The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker. Mark Cocker

rasping sound – and shook their heavy-jowled dark heads so that their yellow-ringed eyes winked madly in the sun. Coot huddled together like winkles on a plate. Drake smew, their phantom arctic whiteness piped and curled about with thin black veins, sank deep like ice-floes or dazzled up the sky like flying snow.

      I did not see a peregrine, though one was never far away. I found a black-headed gull that had been killed in the morning; it was still damp and bloody. Only the head, wings, and legs, were untouched. All other bones had been carefully stripped of flesh. What was left smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple. It was an appetising smell, not the least bit rank or fishy. I could have eaten it myself if I had been hungry.

      December 20th

      Mist cleared in the afternoon and widening rings of sunlight rippled out. A heron flew to a tree beside the brook. His legs reached down with a slow pedalling movement, like a man descending through the trap-door of a loft and feeling for a ladder with his feet. He touched the topmost twig, fumbled his spidery toes around it, gradually deflated himself down on to the long stilts of his legs, hunched and crumpling like a broken parasol.

      Little owls called as I walked beside South Wood. The air was quiet. Birds were feeding in fields where frost had melted. Song thrushes bounced and sprang to spear out the surfacing worms. There is something very cold about a thrush, endlessly listening and stabbing through the arras of grass, the fixed eye blind to what it does. A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a small mad puritan with a banana in his mouth. I went into the wood.

      Dead leaves are crisp with frost. The silence is fretted with the whisper and lisp of tits feeding in the high branches. A goldcrest comes close, a tiny flicker of green in the dark wood, tonsured with a sliver of gold leaf. Its eyes shine large and bright, scanning each twig carefully before deciding which way to jump. It is never still as it deftly dabs up insects. When it is close, the thin ice-needles of its call ring out with surprising vehemence, but they are soon inaudible when it moves away. A pheasant rises suddenly from bracken, rocketing away between the tree-tops as though tight-wound elastic were shuddering loose inside a drum.