We live in a truly marvelous world. A really, really interesting, diverse, marvelous place to have visited for a short time. Some get more out of it than others. Some of us try to get more out of it than others....I think you should make a conscientious effort to try. To be nosy. To look and to marvel. And not only to look but to see. Not only listen but hear on all different levels. It is indeed a marvelous world. Part of what makes it marvelous is our own kind. Part of what makes it incredibly marvelous to me are other than our own kind. I think it is important biologically to have them, but it's also important for my quality of life. I would not want to live in a world that had only people in it. I like snakes and frogs and creepy, crawly things and marvelous birds that can fly two hundred miles an hour and free my spirit....
- Len Soucy, Birdman of the Great Swamp, Founder of The Raptor Trust, a bird rehabilitation center, from Heron Dance, issue 1.
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
A beautifully-written account of an obsession with Peregrine Falcons, and the landscape the author follows them through near England’s Atlantic seacoast.
Page 10
I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.
10
I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.
12
...For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For ten years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawk's eye swings and dilates to the luring food-shapes of gulls and pigeons.
13
To be recognized and accepted by a peregrine you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable. Enter and leave the same fields at the same time each day, soothe the hawk from its wildness by a ritual of behavior as invariable as its own. Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree. A peregrine fears nothing he can see clearly and far off. Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.
...I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word 'predator' is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalize his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.
For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.
19
Everything about peregrines varies: color, size, weight, personality, style: everything.
22
Peregrines bathe every day. They prefer running water, six to nine inches deep; nothing less than two inches or more than twelve inches is acceptable to them. The bed of the stream must be stony and firm, with a shallow incline sloping gradually down from the bank. They favor those places where the color of the stream-bed resembles the color of their own plumage. They like to be concealed by steep banks or overhanging bushes. Shallow streams, brooks, or deep ditches, are preferred to rivers. Salt water is seldom used. Dykes lined with concrete are sometimes chosen, but only if the concrete has been discolored. Shallow fords, where brown-mottled country lanes are crossed by a fast-running brook, are favorite places. For warning of human approach they rely on their remarkably keen hearing and on the alarm calls of other birds. The search for a suitable bathing place is one of the peregrine’s main daily activities, and their hunting and roosting places are located in relation to this search. They bathe frequently to rid themselves of their own feather lice and of the lice that may transfer to them from the prey they have killed. These new lice are unlikely to live long once they have left their natural host species, but they are an additional irritation to which the hawk is most sensitive. Unless the number of lice infesting the hawk’s feathers is controlled by regular bathing, there can be a rapid deterioration in health, which is dangerous for a juvenile bird still learning to hunt and kill its prey.
Though there can be many variations, a peregrine’s day usually begins with a slow, leisurely flight from the roosting place to the nearest suitable bathing stream. This may be as much as ten to fifteen miles away. After bathing, another hour or two is spent in drying the feathers, preening and sleeping. The hawk rouses only gradually from his post-bathing lethargy. His first flights are short and unhurried. He moves from perch to perch, watching other birds and occasionally catching an insect or a mouse on the ground. He re-enacts the whole process of learning to kill that he went through when he first left the eyrie: the first, short, tentative flights; the longer, more confident ones; the playful, mock attacks at inanimate objects, such as falling leaves or drifting feathers; the games with other birds, changing to a pretence of attack, and then to the first serious attempt to kill. True hunting may be a comparatively brief process at the end of this long re-enactment of the hawk’s adolescence.
Hunting is always preceded by some form of play. The hawk may feint at partridges, harass jackdaws or lapwings, skirmish with crows. Sometimes, without warning, he will suddenly kill. Afterwards he seems baffled by what he had done, and he may leave the kill where it fell and return to it later when he is genuinely hunting. Even when he is hungry, and has killed in anger, he may sit beside his prey for ten to fifteen minutes before starting to feed. In these cases the dead bird is usually unmarked, and the hawk seems to be puzzled by it. He nudges it idly with his bill. When blood flows, he feeds at once.
32
Conspicuousness of color or pattern increases vulnerability and influences the peregrine’s choice of prey. Birds moving from place to place are always vulnerable, whether they are flying to and from their roosts along known ways, or merely passing over territory on migration. Recent arrivals are attacked at once, before they can learn refuges. The odd are always singled out. The albinos, the sick, the deformed, the solitary, the imbecile, the senile, the very young; these are the most vulnerable.
35
The eyes of a falcon peregrine weigh approximately one ounce each; they are larger and heavier than human eyes. If our eyes were in the same proportion to our bodies as the peregrine’s are to his, a twelve stone man would have eyes three inches across, weighing four pounds. The whole retina of a hawk’s eye records a resolution of distant objects that is twice as acute as the of the human retina. Where the lateral and binocular visions focus, there are deep-pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a resolution eight times as great as ours. This means that a hawk, endlessly scanning the landscape with small abrupt turns of his head, will pick up any point of movement; by focusing upon it he can immediately make it flare up into larger, clearer view.
81
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.
86
The beagles are going home along the small hill lanes, the huntsmen tired, the followers gone, the hare safe in its form. The valley sinks into mist, and the yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun. The eastern ridge blooms purple, then fades to inimical black. The earth exhales into the cold dusk. Frost forms in hollows shaded from the afterglow. Owls wake and call. The first stars hover and drift down. Like a roosting hawk, I listen to silence and gaze into the dark.
95
In the afternoon I crossed the field that slopes up from North Wood, and saw feathers blowing in the wind. The body of a woodpigeon lay breast upward on a mass of soft white feathers. The head had been eaten. Flesh had been torn from the neck, breast-bone, and pelvis, and even from the shoulder-girdles and the carpal joints of the wings. This tercel eats well. His butchery is beautifully done. The carcass weighed only a few ounces, so nearly a pound of meat had been taken from it. The bones were still dark red, the blood still wet.
I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.
113
Mallard fly along the line of the wood towards the lake. Looking up at them through binoculars, I see for the first time a falcon peregrine circling very high, beating and gliding in the fading light. She stoops, dilates like the pupil of an eye as it passes from day’s brilliance into dusk. She is the size of a lark, then of a jay, now of a crow, now of a mallard. Mallard spray outwards and climb as she dives between them. She bends up through the sky again, curves under and up with the momentum of her stoop, crashes into a mallard, bursts it into a drift of feathers. Grappled together, they glide above the wood, then sweep down to the frosted ride. Mallard fly along the line of the wood towards the lake. Nothing has changed, though one is gone.
High on the steep slope of the hill, fieldfares are flying to roost. It is nearly dark. The tall, grizzled pines have a bony serenity. They tower against the skyline of the hill. It seems that beyond them there must be canyons and mist and nothing more. Silence hangs from the branches. The air tastes cold and metallic. The tercel glides up to the trees, like a shadow. He calls once: a sound as final as the changing of a portcullis. The glaring eyes squint up, and are sheathed in sleep. The hawk puffs out his feathers, looking cuddly and harmless. Only the armor-plated legs and the sickled toes do not relax, will never relax in life.
139
Woodpigeons and jackdaws went up from North Wood at midday, and cawing crows flew to their tree-top stations. Chaffinches by the bridge scolded steadily for ten minutes, their monotonous ‘pink, pink’ gradually dying away in the sunlit silence. I saw nothing. Assuming the hawk to have soared down wind, I searched for him north of the ford and found him in the dead oak half an hour later. He flew up into the wind and began to circle. His wingbeats became shallower, till only the tips of his wings were faintly fluttering. I thought he would soar, but instead he flew quickly south-east. The line that divides North Wood dips and rises through a steep-sided gulley, which is sheltered from the wind. The peregrine has learnt that warm air rises from the sunny, windless slopes of the lane, and he often flies there when he wishes to soar.
Slowly he drifted above the orchard skyline and circled down wind, curving upward and round in long steep glides. He passed from the cold white sky of the south, up to the warm blue zenith, ascending the wind-bent thermal with wonderful ease and skill. His long-winged, blunt-headed shape contracted, dwindled, and darkened to the flinty point of a diamond as he circled high and far over; hanging and drifting above; indolent, watchful, supreme. Looking down, the hawk saw the big orchard beneath him shrink into dark twiggy lines and green strips; saw the dark woods closing together and reaching out across the hills; saw the green and white fields turning to brown; saw the silver line of the brook, and the coiled river uncoiling; saw the horizon staining with distant towns; saw the estuary lifting up its blue and silver mouth, tongued with green islands. And beyond, beyond all, he saw the straight-ruled shine of the sea floating like a rim of mercury on the surface of the brown and white land. The sea, rising as he rose, lifted its blazing storm of light, and thundered freedom to the land-locked hawk.
147
At half past ten, clouds of small birds sprayed up from the fields and a merlin cleaved through them like an arrow, dipping and darting. It was a thin narrow falcon, flying low. It swept over the sea-wall, curved out across the saltings, and swung up into steep spirals, its long sting-like body sawing in the blur of its jabbing, flicking wings. It flew fast, yet its wide circling seemed laborious and its rising slow. At three hundred feet it came round in a long curve, and poised, half-hovering. Then it flew forward into the wind towards a skylark singing high above the fields. It had seen the lark go up, and had circled to gain height before making an attack. From behind, the merlin’s wings looked very straight. They seemed to move up and down with a shallow, flicking action, a febrile pulsation, much faster than any other falcon’s. It reached the lark in a few seconds, and they fell away towards the west, jerking and twisting together, the lark still singing. It looked like a swallow chasing a bee. They rushed down the sky in zigzags and I lost them in the green of distant fields.
Their rapid, shifting, dancing motion had been so deft and graceful that it was difficult to believe that hunger was the cause of it and death the end. The killing that follows the hunting flight of hawks comes with a shocking force, as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had killed the thing it loved. The striving of birds to kill, or to save themselves from death, is beautiful to see. The greater the beauty the more terrible the death.
149
She drifted idly; remote, inimical. She balanced in the wind, two thousand feet above, while the white cloud passed beyond her and went across the estuary to the south. Slowly her wings curved back. She slipped smoothly through the wind, as though she were moving forward on a wire. The mastery of the roaring wind, this majesty and noble power of flight, made me shout loud and dance up and down with excitement. Now, I thought, I have seen the best of the peregrine; there will be no need to pursue further; I shall never want to search for it again. I was wrong of course. One can never have enough.
Far to the north the falcon tilted downward and slid slowly through sun and shadow towards earth. As her wings swept up and back, she glided faster. And then faster, with her whole body flattened and compressed. Bending over in a splendid arc, she plunged to earth. My head came forward with a jerk as my eyes followed the final vertical smash of her falling. I saw fields flash up behind her; then she was gone beyond elms and hedges and farm buildings. And I was left with nothing but the cold wind blowing, the sun hidden, my neck and wrists cold and stiff, my eyes raw, and the glory gone.
152
After an hour of idleness he glided gently away from the tree, down to the green corn in the field in front of him. He rose up almost at once, with a thick red earthworm dangling from his toes. Dodging the rushes of a screeching gull, he bent his head down to meet his uplifted foot and ate the worm in three gulping bites. He returned to the oak, and the gull flew off. Gulls have been flying over these fields for a week or more, dropping down at intervals for worms. Curiosity may have induced the watching hawk to do the same. Three times, during the late afternoon, he planed down to the field to catch and eat a worm. It had begun to rain, and many worms were coming to the surface.
Between these flights, the hawk slept with his head sunk down into his breast feathers, featureless as an owl. The heavy rain did not disturb him, and he was soon bedraggled and sodden. In the early dusk he flew to a higher perch, in an elm at the edge of north orchard. I was able to stand under the tree and look up at him through the drab rainy light. Though he was very sleepy, he woke at the slightest sound or movement and glared intently down at the calls of the partridge conveys. His feathers hung thickly, like wet fur. He looked like a Red Indian stalker with all but his head concealed in shaggy buffalo hide.
153
Heavy clouds lowered, and the afternoon was dull. Mustard yellow in the dusky light, a short-eared owl rose silently from a ditch, floated up like a buoyant moon, with no sound but the soft rustle of the parting grass. Turning its cat-like face towards me, it flexed its mottled snakeskin wings across the marsh.
157
An hour before sunset I lay on the stone slope of the seawall, facing the golden-red fire of the dilating sun. The tide dwindled on the mud. The cold air sharpened, and began to smell of the coming night. With a roar of wings, like a cliff collapsing into the sea, every bird on the shore rose, leaving it bright beneath a wing-clouded sky. Wigeon flew overhead, sweeping up from the marsh behind the wall. There was a loud smacking sound like a plank hitting mud, a splash of falling excrement, and a harsh whistling of wings. The steeply climbing wigeon fanned apart. One fell back on to the marsh, huddled and slack, its narrow head hanging golden-crested from the drooping, shaking neck. It looked unreal, as though it should have split sawdust, not dripped blood. It lay where it fell, crumpled and spoilt.
158
At dusk I saw a barn owl again, hunting between road and river. For twenty minutes it quartered the meadow, moving across in long, straight lines. Six feet above the grass it flew, with fast even wing-beats. The steady pulse of its wings was curiously soothing. Dusk deepened. The owl grew bigger and whiter. The rising moon turned from deep orange to yellow as it drifted clear of the trees. The owl rested on a gate-post, and I could see the bland meditative mask of its face looking at me from the gray of the field. The curved hook of its beak protruded from the heart-shaped disk of the mask, like a single claw. The dark eyes were rimmed with wine. It flew overhead, and in the first coldness of the spring night, suddenly called. A hoarse bellowing shriek drew out to a sharp edge, and bristled away to silence. But not the silence that was there before.
165
Through this flickering web of wings I saw a peregrine flash in the sun, and a plover tumbling down. It took me a long time to find it, and the hawk had gone by then. The plover had been struck from below. There was a wound in its side, as thought it had been stabbed with a thin-bladed knife. Some flesh had already been eaten from the breast. One of its legs was withered and useless. It is astonishing how unerringly a peregrine can select a deformed or abnormal individual from a large flock of apparently identical birds. It may be that even the slightest physical weakness or difference in plumage can disastrously affect a bird’s ability to escape. Perhaps a sick bird does not wish to live.
180
Robins sang in a wood near the river, clear as spring water, fresh as the curled crisped heart of lettuce. Like the tinkle of a harpsichord, their song has a misty brightness of nostalgia. The wood smelt of bark and ashes and dead leaves. Circles of cold sky shone at the end of rides. A cock bullfinch squatted on a sagging larch twig. He stretched his neck up towards the twig above him, bit off a bud with a delicate snip and twist of his bill, and chewed it ruminatively. Then he hung his head downwards and snipped off buds from a lower twig. He was a red and black fatty, idly grazing, occasionally exerting himself to breathe out the husky ‘du-dudu’ of his song, fat dewlap gently quivering. He was like a munching bullock feeding on hawthorn leaves. But the pull and twist of his bill to break off a bud reminded me of a peregrine breaking the neck of its prey. Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty is vapor from the pit of death.
"
