The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker. Mark Cocker
were tearing themselves free. I could see their long down-pointing bills, shining pink and brown; their heads and chests were striped brown and fawn, like sun and shadow on the woodland floor. Their slack legs dangled, then slowly gathered up. Their dark eyes, large and damp, shone brown and gentle. The tops of the hornbeams rattled, twigs swished and snapped. Then the woodcock were free, darting and weaving away above the trees, glowing in the sun like golden roast. Black mud beneath the brambles, where they had squatted side by side, showed the spidery imprint of their feet.
Under pylons, in a flooded field between two woods, I found the remnants of a rook that the peregrine had eaten. The breast-bone was serrated along the keel, where pieces had been nipped out of it by the hawk’s bill. The legs were orange, though they should have been black. When so reduced, a rook’s frame and skull seem pathetically small compared with the huge and heavy bill.
By four o’clock, hundreds of clacking fieldfares had gathered in the woods. They moved higher in the trees and became silent, facing the sun. Then they flew north towards their roosting place, rising and calling, straggling out in uneven lines, the sun shining beneath them. And far above them, a peregrine wandered idly round the blue cupola of the cooling sky, and drifted with them to the dead light of the north.
Half an hour before sunset I came to a pine wood. It was already dark under the trees, but there was light in the ride as I walked along it from the west. Outside it was cold, but the wood was still warm. The boles of the pines glowed redly under the blue-black gloom of their branches. The wood had kept its dusk all day, and seemed now to be breathing it out again. I went quietly down the ride, listening to the last rich dungeon notes of a crow. In the middle of the wood, I stopped. A chill spread over my face and neck. Three yards away, on a pine branch close to the ride, there was a tawny owl. I held my breath. The owl did not move. I heard every small sound of the wood as loudly as though I too were an owl. It looked at the light reflected in my eyes. It waited. Its breast was white, thickly arrowed and speckled with tawny red. The redness passed over the sides of its face and head to form a rufous crown. The helmeted face was pale white, ascetic, half-human, bitter and withdrawn. The eyes were dark, intense, baleful. This helmet effect was grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl. As I looked at those grape-blue eyes, fringed with their fiery gold, the bleak face seemed to crumble back into the dusk; only the eyes lived on. The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been startled out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Neither of us could bear to look away. Its face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man. I moved. I could not help it. And the owl suddenly turned its head, shuffled along the branch as though cringing, and flew softly away into the wood.
November 15th
Above South Wood, a small stream flows through a steep-sided valley. The northern slope is open woodland, rusty with winter bracken, silvered with birches, green with mossy oak. The southern slope is pasture, unchanged for many years, rich with worms, lined by small hedges, freckled with thick-branched oak. Two hundred lapwings, and many fieldfares, redwings and blackbirds, were listening for worms as I went down to the stream, which was loud in the quiet morning. There was no ploughing in the river valley, and I expected the peregrine to hunt the lapwings in the higher pasture.
A hard tapping sound began, a long way off. It was like a song thrush banging a snail on a stone, but it came from above. In a hedgerow oak, at the tip of a side branch, a lesser spotted woodpecker was clinging to a small twig, hammering a marble gall with his bill, trying to hack out the grub inside it. To the six-inch-long woodpecker this gall was the size a large medicine ball is to a man. He swung about freely on the twig, sometimes hanging upside down, attacking from many angles. His head went back at least two inches, then thudded forward with pickaxing ferocity. His black shining eyes were needle bright as he looked all round the yellow gall. He could not pierce it. He flew to another oak and tried another gall. All morning I heard him tapping his way across the fields. I tapped a gall with my fingernail, and with a sharp stone, but I could not reproduce the woodpecker’s loud cracking sound, which was audible a hundred yards away. He was fairly tame, but if I went too near he stopped, and shuffled farther up the branch, returning when I moved back. When jays called in the wood, he stopped hammering, and listened. Lesser spotted woodpeckers are wary of predators; they fly from cuckoos, and take cover from jays and crows.
Jays were noisy all day in the wood, digging up the acorns they buried a month ago. The first to find one was chased by the others. Several woodcock were feeding at the side of the stream, where the flow of water was checked by fallen branches and dead leaves, and I flushed many more from their resting places in the bracken. During the day, they like to lie up on bracken slopes facing south or west, usually near a cluster of sapling chestnuts or small birches, occasionally under holly or pine. Some birds prefer bramble cover to bracken. Woodcock go up suddenly, after one has been standing near them for a time, as little as five yards away. They may wait for a minute or more, till they can bear the uncertainty no longer. You can flush a greater number by making frequent stops. When trudging straight on through the wood, you put up only those directly in your path. Watching its first steep ascent, you can, for a second, capture the woodcock’s colour. Held in a sudden yellowness of light, the blended browns and fawns and chestnuts of its back stand out in relief, like a plating of dead leaves. In the middle of the ridged and stripy back, behind the head, there is a tint of greenish bronze, like verdigris. They may seem to go right away into the distance of the wood, but in fact they pitch steeply down to cover as soon as they are screened by trees. A sudden zigzag and downward flop, over open ground, can be deceptive. They may fly low for a time, rising again when out of sight. Thousands of years of escape practice have evolved these crafty ways. It becomes easy to guess where woodcock are resting, but the actual catapulting ejection from bracken or bramble always startles. One is seldom looking in the right direction.
All wormy mud must have its wader. The fugitive woodcock finds his way along the small windings of the brooks and gulleys, past the forlorn ponds and the muddy undrained rides, to his hermitage of bracken.
The ‘pee-wit’ calls of plover grew louder as the sun declined. Standing among oaks and birches, I saw between the trees the dark curve of a peregrine scything smoothly up the green slope of the valley. Fieldfares fled towards the trees. Some thudded down into bracken, like falling acorns. The peregrine turned and followed, rose steeply, flicked a fieldfare from its perch, lightly as the wind seizing a leaf. The dead bird dangled from a hawk’s-foot gallows. He took it to the brook, plucked and ate it by the water’s edge, and left the feathers for the wind to sift.
November 16th
The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory. Fifty herring gulls flew north along a thin icicle of blue that wedged the clouds apart. Solemn-winged and sombre, moving away into the narrow pincer of blue, they were a splendid portent of the day to come.
By ten o’clock the blue wedge had widened, and defeated clouds were massing in the eastern sky. Lapwings and golden plover circled down to feed in a newly ploughed field near the river. The first rays of the morning sun reached out to the plover, dim in the dark earth. They shone frail gold, as though their bones were luminous, their feathered skin transparent. The peregrine, which had been hunched and drab in the dead oak, gleamed up in red-gold splendour, like the glowing puffed-out fieldfares in bushes by the river.
When I looked away, the peregrine left his perch, and panic began. The southern sky was terraced with mazes of upward winding birds: seven hundred lapwings, a thousand gulls, two hundred woodpigeons, and five thousand starlings, dwindled up in spiral tiers and widening gyres. Three hundred golden plover circled above them all, visible only when they turned and glinted in the sun. Eventually I found the hawk in the last place I thought of looking – which should have been the first – directly above my head.
He flew southward, rising: four light wing-beats and then a glide, an easy rhythm. Seen from below, his wings seemed merely to kink and straighten, kink and straighten, twitching in and out like a pulse. A crow chased him, and they zigzagged together. As he rose higher the hawk flew faster; but so light and deft was his wing flicker that he looked to be almost hovering, while the crow moved backwards and down. He fused into the white mist