Following the restless plover, I crossed the brook and found the falcon peregrine in a hedge to the west. I stalked her, but she moved from tree to tree along the hedge, keeping up against the sun, where she could see me clearly while I was dazzled. When the hedge ended, she flew to a tree by the brook. She seemed sleepy and lethargic and did not move her head much. Her eyes had a brown ceramic glaze. They watched my eyes intently. I turned away for a moment. She flew at once. I looked back quickly, but she had gone. Hawks are reluctant to fly while they are being watched. They wait till the strange bondage of the eyes is broken.
Gulls flew slowly over to the east, their wings transparent in the brilliant light. At three o’clock the falcon circled among them, and began to soar. It was high tide at the estuary. Waders would be swirling up and sinking down above the creeks and saltings like blood pounding in a caged heart. I knew the peregrine would see them, would see the thousands of gulls moving in towards the brimming water, and I thought she would follow them eastward. Without waiting longer, I cycled as fast as I could across to a small hill, six miles away, that overlooks the estuary. Twice I stopped and searched for the falcon and found her circling high above the wooded ridge, drifting east as I had hoped. By the time I reached the hill she had passed over and down.
In the small lens of light that the telescope cored out from three miles of sunlit intervening air, I saw the shining water of the estuary darken and seethe with birds and the sharp hook of the falcon rising and falling in a long crenellation of stoops. Then the dark water lifted to brightness again, and all was still.
December 2nd
The tide was low. Mud shone like wet sand, and shingle strands were bright and glaring in the blue lagoons. Colour smarted in sunlight. A dead tree in dark fields reflected light, like an ivory bone. Bare trees stood in the earth, like the glowing veins of withered leaves.
A peregrine soared above the estuary, and the sky filled with the wings of waders. He dived through sunlight into a falling darkness of curlew, flashed through them into light again, curved under and rose beneath them as they rose, struck one in the breast with gasping force. It dropped beside the sea-wall, all out of shape, as though its body had been suddenly deflated. The peregrine glided down, and lanced the dead curlew’s breast with the hook of his bill.
December 3rd
All day the low clouds lay above the marshes and thin rain drifted in from the sea. Mud was deep in the lanes and along the sea-wall; thick ochre mud, like paint; oozing glutinous mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh, like fungus; octopus mud that clutched and clung and squelched and sucked; slippery mud, smooth and treacherous as oil; mud stagnant; mud evil; mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes; mud to the bone. On the east coast in winter, above or below the tide-line, man walks in water or in mud; there is no dry land. Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide.
At the mouth of the estuary, land and water lose themselves together, and the eye sees only water and land floating upon water. The grey and white horizons are moored on rafts. They move out into the dusk and leave the water-land to the ear alone, to the whistling of the wigeon, the crying of curlew, and the calling of gulls. There was a hawk to the north, circling over the higher ground and flying to roost. But it was too far off to draw me away from the falling tide. Thousands of gulls came out from the land at evening to the cleanness and safety of the sea.
December 5th
The sun fired the bone-white coral of the frosted hedges with a cold and sullen glow. Nothing moved in the silent valley till the rime melted and steamed in the sun, and trees began to drip through the misty cave that boomed and blurred with voices drifting from the stirring farms. The peregrine flew from a haystack by the road, where he had been resting in the sun, and went down to the river.
Half an hour later I found him near the bridge, perched on an overhead wire. He flew low along a ditch, brushing rime from the stiff reeds with his wings. He twisted, and turned, and hovered above a moorhen. It skidded and threshed on the ice between the reeds, and he could not catch it. Fourteen teal and a hundred gulls flew up from a stretch of unfrozen water. There were many tame and hungry snipe in the frosty fields, feeble, and faintly calling.
At one o’clock the peregrine flew east, rising over the sunlit cliffs of fog on strong, determined wings.
December 8th
Golden leaves of sunlight drifted down through morning fog. Fields shone wet under blue sky. From an elm near the river the tiercel peregrine flew up into the misty sunlight, calling: a high, husky, muffled call: ‘keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk’, sharp-edged and barbarous.
He rose over stubble to the north, keeping the sun behind him, beating forward, mounting in buoyant glides. He had the tenseness and taut ply in his wings that means he has sighted prey. Woodpigeons in the stubble stopped feeding, and raised their heads. Two hundred feet above them the hawk slowly circled, then slanted suddenly over and down. He slashed down through the air and swung up, and the pigeons flew wildly beneath him. He twisted over and down, with a sinuous coiling of wings, and cut in among them, piercing their soft grey hurtling mass.
Birds rose from all the fields around. Whole fields seemed to lift into the sky. Somewhere in this seething of wings the hawk was lost inextricably. When the turmoil subsided, there was no hawk within miles. This happens so often: the stealthy soft-winged approach, the sudden attack, then the hidden departure, concealed in a diffusing smokescreen of birds.
I reached the estuary at high tide. Thousands of glittering dunlin hissed and plunged over blue water. Brent geese and wigeon floated in the brimming bays. Gunners were out. Through the bronze flashes, and the booming of the early dusk, wigeon whistled unquenchably and a solitary red-throated diver raised its melancholy wail. The peregrine did not come back to the circling, echoing clangour of the banging estuary. He had killed in the morning, and wisely stayed inland.
December 10th
Bleak light, brutal wind, thickening cloud, showers of sleet. Snipe huddled in a flooded meadow north of the river, like little brown monks fishing. They crouched low over their bent green legs, and I could see their Colorado-beetle-coloured heads and their gentle brown eyes. They did not feed, but simply held their long bills out above the muddy water, as though they were savouring the bouquet. Fifty went up when I walked towards them. There is no hesitation, no slow awakening, for snipe; only the sudden convulsive jump from the mud when the alarm rings in their nerves. They made a tremendous nasal noise as they rose: a sneeze of snipe, not a wisp. They kept close together and did not jink, flying high and fast in a group, like starlings. This meant that a hawk was about.
After much searching I found the tiercel on a post in the fields. He looked sleepy and lethargic. He did not become alert till early afternoon, when light began to fade and misty dusk furred the distant trees. He circled over the meadow where snipe were resting. None rose till he stooped. Then they all spluttered and crackled up from the mud, like damp squibs. The last to rise was chased by the hawk. Together they tore up into the sky, plunged down across the fields, rushed in and out of the willows. The hawk followed every twist and turn, keeping up with the snipe, but never overtaking it. He stopped his pursuit quite suddenly, and dashed at the hundreds of fieldfares that were milling above the river in a random incohesive way. He still flew like a snipe, jinking and bouncing about like an uncoiling spring, scattering fieldfares but not attacking them.
He rested on a post for ten minutes, then flew steadily up wind, keeping very low and half-hidden in the darkening misty fields. His head and tail were invisible. He was like a manta ray flicking along the bottom of the