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

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.

THE HUNTING LIFE

October 1st

Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after harvest.

Over orchards smelling of vinegary windfalls, busy with tits and bullfinches, a peregrine glides to a perch in a river-bank alder. River shadows ripple on the spare, haunted face of the hawk in the water. They cross the cold eyes of the watching heron. Sunlight glints. The heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds.

Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun, feels delicately for winghold on the sheer fall of sky. He is a tiercel, lean and long and supple-winged, the first of the year. He is the colour of yellow ochre sand and reddish-brown gravel. His big, brown, spaniel eyes shine wet in the sunlight, like circles of raw liver, embedded in the darker matt brown of the moustachial mask. He sweeps away to the west, following the gleaming curve of water. Laboriously I follow his trail of rising plover.

Swallows and martins call sharply, fly low; jays and magpies lurk and mutter in hedges; blackbirds splutter and scold. Where the valley widens, the flat fields are vibrant with tractors. Gulls and lapwings are following the plough. The sun shines from a clear sky flecked with high cirrus. The wind is moving round to the north. By the sudden calling of red-legged partridges and the clattering rise of woodpigeons, I know that the hawk is soaring and drifting southward along the woodland ridge. He is too high to be seen. I stay near the river, hoping he will come back into the wind. Crows in the elms are cursing and bobbing. Jackdaws cackle up from the hill, scatter, spiral away, till they are far out and small and silent in blue depths of sky. The hawk comes down to the river, a mile to the east; disappears into trees he left two hours before.

Young peregrines are fascinated by the endless pouring up and drifting down of the white plume of gulls at the brown wake of the plough. While the autumn ploughing lasts, they will follow the white-bannered tractors from field to field across the valley. They seldom attack. They just like to watch.

That is what the tiercel was doing when I found him again in the alder. He did not move from his perch till one o’clock, when the tractor driver went home to his lunch and gulls settled to sleep in the furrows. Jays were screeching in oaks near the river. They were looking for acorns to bury in the wood. The peregrine heard them, watched their wings flashing white between the leaves. He flew steeply up into the wind, and began to soar. Turning, drifting, swaying, he circled up towards the burning clouds and the cool swathes of sky. I lowered the binoculars to rest my aching arms. As though released, the hawk swept higher and was gone. I scanned the long white spines of cirrus for his thin dark crescent shape, but could not find it. Faint as a whisper, his harsh exultant cry came drifting down.

The jays were silent. One flew heavily up, carrying an acorn in its wide-open bill. Leaving the cover of the trees, it rose high above the meadows, making for the hillside wood four hundred yards away. I could see the big acorn bulging its mandibles apart, like a lemon stuffed in the mouth of a boar’s head. There was a sibilant purring sound, like the distant drumming of a snipe. Something blurred and hissed behind the jay, which seemed suddenly to trip and stumble on the air. The acorn spurted out of its bill, like the cork out of a bottle. The jay fell all lopsidedly and threshing, as though it were having a fit. The ground killed it. The peregrine swooped, and carried the dead bird to an oak. There he plucked and ate it, gulping the flesh hastily down, till only the wings, breast-bone, and tail were left.

Gluttonous, hoarding jay; he should have hedge-hopped and lurched from tree to tree in his usual furtive manner. He should never have bared the white flashes of his wings and rump to the watching sky. He was too vivid a mark, as he dazzled slowly across the green water-meadows.

The hawk flew to a dead tree, and slept. At dusk he flew east towards his roosting place.

Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. 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.

October 3rd

Inland stagnant under fog. On the coast: hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining. Fields of skylarks, singing, chasing, flashing in the sun. Saltings ringing with the redshanks’ cry. Shooting, at high tide. Shimmering columns of waders rising from the mud-flats, shaking out across the saltings. White beaches under haze. Waders flashing on the sea like spray, firing the dusty inland fields.

Most of the smaller waders settled on the shell beach: grey plover, knot, turnstone, ringer plover, sanderling. All faced different ways, sleeping, preening, watching, sharp shadowed on the dazzling gritty whiteness of the beach. Dunlin perched on the tips of marsh plants, just above the surface of the tide. They faced the breeze; stolid, patient, swaying uneasily. There was room for them on the beach, but they would not fly.

Five hundred oystercatchers came down from the south; pied brilliance, whistling through pink bills like sticks of rock. Black legs of sanderling ran on the white beach. A curlew sandpiper stood apart; delicate, foal-like, sea rippling behind it, soft eyes closing in the roan of its face. The tide ebbed. Waders swam in the heat-haze, like watery reflections moored to still, black shadows.

Far out at sea, gulls called. One by one, the larks stopped singing. Waders sank into their shadows, and crouched small. A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood. She slashed and ripped the air, but could not strike. Tiring, she flew inland. Waders floated down. Cawing rooks flew out to feed on plains of mud.

October 5th

A kestrel hovered beside the brook that separates the flat river plain from the wooded hill. He sank slowly down into stubble, lowering like a threaded spider from the web his wings had spun.

East of the brook, a green orchard rises to the skyline. A peregrine circled high above it, and began to hover. He advanced into the wind, hovering every fifty yards, sometimes staying motionless for a minute or more. The strong west wind was rising to a gale, bending branches, threshing leaves. The sun had gone, and clouds were deepening. The western horizon pricked out black and thorny. Rain was coming. Colour ebbed to brilliant chiaroscuro. Between the narrow edges of his long, level wings, the hawk’s down-bent head looked round and bulky as an owl’s. A moorhen called, and tinkling goldfinches hid silently in thistles. Magpies hopped into the longer grass, with deep-flexing frog-like bounds. When the orchard ended, the hawk veered away to the north. He would not cross the brook while I was there.

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. From far above and beyond the church on the hill, he came down to the orchard again, hovering and advancing into the wind, just as before. His wide-spread tail depressed, his hook-shaped head bent down, his wings curved forward to hug the gale. He crouched upon air, small and huddled, a thousand feet above the orchard trees. Then he uncurled, slowly stretching out his wings and turning on his side. He folded over and down into a steep spiral, suddenly straightening to a vertical dive. He bucked and jerked in the air, and dropped between the trees, with long legs swinging down to strike. Dark against the sky, his legs and feet showed thick and sinewy. But it was a clumsy strike, which must have missed, for he rose with nothing in his grasp.

Ten minutes later, a large covey of red-legged partridges left the long grass under the hedge, where they had been hiding, and went back to a patch of bare earth to continue their dust-bathing, which the hawk had disturbed. Partridges can be killed when bathing in this way. The fluttering of their wings draws the eye towards them.

The kestrel hovered over stubble again, and the peregrine swooped at it. Merely a slight, disdainful gesture; yet the kestrel dropped low and flew to the furthest corner of the field, his wings almost touching the stubble.

At three o’clock the drenching rain began. A green sandpiper dwindled up from the brook. Its plaintive, plangent call came chiming back, long after it had woven away into the shining reed-bed of the rain-cloud. Golden plover called in deepening mist. The day seemed over. But as I left the rain-smoked field, the peregrine flew heavily up from the blended mud and straw of the wet soil near the gate. Six partridges followed, and settled in the hedge. As the hawk got smaller, his colour seemed to change from the muddy grey-brown of a curlew to the red-brown and grey-black of a kestrel. He flew heavily, as though waterlogged. I think he had been sitting in the stubble for a long time, waiting for the partridges to rise. He called, and faded over the dim eastern skyline, calling and fading. In the grey mist he looked so like a distant curlew that I half expected to hear the far bugling of a curlew’s desolate cry echoing through the harsh staccato chatter of a hawk.

October 7th

The tiercel freed himself from starlings with a rippling slash of wings, and melted up into the mauve haze of the northern sky. Five minutes later he re-appeared, aimed at the river, glided swiftly down into the wind. A falcon flew beside him. Together they glided forward, coming down towards me, beating their wings lightly, then gliding. In ten seconds they had descended from a thousand feet to two hundred, and were passing overhead. The tiercel was more slender and rakish in outline than the falcon. Seen from beneath, their wings were wide across the secondaries, where they joined the body. The falcon’s width of wing was equal to more than half her body length. Their tails were short. The outstretched length of head and neck in front of their wings was only slightly less than the length of body and tail behind the wings, but the breadth was twice as great. This gave them an oddly heavy-headed look. I describe these effects in detail, because they can only be observed when peregrines are gliding directly above. Peregrines are more often seen at flatter angles, or in profile, when the proportions seem quite different. The head then looks blunter, the tail longer, the wings less wide.

Evanescent as flame, peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of birds trails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls.

The sun shone warmer as the wind grew cold. Woods floated clear along the ridge. The cedars of the big house lawns began to burn and smoulder into dark green light.

At the side of the lane to the ford, I found a long-tailed field mouse feeding on a slope of grass. He was eating the grass seeds, holding the blades securely between his skinny white front paws. So small, blown over by the breath of passing cars, felted with a soft moss of green-brown fur; yet his back was hard and solid to the touch. His long, delicate ears were like hands unfolding; his huge, night-seeing eyes were opaque and dark. He was unaware of my touch, of my face a foot above him, as he bent the tree-top grasses down to his nibbling teeth. I was like a galaxy to him, too big to be seen. I could have picked him up, but it seemed wrong to separate him now from the surface he would never leave until he died. I gave him an acorn. He carried it up the slope in his mouth, stopped, and turned it round against his teeth, flicked it round with his hands, like a potter spinning. His life is eating to live, to catch up, to keep up; never getting ahead, moving always in the narrow way between a death and a death; between stoats and weasels, foxes and owls, by night; between cars and kestrels and herons by day.

For two hours, a heron stood at the side of a field, by the hedge, facing the furrowed stubble. He was hunched, slumped, and drooping, on the long stilts of his legs. He shammed dead. His bill moved only once. He was waiting for mice to come and be killed. None came.

Along the brook a tern was hunting, looking down for the flash of a fish at the edge of his dark reflection. He hovered, and plunged into the shallows; rose with a roach in his bill. Twice he dropped it, and spiralled down to catch it again before it hit the water. Then he swallowed it in four large gulps. He glided down, and drank from the brook, running his lower mandible through the surface of the water, slicing out a long, clear ripple.

As the tern rose, the peregrine stooped, whining down from the empty sky. He missed, swept up, and flew off. In the crown of a hollow tree I found three of his kills; a starling, a skylark, and a black-headed gull.