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

Beyond the river, he flew to the east, and I did not see him again. Hundreds of rooks and gulls puffed out of the skyline, circled and drifted, thinned and subsided, put up by the hawk on his way to the coast.

Down by the brook I saw my first snipe of the autumn, and came close to a partridge. The chestnut horseshoe marking on its breast seemed to stand out in relief, sharp-edged by the rays of the sun. At half-past two, the falcon peregrine came over the trees, with a crow in pursuit. She was much the same size as the crow; her chest was wider and more barrel-shaped than the tiercel’s, her wings wider and less pointed. She circled fast, eluded the crow, and began to soar. She soared very high to the east, moving up through the golden-brown, leaf-clouded sky of the hill and out into the hovering cloud of light that towered on the distant water.

October 23rd

Many winter migrants have come into the valley since the twentieth. Today there were fifty blackbirds in hawthorns by the river, where before there were only seven.

The morning was misty and still. A starling mimicked the peregrine perfectly, endlessly repeating its call in the fields to the north of the river. Other birds were made uneasy by it; they were as much deceived as I had been. I could not believe it was not a hawk, until I saw the starling actually opening its bill and producing the sound. By listening to the autumn starlings one can tell from their mimicry when golden plover, fieldfares, kestrels, and peregrines arrive in the valley. Rarer passage birds, like whimbrel and greenshank, will also be faithfully recorded.

At two o’clock, twelve lapwings flew overhead, travelling steadily north-westward. Far above them a peregrine flickered. It was a small, light-coloured tiercel, and it may have been migrating with the lapwings.

When the sun emerged from the mist, the tiercel I had seen throughout the month soared above the water-meadows, surrounded by the inevitable swarm of starlings. At three hundred feet he twitched himself away from the circle, flew quickly over the river, and launched forward and down in a long, fast glide. Hundreds of lapwings and gulls rose steeply from the field, and the hawk was hidden among them. He was probably hoping to seize a bird from below, just after it had risen, but I do not think he succeeded. Half an hour later, many black-headed gulls were still circling a thousand feet above the fields. They drifted fast and gracefully round, on still wings, calling as they glided. Each bird circled a few yards from its neighbour, but always in the opposite direction.

In the clear late-afternoon sunlight, woodpigeons, gulls, and lapwings went up at intervals from different parts of the valley as the peregrine circled over the ford and the woods, along the ridge, and back to the river. He followed the gulls from plough to plough till an hour before sunset. Then he left for the coast.

October 24th

The quiet sky brimmed with cloud, the air was cool and calm, the dry lanes brittle with dead leaves. The tiercel peregrine flew above the valley woods, light, menacing, and stiff-winged, driving woodpigeons from the trees. Down by the river, I found his morning kill; a black-headed gull, a glaring whiteness on dark wet ploughland. It lay on its back, red bill open and stiff red tongue protruding. Though feathers had been plucked from it, not much flesh had been eaten.

I went to the estuary, but the tide was low. The water was hidden in the huge scooped-out emptiness of mud and mist, with the calling of distant curlew and the muffled sadness of grey plover. In the drab light a perched kestrel shone like a triangle of luminous copper.

I left early, and reached the lower river again at four o’clock. Small birds were clamouring from the trees in a shrill hysteria of mobbing. The peregrine flew from cover, passing quite close to me, pursued by blackbirds and starlings. I saw the dark moustachial stripes on the pale face, the buttercup sheen of the brown plumage, the barred and spotted underwings. The crown of his head looked unusually pale and luminous, a golden-yellow lightly flecked with brown. Long-winged, lean, and powerful, the hawk drew swiftly away from the mob, and glided to north of the river.

He returned an hour later, and flew to the top of a tall chimney. Gulls were passing high above the valley, going out towards the estuary to roost. As each long ‘V’ of gulls went over, the peregrine flew up and attacked them from below, scattering their close formation, slashing furiously at one bird after another. He swept up among them with his wings half folded, as though he were stooping. Then he turned on his back, curved over and under, and tried to clutch a gull in his foot as he passed beneath it. Their violent twisting and turning must have confused him, for he caught nothing, though he tried, at intervals, for more than half an hour. Whether he was wholly serious in his attempts it was impossible to judge.

At dusk, he settled to roost at the top of the two-hundred-foot chimney, ready to attack the gulls again as they went inland at sunrise. This was a well-sited roosting place at the confluence of two rivers, near the beginning of a large estuary, and undisturbed by the shooting of wildfowl. The main coastal hunting places, two reservoirs, and two river valleys, were all within ten miles; less than twenty minutes’ flight. (This chimney has since been felled.)

October 26th

The field was silent, misty, furtive with movement. A cold wind layered the sky with cloud. Sparrows pattered into dry-leaved hedges, rustling through the leaves like rain. Blackbirds scolded. Jackdaws and crows peered down from trees. I knew the peregrine was in this field, but I could not find him. I traversed it from corner to corner, but flushed only pheasants and larks. He was hidden among the wet stubble and the dark brown earth his colour matched so well.

Suddenly he was flying, starlings around him, rising from the field and mounting over the river. His wings flickered high, with a lithe and vigorous slash, looking supple and many-jointed. Darting and shrugging, he shook starlings from his shoulders, like a dog shaking spray from his body. He climbed steeply into the east wind, then turned abruptly and headed south. Turning in a long-sided hexagon, not circling, he swung and veered and climbed above the bird-calling fields. In the misty greyness he was the colour of mud and straw; dull frozen shades that only sunlight can transform to flowing gold. His erratic mile-long climb, from ground-level to five-hundred feet, lasted less than a minute. It was made without effort; his wings merely rippled and surged back in an easy unbroken rhythm. His course was never wholly straight; he was always leaning to one side or the other, or suddenly rolling and jinking for a second, like a snipe. Over fields where gulls and lapwings were feeding, he glided for the first time; a long slow glide that made many birds sky up in panic. When they were all rising, he stooped among them, spiralling viciously down. But none was hit.

Two jays flew high across the fields when the peregrine had gone. Unable to decide their direction, they clawed along in an odd disjointed way, carrying acorns and looking gormless. Eventually they went back into the wood. Skylarks and corn buntings sang, the sweet and the dry; redwings whistled thinly through the hedges; curlew called; swallows flew downstream. All was quiet till early afternoon, when the sun shone and gulls came circling over, drifting westward under a small fleece of cloud. They were followed by lapwings and golden plover, including a partial albino with broad white wing-bars and a whitish head. All around me there were birds rising and calling, but I could not see the hawk that was frightening them.

Soon afterwards the tiercel flew near me, where I could not help seeing him. Starlings buzzed about his head, like flies worrying a horse. The sun lit the undersides of his wings, and their cream and brown surfaces had a silver sheen. The dark brown oval patches on the axillaries looked like the black ‘armpit’ markings of a grey plover. There were dark concavities of shadow under the carpal joint of each wing. Only the primaries moved; quick, sculling strokes rippling silkily back from the still shoulders. Two crows flew up, guttural calls coming from their closed bills and jumping throats. They chased the hawk away to the east, pressing him hard, taking it in turns to swoop at him from either side. When he slashed at one of them, the other immediately rushed in from his blind side. He glided, and tried to soar, but there was not enough time. He just had to fly on till the crows got tired of chasing him.

I went to the estuary and found the hawk again, an hour before sunset, circling a mile off-shore. As the gulls came out to roost on the open water, he flew towards them till he was over the saltings and the sea-wall; then he began to attack. Several gulls evaded the stoop by dropping to the water, but one flew higher. The peregrine stooped at this bird repeatedly, diving down at it in hundred-foot vertical jabs. At first he tried to hit it with his hind toe as he flashed past, but the gull always dodged him by flapping aside at the last second. After five attempts he changed his method, stooped behind the gull, curved quickly under and up, and seized it from below. The gull was obviously much more vulnerable to this form of attack. It did not dodge, but simply flew straight up in the path of the hawk. It was clutched in the breast and carried down to the island, with its limp head looking backwards.

October 28th

Beyond the last farm buildings, the smell of the salt and the mud and the sea-weed mingles with the smell of dead leaves and nutty autumn hedges, and suddenly there is no more inland, and green fields float out to the skyline on a mist of water.

At midday I saw a fox, far out on the saltings, leaping and splashing through the incoming tide. On drier ground he walked; his fur was sleek and dark with wetness, his brush limp and dripping. He shook himself like a dog, sniffed the air, and trotted towards the sea-wall. Suddenly he stopped. Looking through binoculars, I saw the small pupils of his eyes contract and dilate in their white-flecked yellow irises. Eyes savagely alive, light smouldering within, yet glitteringly opaque as jewels. Their unchanging glare was fixed upon me as the fox walked slowly forward. When he stopped again, he was only ten yards away, and I lowered the binoculars. He stood there for more than a minute, trying to understand me with his nose and ears, watching me with his baffled, barbaric eyes. Then the breeze conveyed my fetid human smell, and the beautiful roan-coloured savage became a hunted fox again, ducking and darting away, streaming over the sea-wall and across the long green fields beyond.

Wigeon and teal floated in with the tide; waders crowded the tufts of the saltings. A warning puff of sparrows was followed by the peregrine, gliding slowly out above a thousand crouching waders. The elbow-like carpal joints of his wings were curved and enfolded like the hood of a cobra, and were just as menacing. He flew easily, beating and gliding round the bay, casting his shadow on the still and silent birds. Then he turned inland, and flickered low and fast across the fields.

Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse, hushing the air with the tiptoe touch of their soft and elegant wings. Slowly they sank and rose in the wind, drifting against the white estuary and the deep green of the grass. Their big heads turned to watch me, and their fierce eyes glowed and dimmed and glowed again, as though a yellow flame burned beyond the iris, and spat out flakes of fire, and then diminished. One bird called; a sharp barking sound, muffled, like a heron calling in its sleep.

The peregrine circled, and stooped at the drifting owls, but it was like trying to hit blowing feathers with a dart. The owls swayed and turned, rocked about in the draught of the stoops, and rose higher. When they were over the water, the peregrine gave up, and planed down to rest on a post near the wall. I think he could have killed one of them by cutting up at it from below, if he could have separated it from the others, but his stoops went hopelessly wide. At four o’clock he flew slowly inland, darkening briefly along the edges of sunlit fields, deepening out into the shadows of trees.

I left the cold, bird-calling calm of the ebb-tide, and went into the brighter inland dusk, where the air was still heavy and warm between the hedges. Woods smelt pungent and aromatic. In the pure amber of the evening light the dreary green of summer burned up in red and gold. The day came to sunset’s windless calm. The wet fields exhaled that indefinable autumnal smell, a sour-sweet rich aroma of cheese and beer, nostalgic, pervasive in the heavy air. I heard a dead leaf loosen and drift down to touch the shining surface of the lane with a light, hard sound. The peregrine drifted softly from a dead tree, like the dim brown ghost of an owl. He was waiting in the dusk; not roosting, but watching for prey. The partridge coveys called, and gathered in the furrows; mallard swished down to the stubble to feed; the hawk did not move. I could see his dark shape huddled at the top of an elm, outlined against the afterglow. Below him was the shine of a stream. Snipe called. The hawk roused and crouched forward. Down from the wood on the hill the first woodcock came slanting and weaving. Three more followed. As they dropped to the mud at the side of the stream the hawk crashed among them. There was a sharp hissing and thrumming of wings as hawk and snipe and woodcock raced upward together. They splayed out above the trees, and a woodcock fell, and splashed into the shallows of the stream. I saw his falling bundled shape and long bill turning aimlessly. The hawk stood in water, plucked his prey, and fed.

October 29th

Ground up by the slow bit of the plough, big clods of black-brown earth curved over into furrows, sliced and shiny-solid, sun glinting on their smooth-cut edges. Gulls and lapwings searched the long brown valleys and the dark crevasses, looking for worms, like eagles seeking snakes.

The peregrine sat on a post by the river, ignoring the birds around him, peering down at a dung-heap. He plunged into reeking straw, scrabbling and fluttering, then rose heavily and flew out of sight to the north, carrying a large brown rat.

At one o’clock the sky above the river darkened from the east, and volleys of arrowed starlings hissed overhead. Behind them, and higher, came a heavy bombardment of woodpigeons and lapwings. A thousand birds strained forward together as though they did not dare to look back. The dull sky domed white with spiralling gulls. Ten minutes later, the gulls glided back to the plough; starlings and sparrows flew down from the trees. Through the sky, across fields, along hedges, over woodland and river, the peregrine had left his unmistakable spoor of fear.

Birds to the north-east stayed longer in cover, as though they were closer to danger. Following the direction of their gaze, I found the hawk skirmishing with two crows. They chased him; he rose steeply above them; they flew down to a tree; he swooped at them, flicking between the branches; they rose, and chased him again. This game was repeated a dozen times; then the hawk tired of it, and glided away down river. The crows flew towards the woods. Crows must feed very early or very late, for I seldom see them feeding in the valley. They spend their time bathing, mobbing, or chasing other crows.

By three o’clock the hawk had become lithe and nimble in flight. His hunger was growing, and his wings were dancing and bounding on the air as he flew from tree to tree. Starlings rose like smoke from the willows, and hid him completely. He mounted clear of them, spread his wings, and sailed. The wind drifted him away, down the valley. He circled slowly under low grey clouds.

It was almost dark when I found the remains of his kill, the feathers and wings of a common partridge, lying on the river-bank five miles downstream. Blood looked black in the dusk, bare bones white as a grin of teeth. A hawk’s kill is like the warm embers of a dying fire.

October 30th

The wind-shred banner of the autumn light spanned the green headland between the two estuaries. The east wind drove drenching grey and silver showers through the frozen cider sky. Birds rose from ploughland as a merlin flew above them, small and brown and swift, lifting dark against the sky, dipping and swerving down along the furrows. All brown or stubbled fields shivered and glittered with larks: all green were pied with plover. Quiet lanes brindled with drifting leaves.

On the coast, the gale was bending the trees back through their lashing branches. The flat land was a booming void where nothing lived. Under the wind, a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted till death.

I went over the hill to the southern estuary. Rain blew across the fields in roaring clouds of spray. Then the sun shone, and a swallow flitted into light. This valley has its own peculiar loneliness. Steep pastures, lined with elms, slope down to flat fields and marshes. The narrow shining estuary diminishes as the lanes descend. The sudden loneliness and peace one sees, far down between the elms, changes to a different desolation when the river-wall is reached.

Jackdaws charred the green slopes to the north with black. Wigeon whistled through the dry rattling of the bleak marsh reeds, a cheerful explosive sound, which only mist and distance can make faint or sad. A dead curlew lay on top of the wall untouched, breast upward, with a broken neck. The jagged ends of bone had pierced the skin. When I lifted the soft damp body, the long wings fell out like fans. The crows had not yet taken the lovely river-shining of its eyes. I laid it back as it was. The peregrine that had killed it could return to feed when I had gone, and its death would not be wasted. On the marsh, a swan – shot in the breast – had been left to rot. It was greasy, and heavy to lift, and it stank. This handling of the dead left a taint upon the splendour of the day, which ended in a quiet desolation of cloud as the wind fell and the sun passed down.

November 2nd

The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light. The peregrine sank up into blue depths, luring the flocked birds higher. Constellations of golden plover glinted far above; gulls and lapwings orbited below; pigeons, duck and starlings hissed in shallow air.

A shower cloud bloomed at the northern edge of the valley and slowly opened out across the sky. The peregrine circled beneath it, clenched in dark fists of starlings. Savagely he lashed himself free, and came superbly to the south, rising on the bright rim of the black cloud, dark in the sun-dazzle floating upon it. He came directly towards me, outlined and fore-shortened, and I could see his long wings angling steeply from his rounded head. The inner wings were inclined upward at an angle of sixty degrees to the body, and they did not move; the narrow outer wings curled higher and dipped lightly into air, waving flamboyantly like sculls that touch and feather through a river’s gliding skin. He passed above me, and floated up across the open fields. Slowly he drifted and began to soar, shining in the sun like a bar of river gravel, golden-red. The falcon soared to meet him; together they circled out into the glaring whiteness of the south.

When they had gone, hundreds of fieldfares went back to feed in hawthorns by the river. Some stayed in the yellow Lombardy poplars, silently watching, noble in the topmost branches, thin bright eyes and fierce warrior faces. The deep blue of the sky was stained with cloud. Slowly its brilliance descended to the earth. Yellow stubble and dark ploughland shone upward with a greater light.

At half-past one the tiercel returned, flying quickly down towards me as I stood among trees by the brook. He is more willing to face me now, less ready to fly when I approach, puzzled perhaps by my steady pursuit. Seven magpies suddenly dashed up from the grass, squawked in alarm like deep-voiced snipe, swirled together like waders, flung themselves into a tree. The peregrine hovered briefly above the place where they had been. Veering and swaying from side to side, beating his wings with great power and careless freedom, he went overhead in a wash of rushing air. Wings pliant as willow, body firm as oak, he had all the spring and buoyancy of a tern in his leaping, darting flight. Below, he was the colour of river mud, ochreous and tawny; above, he had the sheen of autumn leaves, beech and elm and chestnut. His feathers were finely grained and shaded; they shone like polished wood. Trees hid him from me. When I saw him again, he was a hundred feet higher, climbing fast towards the coast. Two hours to sunset, and the tide rising: it seemed likely that he was heading for the estuary. I followed him there an hour later.

The north wind grew, towering over a cold sky, shedding bleak light, hardening the edges of the hills. Rain drifted across the estuary, and islands stood black on striped and silver water. There were fires and shooting to the north, and a rainbow shone. A horseman rode across the marsh and put up the peregrine, which flew north above the smoke of the fires and the crash of the guns. He carried a dead gull. Long after the brown and yellow hawk had merged into the brown and yellow autumn field I could see the white wings of the gull fluttering in the wind.

November 4th

The sky peeled white in the north-west gale, leaving the eye no refuge from the sun’s cold glare. Distance was blown away, and every tree and church and farm came closer, scoured of its skin of haze. Down the estuary I could see trees nine miles away, bending over in the wind-whipped sea. New horizons stood up bleached and stark, plucked out by the cold talons of the gale.

An iridescence of duck’s heads smouldered in foaming blue water: teal brown and green, with a nap like velvet; wigeon copper-red, bla-zoned with a crest of chrome; mallard deep green in shadow but in the sun luminous, seething up through turquoise, to palest burning blue. A cock bullfinch, alighting on a post against the water, seemed suddenly to flame there, like a winged firework hissing up to glory.

For two hours a falcon peregrine hovered in the gale, leaning into it with heavy flailing wings, moving slowly round the creeks and saltings. She seldom rested, and the wind was too strong for soaring. She followed the sea-wall, flying forward for thirty yards, then hovering. Once, she hovered for a long time, and sank to sixty feet; hovered, and sank to thirty feet; hovered and dropped till only a foot above the long grass on the top of the wall. There she stayed, hovering steadily, for two minutes. She had to fly strongly forward to keep in the same place. Then the grass swayed and crumpled as something ran through it, and the hawk plunged down with outspread wings. There was a scuffle, and something ran along the side of the wall to safety in the ditch at the bottom. The falcon rose, and resumed her patient hovering. She was probably hunting for hares or rabbits. I found the remains of both; the fur had been carefully plucked from them, and the bones neatly cleaned. I also found a mallard drake, drab and ignominious in death.

At sunset the tiercel flew above the marsh, pursuing a wisp of snip. They drummed away down wind, like stones skidding across ice.