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