November 28th
Nothing was clear in the tractor-echoing dreariness of this misty day. The thin and faltering north-west wind was cold.
At eleven o’clock a peregrine flew up to one of the line of tall pylons that extends across the valley. He was blurred in mist, but the deft bowing and fanning of his wings was instantly familiar. For twenty minutes he watched the plover feeding in the surrounding fields, then flew south to the next pylon. There he was silhouetted in an owl shape against the white sky, his sunken head rounding out into high curved shoulders and tapering down to the short blunt-ended tail. He flew north again, moving up above the shining mist-coils of the river, the red-gold burnish of his plumage glowing into dimness. His wings rowed back with long powerful strokes, sweeping him easily, majestically forward.
I could not follow him in such poor light, so I went down to the brook, thinking that later he might come there to bathe. Blackbirds and chaffinches were scolding in the hawthorns by North Wood, and a jay was perching in alders and looking down at something. Keeping in the cover of hedges, I went slowly along to the thick mass of hawthorns. I forced my way into them till I could see the fast-moving water of the brook, which the jay had been watching. Through the dark mesh of thorny twigs, I saw a falcon peregrine standing on stones, a few inches from the water, looking intently at her own reflection. She walked slowly forward till her large, wrinkled yellow feet were immersed. She stopped and glared around, then raised her wings at a steep angle above her back and waded carefully out into the water, stepping gingerly on the small gravelly stones as though afraid of slipping. When the water was nearly up to her shoulders, she stopped. She drank a few sips, dipped her head beneath the surface repeatedly, splashed, dowsed and flapped her wings. Blackbirds and chaffinches stopped scolding, and the jay flew off.
She stayed in the water for ten minutes, gradually becoming less active; then she waddled heavily ashore. Her curious parrot-like amble was made even more ungainly by the weight of water in her feathers. She shook herself a great deal, made little jumps into the air with flailing wings, and flew cumbersomely up into a dead alder that overhangs the brook. Blackbirds and chaffinches started scolding again, and the jay came back. The peregrine was huge with water, and did not look at all happy. She was deeper-chested and broader-backed than the tiercel, with a bigger hump of muscle between her shoulders. She was darker in colour and more like the conventional pictures of young peregrines. The jay began to flutter round her in an irritating manner. She flew heavily away to the north, with the jay screeching derisively in pursuit.
I found her in a dead oak to the north-east of the ford. The tree stands on higher ground, and from its topmost branches a hawk can see for several miles across the open river plain to the west. After looking all around, and up at the sky, she began to preen. She did not raise her head again till she had finished. The breast feathers were preened first; then the undersides of the wings, the belly, and the flanks, in that order. When the preening was done, she picked savagely at her feet, sometimes raising one to get a better grip on it, and cleaned and honed her bill upon the bark of the tree. She slept fitfully till one o’clock, then flew quickly away to the east.
November 29th
At midday a peregrine flew from inland, passing quite close to me as I stood on the sea-wall near the saltings. Beyond the wall it rose, hovered, and swept down and up in savage ‘U’-shaped stoops. Three times it did this, then flew back the way it had come. I thought it was trying to flush prey from the shore, but when I reached the place where it had stopped, I found nothing there. It may have been practising its aim at some post or stone, but I do not understand why it should have flown to and from that particular spot in such a deliberate way.
I went on to the east. The sun shone, but the wind was cold; a good soaring day for hawks.
Three hours later I returned to the saltings, and found the remains of a great crested grebe at the foot of the sea-wall, near the high-water mark. It had been a heavy bird, weighing perhaps two and a half pounds, and it was probably killed by a stoop from a considerable height. It now weighed less than a pound. The breast-bone and ribs were bare. The vertebrae of the long neck had also been carefully cleaned. The head, wings, and stomach were untouched. The exposed organs steamed slightly in the frosty air, and were still warm. Although so fresh, they had an unpleasant rancid smell. Grebes taste rank and fishy to the human palate.
At sunset, as I went across the marsh, two peregrines flew from the roof of a hut. Languid and heavy-cropped, they did not fly far. They had shared the grebe, and now they were roosting together.
November 30th
Two kills by the river: kingfisher and snipe. The snipe lay half submerged in flooded grass, cryptic even in death. The kingfisher shone in mud at the river’s edge, like a brilliant eye. He was tattered with blood, stained with the blood-red colour of his stumpy legs that were stiff and red as sticks of sealing wax, cold in the lapping ripple of the river. He was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light-years.
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, ribs, and pelvis, and even from the shoulder-girdles and the carpal joints of the wings. This tiercel 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.
December 1st
The peregrine soared unseen in the blue zenith of the misty sky, and circled east above the rising coils of gulls. After half an hour of idling through the morning sunshine and drifting in the cold south-east wind, he came down to the brook with tremendous swooping force, bursting up a star of fragment birds. A snipe whistled away down wind like a shell, and the first great clattering of woodpigeons settled to the long sighing of departing wings. Blackbirds were still scolding when I reached the bridge, but the sky was empty. All the trees to southward – stark against the low glare of the sun – were heavy with pigeons, thick clustered like black fruit.
When the slowly relaxing tension, and the uneasy peace, had lasted for twenty minutes, the pigeons began to return to the fields. Gulls and plover went back to following the plough. Migrating lapwings flew high to the north-west, serene and untroubled. Woodpigeons flew between the two woods, and between the woods and the ploughed fields. They were never still, and their white wing-bars flashed in sunlight, a temptation and a challenge to the watching peregrine.
I scanned the sky constantly to see if a hawk was soaring, scrutinised every tree and bush, searched the apparently empty sky through every arc. That is how the hawk finds his prey and eludes his enemies, and that is the only way one can hope to find him and share his hunting. Binoculars, and a hawk-like vigilance, reduce the disadvantage of myopic human vision.
At last, yet one more of all the distant pigeon-like birds, that till then had always proved to be pigeons, was suddenly the peregrine. He flew over South Wood, and soared in the warm air rising from open spaces sheltered by encircling trees. Crisp and golden in the sunlight, he swam up through the warm air with muscular undulations of his wings, like the waving flicker of a fish’s fins. He drifted on the surface, a tiny silver flake on the blue burnish of the sky. His