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