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

December 8th

Golden leaves of sunlight drifted down through morning fog. Fields shone wet under blue sky. From an elm near the river the tiercel peregrine flew up into the misty sunlight, calling: a high, husky, muffled call: ‘keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk’, sharp-edged and barbarous.

He rose over stubble to the north, keeping the sun behind him, beating forward, mounting in buoyant glides. He had the tenseness and taut ply in his wings that means he has sighted prey. Woodpigeons in the stubble stopped feeding, and raised their heads. Two hundred feet above them the hawk slowly circled, then slanted suddenly over and down. He slashed down through the air and swung up, and the pigeons flew wildly beneath him. He twisted over and down, with a sinuous coiling of wings, and cut in among them, piercing their soft grey hurtling mass.

Birds rose from all the fields around. Whole fields seemed to lift into the sky. Somewhere in this seething of wings the hawk was lost inextricably. When the turmoil subsided, there was no hawk within miles. This happens so often: the stealthy soft-winged approach, the sudden attack, then the hidden departure, concealed in a diffusing smokescreen of birds.

I reached the estuary at high tide. Thousands of glittering dunlin hissed and plunged over blue water. Brent geese and wigeon floated in the brimming bays. Gunners were out. Through the bronze flashes, and the booming of the early dusk, wigeon whistled unquenchably and a solitary red-throated diver raised its melancholy wail. The peregrine did not come back to the circling, echoing clangour of the banging estuary. He had killed in the morning, and wisely stayed inland.

December 10th

Bleak light, brutal wind, thickening cloud, showers of sleet. Snipe huddled in a flooded meadow north of the river, like little brown monks fishing. They crouched low over their bent green legs, and I could see their Colorado-beetle-coloured heads and their gentle brown eyes. They did not feed, but simply held their long bills out above the muddy water, as though they were savouring the bouquet. Fifty went up when I walked towards them. There is no hesitation, no slow awakening, for snipe; only the sudden convulsive jump from the mud when the alarm rings in their nerves. They made a tremendous nasal noise as they rose: a sneeze of snipe, not a wisp. They kept close together and did not jink, flying high and fast in a group, like starlings. This meant that a hawk was about.

After much searching I found the tiercel on a post in the fields. He looked sleepy and lethargic. He did not become alert till early afternoon, when light began to fade and misty dusk furred the distant trees. He circled over the meadow where snipe were resting. None rose till he stooped. Then they all spluttered and crackled up from the mud, like damp squibs. The last to rise was chased by the hawk. Together they tore up into the sky, plunged down across the fields, rushed in and out of the willows. The hawk followed every twist and turn, keeping up with the snipe, but never overtaking it. He stopped his pursuit quite suddenly, and dashed at the hundreds of fieldfares that were milling above the river in a random incohesive way. He still flew like a snipe, jinking and bouncing about like an uncoiling spring, scattering fieldfares but not attacking them.

He rested on a post for ten minutes, then flew steadily up wind, keeping very low and half-hidden in the darkening misty fields. His head and tail were invisible. He was like a manta ray flicking along the bottom of the sea. Gulls flew southward towards their roost. They came in fast-moving flocks of thirty or forty, and they would not fly directly overhead They split up as soon as they saw me, scattering to left or right, like woodpigeons. I had never seen them do that before. Repeated attacks by the peregrine, at morning and evening, had made them very wild, and suspicious of danger from below.

I followed the peregrine to the east. Fieldfares clacked and whistled above me on their way to roost by the river. From a small stream I put up a green sandpiper. It towered into the dusk, calling, veering and swaying about like a tipsy snipe. Its call was a wild, whistling ‘too-loo-weet’, indescribably triumphant and forlorn. The peregrine stooped as the sandpiper rose, but he missed it by a yard. He may have been following me so that I could flush prey for him. All the stoops he made today were slow and inaccurate. Perhaps he was not really hungry, but was compelled by habit to practise a ritual of hunting and killing.

The sky cleared after sunset. Far above, there was a sound like a distant striking of matches. Many rooks and jackdaws were calling as they flew slowly, peacefully, westward, high in the cold blue dusk, small as the first stars.

December 12th

High clouds slowly filled the sky, the morning whitened out, the sun was hidden. A cold wind rose from the north. The horizon light became clear and vivid.

The remains of a herring gull lay at the roadside, between two farms, half on the grass verge and half in the dust and grit. The peregrine had killed it in the night, or in the morning dusk, before there was any traffic on the road, and had found it too heavy to carry to a safer place. Since then, the passing cars had squashed it flat. The shredded flesh was still wet with blood, and the neck gaped redly where the head had been. To hawks, these gritty country lanes must look like shingle beaches; the polished roads must gleam like seams of granite in a moorland waste. All the monstrous artefacts of man are natural, untainted things to them. All that is still is dead. All that moves, and stops, and does not move again, then very slowly dies. Movement is like colour to a hawk; it flares upon the eye like crimson flame.

I found the gull at ten o’clock, and the peregrine a quarter of an hour later. As I expected, after eating so large a bird he had not gone far away. Looking very wet and dejected, with feathers loose and bedraggled, he was slumped on a tree by the ford lane pond. His tail dangled beneath him like a sodden umbrella. The pond is small and shallow, and contains the usual human detritus; pram wheels, tricycles, broken glass, rotting cabbages, and detergent containers, overlaid by a thin ketchup of sewage. The water is stagnant and greasy, but the hawk may have bathed in it. Normally he prefers clear running water of a certain depth and quality – and he will fly long distances to find it – but sometimes he seems deliberately to choose water containing sewage.

Three tractors were ploughing in the big field to the south. One of them was passing up and down, a few yards from the hawk, without disturbing him at all. Hawks perch near fields where tractors are working, because that is where birds are constantly on the move. There is always something to watch, or something to kill if the hawk should be hungry. They have learnt that the dreaded man-shape is harmless while the tractor is in motion. They do not fear machines, for a machine’s behaviour is so much more predictable than man’s. When the tractor stops, the hawk is immediately alert. When the driver walks away, the hawk moves to a more distant perch. This happened in the field by the pond half an hour after I arrived there. The hawk flew slowly south-east, lifting and swinging his wings like heavy unwieldy oars, and drifted down to rest at the top of a roadside elm. He did not see me coming till I was almost below the tree. Then he gaped, and started in alarm, and flew back towards the pond. He still moved slowly and carefully, as though fearful of spilling something, gliding with wings drooped down in limp, ignoble curves. This heavy waterlogged flight was like a crow’s, with the tips of the wings giving the air a light, quick touch at the end of the wings’ deep oaring.

I found him huddled in the oak that overhangs the lane, between the pond and the ford. He did not move when I passed beneath him. With eyes close, and drying feathers ruffled by the wind, he perched very upright and wooden, looking dingy and comatose, as though long-dead and rather moth-eaten. When I clapped my hands, he roused and flew down to the copse by the ford. Flushed from there, he flew back to the oak. Three times this manoeuvre was repeated. Then I left him to rest in the oak while I watched from the edge of the copse. He slept for another hour, waking at one o’clock to preen and look around. The colour of his feathers lightened as they dried. The tail was narrowly barred with pale fawn and pale brown; the back, mantle, and scapulars, were pale yellowish brown, flecked and barred laterally with glowing burnt sienna. The bars were close and narrow, and the whole surface had a luminous red-gold sheen. The crown of his head was pale gold, flecked lightly with brown. The tips of the folded wings reached just beyond the end of the tail; exceptionally long, even for a tiercel peregrine.

He left the tree at half past one, but was immediately chased back there by a crow. He called loudly in flight: a shrill petulant sound. When perched, he called again: a deeper, more challenging cry. At two o’clock he became restless, moving his head up and down and shifting his feet about. He took several minutes to bring himself to it, but when he finally flew he was fast and decisive. He swung out and round in a rising arc and went steeply up over North Wood, striking the air smartly with his wings; earlier, he had merely stroked it. Jackdaws, that all day had been playing and feeding unconcernedly in pastures by the brook, now flew up in panic, circled high, and dispersed hastily.

Rain fell for an hour, but I stayed by the copse, waiting. At three o’clock the peregrine returned, flying fast and savagely into the cold north wind, throwing up gulls and lapwings. A lapwing was cut off from the flock, and the lean brown tiercel cleaved behind, low to the ground as a running hare. The two birds seemed to be looped together, then seemed to swing apart. The lapwing turned in its own length, but the hawk wheeled out on a wider arc and whipped back in again with frenzied wings. Suddenly the tethering cord was broken. The hawk rushed up into the sky, the lapwing tumbled forward. The hawk turned on its side and stooped, as though hurled down through a hole in the air. Then nothing. Nothing at all. However it had ended, it was over. There was only silence and the hissing of the wind. The tortuous coiling of the hunter and his victim seemed to hang in the gloomy air.

As I went up the lane from the ford I saw a bird’s wing fluttering in the grey-twigged crown of a pollard ash. When I was two yards away, the peregrine flew out, his wings drumming in a frantic effort to wrench himself clear. For a second he was very close, and I could see the satin smoothness of his underwings and the thickly quilted feathers, spotted with brown and cream. He flew south across the fields, veering and swaying erratically. His legs hung down, and there was something white between them that fluttered like paper. Through binoculars I saw that he was carrying the dead lapwing, gripping it with both feet, so that it lay up against his tail, breast upward and head foremost, with its wings lolling open to show their black and white undersides. He flew easily, carrying his half-pound load, but he was troubled by the strength of the wind. He sagged a little in the gusts, and his wings beat in quick short jabs. He landed in a tree near the lane. When I disturbed him, five minutes later, the lapwing was smaller and easier to carry. He flew into another pollard ash, and there I left him to finish his meal. Three tractors were still ploughing in the field beside him.

At sunset, ten curlew rose and flew east, calling loudly. The tractors went back to the farm, and the last gulls flew south. The peregrine circled high in the dusk, and flickered out into the darkness of the hill. The hawkless valley bloomed with the soft voices of the waking owls.

December 15th

The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge. The stark horizon, fringing the far edges of the wind, was still and silent. Its clear serenity moved back before me; a mirage of elms and oaks and cedars, farms and houses, churches, and pylons silver-webbed like swords.

At eleven o’clock the tiercel peregrine flew steeply up above the river, arching and shrugging his wings into the gale, dark on the grey clouds racing over. Wild peregrines love the wind, as otters love water. It is their element. Only within it do they truly live. All wild peregrines I have seen have flown longer and higher and further in a gale than at any other time. They avoid it only when bathing or sleeping. The tiercel glided at two hundred feet, spread his wings and tail upon the billowing air, and turned down wind in a long and sweeping curve. Quickly his circles stretched away to the east, blown out elliptically by the force of the wind. Hundreds of birds rose beneath him. The most exciting thing about a hawk is the way in which it can create life from the still earth by conjuring flocks of birds into the air. All the feeding gulls and lapwings and woodpigeons went up from the big field between the road and the brook as the hawk circled above them. The farm seemed to be hidden by a sheet of white water, so close together were the rising gulls. Dark through the white gulls the sharp hawk dropped, shattering them apart like flinging white foam. When I lowered my binoculars, I saw that the birds around me had also been watching the hawk. In bushes and trees there were many sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and thrushes, looking east and steadily chattering and scolding. And all the way along the lanes, as I hurried east, there were huddles of small birds lining the hedges, shrilling their warning to the empty sky.

As I passed the farm, a flock of golden plover went up like a puff of gunsmoke. The whole flock streamed low, then slowly rose, like a single golden wing. When I reached ford lane, the trees by the pond were full of woodpigeons. None moved when I walked past them, but from the last tree of the line the peregrine flew up into the wind and circled east. The pigeons immediately left the trees, where they had been comparatively safe, and flew towards North Wood. They passed below the peregrine. He could have stooped at them if he had wished to do so. Woodpigeons are very fast and wary, but like teal they sometimes have a fatal weakness for flying towards danger instead of away from it.

In long arcs and tangents the hawk drifted slowly higher. From five hundred feet above the brook, without warning, he suddenly fell. He simply stopped, flung his wings up, dived vertically down. He seemed to split in two, his body shooting off like an arrow from the tight-strung bow of his wings. There was an unholy impetus in his falling, as though he had been hurled from the sky. It was hard to believe, afterwards, that it had happened at all. The best stoops are always like that, and they often miss. A few seconds later the hawk flew up from the brook and resumed his eastward circling, moving higher over the dark woods and orchards till he was lost to sight. I searched the fields, but found no kill. Woodpigeons in hawthorns, and snipe in the marshy ground, were tamed by their greater fear of the hawk. They did not fly when I went near them. Partridges crouched together in the longest grass.

Rain began, and the peregrine returned to the brook. He flew from an elm near the bridge, and I lost him at once in the hiss and shine of rain and the wet shuddering of the wind. He looked thin and keen, and very wild. When the rain stopped, the wind roared into frenzy. It was hard to stand still in the open, and I kept to the lee of the trees. At half past two the peregrine swung up into the eastern sky. He climbed vertically upward, like a salmon leaping in the great waves of air that broke against the cliff of South Wood. He dived to the trough of a wave, then rose steeply within it, flinging himself high in the air, on outstretched wings exultant. At five hundred feet he hung still, tail closed, wings curving far back with their tips almost touching the tip of his tail. He was stoopping horizontally forward at the speed of the oncoming wind. He rocked and swayed and shuddered, close-hauled in a roaring sea of air, his furled wings whipping and plying like wet canvas. Suddenly he plunged to the north, curved over to the vertical stoop, flourished his wings high, shrank small, and fell.

He fell so fast, he fired so furiously from the sky to the dark wood below, that his black shape dimmed to grey air, hidden in a shining cloud of speed. He drew the sky about him as he fell. It was final. It was death. There was nothing more. There could be nothing more. Dusk came early. Through the almost dark, the fearful pigeons flew quietly down to roost above the feathered bloodstain in the woodland ride.

December 17th

The low sun was dazzling, the south a polar blaze. The north wind was cold. The night’s frost was un-melted, white on the grass like salt, and crisp in the morning sun.

The falcon peregrine flew tentatively up wind, and hovered over the still, white fields. The air would not be warm enough for soaring for another hour at least; till then, she was simply passing the time. Her hovering was desultory. She moved idly from tree to tree. You can almost feel the boredom of a hawk that has bathed and preened and is neither hungry nor sleepy. It seems to lounge about, stirring up trouble, just for the sake of something to do.

The morning was strange and wraith-like, very pure and new. The frosted fields were quiet. The sun had no grip of warmth. Where the frost had gone, the dry grass smelt of hay. Golden plover were close, softly calling. A corn bunting sang. The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges, and smote through the thorny gaps. A woodcock swished up from the darkness of a ditch into the stinging gleam of light. It flew north with deep, sharp wing-beats, then looser, shallower ones. The falcon went after it, in a leisurely disinterested way. She did not come back, so I went down to the river.

At midday she rose from the willows and floated up into the wind, gliding briefly, or moving the tips of her wings in small paddling circles. They quivered rapidly, as though they were merely vibrating in the wind. The growing warmth of the sun had told her she could soar. She was delicately feeling her way forward till she found the first rising of the warmer air. Over the dead oak she glided very slowly, then spread out her wings and tail, and turned down wind. In wide sweeping arcs she drifted to the south, circling a hundred feet above me. Her long, powerful head, like a hooked pike glaring from reeds, flexed slowly round as she scanned the fields below. The two deep-brown moustachial bars shone glossily in the sun, hanging down each side of the bill like strips of polished leather. The large dark eyes, and the bare white patches of skin in front of them, glinted black and white like wet flint. The low sun glowed the hawk’s colours into rich relief: copper and rust of dead beech leaves, shining damp-earth brown. She was a large and broad-winged hawk, a falcon unmistakably, spreading her long wings like a buzzard to win lift from the warm air rising from melting frost and from fields now steaming in the sun. I could almost hear the hiss and rustle of the parting air as she swished round in her taut muscular gliding.

Quickly she circled southward, turning in smaller arcs. I was afraid I would lose her in sun-dazzle, but she rose above it. She was moving faster, beating her wings between short glides, changing direction erratically. Sometimes she circled to left and right alternately, sometimes she went round clockwise. When circling alternately, she looked intently inwards or down; when she went round in the same direction, she looked outwards or straight ahead. She leaned round in steep banking curves. Over the roofs of farm buildings warm air was rising faster. Thrusting her wings in quick pumping movements, and gliding at steep upward angles, the hawk climbed to a thousand feet, and drifted south-east. Then her circling stopped. She floated on the white surface of the sky. Half-way to the woods she circled up as before, adding another five hundred feet to her height, till she was almost hidden in mist and distance. Suddenly she glided to the north, cutting away very fast, occasionally beating her wings in a flurry. She flew a mile in much less than a minute, sweeping down through the sky from South Wood to the river, following the line of the brook, till she pierced the horizon in a puff of white gulls. Throughout this long flight, over three miles of valley, she rose so far and fast that perspective did not level her down to earth, in spite of the distance covered. I saw her only against the sky. To trace her movements I had always to lower the binoculars through thirty to forty degrees to pick out the landmarks beneath. She was wholly of the sun and wind and the purity of sky.

Birds were still restless when I reached the place where she had descended. Gulls circled along the rim of the valley; lapwings flew over from the east. Remote as a star, the falcon glided out towards the estuary, a purple speck kindling and fading through the frost-fire of the sky.

December 18th

The silent east wind breathed white frost on to grass and trees and the edges of still water, and the sun did not melt it. The sun shone from a cobalt sky that curved down, through pale violet, to cold and white horizons.

The reservoir glittered in the sun, still as ice, and rippling with duck. Ten goosander launched upward from the water in crystal troughs of foam, and rose superbly through the sky. All were drakes. Their long red bills, sleek green heads, and narrow straining necks, led their heavy, lean, bomb-shaped bodies forward under the black and white flicking fins of their wings. They were splendid imperial duck, regal in the long reaches of the sky.

The harsh whistling of goldeneyes’ wings sounded constantly over the still water. When they were not flying, the drakes called ‘ung-ick’ through their noses – a thin, rasping sound – and shook their heavy-jowled dark heads so that their yellow-ringed eyes winked madly in the sun. Coot huddled together like winkles on a plate. Drake smew, their phantom arctic whiteness piped and curled about with thin black veins, sank deep like ice-floes or dazzled up the sky like flying snow.

I did not see a peregrine, though one was never far away. I found a black-headed gull that had been killed in the morning; it was still damp and bloody. Only the head, wings, and legs, were untouched. All other bones had been carefully stripped of flesh. What was left smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple. It was an appetising smell, not the least bit rank or fishy. I could have eaten it myself if I had been hungry.

December 20th

Mist cleared in the afternoon and widening rings of sunlight rippled out. A heron flew to a tree beside the brook. His legs reached down with a slow pedalling movement, like a man descending through the trap-door of a loft and feeling for a ladder with his feet. He touched the topmost twig, fumbled his spidery toes around it, gradually deflated himself down on to the long stilts of his legs, hunched and crumpling like a broken parasol.

Little owls called as I walked beside South Wood. The air was quiet. Birds were feeding in fields where frost had melted. 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. A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a small mad puritan with a banana in his mouth. I went into the wood.

Dead leaves are crisp with frost. The silence is fretted with the whisper and lisp of tits feeding in the high branches. A goldcrest comes close, a tiny flicker of green in the dark wood, tonsured with a sliver of gold leaf. Its eyes shine large and bright, scanning each twig carefully before deciding which way to jump. It is never still as it deftly dabs up insects. When it is close, the thin ice-needles of its call ring out with surprising vehemence, but they are soon inaudible when it moves away. A pheasant rises suddenly from bracken, rocketing away between the tree-tops as though tight-wound elastic were shuddering loose inside a drum.