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

October 8th

Fog lifted. The estuary hardened into shape, cut by the east wind. Horizons smarted in the sun. Islands grew upon the water. At three o’clock, a man walked along the sea-wall, flapping with maps. Five thousand dunlin flew low inland, twenty feet above his head. He did not see them. They poured a waterfall of shadow on to his indifferent face. They rained away inland, like a horde of beetles gleamed with gold chitin.

The tide was high; all waders flew inland; slowly the saltings drifted down beneath the glassy water. Funnels of waders tilted onto inland fields. I crept towards them along a dry ditch, inching forward like the tide. I crawled across stubble and dry plough. A frieze of curlew stood along the skyline, turning their narrow long-billed heads to watch and listen. A pheasant spurted from the dust. The curlew saw me, and glided behind the ridge, but the small waders did not move. They were a long white line on the brown field, like a line of snow. A shadow curved across in front of me. I looked up, and saw a falcon peregrine circling overhead. She kept above me as I moved nearer to the waders, hoping I would put them up. She may have been uncertain what they were. I stayed still, crouching like the waders, looking up at the dark crossbow shape of the hawk. She came lower, peering down at me. She called once: a wild, skirling, ‘airk, airk, airk, airk, airk.’ When nothing moved, she soared away inland.

There were at least two thousand waders facing me across the furrows, like toy soldiers formed up for battle. Their whiteness was chiefly the white crowns and faces of grey plover. Many dunlin were asleep; turnstones and knot were drowsy; only the godwits were restless and alert. A greenshank flew over, calling monotonously for a long time, making the small waders very uneasy. They reacted as they would to a hawk. Red-legged partridges walked among them, bumping into dunlin, jostling turnstones. They walked forward, or stopped and fed. When a wader would not move, they tried to walk over it. For a bird, there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.

October 9th

Fog hid the day in steamy heat. It smelt acrid and metallic, fumbling my face with cold decaying fingers. It lay by the road like a Jurassic saurian, fetid and inert in a swamp.

As the sun rose, the fog shredded and whirled and died away under bushes and hedges. By eleven o’clock the sun was shining from the centre of a great blue circle. Fog burned outwards from its edge, like a dwindling white corona. Colour flamed up from the kindled land. Skylarks sang. Swallows and martins flew downstream.

North of the river, ploughs were turning the heavy earth to smoke and glisten in the sun. From a distant coil of birds the peregrine shook free, and rose into the morning sky. He came south, beating and gliding up in the first frail thermal of the day, circling in figures of eight, curving alternately to left and right. Mobbed by starlings, and rising among them, he passed above me, very high and small, turning his head from side to side and looking down. His large eyes flashed white between the dark bars of his face. The sun bronzed the splendid stubble-coloured brown and yellow hawk, and gleamed his clenched feet to sudden gold. His spread tail stood stiffly out; twelve brown feathers with ten blue strips of sky between.

His circling stopped, and he darted quickly forward, plunging through sunlight. Starlings poured back like jets of smoke, to diffuse and drift to earth. The hawk flew on, into the shining mist-cloud of the south.

He went too fast for me to follow him. I stayed in the valley with partridges and jays, watching skylarks and lapwings come in from the coast. Red-legged partridges had a good breeding season; their coveys are larger and more numerous than ever. Jays abound. I saw eight of them flying across the river, each with an acorn in its bill. They have learnt nothing from the death they saw a week ago; nor has the peregrine learnt how to exploit their folly. Perhaps he found jay meat stringy or insipid. He returned in the late afternoon, but he did not stay. He glided between lombardy poplars, like a full-fed pike between reeds.

October 12th

Dry leaves wither and shine, green of the oak is fading, elms are barred with luminous gold.

There was fog, but the south wind blew it away. The sunburnt sky grew hot. Damp air moved over dusty earth. The north was a haze of blue, the south bleached white. Larks sang up into the warmth, or flashed along furrows. Gulls and lapwings drifted from plough to plough.

Autumn peregrines come inland from the estuaries to bathe in the stony shallows of brook or river. Between eleven o’clock and one they rest in dead trees to dry their feathers, preen, and sleep. Perching stiff and erect, they look like gnarled and twisted oak. To find them, one must learn the shapes of all the valley trees, till anything added becomes, at once, a bird. Hawks hide in dead trees. They grow out of them like branches.

At midday I flushed the tiercel from an elm by the river. Against brown fields, brown leaves, brown mist low to the skyline, he was hard to see. He looked much smaller than the two crows that chased him. But when he rose against the white sky he was bigger, and easier to focus. Quickly he circled higher, slewing away from his course at sudden tangents, baffling the clumsy crows. They always overshot him, and laboured heavily to regain the distance lot. They called, rolling out the ‘r’s’ of their guttural high-pitched ‘prruk, prruk’, their hawk-mobbing cry. When mobbed, the peregrine beats its wings deeply and rhythmically. They bounce from the air, with silent slaps, like a lapwing’s. This deliberate pulse of evasion is beautiful to watch; one breathes in time to it; the effect is hypnotic.

The tiercel turned and twisted in the sun. The undersides of his wings flashed in sword-glints of silver. His dark eyes shone, and the bare skin around them glittered like salt. At five hundred feet the crows gave up, planning back to the trees on outspread wings. The hawk rose higher, and flew fast to the north, gliding smoothly up and round into long soaring circles, till he was hidden in blue haze. Plover volleyed from the fields and fretted the horizon with the dark susurrus of their wings.

Throughout the glaring afternoon, I sat at the southern end of the big field by the river. The sun was hot on my back, and the dry sand-and-clay coloured field shimmered in desert haze. Partridge coveys stood out upon the shining surface like rings of small black stones. When the peregrine circled above them, the partridge rings shrank inward. Lapwings rose and fled. They had been hidden in the furrows, as the hawk was hidden in the shiny corrugations of the sky.

Crows flew up again to chase the hawk away, and the three birds drifted east. Dry feathered and more buoyant now, the tiercel did not beat his wings, but simply soared in the abundant warmth of air. He dodged easily the sudden rushes of the crows, and swooped at them with waggling snipey wings. One crow planed back to earth, but the other plodded on, beating heavily round, a hundred feet below the hawk. When both were very small and high above the wooded hill, the hawk slowed down to let the crow catch up. They dashed at each other, tangling and flinging away, swooping up to regain the height they lost. Rising and fighting, they circled out of sight. Long afterwards the crow came floating back, but the hawk had gone. Half-way to the estuary I found him again, circling among thousands of starlings. They ebbed and flowed about him, bending and flexing sinuously across the sky, like the black funnel of a whirlwind. They carried the tormented hawk towards the coast, till all were suddenly scorched from sight in the horizon’s gold corona.

The tide was rising in the estuary; sleeping waders crowded the saltings; plover were restless. I expected the hawk to drop from the sky, but he came low from inland. He was a skimming black crescent, cutting across the saltings, sending up a cloud of dunlin dense as a swarm of bees. He drove up between them, black shark in shoals of silver fish, threshing and plunging. With a sudden stab down he was clear of the swirl and was chasing a solitary dunlin up into the sky. The dunlin seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline, and did not reappear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin’s heart as effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk glided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his prey.

October 14th

One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist. Elms and oaks still green, but some now scorched with gold. A few leaves falling. Choking smoke from stubble burning.

High tide was at three o’clock, lifting along the southern shore of the estuary. Snipe shuddering from the dykes. White glinting water welling in, mouthing the stones of the sea-wall. Moored boats pecking at the water. Dark red glasswort shining like drowned blood.

Curlew coming over from the island in long flat shields of birds, changing shape like waves upon the shore, long ‘V’s’ widening and narrowing their arms. Redshanks shrill and vehement; never still, never silent. The faint, insistent sadness of grey plover calling. Turnstone 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.

Screaming gulls corkscrewing high under cloud. Islands blazing with birds. A peregrine rising and falling. Godwits ricocheting across water, tumbling, towering. A peregrine following, swooping, clutching. Godwit and peregrine darting, dodging; stitching land and water with flickering shuttle. Godwit climbing, dwindling, tiny, gone: peregrine diving, perching, panting, beaten.

Tide going out, wigeon cropping zostera, herons lanky in shallows. Sheep on the sea-wall grazing. Revolve the long estuary through turning eyes. Let the water smooth out its healing line, like touch of dock on nettled finger. Leave the wader-teeming skies, soft over still water, arched light.

October 15th

Fog cleared quickly after one o’clock, and sun shone. The peregrine arrived from the east an hour later. It was seen by sparrows, lapwings, starlings, and woodpigeons, but not by me. I watched and waited in a field near the ford, trying to be as still and patient as the heron that was standing in stubble and waiting for mice to run within reach of his down-chopping bill. Bullfinches called by the brook; swallows flickered round my head. A covey of magpies muttered in hawthorns and then dispersed, dragging up their baggy broomstick tails, catapulting themselves forward from each flurry of wingbeats, sagging on to air at the angle of a well-thrown discus. Thousands of starlings came into the valley to gather by the river before flying to roost.

At half-past four, blackbirds began to scold in the hedges, and red-legged partridges called. I scanned the sky, and found two peregrines – tiercel and falcon – flying high above the ford, chased by crows. The crows soon gave up, but the peregrines flew round for another twenty minutes, in wide random circles. They made many abrupt-angled turns, so that they were never more than a quarter of a mile from the ford. They flew with deep, measured wingbeats – the tiercel’s quicker than the falcon’s – but they did not move fast. The tiercel flew higher, and constantly swooped down at the falcon, shuddering his wings violently. She avoided these rushes by veering slightly aside. Sometimes both birds slowed till they were almost hovering; then they gradually increased their speed again.

The detail of their plumage was difficult to see, but their moustachial bars seemed as prominent at a distance as they did when close. The falcon’s breast was golden tinted, barred laterally with blackish brown. Her upper parts were a blend of blue-black and brown, so she was probably a second winter bird moulting into adult plumage.

This was the peregrines’ true hunting time; an hour and a half to sunset, with the western light declining and the early dusk just rising above the eastern skyline. I thought at first that the peregrines were ringing up to gain height, but they went on circling for so long that obviously some sort of sexual pursuit and display was involved. The birds around me believed they were in danger. Blackbirds and partridges were never silent; woodpigeons, lapwings, and jackdaws scattered from the fields and left the area completely; mallard flew up from the brook.

After twenty minutes the hawks began to fly faster. They rose higher, and the tiercel stopped swooping at the falcon. They circled once, at great speed, and then flew east without turning back. They flickered out of sight towards the estuary, vanishing into the grey dusk a thousand feet above the hill. They were hunting.

October 16th

Waders slept in the spray that leapt from the waves along the shingle ridges. They lined the hot furrows of the inland fields, where dust was blowing. Dunlin, ringed plover, knot and turnstone, faced the wind and sun, clustered together like white pebbles on brown earth.

A roaring southerly gale drove waves to lash the high sea-wall, flinging their spray up through the air above. On the lee side of the wall the long, dry grass was burning. Gasps of yellow flame and northward streaming smoke jetted away in the wind. There was a fierce anguish of heat, like a beast in pain. The short grass on top of the wall glowed orange and black; it hissed when the salt spray thudded down. Under a torrid sky, and in the strength of the sun, water and fire were rejoicing together.

When the waders suddenly flew, I looked beyond them and saw a peregrine lashing down from the northern sky. By the high hunched shoulders, and the big head bent between, and the long, flickering shudder-up and shake-out of the wings, I knew that this was the tiercel. He flew straight towards me, and his eyes seemed to stare into mine. Then they widened in recognition of my hostile human shape. The long wings wrenched and splayed as the hawk swerved violently aside.

I saw his colours clearly in the brilliant light: back and secondaries rich burnt sienna; primaries black; underparts ochreous yellow, streaked with arrowheads of tawny brown. Down the pale cheeks the long dark triangles of the moustachial lobes depended from the polished sun-reflecting eyes.

Through the smoke, through the spray, he glided over the wall in a smooth outpouring, like water gliding over stone. The waders shimmered to earth, and slept. The hawk’s plumage stained through shadows of smoke, gleamed like mail in glittering spray. He flew out in the grip of the gale, flicking low across the rising tide. He slashed at a floating gull, and would have plucked it from the water if it had not flown up at once. He flickered out into the light, a small dark blemish diminishing along the great sword of sun-dazzle that lay across the estuary from the south.

By dusk the wind had passed to the north. The sky was clouded, the water low and calm, the fires dying. Out of the misty darkening north, a hundred mallard climbed into the brighter sky, towering above the sunset, far beyond the peregrine that watched them from the shore and the gunners waiting low in the marsh.

October 18th

The valley a damp cocoon of mist; rain drifting through; jackdaws elaborating their oddities of voice and flight, their rackety pursuits, their febrile random feeding; golden plover calling in the rain.

When a crescendo of crackling jackdaws swept into the elms and was silent, I knew that the peregrine was flying. I followed it down to the river. Thousands of starlings sat on pylons and cables, bills opening wide as each bird had his bubbly, squeaky say. Crows watched for the hawk, and blackbirds scolded. After five minutes’ alertness the crows relaxed, and released their frustration by swooping at starlings. Blackbirds stopped scolding.

The fine rain was heavy and cold, and I stood by a hawthorn for shelter. At one o’clock, six fieldfares flew into the bush, ate some berries, and flew on again. Their feathers were dark and shining with damp. It was quiet by the river. There was only the faint whisper of the distant weir and the soft gentle breathing of the wind and rain. A monotonous ‘keerk, keerk, keerk’ sound began, somewhere to the west. It went on for a long time before I recognised it. At first I thought it was the squeak and puff of a mechanical water-pump, but when the sound came nearer I realised that it was a peregrine screeching. This saw-like rasping continued for twenty minutes, gradually becoming feebler and spasmodic. Then it stopped. The peregrine chased a crow through the misty fields and into the branches of a dead oak. As they swooped up to perch, twenty woodpigeons hurtled out of the tree as though they had been fired from it. The crow hopped and sidled along a branch till it was within pecking distance of the peregrine, who turned to face it, lowering his head and wings into a threatening posture. The crow retreated, and the hawk began to call again. His slow, harsh, beaky, serrated cry came clearly across to me through a quarter of a mile of saturated misty air. There is a fine challenging ring to a peregrine’s call when there are cliffs or mountains or wide river valleys to give it echo and timbre. A second crow flew up, and the hawk stopped calling. When both crows rushed at him, he flew at once to an overhead wire, where they left him alone.

He looked down at the stubble field in front of him, sleepy but watchful. Gradually he became more alert and intent, restlessly clenching and shifting his feet on the wire. His feathers were ruffled and rain-sodden, draggling down his chest like plaited tawny and brown ropes. He drifted lightly to the field, rose with a mouse, and flew to a distant tree to eat it. He came back to the same place an hour later, and again he sat watching the field; sold, hunched, and bulky with rain. His large head inclined downward, and his eyes probed and unravelled and sorted the intricate mazes of stubbled furrows and rank-spreading weeds. Suddenly he leapt forward into the spreading net of his wings, and flew quickly down to the field. Something was running towards the safety of the ditch at the side.

The hawk dropped lightly upon it. Four wings fluttered together, then two were suddenly still. The hawk flew heavily to the centre of the field, dangling a dead moorhen from his foot. It has wandered too far from cover, as moorhens so often do in their search for food, and it had forgotten the enemy that does not move. The bird out of place is always the first to die. Terror seeks out the odd, and the sick, and the lost. The hawk turned his back to the rain, half spread his wings, and began to feed. For two or three minutes his head stayed down, moving slightly from side to side, as he plucked feathers from the breast of his prey. Then both head and neck moved steadily, regularly, up and down, as he skewered flesh with his notched and pointed bill and dragged lumps of it away from the bone by jerking his head sharply upward. Each time his head came up he looked quickly to left and right before descending again to his food. After ten minutes, this up and down motion became slower, and the pauses between each gulp grew longer. But desultory feeding went on for fifteen minutes more.

When the hawk was still, and his hunger apparently satisfied, I went carefully across the soaking wet grass towards him. He flew at once, carrying the remains of his prey, and was soon hidden in the blinding rain. He begins to know me, but he will not share his kill.

October 20th

The peregrine hovered above the river meadows, large and shining in dark coils of starlings, facing the strong south wind and the freshness of the morning sun. He circled higher, then stooped languidly down, revolving as he fell, his golden feet flashing through sunlight. He tumbled headlong, corkscrewing like a lapwing, scattering starlings. Five minutes later he lifted into air again, circling, gliding, diving up to brightness, like a fish cleaving up through warm blue water, far from the falling nets of the starlings.

A thousand feet high, he poised and drifted, looking down at the small green fields beneath him. His body shone tawny and golden with sunlight, speckled with brown like the scales of a trout. The undersides of his wings were silvery; the secondaries were shaded with a horseshoe pattern of blackish bars, curving inwards from the carpal joint to the axillaries. He rocked and drifted like a boat at anchor, then sailed slowly out onto the northern sky. He lengthened his circles into long ellipses, and swept up to smallness. A flock of lapwings rose below him, veering, swaying, breaking apart. He stooped between them, revolving down in tigerish spirals. Golden light leapt from his twisting talons. It was a splendid stoop, but showy, and I do not think he killed.

The river glinted blue, in green and tawny fields, as I followed the hawk along the side of the hill. At one o’clock he flew fast from the north, where gulls were following the plough. He landed on a post, mettlesome and wild in movement, with the strong wind ruffling the long fleece of feathers on his chest, yellow-rippling like ripe wheat. He rested for a moment, and then dashed forward, sweeping low across a field of kale, driving out woodpigeons. He rose slightly and struck at one of them, reaching for it with his foot, like a goshawk. But it was the merest feint, an idle blow that missed by yards. He flew on without pausing, keeping low, his back shining in the sun to a rich mahogany roan, the colour of clay stained with a deep rust of iron oxide.

Leaving the field, he swung up in the wing and glided over the river, outlined against sunlight. His wings hung loosely in the glide, with shoulders drooping; they seemed to project from the middle of his body, more like the silhouette of a golden plover than a peregrine. Normally the shoulders are so hunched, and point so far forward, that the length of body and neck in front of the wings is never apparent.