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