seems baffled by what he has done, and he may leave the kill where it fell and return to it later when he is genuinely hunting. Even when he is hungry, and has killed in anger, he may sit beside his prey for ten to fifteen minutes before starting to feed. In these cases the dead bird is usually unmarked, and the hawk seems to be puzzled by it. He nudges it idly with his bill. When blood flows, he feeds at once.
Regular hunting over the same area will produce an increasingly effective defensive reaction from possible prey. It is always noticeable that the reaction of birds to a peregrine flying above them is comparatively slight in September and October, but that it steadily increases throughout the winter, till in March it is violent and spectacular. The peregrine has to avoid frightening the same birds too often, or they may leave the area altogether. For this reason he may be seen hunting in the same place for several days in succession, and then not be seen there again for a week or more. He may move only a short distance, or he may go twenty miles away. Individuals vary greatly in their hunting habits. Some hunt across their territory in straight lines five to fifteen miles long. They may suddenly turn about and fly back on the same course to attack birds already made uneasy. These hunting lines may run from estuary to reservoir to valley, and from valley to estuary; or they may follow the lines of flight from roosting places to bathing places. The territory is also effectively quartered by long up-wind flights, followed by diagonal down and cross wind gliding that finishes a mile or two away from the original starting point. Hunting on sunny days is done chiefly by soaring and circling down wind, and is based on a similar diagonal quartering of the ground. When an attack is made, it is usually a single vicious stoop. If it misses, the hawk may fly on at once to look for other prey.
In early autumn, and in spring, when days are longer and the air warmer, the peregrine soars higher and hunts over a wider area. In March, when conditions are often ideal for soaring, his range increases, and by long stoops from a great height he is able to kill larger and heavier prey. Cloudy weather means shorter flights at lower levels. Rain curtails the hunting range still further. Fog reduces it to a single field. The shorter the day the more active the hawk, for there is less time available for hunting. All its activities contract or expand with the shortening or lengthening of days on either side of the winter solstice.
Juvenile peregrines hover whenever the wind is too strong to allow them to circle sufficiently slowly above the area they are surveying. Such hovering usually lasts for ten to twenty seconds, but some birds are more addicted to the habit than others and will hover persistently for long periods. The hunting hawk uses every advantage he can. Height is the obvious one. He may stoop (stoop is another word for swoop) at prey from any height between three feet and three thousand. Ideally, prey is taken by surprise: by a hawk hidden by height and diving unseen to his victim, or by a hawk that rushes suddenly out from concealment in a tree or a dyke. Like a sparrowhawk, the peregrine will wait in ambush. The more spectacular methods of killing are used less often by juveniles than they are by adults. Some soaring peregrines deliberately stoop with the sun behind them. They do it too frequently for it to be merely a matter of chance.
Like all hunters, the peregrine is inhibited by a code of behaviour. It seldom chases prey on the ground or pursues it into cover, in the manner of other hawks, though it is quite capable of doing so. Many adults take only birds in flight, but juveniles are less particular. Peregrines perfect their killing power by endless practice, like knights or sportsmen. Those most adaptable, within the limits of the code, survive. If the code is persistently broken, the hawk is probably sick or insane.
Killing is simple once the peregrine has the advantage of his prey. Small, light birds are seized in his outstretched foot; larger, heavier birds are stooped at from above, at any angle between ten and ninety degrees, and are often struck to the ground. The stoop is a means of increasing the speed at which the hawk makes contact with his prey. The momentum of the stoop adds weight to the hawk and enables him to kill birds twice as heavy as himself. Young peregrines have to be taught to stoop by their parents; captive birds have to be trained by falconers in a similar way. The action of stooping does not seem to be innate, though it is quickly learnt. The ability to stoop at birds in flight was probably a comparatively recent evolutionary development, superseding capture by follow-chase and the taking of ground-game. Most birds still fly up from the ground when a peregrine passes above them, though this may increase their vulnerability.
The peregrine swoops down towards his prey. As he descends, his legs are extended forward till the feet are underneath his breast. The toes are clenched, with the long hind toe projecting below the three front ones, which are bent up out of the way. He passes close to the bird, almost touching it with his body, and still moving very fast. His extended hind toe (or toes – sometimes one, sometimes both) gashes into the back or breast of the bird, like a knife. At the moment of impact the hawk raises his wings above his back. If the prey is cleanly hit – and it is usually hit hard or missed altogether – it dies at once, either from shock or from the perforation of some vital organ. A peregrine weighs between 1½ and 2½ lbs.; such a weight, falling from a hundred feet, will kill all but the largest birds. Shelduck, pheasants, or great black-backed gulls usually succumb to a stoop of five hundred feet or more. Sometimes the prey is seized and then released, so that it tumbles to the ground, stunned but still alive; or it may be clutched and carried off to a suitable feeding place. The hawk breaks its neck with his bill, either while he is carrying it or immediately he alights. No flesh-eating creature is more efficient, or more merciful, than the peregrine. It is not deliberately merciful; it simply does what it was designed to do. The crow-catchers of Königsberg kill their prey in the same way. Having decoyed the crows into their nets, they kill them by biting them in the neck, severing the spinal cord with their teeth.
The peregrine plucks feathers from his prey before he begins to eat. The amount of plucking varies, not only with the hunger of the hawk, but also according to individual preference. Some hawks always pluck their prey thoroughly, others pull out only a few beakfuls of feathers. Peregrines hold the prey steady by standing on it, gripping it with the inner talon of one or both feet. Plucking takes two to three minutes. Eating takes ten minutes to half an hour, depending on the size of the prey; ten minutes for a fieldfare or redshank, half an hour for a pheasant or mallard.
Prey may be eaten where it falls, if it is too heavy to carry off, or if it has landed in a suitable place. Many peregrines seem to be quite indifferent, feeding wherever they happen to make a kill. Others prefer a completely open place, or a completely secluded one. Seventy per cent of the kills I have found were lying on short grass, although most of the land here is arable. Peregrines like a firm surface to feed on. Small kills are often eaten in trees, especially in autumn. Birds reared in tree nests may eat their kills in trees whenever possible. On the coast, some peregrines prefer the top of the sea-wall for feeding, others eat at the foot of the wall, near the water line. The latter may have come from cliff eyries and be used to a steep slope above them as they eat.
A peregrine kill can be easily recognised. The framework of a bird is left on its back, with the wings untouched and still attached to the body by the shoulder-girdles. The breast-bone and all the main bones of the body may be quite fleshless. If the head has been left, the neck vertebrae will usually be fleshless also. The legs and back are frequently left untouched. If the breast-bone is still intact, small triangular pieces will have been nipped out of it by the peregrine’s bill. (This is not always true of very large birds, which have thicker bones.) When a kill is left with a good deal of meat still on it, the peregrine may return next day, or even several days later, to finish it up. Surplus meat from abandoned kills helps to support foxes, rats, stoats, weasels, crows, kestrels, gulls, tramps, and gypsies. The feathers are used by long-tailed tits in the construction of their nests. I have found an unusual concentration of such nests in areas where many kills have been made.
No other predator conflicts with the peregrine in the pursuit of prey, but it is sometimes prevented from hunting in certain places by the determined and concerted attacks of crows. When man is hunting, the peregrine goes elsewhere. It is remarkably quick to distinguish between an unarmed man and a man with a gun. There is a curious relationship between peregrines and kestrels that is difficult to define. The two species are often seen in the same place, especially in autumn and spring. I rarely saw one of them without finding the other close by. They may share the same bathing places, the peregrine may occasionally rob the kestrel of its prey, the kestrel may feed on kills the peregrine has left, the peregrine may attack birds that the kestrel unwittingly puts up for him. In September and October some peregrines seem to copy the kestrel’s way of hunting, and I have seen the two species hovering together over the same field. In a similar way, I have seen a peregrine hunting near a short-eared owl, and apparently mimicking its style of flight. By March the relationship between kestrel and peregrine has changed; the peregrine has become hostile, and will stoop at, and probably kill, any kestrel hovering near him.
During ten winters I found 619 peregrine kills. Individual species were represented as follows:
Woodpigeon
38%
Black-headed gull
14%
Lapwing
6%
Wigeon
3%
Partridge
3%
Fieldfare
3%
Moorhen
2%
Curlew
2%
Golden plover
2%
Rook
2%
In addition to these ten, there were 35 other species taken, to make up the remaining 25% of the total. Analysed by families, these are the proportions:
Pigeons
39%
Gulls
17%
Waders
16%
Duck
8%
Game
5%
Corvids
5%
Small or medium-sized Passerines
5%
Others
5%
More woodpigeons were killed during the winter I have described in this book, because of their extraordinary abundance in the cold weather, and because of the absence of other inland species at that time. The relative figures for this particular winter are as follows:
Woodpigeon
54%
Black-headed gull
9%
Lapwing
7%
Wigeon
3%
Partridge
3%
Fieldfare
2%
Moorhen
2%
Curlew
2%
Rook
2%
Mallard
2%
The remaining 14% was made up of 22 other species.
These tables suggest that the juvenile peregrine preys mainly on those species that are most numerous in its hunting territory, provided they weigh at least half a pound. Sparrows and starlings are very common here, but few are killed by peregrines. Of the larger birds, the commonest and most widely distributed species are woodpigeons, black-headed gulls, and lapwings, in that order. If the total weight of available prey is considered, the woodpigeon probably represents a proportion of the total biomass approximately equal to the percentage of woodpigeons actually killed by the peregrine. The method of selection employed, if there is one, may in fact be nothing more spectacular than this: that the peregrine kills most frequently the species of bird it sees most frequently, provided it is a reasonably large and conspicuous one. The presence of abnormally large numbers of any species of bird invariably results in a higher proportion of that species being killed by the peregrine. If a dry summer enables more partridges to breed successfully, then more partridges will be taken by the peregrine during the following winter. If wigeon numbers increase when the cold weather comes, more wigeon will be killed. Predators that kill what is commonest have the best chance for survival. Those that develop a preference for one species only are more likely to go hungry and to succumb to disease.
Over the valley and the estuary, many gulls and lapwings are killed by the peregrine in October and November, chiefly from freshly ploughed land. From December to February woodpigeons are the main prey, especially in hard weather, when fewer lapwings are available. Woodpigeons are still taken in March, the killing of lapwings and gulls increases again, and more duck are killed than in any other month. Game-birds, moorhens, fieldfares, and waders, are taken occasionally throughout the winter. In rain or fog, game-birds and moorhens become the principal prey. Ducks are killed far less often than is popularly supposed. This is true of all countries, both in summer and winter; the peregrine is definitely not a ‘duck-hawk’. Domestic and feral pigeons figure highly in most lists of peregrine kills, but I have found none here. No peregrine I have seen has ever attacked them, or shown any interest in them at all.
The peregrine’s choice of prey can be affected by weather conditions. When a wet summer is followed by a wet winter, the land becomes water-logged, ploughing is delayed, and the valley bathing-places are covered by flood-water. Peregrines then hunt over the grasslands to the south of the valley and between the two estuaries. They bathe in ditches or at the edge of flood-water. Some birds prefer to hunt over grassland, irrespective of weather conditions. These green-country peregrines arrive late in the autumn and stay till late April or early May. Possibly they come from the Lapland tundra, where the country, in summer, is like a huge emerald sponge. The wet marsh pastures, and the green fields of the heavy clay, are the colour of home to them. They range over vast distances, they fly high, they are much harder to find and follow than the comparatively sedentary peregrines of the valley. Lapwings, gulls, and fieldfares, feeding on worms in wet pastures, are their favourite prey. Clover-eating woodpigeons are taken from January to March. Nest-building rooks are often attacked.
It seems unlikely that the peregrine can have a discriminating sense of taste. If it has a preference for a certain species, it is probably because of the texture of the flesh and the amount of tender meat on the bones. Rooks, jackdaws, gulls, sawbill ducks and grebes, are all more or less distasteful to the human palate, but are eaten by the peregrine with apparent relish.
Conspicuousness of colour or pattern increases vulnerability and influences the peregrine’s choice of prey. Birds moving from place to place are always vulnerable, whether they are flying to and from their roosts along known ways, or merely passing over the territory on migration. Recent arrivals are attacked at once, before they can learn refuges. The odd are always singled out. The albinos, the sick, the deformed, the solitary, the imbecile, the senile, the very young; these are the most vulnerable.
Predators overcome their prey by the exploitation of weakness rather than by superior power. As in the following instances:
Woodpigeon
The white wing and neck feathers are visible at a great distance. White shows up against all ground-colours. The peregrine sees and reacts to white more rapidly than to any colour. Eight per cent of the birds killed in the territory were either mainly white or showed conspicuous white markings. Woodpigeons are also betrayed by the loud clatter of their wings at take-off. In spring, their display flight makes them still more obvious. Their flocks gain height too slowly, and the individual birds do not keep close enough together. They are strong in level flight; they are quick to see danger from below and to swerve suddenly aside; but when attacked from above, their reaction is less violent, they dodge with difficulty, their straight flight is slow to bend. Because they are so much shot at and disturbed by man they are often forced to fly beneath the hunting hawk. They are loose-feathered and easy to pluck. In every respect they are an ideal species for the peregrine to prey upon. They are noisy, conspicuous, numerous, heavy, well-fleshed, nourishing, and not hard to kill.
Black-headed gull
White gulls are the most conspicuous of all winter birds. Against dark ploughland they are visible even to the feeble human eye when half a mile away. That is why the peregrine kills so many adult gulls, and so few juveniles. Gulls can rise quickly to evade the stoop, but they are easily driven to panic by attack from below. Their whiteness blends with the sky. It may make them invisible to the fish they live on when at sea. Relying on camouflage, perhaps they are slow to adapt themselves to unexpected danger from beneath. It was once believed that peregrines detested gull-flesh. Many gulls are killed by Finnish peregrines during the summer, and gulls are frequently taken on the coast of Norway, and in Scotland.
Lapwing
They are well hidden when feeding in a field, but the flocks always fly up when a peregrine goes over. As soon as they rise, their black and white tails are a target to the falcon’s eye. Their spring display flight makes them careless of danger and less alert to predators. They have the reputation of being hard to kill, but the peregrines I have seen have outflown them fairly easily.
Wigeon
Peregrines prefer wigeon to any other species of duck. It is the commonest coastal duck, in winter, and its broad white wing-markings and loud whistling calls make it very conspicuous. Like all duck, it flies fast and straight, but it cannot dodge easily from the stoop. In March the paired birds are slow to react to the peregrine’s approach. When wildfowling finishes in February, the peregrine kills more duck and is often seen hunting on the coast at nightfall.
To summarise, these are the characteristics that make birds vulnerable to peregrine attack: white or light-coloured plumage or markings, too great a reliance on cryptic colouring, loud repetitive calling, audible wing-beats, straight inflexible flight, prolonged and high song-flight (e.g. skylark and redshank), display and fighting by males in spring, feeding too far from adequate refuge, the habitual use of the same feeding and bathing places, flying to and from roost along known ways, the failure of a flock to bunch together when attacked.
The quantity of food eaten by wild peregrines is difficult to estimate accurately. Captive peregrines are given four to five ounces of beef daily (or its equivalent). Wild juveniles probably eat more than this. A wild tiercel will kill and eat two lapwings each day, or two black-headed gulls, or one woodpigeon. A falcon may eat two woodpigeons – though not wholly – or one larger bird, such as a mallard or a curlew.
During March, a greater variety of prey is taken, including a wider range of bird species and a surprisingly large number of mammals. Moult is beginning, and the time for migration is near. An increased blood supply is needed for the growth of new feathers. The peregrine seems to be always eating. Two birds are killed daily, as well as mice, worms, and insects.
The eyes of a falcon peregrine weigh approximately one ounce each; they are larger and heavier than human eyes. If our eyes were in the same proportion to our bodies as the peregrine’s are to his, a twelve-stone man would have eyes three inches across, weighing four pounds. The whole retina of a hawk’s eye records a resolution of distant objects that is twice as acute as that of the human retina. Where the lateral and binocular visions focus, there are deep-pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a resolution eight times as great as ours. This means that a hawk, endlessly scanning the landscape with small abrupt turns of his head, will pick up any point of movement; by focusing upon it he can immediately make it flare up into larger, clearer view.
The peregrine’s view of the land is like the yachtsman’s view of the shore as he sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the pierced horizon glides back on either side. Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand? Does he really ‘know’ that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel – as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white – that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.
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