At half past two I reached the estuary. It was high tide. White gulls floated on blue unclouded water, duck slept, waders crowded the saltings. I walked slowly west along the sea-wall. It was now the ebb-light of a cold November day, and the western sky was frosted with pale gold. That radiant arch of light, which curves up and over the flat river land from the North Sea beyond it, was crumbling at the zenith and flaking back to grey. This was the last true hunting light, a call as clear to the hungry hawk as the ‘gone away’ of a huntsman’s horn.
A low stream of dunlin left the saltings and swelled upon the water to a glittering silver sail, billowing out towards the island. Above, and far beyond them, a peregrine was flying, a small dark knuckle in the flawless sky. Swiftly it grew to a dart of flickering wings. It rose black and sharp against the sun, and then it was beyond the sun and was browner and less menacing. It dived, and the island birds were flung up like spray. It circled above them, and they fell back like a wave. In steeply rising rings the hawk mounted to a silent crescendo. Gulls flew up. It stopped above them, poised, then dived downward, sweeping down and under and up again in a great ‘U’-shaped curve, cleaving the air as a human diver cleaves through air and water. From the reaching talons a gull flopped gracelessly aside. The peregrine rose higher, and shivered out into the greying eastern sky.
In the bright west, in long streams above the estuary calm, a thousand lapwings wheeled and feathered in their changing squadrons, their soft wings rising and falling in rhythm like the oars of a long-boat.
November 21st
A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees stands sharply up along the valley skyline. The cold north air, like a lens of ice, transforms and clarifies. Wet ploughlands are dark as malt, stubbles are bearded with weeds and sodden with water. Gales have taken the last of the leaves. Autumn is thrown down. Winter stands.
At two o’clock a crackling blackness of jackdaws swept up from stubble and scattered out across the sky with a noise like dominoes being rattled together on a pub table. Woodpigeons and lapwings rose to the south. The peregrine was near, but I could not see it. I went down to the brook and across the fields between the two woods. From stubble and plough I flushed gleanings of skylarks. The sun shone. Trees coloured like tawny gravel on the bed of a clear stream. The oaks of the two woods were maned with spiky gold. A green woodpecker flew from the wet grass and clapped itself to the bole of a tree as though pulled in by a magnet. Above the moss and mustard of its back, the crown of its head smouldered vermilion, like scarlet agaric shining through a dark wood. The high, harsh alarm call came loud and sudden, a breathless squeezed-out sound, meaning ‘hawk sighted’. In the bare spars of the limes by the bridge, silent fieldfares were watching the sky.
I looked to the west, and saw the peregrine moving up above the distant farmhouse cedar, luminous in a dark cloud of rooks, drifting in streams of golden plover. A black shower cloud was glooming from the north; the peregrine shone against it in a nimbus of narrow gold. He glided over stubble, and a wave of sparrows dashed itself into a hedge. For a second, the hawk’s wings danced in pursuit, flicking lithe and high in a cluster of frenzied beats that freeze in memory to the shape of antlers. Then he flew calmly on towards the river.
I followed, but could not find him. Dusk and sunset came together in the river mist. A shrew scuffled in dead leaves beneath a hedge, and hid among them when a little owl began to call. Water voles, running along the branch of a bush that overhangs the river, were suddenly still when they heard the call. When it stopped, they dived into the water and swam into the cover of the reeds. I walked along beside the hedge. A woodcock startled me by its sudden, noisy, upward leaping. It flew against the sky, and I saw the long downward-pointing bill and the blunt owl-like wings, and heard the thin whistle and throaty croak of its roding call; a strange thing to hear in the cold November dusk. It wavered away to the west, and the peregrine starred above it, a dark incisive shape descending through the pale saffron of the afterglow. They disappeared into the dusk together, and I saw nothing more.
November 24th
A peregrine soared above the valley in the morning sunshine and the warm south breeze. I could not see it, but its motion through the sky was reflected on the ground beneath in the restless rising of the plover, in the white swirl of gulls, in the clattering grey clouds of woodpigeons, in hundreds of bright birds’ eyes looking upward.
When all was quiet, tiercel and falcon flew low and side by side across the wide plain of the open fields. Moving up wind, they scattered golden plover from the stubble. They were coloured like plover themselves and were soon hidden in the tawny-brown horizon of the fields.
Rain-clouds thickened and lowered, wind rose, everything became sharp-edged. I disturbed the falcon from an oak near ford lane. She flew quickly away to the north-east, rose beyond the brook, and hovered over the orchard. Between hovers she glided and circled, trying to soar, but she could not do so. Slowly she drifted over the hill to the east. There was no panic among the orchard birds, but many fieldfares and finches flew up and straggled aimlessly about beneath the hawk as though unable to decide whether to mob it or not. Most birds find a hovering peregrine difficult to understand. As soon as it flies fast, they know what they have to do, but when it hovers like a kestrel they are less perturbed. The only birds that immediately recognise it as being dangerous are partridges and pheasants. They are the species most threatened by this manner of hunting, and they either crouch low or run to the nearest cover. Hovering kestrels they ignore.
I went across the fields to the south of the lane, and put up three curlew. There were four there on the 21st; a peregrine may have killed the other one since then. As the curlew flew off, calling, the tiercel appeared, a hundred yards to the west. Lapwings rose quickly from the stubble in front of him, but they had misjudged the strength of the wind and had risen too late. The tiercel swung steeply up, wind filling his cupped wings like sails. He poised for a moment, then flattened his wings sharply to his sides and rushed downwards, piercing through the wind to the last lapwing of the straggling line. The glancing blow was struck so quickly that I did not see it. I only saw the hawk flying down wind, carrying his kill.
An hour of drenching rain extinguished the day. The valley was a sopping brown sponge, misty and dun. Sixteen mallard flew over, and a wigeon whistled. Rain fell copiously again, and the hollow dusk was filled with the squelching calls of snipe.
November 26th
Rooks and gulls moving over the rainy town at dawn: rooks to the estuary, gulls to inland. Down by the sound of the tide, corn buntings sang in cottage gardens. Rain blew gently as daylight gained. Waders gathered on the shrinking rim of shore, dark heads against white water. Grey plover were feeding, leaning forward like pointers, listening to the mud like thrushes on a lawn. A careful step, a thrust of the head forward and over, a strained intentness; then the bill darting down through the mud, spearing out a worm, fast and springy as a fencer. Knot were resting. They had a slant-eyed mongol look, like sleeping huskies. Fifty flew out across the water as I stumbled through the sticky clay on the top of the sea-wall. Grey birds, sweeping low under the white-stoned clear horizon and the high grey sky, low to the rain-spattered white of water and the scoured shore, black-purple seaweed, weed-green islands, and long seas heaving smooth.
Six cormorants squatted at the tideline, like blackened tree-stumps. Farther east, one rested with its wings outspread, heraldic against the whole North Sea. Long ‘V’s’ of brent geese flew past. The clucking guttural of their conversation was audible a mile away. Their long black lines clawed along the bottom of the sky.
The wings of hawk kills fluttered on the shingle: a wigeon and six black-headed gulls were old and stale, a red-breasted merganser was only three days dead. It is surprising that a peregrine should kill a merganser, a bird most foul and fishy-tasting to the human palate. Only the wings, bones, and bill, had been left. Even the skull had been picked clean. That narrow saw-billed head, with its serrated prehistoric grin, had been too much to swallow. A falcon peregrine watched me from posts far out on the saltings, sitting huddled and morose under darkening rain. She flew seldom, had fed, had nothing to do. Later, she went inland.
Greenshanks stood in the marsh; hoary-looking waders, grey and mossy coloured, tilting forward to