The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker. Mark Cocker
towards their roost. They came in fast-moving flocks of thirty or forty, and they would not fly directly overhead They split up as soon as they saw me, scattering to left or right, like woodpigeons. I had never seen them do that before. Repeated attacks by the peregrine, at morning and evening, had made them very wild, and suspicious of danger from below.
I followed the peregrine to the east. Fieldfares clacked and whistled above me on their way to roost by the river. From a small stream I put up a green sandpiper. It towered into the dusk, calling, veering and swaying about like a tipsy snipe. Its call was a wild, whistling ‘too-loo-weet’, indescribably triumphant and forlorn. The peregrine stooped as the sandpiper rose, but he missed it by a yard. He may have been following me so that I could flush prey for him. All the stoops he made today were slow and inaccurate. Perhaps he was not really hungry, but was compelled by habit to practise a ritual of hunting and killing.
The sky cleared after sunset. Far above, there was a sound like a distant striking of matches. Many rooks and jackdaws were calling as they flew slowly, peacefully, westward, high in the cold blue dusk, small as the first stars.
December 12th
High clouds slowly filled the sky, the morning whitened out, the sun was hidden. A cold wind rose from the north. The horizon light became clear and vivid.
The remains of a herring gull lay at the roadside, between two farms, half on the grass verge and half in the dust and grit. The peregrine had killed it in the night, or in the morning dusk, before there was any traffic on the road, and had found it too heavy to carry to a safer place. Since then, the passing cars had squashed it flat. The shredded flesh was still wet with blood, and the neck gaped redly where the head had been. To hawks, these gritty country lanes must look like shingle beaches; the polished roads must gleam like seams of granite in a moorland waste. All the monstrous artefacts of man are natural, untainted things to them. All that is still is dead. All that moves, and stops, and does not move again, then very slowly dies. Movement is like colour to a hawk; it flares upon the eye like crimson flame.
I found the gull at ten o’clock, and the peregrine a quarter of an hour later. As I expected, after eating so large a bird he had not gone far away. Looking very wet and dejected, with feathers loose and bedraggled, he was slumped on a tree by the ford lane pond. His tail dangled beneath him like a sodden umbrella. The pond is small and shallow, and contains the usual human detritus; pram wheels, tricycles, broken glass, rotting cabbages, and detergent containers, overlaid by a thin ketchup of sewage. The water is stagnant and greasy, but the hawk may have bathed in it. Normally he prefers clear running water of a certain depth and quality – and he will fly long distances to find it – but sometimes he seems deliberately to choose water containing sewage.
Three tractors were ploughing in the big field to the south. One of them was passing up and down, a few yards from the hawk, without disturbing him at all. Hawks perch near fields where tractors are working, because that is where birds are constantly on the move. There is always something to watch, or something to kill if the hawk should be hungry. They have learnt that the dreaded man-shape is harmless while the tractor is in motion. They do not fear machines, for a machine’s behaviour is so much more predictable than man’s. When the tractor stops, the hawk is immediately alert. When the driver walks away, the hawk moves to a more distant perch. This happened in the field by the pond half an hour after I arrived there. The hawk flew slowly south-east, lifting and swinging his wings like heavy unwieldy oars, and drifted down to rest at the top of a roadside elm. He did not see me coming till I was almost below the tree. Then he gaped, and started in alarm, and flew back towards the pond. He still moved slowly and carefully, as though fearful of spilling something, gliding with wings drooped down in limp, ignoble curves. This heavy waterlogged flight was like a crow’s, with the tips of the wings giving the air a light, quick touch at the end of the wings’ deep oaring.
I found him huddled in the oak that overhangs the lane, between the pond and the ford. He did not move when I passed beneath him. With eyes close, and drying feathers ruffled by the wind, he perched very upright and wooden, looking dingy and comatose, as though long-dead and rather moth-eaten. When I clapped my hands, he roused and flew down to the copse by the ford. Flushed from there, he flew back to the oak. Three times this manoeuvre was repeated. Then I left him to rest in the oak while I watched from the edge of the copse. He slept for another hour, waking at one o’clock to preen and look around. The colour of his feathers lightened as they dried. The tail was narrowly barred with pale fawn and pale brown; the back, mantle, and scapulars, were pale yellowish brown, flecked and barred laterally with glowing burnt sienna. The bars were close and narrow, and the whole surface had a luminous red-gold sheen. The crown of his head was pale gold, flecked lightly with brown. The tips of the folded wings reached just beyond the end of the tail; exceptionally long, even for a tiercel peregrine.
He left the tree at half past one, but was immediately chased back there by a crow. He called loudly in flight: a shrill petulant sound. When perched, he called again: a deeper, more challenging cry. At two o’clock he became restless, moving his head up and down and shifting his feet about. He took several minutes to bring himself to it, but when he finally flew he was fast and decisive. He swung out and round in a rising arc and went steeply up over North Wood, striking the air smartly with his wings; earlier, he had merely stroked it. Jackdaws, that all day had been playing and feeding unconcernedly in pastures by the brook, now flew up in panic, circled high, and dispersed hastily.
Rain fell for an hour, but I stayed by the copse, waiting. At three o’clock the peregrine returned, flying fast and savagely into the cold north wind, throwing up gulls and lapwings. A lapwing was cut off from the flock, and the lean brown tiercel cleaved behind, low to the ground as a running hare. The two birds seemed to be looped together, then seemed to swing apart. The lapwing turned in its own length, but the hawk wheeled out on a wider arc and whipped back in again with frenzied wings. Suddenly the tethering cord was broken. The hawk rushed up into the sky, the lapwing tumbled forward. The hawk turned on its side and stooped, as though hurled down through a hole in the air. Then nothing. Nothing at all. However it had ended, it was over. There was only silence and the hissing of the wind. The tortuous coiling of the hunter and his victim seemed to hang in the gloomy air.
As I went up the lane from the ford I saw a bird’s wing fluttering in the grey-twigged crown of a pollard ash. When I was two yards away, the peregrine flew out, his wings drumming in a frantic effort to wrench himself clear. For a second he was very close, and I could see the satin smoothness of his underwings and the thickly quilted feathers, spotted with brown and cream. He flew south across the fields, veering and swaying erratically. His legs hung down, and there was something white between them that fluttered like paper. Through binoculars I saw that he was carrying the dead lapwing, gripping it with both feet, so that it lay up against his tail, breast upward and head foremost, with its wings lolling open to show their black and white undersides. He flew easily, carrying his half-pound load, but he was troubled by the strength of the wind. He sagged a little in the gusts, and his wings beat in quick short jabs. He landed in a tree near the lane. When I disturbed him, five minutes later, the lapwing was smaller and easier to carry. He flew into another pollard ash, and there I left him to finish his meal. Three tractors were still ploughing in the field beside him.
At sunset, ten curlew rose and flew east, calling loudly. The tractors went back to the farm, and the last gulls flew south. The peregrine circled high in the dusk, and flickered out into the darkness of the hill. The hawkless valley bloomed with the soft voices of the waking owls.
December 15th
The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge. The stark horizon, fringing the far edges of the wind, was still and silent. Its clear serenity moved back before me; a mirage of elms and oaks and cedars, farms and houses, churches, and pylons silver-webbed like swords.
At eleven o’clock the tiercel peregrine flew steeply up above the river, arching and shrugging his wings into the gale, dark on the grey clouds racing over. Wild peregrines love the wind, as otters love water. It is their element. Only within it do they truly live. All wild peregrines I have seen have flown longer and higher and further in a gale than at any other time. They avoid it only when bathing