The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

In the bright west, in long streams above the estuary calm, a thousand lapwings wheeled and feathered in their changing squadrons, their soft wings rising and falling in rhythm like the oars of a long-boat.

November 21st

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 ploughlands 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.

At two o’clock a crackling blackness of jackdaws swept up from stubble and scattered out across the sky with a noise like dominoes being rattled together on a pub table. Woodpigeons and lapwings rose to the south. The peregrine was near, but I could not see it. I went down to the brook and across the fields between the two woods. From stubble and plough I flushed gleanings of skylarks. The sun shone. Trees coloured like tawny gravel on the bed of a clear stream. The oaks of the two woods were maned with spiky gold. A green woodpecker flew from the wet grass and clapped itself to the bole of a tree as though pulled in by a magnet. Above the moss and mustard of its back, the crown of its head smouldered vermilion, like scarlet agaric shining through a dark wood. The high, harsh alarm call came loud and sudden, a breathless squeezed-out sound, meaning ‘hawk sighted’. In the bare spars of the limes by the bridge, silent fieldfares were watching the sky.

I looked to the west, and saw the peregrine moving up above the distant farmhouse cedar, luminous in a dark cloud of rooks, drifting in streams of golden plover. A black shower cloud was glooming from the north; the peregrine shone against it in a nimbus of narrow gold. He glided over stubble, and a wave of sparrows dashed itself into a hedge. For a second, the hawk’s wings danced in pursuit, flicking lithe and high in a cluster of frenzied beats that freeze in memory to the shape of antlers. Then he flew calmly on towards the river.

I followed, but could not find him. Dusk and sunset came together in the river mist. A shrew scuffled in dead leaves beneath a hedge, and hid among them when a little owl began to call. Water voles, running along the branch of a bush that overhangs the river, were suddenly still when they heard the call. When it stopped, they dived into the water and swam into the cover of the reeds. I walked along beside the hedge. A woodcock startled me by its sudden, noisy, upward leaping. It flew against the sky, and I saw the long downward-pointing bill and the blunt owl-like wings, and heard the thin whistle and throaty croak of its roding call; a strange thing to hear in the cold November dusk. It wavered away to the west, and the peregrine starred above it, a dark incisive shape descending through the pale saffron of the afterglow. They disappeared into the dusk together, and I saw nothing more.

November 24th

A peregrine soared above the valley in the morning sunshine and the warm south breeze. I could not see it, but its motion through the sky was reflected on the ground beneath in the restless rising of the plover, in the white swirl of gulls, in the clattering grey clouds of woodpigeons, in hundreds of bright birds’ eyes looking upward.

When all was quiet, tiercel and falcon flew low and side by side across the wide plain of the open fields. Moving up wind, they scattered golden plover from the stubble. They were coloured like plover themselves and were soon hidden in the tawny-brown horizon of the fields.

Rain-clouds thickened and lowered, wind rose, everything became sharp-edged. I disturbed the falcon from an oak near ford lane. She flew quickly away to the north-east, rose beyond the brook, and hovered over the orchard. Between hovers she glided and circled, trying to soar, but she could not do so. Slowly she drifted over the hill to the east. There was no panic among the orchard birds, but many fieldfares and finches flew up and straggled aimlessly about beneath the hawk as though unable to decide whether to mob it or not. Most birds find a hovering peregrine difficult to understand. As soon as it flies fast, they know what they have to do, but when it hovers like a kestrel they are less perturbed. The only birds that immediately recognise it as being dangerous are partridges and pheasants. They are the species most threatened by this manner of hunting, and they either crouch low or run to the nearest cover. Hovering kestrels they ignore.

I went across the fields to the south of the lane, and put up three curlew. There were four there on the 21st; a peregrine may have killed the other one since then. As the curlew flew off, calling, the tiercel appeared, a hundred yards to the west. Lapwings rose quickly from the stubble in front of him, but they had misjudged the strength of the wind and had risen too late. The tiercel swung steeply up, wind filling his cupped wings like sails. He poised for a moment, then flattened his wings sharply to his sides and rushed downwards, piercing through the wind to the last lapwing of the straggling line. The glancing blow was struck so quickly that I did not see it. I only saw the hawk flying down wind, carrying his kill.

An hour of drenching rain extinguished the day. The valley was a sopping brown sponge, misty and dun. Sixteen mallard flew over, and a wigeon whistled. Rain fell copiously again, and the hollow dusk was filled with the squelching calls of snipe.

November 26th

Rooks and gulls moving over the rainy town at dawn: rooks to the estuary, gulls to inland. Down by the sound of the tide, corn buntings sang in cottage gardens. Rain blew gently as daylight gained. Waders gathered on the shrinking rim of shore, dark heads against white water. Grey plover were feeding, leaning forward like pointers, listening to the mud like thrushes on a lawn. A careful step, a thrust of the head forward and over, a strained intentness; then the bill darting down through the mud, spearing out a worm, fast and springy as a fencer. Knot were resting. They had a slant-eyed mongol look, like sleeping huskies. Fifty flew out across the water as I stumbled through the sticky clay on the top of the sea-wall. Grey birds, sweeping low under the white-stoned clear horizon and the high grey sky, low to the rain-spattered white of water and the scoured shore, black-purple seaweed, weed-green islands, and long seas heaving smooth.

Six cormorants squatted at the tideline, like blackened tree-stumps. Farther east, one rested with its wings outspread, heraldic against the whole North Sea. Long ‘V’s’ of brent geese flew past. The clucking guttural of their conversation was audible a mile away. Their long black lines clawed along the bottom of the sky.

The wings of hawk kills fluttered on the shingle: a wigeon and six black-headed gulls were old and stale, a red-breasted merganser was only three days dead. It is surprising that a peregrine should kill a merganser, a bird most foul and fishy-tasting to the human palate. Only the wings, bones, and bill, had been left. Even the skull had been picked clean. That narrow saw-billed head, with its serrated prehistoric grin, had been too much to swallow. 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.

Greenshanks stood in the marsh; hoary-looking waders, grey and mossy coloured, tilting forward to feed over their thin grey legs. Where they were not grey, they were white; bleak, leaden birds, phantoms of summer green, suddenly aloof and beautiful in flight. Slow rain fell from mid-grey, light grey sky. A deceptive clarity and brightening at eleven o’clock meant that the rain was really setting in. For an hour, till greyness covered all, the water shone like milk and mother-of-pearl. The sea breathed quietly, like a sleeping dog.

November 28th

Nothing was clear in the tractor-echoing dreariness of this misty day. The thin and faltering north-west wind was cold.

At eleven o’clock a peregrine flew up to one of the line of tall pylons that extends across the valley. He was blurred in mist, but the deft bowing and fanning of his wings was instantly familiar. For twenty minutes he watched the plover feeding in the surrounding fields, then flew south to the next pylon. There he was silhouetted in an owl shape against the white sky, his sunken head rounding out into high curved shoulders and tapering down to the short blunt-ended tail. He flew north again, moving up above the shining mist-coils of the river, the red-gold burnish of his plumage glowing into dimness. His wings rowed back with long powerful strokes, sweeping him easily, majestically forward.

I could not follow him in such poor light, so I went down to the brook, thinking that later he might come there to bathe. Blackbirds and chaffinches were scolding in the hawthorns by North Wood, and a jay was perching in alders and looking down at something. Keeping in the cover of hedges, I went slowly along to the thick mass of hawthorns. I forced my way into them till I could see the fast-moving water of the brook, which the jay had been watching. Through the dark mesh of thorny twigs, I saw a falcon peregrine standing on stones, a few inches from the water, looking intently at her own reflection. She walked slowly forward till her large, wrinkled yellow feet were immersed. She stopped and glared around, then raised her wings at a steep angle above her back and waded carefully out into the water, stepping gingerly on the small gravelly stones as though afraid of slipping. When the water was nearly up to her shoulders, she stopped. She drank a few sips, dipped her head beneath the surface repeatedly, splashed, dowsed and flapped her wings. Blackbirds and chaffinches stopped scolding, and the jay flew off.

She stayed in the water for ten minutes, gradually becoming less active; then she waddled heavily ashore. Her curious parrot-like amble was made even more ungainly by the weight of water in her feathers. She shook herself a great deal, made little jumps into the air with flailing wings, and flew cumbersomely up into a dead alder that overhangs the brook. Blackbirds and chaffinches started scolding again, and the jay came back. The peregrine was huge with water, and did not look at all happy. She was deeper-chested and broader-backed than the tiercel, with a bigger hump of muscle between her shoulders. She was darker in colour and more like the conventional pictures of young peregrines. The jay began to flutter round her in an irritating manner. She flew heavily away to the north, with the jay screeching derisively in pursuit.

I found her in a dead oak to the north-east of the ford. The tree stands on higher ground, and from its topmost branches a hawk can see for several miles across the open river plain to the west. After looking all around, and up at the sky, she began to preen. She did not raise her head again till she had finished. The breast feathers were preened first; then the undersides of the wings, the belly, and the flanks, in that order. When the preening was done, she picked savagely at her feet, sometimes raising one to get a better grip on it, and cleaned and honed her bill upon the bark of the tree. She slept fitfully till one o’clock, then flew quickly away to the east.

November 29th

At midday a peregrine flew from inland, passing quite close to me as I stood on the sea-wall near the saltings. Beyond the wall it rose, hovered, and swept down and up in savage ‘U’-shaped stoops. Three times it did this, then flew back the way it had come. I thought it was trying to flush prey from the shore, but when I reached the place where it had stopped, I found nothing there. It may have been practising its aim at some post or stone, but I do not understand why it should have flown to and from that particular spot in such a deliberate way.

I went on to the east. The sun shone, but the wind was cold; a good soaring day for hawks.

Three hours later I returned to the saltings, and found the remains of a great crested grebe at the foot of the sea-wall, near the high-water mark. It had been a heavy bird, weighing perhaps two and a half pounds, and it was probably killed by a stoop from a considerable height. It now weighed less than a pound. The breast-bone and ribs were bare. The vertebrae of the long neck had also been carefully cleaned. The head, wings, and stomach were untouched. The exposed organs steamed slightly in the frosty air, and were still warm. Although so fresh, they had an unpleasant rancid smell. Grebes taste rank and fishy to the human palate.

At sunset, as I went across the marsh, two peregrines flew from the roof of a hut. Languid and heavy-cropped, they did not fly far. They had shared the grebe, and now they were roosting together.

November 30th

Two kills by the river: kingfisher and snipe. The snipe lay half submerged in flooded grass, cryptic even in death. The kingfisher shone in mud at the river’s edge, like a brilliant eye. He was tattered with blood, stained with the blood-red colour of his stumpy legs that were stiff and red as sticks of sealing wax, cold in the lapping ripple of the river. He was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light-years.

In the afternoon I crossed the field that slopes up from North Wood, and saw feathers blowing in the wind. The body of a woodpigeon lay breast upward on a mass of soft white feathers. The head had been eaten. Flesh had been torn from the neck, breast-bone, ribs, and pelvis, and even from the shoulder-girdles and the carpal joints of the wings. This tiercel eats well. His butchery is beautifully done. The carcass weighed only a few ounces, so nearly a pound of meat had been taken from it. The bones were still dark red, the blood still wet.

I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.

December 1st

The peregrine soared unseen in the blue zenith of the misty sky, and circled east above the rising coils of gulls. After half an hour of idling through the morning sunshine and drifting in the cold south-east wind, he came down to the brook with tremendous swooping force, bursting up a star of fragment birds. A snipe whistled away down wind like a shell, and the first great clattering of woodpigeons settled to the long sighing of departing wings. Blackbirds were still scolding when I reached the bridge, but the sky was empty. All the trees to southward – stark against the low glare of the sun – were heavy with pigeons, thick clustered like black fruit.

When the slowly relaxing tension, and the uneasy peace, had lasted for twenty minutes, the pigeons began to return to the fields. Gulls and plover went back to following the plough. Migrating lapwings flew high to the north-west, serene and untroubled. Woodpigeons flew between the two woods, and between the woods and the ploughed fields. They were never still, and their white wing-bars flashed in sunlight, a temptation and a challenge to the watching peregrine.

I scanned the sky constantly to see if a hawk was soaring, scrutinised every tree and bush, searched the apparently empty sky through every arc. That is how the hawk finds his prey and eludes his enemies, and that is the only way one can hope to find him and share his hunting. Binoculars, and a hawk-like vigilance, reduce the disadvantage of myopic human vision.

At last, yet one more of all the distant pigeon-like birds, that till then had always proved to be pigeons, was suddenly the peregrine. He flew over South Wood, and soared in the warm air rising from open spaces sheltered by encircling trees. Crisp and golden in the sunlight, he swam up through the warm air with muscular undulations of his wings, like the waving flicker of a fish’s fins. He drifted on the surface, a tiny silver flake on the blue burnish of the sky. His wings tightened and bent back, and he slid away to the east, a dark blade cutting slowly through blue ice. Moving down through sunlight, he changed colour like an autumn leaf, passing from shining gold to pallid yellow, turning from tawny to brown, suddenly flicking out black against the skylinee. White fire smouldered in the south as the sun glared lower. Two jackdaws flew high above. One dived, went into a spin, looped the loop, and fell towards earth as though it had been shot, a tossing bag of bones and feathers. It was playing at being dead. When a foot from the ground, it spread its wings and dropped lightly down, superbly nonchalant.

Following the restless plover, I crossed the brook and found the falcon peregrine in a hedge to the west. I stalked her, but she moved from tree to tree along the hedge, keeping up against the sun, where she could see me clearly while I was dazzled. When the hedge ended, she flew to a tree by the brook. She seemed sleepy and lethargic and did not move her head much. Her eyes had a brown ceramic glaze. They watched my eyes intently. I turned away for a moment. She flew at once. I looked back quickly, but she had gone. Hawks are reluctant to fly while they are being watched. They wait till the strange bondage of the eyes is broken.

Gulls flew slowly over to the east, their wings transparent in the brilliant light. At three o’clock the falcon circled among them, and began to soar. It was high tide at the estuary. Waders would be swirling up and sinking down above the creeks and saltings like blood pounding in a caged heart. I knew the peregrine would see them, would see the thousands of gulls moving in towards the brimming water, and I thought she would follow them eastward. Without waiting longer, I cycled as fast as I could across to a small hill, six miles away, that overlooks the estuary. Twice I stopped and searched for the falcon and found her circling high above the wooded ridge, drifting east as I had hoped. By the time I reached the hill she had passed over and down.

In the small lens of light that the telescope cored out from three miles of sunlit intervening air, I saw the shining water of the estuary darken and seethe with birds and the sharp hook of the falcon rising and falling in a long crenellation of stoops. Then the dark water lifted to brightness again, and all was still.

December 2nd

The tide was low. Mud shone like wet sand, and shingle strands were bright and glaring in the blue lagoons. Colour smarted in sunlight. A dead tree in dark fields reflected light, like an ivory bone. Bare trees stood in the earth, like the glowing veins of withered leaves.

A peregrine soared above the estuary, and the sky filled with the wings of waders. He dived through sunlight into a falling darkness of curlew, flashed through them into light again, curved under and rose beneath them as they rose, struck one in the breast with gasping force. It dropped beside the sea-wall, all out of shape, as though its body had been suddenly deflated. The peregrine glided down, and lanced the dead curlew’s breast with the hook of his bill.

December 3rd

All day the low clouds lay above the marshes and thin rain drifted in from the sea. Mud was deep in the lanes and along the sea-wall; thick ochre mud, like paint; oozing glutinous mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh, like fungus; octopus mud that clutched and clung and squelched and sucked; slippery mud, smooth and treacherous as oil; mud stagnant; mud evil; mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes; mud to the bone. On the east coast in winter, above or below the tide-line, man walks in water or in mud; there is no dry land. Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide.

At the mouth of the estuary, land and water lose themselves together, and the eye sees only water and land floating upon water. The grey and white horizons are moored on rafts. They move out into the dusk and leave the water-land to the ear alone, to the whistling of the wigeon, the crying of curlew, and the calling of gulls. There was a hawk to the north, circling over the higher ground and flying to roost. But it was too far off to draw me away from the falling tide. Thousands of gulls came out from the land at evening to the cleanness and safety of the sea.

December 5th

The sun fired the bone-white coral of the frosted hedges with a cold and sullen glow. Nothing moved in the silent valley till the rime melted and steamed in the sun, and trees began to drip through the misty cave that boomed and blurred with voices drifting from the stirring farms. The peregrine flew from a haystack by the road, where he had been resting in the sun, and went down to the river.

Half an hour later I found him near the bridge, perched on an overhead wire. He flew low along a ditch, brushing rime from the stiff reeds with his wings. He twisted, and turned, and hovered above a moorhen. It skidded and threshed on the ice between the reeds, and he could not catch it. Fourteen teal and a hundred gulls flew up from a stretch of unfrozen water. There were many tame and hungry snipe in the frosty fields, feeble, and faintly calling.

At one o’clock the peregrine flew east, rising over the sunlit cliffs of fog on strong, determined wings.