The Peregrine

Many people have witnessed the stoop of a Peregrine Falcon.
Indeed, I have, but just twice over many years of birdwatching.

 But to have it described in words like this ....

"He hovered, and stayed still,striding on the crumbling columns of air, curved wings jerking and flexing. Five minutes he stayed there, fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of the sky. His body was still and rigid, his head turned from side to side, his tail fanned open and shut, his wings whipped and shuddered like canvas in the lash of the wind ....
 There is no mistaking the menace of that first easy drifting fall. Smoothly, at an angle of fifty degrees, he descended ; not slowly, but controlling his speed; gracefully, beautifully balanced....
The angle of his fall became gradually steeper till there was no angle left, but only a perfect arc. He curved over and slowly revolved, as though for delight, glorying in anticipation of the dive to come...
For a thousand feet he fell...then his speed increased, and he dropped vertically down... he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped like a heart in flames. ....
The partridge in the snow beneath looked up at the black heart dilating down upon him, and heard a hiss of wings rising to a roar. In ten seconds the hawk was down, and the whole splendid fabric, the arched reredos and immense fan-vaulting of his flight, was consumed and lost in the fiery maelstrom of the sky".

.... An extract from 'The Peregrine' by J. A. Baker.

So we have a somewhat different blog post this time. A friend has suggested that I review the book.

This slim volume is not new. It was first published in the year 1967. The author still remains virtually unknown. Yet, many lay readers (and not just birdwatchers) consider this to be a classic. For what it is worth, I certainly concur. This is the kind of book that you start reading and just cannot finish ! And that is all praise. I needed to constantly stop myself from rushing ahead; and return to passages (that just rang in my ears) to savour again the images evoked so viscerally on these pages.

So who was J A Baker ? What is this book about ?

To the first question, I suspect, there is a book waiting in the wings which may finally tell us something about this very private individual who died as quietly as he lived... and so we will have to wait for that.
As Baker writes, he obsessively chooses to follow the peregrines over the course of several winters in eastern England on foot, by bicycle, learning their habits, their routines.
The book itself is in the form of a diary telescoped into one single winter season, observing the falcons hunting, feeding, bathing, preening, resting ... and at one level it is just that. There is no 'story', there is no 'plot'.
Yet Baker's powers of observation have been honed to the needle-sharp point of the peregrine's talons, he rips through to the core with his unique prose like the raptor tears the flesh of a red-legged partridge.

And like all the better writers of literature he has 'found his voice'. And what a voice it is.

Descriptions of the falcon riding the wind are a crescendo of music which wash over us ...
 "  He climbed vertically upward, like a salmon leaping in the great waves of air ... he dived to the trough of a wave, then rose steeply within it , flinging himself high in the air, on outstretched wings, exultant." ... " He left the blue sky baroque with fading curves of power and precision, of lithe and muscular flight".

Other passages are almost  poetic ...
"He rose upon the wind, and climbed in a narrow spiral, wafting a thousand feet higher with lyrical ease. He skimmed and floated lightly, small and slowly spinning, like a drifting sycamore seed".

You may have noticed in one of the extracts earlier that Baker uses the terms 'hawk' and 'falcon', both for the peregrine. This is deliberate. Actually 'tiercel' is a falconry term for the male or 'hawk' ( smaller in size ); whereas the female is the 'falcon'. Over time the author is able to identify each of the individual wintering peregrines, even in flight.

Much of the text is from the point of view of the peregrine ...

"The peregrine lives in a pouring away world of no attachment,a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water..."

So, the peregrine sees his / her world as such :
the land ( "...the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields"...);
 the sky ( "...patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...");
the wind ( " ... wild peregrines love the wind . It is their element. Only within it do they truly live..");
the prey (  "crackling blackness of jackdaws... gleanings of skylarks...streams of golden plover.. white helix of gulls...")

The only character in the book other than the peregrines, is the author. The hunter. Tracking the birds from before dawn, till after sunset, through fields, over marshes, skirting tide-exposed sea shore.

"I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified".

"Pagan head... be purified"?  What purgatory does Baker seek ? What ails him ?
While nothing is actually revealed in the text itself, other than oblique references that all may not be well with him physically; there is mention of other species in distress, mainly because of man's insidious effect on the environment.

"No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide".

What burdening carapace does he seek to slough off  in this demented, metronomic, single-minded pursuit of the peregrine ?

"I shut my eyes and tried to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk's mind.... Like the hawk, I heard and hated the sound of man, that faceless horror of the stony places. I stifled in the same filthy sack of fear".

And then, as autumn turns to winter and then to spring, the author is finding the catharsis that he possibly seeks from the peregrine.

"I think he regards me now as part hawk, part man... but never to be wholly trusted; a crippled hawk perhaps, unable to fly or to kill cleanly, uncertain and sour of temper".... and later ...
"There is a bond : impalpable, indefinable, but it exists ".

So in time, as he comes upon a fresh kill of a peregrine which is still warm and seeping blood, he is almost tempted to eat it himself. Or when he places his hand reverently on a perch that the peregrine has just flown from. The hunter is becoming the thing he hunts.

For the serious birder there is much to delight in - many of the creatures that inhabit these pages are familiar to us. The astonishing clarity and singularity of the prose describing the birds and animals and their behaviour, (while the author waits for his quarry), inevitably makes one exclaim, 'that is exactly how it is !'
And while even the lay reader would exult in the landscape painted on these pages ... there is always the shadow of the falcon hovering, a harbinger of death.