Читать книгу The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker - Mark Cocker - Страница 10

October 1st

Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after harvest.

Over orchards smelling of vinegary windfalls, busy with tits and bullfinches, a peregrine glides to a perch in a river-bank alder. River shadows ripple on the spare, haunted face of the hawk in the water. They cross the cold eyes of the watching heron. Sunlight glints. The heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds.

Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun, feels delicately for winghold on the sheer fall of sky. He is a tiercel, lean and long and supple-winged, the first of the year. He is the colour of yellow ochre sand and reddish-brown gravel. His big, brown, spaniel eyes shine wet in the sunlight, like circles of raw liver, embedded in the darker matt brown of the moustachial mask. He sweeps away to the west, following the gleaming curve of water. Laboriously I follow his trail of rising plover.

Swallows and martins call sharply, fly low; jays and magpies lurk and mutter in hedges; blackbirds splutter and scold. Where the valley widens, the flat fields are vibrant with tractors. Gulls and lapwings are following the plough. The sun shines from a clear sky flecked with high cirrus. The wind is moving round to the north. By the sudden calling of red-legged partridges and the clattering rise of woodpigeons, I know that the hawk is soaring and drifting southward along the woodland ridge. He is too high to be seen. I stay near the river, hoping he will come back into the wind. Crows in the elms are cursing and bobbing. Jackdaws cackle up from the hill, scatter, spiral away, till they are far out and small and silent in blue depths of sky. The hawk comes down to the river, a mile to the east; disappears into trees he left two hours before.

Young peregrines are fascinated by the endless pouring up and drifting down of the white plume of gulls at the brown wake of the plough. While the autumn ploughing lasts, they will follow the white-bannered tractors from field to field across the valley. They seldom attack. They just like to watch.

That is what the tiercel was doing when I found him again in the alder. He did not move from his perch till one o’clock, when the tractor driver went home to his lunch and gulls settled to sleep in the furrows. Jays were screeching in oaks near the river. They were looking for acorns to bury in the wood. The peregrine heard them, watched their wings flashing white between the leaves. He flew steeply up into the wind, and began to soar. Turning, drifting, swaying, he circled up towards the burning clouds and the cool swathes of sky. I lowered the binoculars to rest my aching arms. As though released, the hawk swept higher and was gone. I scanned the long white spines of cirrus for his thin dark crescent shape, but could not find it. Faint as a whisper, his harsh exultant cry came drifting down.

The jays were silent. One flew heavily up, carrying an acorn in its wide-open bill. Leaving the cover of the trees, it rose high above the meadows, making for the hillside wood four hundred yards away. I could see the big acorn bulging its mandibles apart, like a lemon stuffed in the mouth of a boar’s head. There was a sibilant purring sound, like the distant drumming of a snipe. Something blurred and hissed behind the jay, which seemed suddenly to trip and stumble on the air. The acorn spurted out of its bill, like the cork out of a bottle. The jay fell all lopsidedly and threshing, as though it were having a fit. The ground killed it. The peregrine swooped, and carried the dead bird to an oak. There he plucked and ate it, gulping the flesh hastily down, till only the wings, breast-bone, and tail were left.

Gluttonous, hoarding jay; he should have hedge-hopped and lurched from tree to tree in his usual furtive manner. He should never have bared the white flashes of his wings and rump to the watching sky. He was too vivid a mark, as he dazzled slowly across the green water-meadows.

The hawk flew to a dead tree, and slept. At dusk he flew east towards his roosting place.

Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

October 3rd

Inland stagnant under fog. On the coast: hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining. Fields of skylarks, singing, chasing, flashing in the sun. Saltings ringing with the redshanks’ cry. Shooting, at high tide. Shimmering columns of waders rising from the mud-flats, shaking out across the saltings. White beaches under haze. Waders flashing on the sea like spray, firing the dusty inland fields.

Most of the smaller waders settled on the shell beach: grey plover, knot, turnstone, ringer plover, sanderling. All faced different ways, sleeping, preening, watching, sharp shadowed on the dazzling gritty whiteness of the beach. Dunlin perched on the tips of marsh plants, just above the surface of the tide. They faced the breeze; stolid, patient, swaying uneasily. There was room for them on the beach, but they would not fly.

Five hundred oystercatchers came down from the south; pied brilliance, whistling through pink bills like sticks of rock. Black legs of sanderling ran on the white beach. A curlew sandpiper stood apart; delicate, foal-like, sea rippling behind it, soft eyes closing in the roan of its face. The tide ebbed. Waders swam in the heat-haze, like watery reflections moored to still, black shadows.

Far out at sea, gulls called. One by one, the larks stopped singing. Waders sank into their shadows, and crouched small. A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood. She slashed and ripped the air, but could not strike. Tiring, she flew inland. Waders floated down. Cawing rooks flew out to feed on plains of mud.

October 5th

A kestrel hovered beside the brook that separates the flat river plain from the wooded hill. He sank slowly down into stubble, lowering like a threaded spider from the web his wings had spun.

East of the brook, a green orchard rises to the skyline. A peregrine circled high above it, and began to hover. He advanced into the wind, hovering every fifty yards, sometimes staying motionless for a minute or more. The strong west wind was rising to a gale, bending branches, threshing leaves. The sun had gone, and clouds were deepening. The western horizon pricked out black and thorny. Rain was coming. Colour ebbed to brilliant chiaroscuro. Between the narrow edges of his long, level wings, the hawk’s down-bent head looked round and bulky as an owl’s. A moorhen called, and tinkling goldfinches hid silently in thistles. Magpies hopped into the longer grass, with deep-flexing frog-like bounds. When the orchard ended, the hawk veered away to the north. He would not cross the brook while I was there.

He rose upon the wind, and climbed in a narrow spiral, wafting a thousand feet higher with lyrical ease. He skimmed and floated lightly, small and slowly spinning, like a drifting sycamore seed. From far above and beyond the church on the hill, he came down to the orchard again, hovering and advancing into the wind, just as before. His wide-spread tail depressed, his hook-shaped head bent down, his wings curved forward to hug the gale. He crouched upon air, small and huddled, a thousand feet above the orchard trees. Then he uncurled, slowly stretching out his wings and turning on his side. He folded over and down into a steep spiral, suddenly straightening to a vertical dive. He bucked and jerked in the air, and dropped between the trees, with long legs swinging down to strike. Dark against the sky, his legs and feet showed thick and sinewy. But it was a clumsy strike, which must have missed, for he rose with nothing in his grasp.

Ten minutes later, a large covey of red-legged partridges left the long grass under the hedge, where they had been hiding, and went back to a patch of bare earth to continue their dust-bathing, which the hawk had disturbed. Partridges can be killed when bathing in this way. The fluttering of their wings draws the eye towards them.

The kestrel hovered over stubble again, and the peregrine swooped at it. Merely a slight, disdainful gesture; yet the kestrel dropped low and flew to the furthest corner of the field, his wings almost touching the stubble.

At three o’clock the drenching rain began. A green sandpiper dwindled up from the brook. Its plaintive, plangent call came chiming back, long after it had woven away into the shining reed-bed of the rain-cloud. Golden plover called in deepening mist. The day seemed over. But as I left the rain-smoked field, the peregrine flew heavily up from the blended mud and straw of the wet soil near the gate. Six partridges followed, and settled in the hedge. As the hawk got smaller, his colour seemed to change from the muddy grey-brown of a curlew to the red-brown and grey-black of a kestrel. He flew heavily, as though waterlogged. I think he had been sitting in the stubble for a long time, waiting for the partridges to rise. He called, and faded over the dim eastern skyline, calling and fading. In the grey mist he looked so like a distant curlew that I half expected to hear the far bugling of a curlew’s desolate cry echoing through the harsh staccato chatter of a hawk.

October 7th

The tiercel freed himself from starlings with a rippling slash of wings, and melted up into the mauve haze of the northern sky. Five minutes later he re-appeared, aimed at the river, glided swiftly down into the wind. A falcon flew beside him. Together they glided forward, coming down towards me, beating their wings lightly, then gliding. In ten seconds they had descended from a thousand feet to two hundred, and were passing overhead. The tiercel was more slender and rakish in outline than the falcon. Seen from beneath, their wings were wide across the secondaries, where they joined the body. The falcon’s width of wing was equal to more than half her body length. Their tails were short. The outstretched length of head and neck in front of their wings was only slightly less than the length of body and tail behind the wings, but the breadth was twice as great. This gave them an oddly heavy-headed look. I describe these effects in detail, because they can only be observed when peregrines are gliding directly above. Peregrines are more often seen at flatter angles, or in profile, when the proportions seem quite different. The head then looks blunter, the tail longer, the wings less wide.

Evanescent as flame, peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of birds trails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls.

The sun shone warmer as the wind grew cold. Woods floated clear along the ridge. The cedars of the big house lawns began to burn and smoulder into dark green light.

At the side of the lane to the ford, I found a long-tailed field mouse feeding on a slope of grass. He was eating the grass seeds, holding the blades securely between his skinny white front paws. So small, blown over by the breath of passing cars, felted with a soft moss of green-brown fur; yet his back was hard and solid to the touch. His long, delicate ears were like hands unfolding; his huge, night-seeing eyes were opaque and dark. He was unaware of my touch, of my face a foot above him, as he bent the tree-top grasses down to his nibbling teeth. I was like a galaxy to him, too big to be seen. I could have picked him up, but it seemed wrong to separate him now from the surface he would never leave until he died. I gave him an acorn. He carried it up the slope in his mouth, stopped, and turned it round against his teeth, flicked it round with his hands, like a potter spinning. His life is eating to live, to catch up, to keep up; never getting ahead, moving always in the narrow way between a death and a death; between stoats and weasels, foxes and owls, by night; between cars and kestrels and herons by day.

For two hours, a heron stood at the side of a field, by the hedge, facing the furrowed stubble. He was hunched, slumped, and drooping, on the long stilts of his legs. He shammed dead. His bill moved only once. He was waiting for mice to come and be killed. None came.

Along the brook a tern was hunting, looking down for the flash of a fish at the edge of his dark reflection. He hovered, and plunged into the shallows; rose with a roach in his bill. Twice he dropped it, and spiralled down to catch it again before it hit the water. Then he swallowed it in four large gulps. He glided down, and drank from the brook, running his lower mandible through the surface of the water, slicing out a long, clear ripple.

As the tern rose, the peregrine stooped, whining down from the empty sky. He missed, swept up, and flew off. In the crown of a hollow tree I found three of his kills; a starling, a skylark, and a black-headed gull.

October 8th

Fog lifted. The estuary hardened into shape, cut by the east wind. Horizons smarted in the sun. Islands grew upon the water. At three o’clock, a man walked along the sea-wall, flapping with maps. Five thousand dunlin flew low inland, twenty feet above his head. He did not see them. They poured a waterfall of shadow on to his indifferent face. They rained away inland, like a horde of beetles gleamed with gold chitin.

The tide was high; all waders flew inland; slowly the saltings drifted down beneath the glassy water. Funnels of waders tilted onto inland fields. I crept towards them along a dry ditch, inching forward like the tide. I crawled across stubble and dry plough. A frieze of curlew stood along the skyline, turning their narrow long-billed heads to watch and listen. A pheasant spurted from the dust. The curlew saw me, and glided behind the ridge, but the small waders did not move. They were a long white line on the brown field, like a line of snow. A shadow curved across in front of me. I looked up, and saw a falcon peregrine circling overhead. She kept above me as I moved nearer to the waders, hoping I would put them up. She may have been uncertain what they were. I stayed still, crouching like the waders, looking up at the dark crossbow shape of the hawk. She came lower, peering down at me. She called once: a wild, skirling, ‘airk, airk, airk, airk, airk.’ When nothing moved, she soared away inland.

There were at least two thousand waders facing me across the furrows, like toy soldiers formed up for battle. Their whiteness was chiefly the white crowns and faces of grey plover. Many dunlin were asleep; turnstones and knot were drowsy; only the godwits were restless and alert. A greenshank flew over, calling monotonously for a long time, making the small waders very uneasy. They reacted as they would to a hawk. Red-legged partridges walked among them, bumping into dunlin, jostling turnstones. They walked forward, or stopped and fed. When a wader would not move, they tried to walk over it. For a bird, there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.

October 9th

Fog hid the day in steamy heat. It smelt acrid and metallic, fumbling my face with cold decaying fingers. It lay by the road like a Jurassic saurian, fetid and inert in a swamp.

As the sun rose, the fog shredded and whirled and died away under bushes and hedges. By eleven o’clock the sun was shining from the centre of a great blue circle. Fog burned outwards from its edge, like a dwindling white corona. Colour flamed up from the kindled land. Skylarks sang. Swallows and martins flew downstream.

North of the river, ploughs were turning the heavy earth to smoke and glisten in the sun. From a distant coil of birds the peregrine shook free, and rose into the morning sky. He came south, beating and gliding up in the first frail thermal of the day, circling in figures of eight, curving alternately to left and right. Mobbed by starlings, and rising among them, he passed above me, very high and small, turning his head from side to side and looking down. His large eyes flashed white between the dark bars of his face. The sun bronzed the splendid stubble-coloured brown and yellow hawk, and gleamed his clenched feet to sudden gold. His spread tail stood stiffly out; twelve brown feathers with ten blue strips of sky between.

His circling stopped, and he darted quickly forward, plunging through sunlight. Starlings poured back like jets of smoke, to diffuse and drift to earth. The hawk flew on, into the shining mist-cloud of the south.

He went too fast for me to follow him. I stayed in the valley with partridges and jays, watching skylarks and lapwings come in from the coast. Red-legged partridges had a good breeding season; their coveys are larger and more numerous than ever. Jays abound. I saw eight of them flying across the river, each with an acorn in its bill. They have learnt nothing from the death they saw a week ago; nor has the peregrine learnt how to exploit their folly. Perhaps he found jay meat stringy or insipid. He returned in the late afternoon, but he did not stay. He glided between lombardy poplars, like a full-fed pike between reeds.

October 12th

Dry leaves wither and shine, green of the oak is fading, elms are barred with luminous gold.

There was fog, but the south wind blew it away. The sunburnt sky grew hot. Damp air moved over dusty earth. The north was a haze of blue, the south bleached white. Larks sang up into the warmth, or flashed along furrows. Gulls and lapwings drifted from plough to plough.

Autumn peregrines come inland from the estuaries to bathe in the stony shallows of brook or river. Between eleven o’clock and one they rest in dead trees to dry their feathers, preen, and sleep. Perching stiff and erect, they look like gnarled and twisted oak. To find them, one must learn the shapes of all the valley trees, till anything added becomes, at once, a bird. Hawks hide in dead trees. They grow out of them like branches.

At midday I flushed the tiercel from an elm by the river. Against brown fields, brown leaves, brown mist low to the skyline, he was hard to see. He looked much smaller than the two crows that chased him. But when he rose against the white sky he was bigger, and easier to focus. Quickly he circled higher, slewing away from his course at sudden tangents, baffling the clumsy crows. They always overshot him, and laboured heavily to regain the distance lot. They called, rolling out the ‘r’s’ of their guttural high-pitched ‘prruk, prruk’, their hawk-mobbing cry. When mobbed, the peregrine beats its wings deeply and rhythmically. They bounce from the air, with silent slaps, like a lapwing’s. This deliberate pulse of evasion is beautiful to watch; one breathes in time to it; the effect is hypnotic.

The tiercel turned and twisted in the sun. The undersides of his wings flashed in sword-glints of silver. His dark eyes shone, and the bare skin around them glittered like salt. At five hundred feet the crows gave up, planning back to the trees on outspread wings. The hawk rose higher, and flew fast to the north, gliding smoothly up and round into long soaring circles, till he was hidden in blue haze. Plover volleyed from the fields and fretted the horizon with the dark susurrus of their wings.

Throughout the glaring afternoon, I sat at the southern end of the big field by the river. The sun was hot on my back, and the dry sand-and-clay coloured field shimmered in desert haze. Partridge coveys stood out upon the shining surface like rings of small black stones. When the peregrine circled above them, the partridge rings shrank inward. Lapwings rose and fled. They had been hidden in the furrows, as the hawk was hidden in the shiny corrugations of the sky.

Crows flew up again to chase the hawk away, and the three birds drifted east. Dry feathered and more buoyant now, the tiercel did not beat his wings, but simply soared in the abundant warmth of air. He dodged easily the sudden rushes of the crows, and swooped at them with waggling snipey wings. One crow planed back to earth, but the other plodded on, beating heavily round, a hundred feet below the hawk. When both were very small and high above the wooded hill, the hawk slowed down to let the crow catch up. They dashed at each other, tangling and flinging away, swooping up to regain the height they lost. Rising and fighting, they circled out of sight. Long afterwards the crow came floating back, but the hawk had gone. Half-way to the estuary I found him again, circling among thousands of starlings. They ebbed and flowed about him, bending and flexing sinuously across the sky, like the black funnel of a whirlwind. They carried the tormented hawk towards the coast, till all were suddenly scorched from sight in the horizon’s gold corona.

The tide was rising in the estuary; sleeping waders crowded the saltings; plover were restless. I expected the hawk to drop from the sky, but he came low from inland. He was a skimming black crescent, cutting across the saltings, sending up a cloud of dunlin dense as a swarm of bees. He drove up between them, black shark in shoals of silver fish, threshing and plunging. With a sudden stab down he was clear of the swirl and was chasing a solitary dunlin up into the sky. The dunlin seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline, and did not reappear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin’s heart as effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk glided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his prey.

October 14th

One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist. Elms and oaks still green, but some now scorched with gold. A few leaves falling. Choking smoke from stubble burning.

High tide was at three o’clock, lifting along the southern shore of the estuary. Snipe shuddering from the dykes. White glinting water welling in, mouthing the stones of the sea-wall. Moored boats pecking at the water. Dark red glasswort shining like drowned blood.

Curlew coming over from the island in long flat shields of birds, changing shape like waves upon the shore, long ‘V’s’ widening and narrowing their arms. Redshanks shrill and vehement; never still, never silent. The faint, insistent sadness of grey plover calling. Turnstone and dunlin rising. Twenty greenshank calling, flying high; grey and white as gulls, as sky. Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone, seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water.

Screaming gulls corkscrewing high under cloud. Islands blazing with birds. A peregrine rising and falling. Godwits ricocheting across water, tumbling, towering. A peregrine following, swooping, clutching. Godwit and peregrine darting, dodging; stitching land and water with flickering shuttle. Godwit climbing, dwindling, tiny, gone: peregrine diving, perching, panting, beaten.

Tide going out, wigeon cropping zostera, herons lanky in shallows. Sheep on the sea-wall grazing. Revolve the long estuary through turning eyes. Let the water smooth out its healing line, like touch of dock on nettled finger. Leave the wader-teeming skies, soft over still water, arched light.

October 15th

Fog cleared quickly after one o’clock, and sun shone. The peregrine arrived from the east an hour later. It was seen by sparrows, lapwings, starlings, and woodpigeons, but not by me. I watched and waited in a field near the ford, trying to be as still and patient as the heron that was standing in stubble and waiting for mice to run within reach of his down-chopping bill. Bullfinches called by the brook; swallows flickered round my head. A covey of magpies muttered in hawthorns and then dispersed, dragging up their baggy broomstick tails, catapulting themselves forward from each flurry of wingbeats, sagging on to air at the angle of a well-thrown discus. Thousands of starlings came into the valley to gather by the river before flying to roost.

At half-past four, blackbirds began to scold in the hedges, and red-legged partridges called. I scanned the sky, and found two peregrines – tiercel and falcon – flying high above the ford, chased by crows. The crows soon gave up, but the peregrines flew round for another twenty minutes, in wide random circles. They made many abrupt-angled turns, so that they were never more than a quarter of a mile from the ford. They flew with deep, measured wingbeats – the tiercel’s quicker than the falcon’s – but they did not move fast. The tiercel flew higher, and constantly swooped down at the falcon, shuddering his wings violently. She avoided these rushes by veering slightly aside. Sometimes both birds slowed till they were almost hovering; then they gradually increased their speed again.

The detail of their plumage was difficult to see, but their moustachial bars seemed as prominent at a distance as they did when close. The falcon’s breast was golden tinted, barred laterally with blackish brown. Her upper parts were a blend of blue-black and brown, so she was probably a second winter bird moulting into adult plumage.

This was the peregrines’ true hunting time; an hour and a half to sunset, with the western light declining and the early dusk just rising above the eastern skyline. I thought at first that the peregrines were ringing up to gain height, but they went on circling for so long that obviously some sort of sexual pursuit and display was involved. The birds around me believed they were in danger. Blackbirds and partridges were never silent; woodpigeons, lapwings, and jackdaws scattered from the fields and left the area completely; mallard flew up from the brook.

After twenty minutes the hawks began to fly faster. They rose higher, and the tiercel stopped swooping at the falcon. They circled once, at great speed, and then flew east without turning back. They flickered out of sight towards the estuary, vanishing into the grey dusk a thousand feet above the hill. They were hunting.

October 16th

Waders slept in the spray that leapt from the waves along the shingle ridges. They lined the hot furrows of the inland fields, where dust was blowing. Dunlin, ringed plover, knot and turnstone, faced the wind and sun, clustered together like white pebbles on brown earth.

A roaring southerly gale drove waves to lash the high sea-wall, flinging their spray up through the air above. On the lee side of the wall the long, dry grass was burning. Gasps of yellow flame and northward streaming smoke jetted away in the wind. There was a fierce anguish of heat, like a beast in pain. The short grass on top of the wall glowed orange and black; it hissed when the salt spray thudded down. Under a torrid sky, and in the strength of the sun, water and fire were rejoicing together.

When the waders suddenly flew, I looked beyond them and saw a peregrine lashing down from the northern sky. By the high hunched shoulders, and the big head bent between, and the long, flickering shudder-up and shake-out of the wings, I knew that this was the tiercel. He flew straight towards me, and his eyes seemed to stare into mine. Then they widened in recognition of my hostile human shape. The long wings wrenched and splayed as the hawk swerved violently aside.

I saw his colours clearly in the brilliant light: back and secondaries rich burnt sienna; primaries black; underparts ochreous yellow, streaked with arrowheads of tawny brown. Down the pale cheeks the long dark triangles of the moustachial lobes depended from the polished sun-reflecting eyes.

Through the smoke, through the spray, he glided over the wall in a smooth outpouring, like water gliding over stone. The waders shimmered to earth, and slept. The hawk’s plumage stained through shadows of smoke, gleamed like mail in glittering spray. He flew out in the grip of the gale, flicking low across the rising tide. He slashed at a floating gull, and would have plucked it from the water if it had not flown up at once. He flickered out into the light, a small dark blemish diminishing along the great sword of sun-dazzle that lay across the estuary from the south.

By dusk the wind had passed to the north. The sky was clouded, the water low and calm, the fires dying. Out of the misty darkening north, a hundred mallard climbed into the brighter sky, towering above the sunset, far beyond the peregrine that watched them from the shore and the gunners waiting low in the marsh.

October 18th

The valley a damp cocoon of mist; rain drifting through; jackdaws elaborating their oddities of voice and flight, their rackety pursuits, their febrile random feeding; golden plover calling in the rain.

When a crescendo of crackling jackdaws swept into the elms and was silent, I knew that the peregrine was flying. I followed it down to the river. Thousands of starlings sat on pylons and cables, bills opening wide as each bird had his bubbly, squeaky say. Crows watched for the hawk, and blackbirds scolded. After five minutes’ alertness the crows relaxed, and released their frustration by swooping at starlings. Blackbirds stopped scolding.

The fine rain was heavy and cold, and I stood by a hawthorn for shelter. At one o’clock, six fieldfares flew into the bush, ate some berries, and flew on again. Their feathers were dark and shining with damp. It was quiet by the river. There was only the faint whisper of the distant weir and the soft gentle breathing of the wind and rain. A monotonous ‘keerk, keerk, keerk’ sound began, somewhere to the west. It went on for a long time before I recognised it. At first I thought it was the squeak and puff of a mechanical water-pump, but when the sound came nearer I realised that it was a peregrine screeching. This saw-like rasping continued for twenty minutes, gradually becoming feebler and spasmodic. Then it stopped. The peregrine chased a crow through the misty fields and into the branches of a dead oak. As they swooped up to perch, twenty woodpigeons hurtled out of the tree as though they had been fired from it. The crow hopped and sidled along a branch till it was within pecking distance of the peregrine, who turned to face it, lowering his head and wings into a threatening posture. The crow retreated, and the hawk began to call again. His slow, harsh, beaky, serrated cry came clearly across to me through a quarter of a mile of saturated misty air. There is a fine challenging ring to a peregrine’s call when there are cliffs or mountains or wide river valleys to give it echo and timbre. A second crow flew up, and the hawk stopped calling. When both crows rushed at him, he flew at once to an overhead wire, where they left him alone.

He looked down at the stubble field in front of him, sleepy but watchful. Gradually he became more alert and intent, restlessly clenching and shifting his feet on the wire. His feathers were ruffled and rain-sodden, draggling down his chest like plaited tawny and brown ropes. He drifted lightly to the field, rose with a mouse, and flew to a distant tree to eat it. He came back to the same place an hour later, and again he sat watching the field; sold, hunched, and bulky with rain. His large head inclined downward, and his eyes probed and unravelled and sorted the intricate mazes of stubbled furrows and rank-spreading weeds. Suddenly he leapt forward into the spreading net of his wings, and flew quickly down to the field. Something was running towards the safety of the ditch at the side.

The hawk dropped lightly upon it. Four wings fluttered together, then two were suddenly still. The hawk flew heavily to the centre of the field, dangling a dead moorhen from his foot. It has wandered too far from cover, as moorhens so often do in their search for food, and it had forgotten the enemy that does not move. The bird out of place is always the first to die. Terror seeks out the odd, and the sick, and the lost. The hawk turned his back to the rain, half spread his wings, and began to feed. For two or three minutes his head stayed down, moving slightly from side to side, as he plucked feathers from the breast of his prey. Then both head and neck moved steadily, regularly, up and down, as he skewered flesh with his notched and pointed bill and dragged lumps of it away from the bone by jerking his head sharply upward. Each time his head came up he looked quickly to left and right before descending again to his food. After ten minutes, this up and down motion became slower, and the pauses between each gulp grew longer. But desultory feeding went on for fifteen minutes more.

When the hawk was still, and his hunger apparently satisfied, I went carefully across the soaking wet grass towards him. He flew at once, carrying the remains of his prey, and was soon hidden in the blinding rain. He begins to know me, but he will not share his kill.

October 20th

The peregrine hovered above the river meadows, large and shining in dark coils of starlings, facing the strong south wind and the freshness of the morning sun. He circled higher, then stooped languidly down, revolving as he fell, his golden feet flashing through sunlight. He tumbled headlong, corkscrewing like a lapwing, scattering starlings. Five minutes later he lifted into air again, circling, gliding, diving up to brightness, like a fish cleaving up through warm blue water, far from the falling nets of the starlings.

A thousand feet high, he poised and drifted, looking down at the small green fields beneath him. His body shone tawny and golden with sunlight, speckled with brown like the scales of a trout. The undersides of his wings were silvery; the secondaries were shaded with a horseshoe pattern of blackish bars, curving inwards from the carpal joint to the axillaries. He rocked and drifted like a boat at anchor, then sailed slowly out onto the northern sky. He lengthened his circles into long ellipses, and swept up to smallness. A flock of lapwings rose below him, veering, swaying, breaking apart. He stooped between them, revolving down in tigerish spirals. Golden light leapt from his twisting talons. It was a splendid stoop, but showy, and I do not think he killed.

The river glinted blue, in green and tawny fields, as I followed the hawk along the side of the hill. At one o’clock he flew fast from the north, where gulls were following the plough. He landed on a post, mettlesome and wild in movement, with the strong wind ruffling the long fleece of feathers on his chest, yellow-rippling like ripe wheat. He rested for a moment, and then dashed forward, sweeping low across a field of kale, driving out woodpigeons. He rose slightly and struck at one of them, reaching for it with his foot, like a goshawk. But it was the merest feint, an idle blow that missed by yards. He flew on without pausing, keeping low, his back shining in the sun to a rich mahogany roan, the colour of clay stained with a deep rust of iron oxide.

Leaving the field, he swung up in the wing and glided over the river, outlined against sunlight. His wings hung loosely in the glide, with shoulders drooping; they seemed to project from the middle of his body, more like the silhouette of a golden plover than a peregrine. Normally the shoulders are so hunched, and point so far forward, that the length of body and neck in front of the wings is never apparent.

Beyond the river, he flew to the east, and I did not see him again. Hundreds of rooks and gulls puffed out of the skyline, circled and drifted, thinned and subsided, put up by the hawk on his way to the coast.

Down by the brook I saw my first snipe of the autumn, and came close to a partridge. The chestnut horseshoe marking on its breast seemed to stand out in relief, sharp-edged by the rays of the sun. At half-past two, the falcon peregrine came over the trees, with a crow in pursuit. She was much the same size as the crow; her chest was wider and more barrel-shaped than the tiercel’s, her wings wider and less pointed. She circled fast, eluded the crow, and began to soar. She soared very high to the east, moving up through the golden-brown, leaf-clouded sky of the hill and out into the hovering cloud of light that towered on the distant water.

October 23rd

Many winter migrants have come into the valley since the twentieth. Today there were fifty blackbirds in hawthorns by the river, where before there were only seven.

The morning was misty and still. A starling mimicked the peregrine perfectly, endlessly repeating its call in the fields to the north of the river. Other birds were made uneasy by it; they were as much deceived as I had been. I could not believe it was not a hawk, until I saw the starling actually opening its bill and producing the sound. By listening to the autumn starlings one can tell from their mimicry when golden plover, fieldfares, kestrels, and peregrines arrive in the valley. Rarer passage birds, like whimbrel and greenshank, will also be faithfully recorded.

At two o’clock, twelve lapwings flew overhead, travelling steadily north-westward. Far above them a peregrine flickered. It was a small, light-coloured tiercel, and it may have been migrating with the lapwings.

When the sun emerged from the mist, the tiercel I had seen throughout the month soared above the water-meadows, surrounded by the inevitable swarm of starlings. At three hundred feet he twitched himself away from the circle, flew quickly over the river, and launched forward and down in a long, fast glide. Hundreds of lapwings and gulls rose steeply from the field, and the hawk was hidden among them. He was probably hoping to seize a bird from below, just after it had risen, but I do not think he succeeded. Half an hour later, many black-headed gulls were still circling a thousand feet above the fields. They drifted fast and gracefully round, on still wings, calling as they glided. Each bird circled a few yards from its neighbour, but always in the opposite direction.

In the clear late-afternoon sunlight, woodpigeons, gulls, and lapwings went up at intervals from different parts of the valley as the peregrine circled over the ford and the woods, along the ridge, and back to the river. He followed the gulls from plough to plough till an hour before sunset. Then he left for the coast.

October 24th

The quiet sky brimmed with cloud, the air was cool and calm, the dry lanes brittle with dead leaves. The tiercel peregrine flew above the valley woods, light, menacing, and stiff-winged, driving woodpigeons from the trees. Down by the river, I found his morning kill; a black-headed gull, a glaring whiteness on dark wet ploughland. It lay on its back, red bill open and stiff red tongue protruding. Though feathers had been plucked from it, not much flesh had been eaten.

I went to the estuary, but the tide was low. The water was hidden in the huge scooped-out emptiness of mud and mist, with the calling of distant curlew and the muffled sadness of grey plover. In the drab light a perched kestrel shone like a triangle of luminous copper.

I left early, and reached the lower river again at four o’clock. Small birds were clamouring from the trees in a shrill hysteria of mobbing. The peregrine flew from cover, passing quite close to me, pursued by blackbirds and starlings. I saw the dark moustachial stripes on the pale face, the buttercup sheen of the brown plumage, the barred and spotted underwings. The crown of his head looked unusually pale and luminous, a golden-yellow lightly flecked with brown. Long-winged, lean, and powerful, the hawk drew swiftly away from the mob, and glided to north of the river.

He returned an hour later, and flew to the top of a tall chimney. Gulls were passing high above the valley, going out towards the estuary to roost. As each long ‘V’ of gulls went over, the peregrine flew up and attacked them from below, scattering their close formation, slashing furiously at one bird after another. He swept up among them with his wings half folded, as though he were stooping. Then he turned on his back, curved over and under, and tried to clutch a gull in his foot as he passed beneath it. Their violent twisting and turning must have confused him, for he caught nothing, though he tried, at intervals, for more than half an hour. Whether he was wholly serious in his attempts it was impossible to judge.

At dusk, he settled to roost at the top of the two-hundred-foot chimney, ready to attack the gulls again as they went inland at sunrise. This was a well-sited roosting place at the confluence of two rivers, near the beginning of a large estuary, and undisturbed by the shooting of wildfowl. The main coastal hunting places, two reservoirs, and two river valleys, were all within ten miles; less than twenty minutes’ flight. (This chimney has since been felled.)

October 26th

The field was silent, misty, furtive with movement. A cold wind layered the sky with cloud. Sparrows pattered into dry-leaved hedges, rustling through the leaves like rain. Blackbirds scolded. Jackdaws and crows peered down from trees. I knew the peregrine was in this field, but I could not find him. I traversed it from corner to corner, but flushed only pheasants and larks. He was hidden among the wet stubble and the dark brown earth his colour matched so well.

Suddenly he was flying, starlings around him, rising from the field and mounting over the river. His wings flickered high, with a lithe and vigorous slash, looking supple and many-jointed. Darting and shrugging, he shook starlings from his shoulders, like a dog shaking spray from his body. He climbed steeply into the east wind, then turned abruptly and headed south. Turning in a long-sided hexagon, not circling, he swung and veered and climbed above the bird-calling fields. In the misty greyness he was the colour of mud and straw; dull frozen shades that only sunlight can transform to flowing gold. His erratic mile-long climb, from ground-level to five-hundred feet, lasted less than a minute. It was made without effort; his wings merely rippled and surged back in an easy unbroken rhythm. His course was never wholly straight; he was always leaning to one side or the other, or suddenly rolling and jinking for a second, like a snipe. Over fields where gulls and lapwings were feeding, he glided for the first time; a long slow glide that made many birds sky up in panic. When they were all rising, he stooped among them, spiralling viciously down. But none was hit.

Two jays flew high across the fields when the peregrine had gone. Unable to decide their direction, they clawed along in an odd disjointed way, carrying acorns and looking gormless. Eventually they went back into the wood. Skylarks and corn buntings sang, the sweet and the dry; redwings whistled thinly through the hedges; curlew called; swallows flew downstream. All was quiet till early afternoon, when the sun shone and gulls came circling over, drifting westward under a small fleece of cloud. They were followed by lapwings and golden plover, including a partial albino with broad white wing-bars and a whitish head. All around me there were birds rising and calling, but I could not see the hawk that was frightening them.

Soon afterwards the tiercel flew near me, where I could not help seeing him. Starlings buzzed about his head, like flies worrying a horse. The sun lit the undersides of his wings, and their cream and brown surfaces had a silver sheen. The dark brown oval patches on the axillaries looked like the black ‘armpit’ markings of a grey plover. There were dark concavities of shadow under the carpal joint of each wing. Only the primaries moved; quick, sculling strokes rippling silkily back from the still shoulders. Two crows flew up, guttural calls coming from their closed bills and jumping throats. They chased the hawk away to the east, pressing him hard, taking it in turns to swoop at him from either side. When he slashed at one of them, the other immediately rushed in from his blind side. He glided, and tried to soar, but there was not enough time. He just had to fly on till the crows got tired of chasing him.

I went to the estuary and found the hawk again, an hour before sunset, circling a mile off-shore. As the gulls came out to roost on the open water, he flew towards them till he was over the saltings and the sea-wall; then he began to attack. Several gulls evaded the stoop by dropping to the water, but one flew higher. The peregrine stooped at this bird repeatedly, diving down at it in hundred-foot vertical jabs. At first he tried to hit it with his hind toe as he flashed past, but the gull always dodged him by flapping aside at the last second. After five attempts he changed his method, stooped behind the gull, curved quickly under and up, and seized it from below. The gull was obviously much more vulnerable to this form of attack. It did not dodge, but simply flew straight up in the path of the hawk. It was clutched in the breast and carried down to the island, with its limp head looking backwards.

October 28th

Beyond the last farm buildings, the smell of the salt and the mud and the sea-weed mingles with the smell of dead leaves and nutty autumn hedges, and suddenly there is no more inland, and green fields float out to the skyline on a mist of water.

At midday I saw a fox, far out on the saltings, leaping and splashing through the incoming tide. On drier ground he walked; his fur was sleek and dark with wetness, his brush limp and dripping. He shook himself like a dog, sniffed the air, and trotted towards the sea-wall. Suddenly he stopped. Looking through binoculars, I saw the small pupils of his eyes contract and dilate in their white-flecked yellow irises. Eyes savagely alive, light smouldering within, yet glitteringly opaque as jewels. Their unchanging glare was fixed upon me as the fox walked slowly forward. When he stopped again, he was only ten yards away, and I lowered the binoculars. He stood there for more than a minute, trying to understand me with his nose and ears, watching me with his baffled, barbaric eyes. Then the breeze conveyed my fetid human smell, and the beautiful roan-coloured savage became a hunted fox again, ducking and darting away, streaming over the sea-wall and across the long green fields beyond.

Wigeon and teal floated in with the tide; waders crowded the tufts of the saltings. A warning puff of sparrows was followed by the peregrine, gliding slowly out above a thousand crouching waders. The elbow-like carpal joints of his wings were curved and enfolded like the hood of a cobra, and were just as menacing. He flew easily, beating and gliding round the bay, casting his shadow on the still and silent birds. Then he turned inland, and flickered low and fast across the fields.

Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse, hushing the air with the tiptoe touch of their soft and elegant wings. Slowly they sank and rose in the wind, drifting against the white estuary and the deep green of the grass. Their big heads turned to watch me, and their fierce eyes glowed and dimmed and glowed again, as though a yellow flame burned beyond the iris, and spat out flakes of fire, and then diminished. One bird called; a sharp barking sound, muffled, like a heron calling in its sleep.

The peregrine circled, and stooped at the drifting owls, but it was like trying to hit blowing feathers with a dart. The owls swayed and turned, rocked about in the draught of the stoops, and rose higher. When they were over the water, the peregrine gave up, and planed down to rest on a post near the wall. I think he could have killed one of them by cutting up at it from below, if he could have separated it from the others, but his stoops went hopelessly wide. At four o’clock he flew slowly inland, darkening briefly along the edges of sunlit fields, deepening out into the shadows of trees.

I left the cold, bird-calling calm of the ebb-tide, and went into the brighter inland dusk, where the air was still heavy and warm between the hedges. Woods smelt pungent and aromatic. In the pure amber of the evening light the dreary green of summer burned up in red and gold. The day came to sunset’s windless calm. The wet fields exhaled that indefinable autumnal smell, a sour-sweet rich aroma of cheese and beer, nostalgic, pervasive in the heavy air. I heard a dead leaf loosen and drift down to touch the shining surface of the lane with a light, hard sound. The peregrine drifted softly from a dead tree, like the dim brown ghost of an owl. He was waiting in the dusk; not roosting, but watching for prey. The partridge coveys called, and gathered in the furrows; mallard swished down to the stubble to feed; the hawk did not move. I could see his dark shape huddled at the top of an elm, outlined against the afterglow. Below him was the shine of a stream. Snipe called. The hawk roused and crouched forward. Down from the wood on the hill the first woodcock came slanting and weaving. Three more followed. As they dropped to the mud at the side of the stream the hawk crashed among them. There was a sharp hissing and thrumming of wings as hawk and snipe and woodcock raced upward together. They splayed out above the trees, and a woodcock fell, and splashed into the shallows of the stream. I saw his falling bundled shape and long bill turning aimlessly. The hawk stood in water, plucked his prey, and fed.

October 29th

Ground up by the slow bit of the plough, big clods of black-brown earth curved over into furrows, sliced and shiny-solid, sun glinting on their smooth-cut edges. Gulls and lapwings searched the long brown valleys and the dark crevasses, looking for worms, like eagles seeking snakes.

The peregrine sat on a post by the river, ignoring the birds around him, peering down at a dung-heap. He plunged into reeking straw, scrabbling and fluttering, then rose heavily and flew out of sight to the north, carrying a large brown rat.

At one o’clock the sky above the river darkened from the east, and volleys of arrowed starlings hissed overhead. Behind them, and higher, came a heavy bombardment of woodpigeons and lapwings. A thousand birds strained forward together as though they did not dare to look back. The dull sky domed white with spiralling gulls. Ten minutes later, the gulls glided back to the plough; starlings and sparrows flew down from the trees. Through the sky, across fields, along hedges, over woodland and river, the peregrine had left his unmistakable spoor of fear.

Birds to the north-east stayed longer in cover, as though they were closer to danger. Following the direction of their gaze, I found the hawk skirmishing with two crows. They chased him; he rose steeply above them; they flew down to a tree; he swooped at them, flicking between the branches; they rose, and chased him again. This game was repeated a dozen times; then the hawk tired of it, and glided away down river. The crows flew towards the woods. Crows must feed very early or very late, for I seldom see them feeding in the valley. They spend their time bathing, mobbing, or chasing other crows.

By three o’clock the hawk had become lithe and nimble in flight. His hunger was growing, and his wings were dancing and bounding on the air as he flew from tree to tree. Starlings rose like smoke from the willows, and hid him completely. He mounted clear of them, spread his wings, and sailed. The wind drifted him away, down the valley. He circled slowly under low grey clouds.

It was almost dark when I found the remains of his kill, the feathers and wings of a common partridge, lying on the river-bank five miles downstream. Blood looked black in the dusk, bare bones white as a grin of teeth. A hawk’s kill is like the warm embers of a dying fire.

October 30th

The wind-shred banner of the autumn light spanned the green headland between the two estuaries. The east wind drove drenching grey and silver showers through the frozen cider sky. Birds rose from ploughland as a merlin flew above them, small and brown and swift, lifting dark against the sky, dipping and swerving down along the furrows. All brown or stubbled fields shivered and glittered with larks: all green were pied with plover. Quiet lanes brindled with drifting leaves.

On the coast, the gale was bending the trees back through their lashing branches. The flat land was a booming void where nothing lived. Under the wind, a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted till death.

I went over the hill to the southern estuary. Rain blew across the fields in roaring clouds of spray. Then the sun shone, and a swallow flitted into light. This valley has its own peculiar loneliness. Steep pastures, lined with elms, slope down to flat fields and marshes. The narrow shining estuary diminishes as the lanes descend. The sudden loneliness and peace one sees, far down between the elms, changes to a different desolation when the river-wall is reached.

Jackdaws charred the green slopes to the north with black. Wigeon whistled through the dry rattling of the bleak marsh reeds, a cheerful explosive sound, which only mist and distance can make faint or sad. A dead curlew lay on top of the wall untouched, breast upward, with a broken neck. The jagged ends of bone had pierced the skin. When I lifted the soft damp body, the long wings fell out like fans. The crows had not yet taken the lovely river-shining of its eyes. I laid it back as it was. The peregrine that had killed it could return to feed when I had gone, and its death would not be wasted. On the marsh, a swan – shot in the breast – had been left to rot. It was greasy, and heavy to lift, and it stank. This handling of the dead left a taint upon the splendour of the day, which ended in a quiet desolation of cloud as the wind fell and the sun passed down.

November 2nd

The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light. The peregrine sank up into blue depths, luring the flocked birds higher. Constellations of golden plover glinted far above; gulls and lapwings orbited below; pigeons, duck and starlings hissed in shallow air.

A shower cloud bloomed at the northern edge of the valley and slowly opened out across the sky. The peregrine circled beneath it, clenched in dark fists of starlings. Savagely he lashed himself free, and came superbly to the south, rising on the bright rim of the black cloud, dark in the sun-dazzle floating upon it. He came directly towards me, outlined and fore-shortened, and I could see his long wings angling steeply from his rounded head. The inner wings were inclined upward at an angle of sixty degrees to the body, and they did not move; the narrow outer wings curled higher and dipped lightly into air, waving flamboyantly like sculls that touch and feather through a river’s gliding skin. He passed above me, and floated up across the open fields. Slowly he drifted and began to soar, shining in the sun like a bar of river gravel, golden-red. The falcon soared to meet him; together they circled out into the glaring whiteness of the south.

When they had gone, hundreds of fieldfares went back to feed in hawthorns by the river. Some stayed in the yellow Lombardy poplars, silently watching, noble in the topmost branches, thin bright eyes and fierce warrior faces. The deep blue of the sky was stained with cloud. Slowly its brilliance descended to the earth. Yellow stubble and dark ploughland shone upward with a greater light.

At half-past one the tiercel returned, flying quickly down towards me as I stood among trees by the brook. He is more willing to face me now, less ready to fly when I approach, puzzled perhaps by my steady pursuit. Seven magpies suddenly dashed up from the grass, squawked in alarm like deep-voiced snipe, swirled together like waders, flung themselves into a tree. The peregrine hovered briefly above the place where they had been. Veering and swaying from side to side, beating his wings with great power and careless freedom, he went overhead in a wash of rushing air. Wings pliant as willow, body firm as oak, he had all the spring and buoyancy of a tern in his leaping, darting flight. Below, he was the colour of river mud, ochreous and tawny; above, he had the sheen of autumn leaves, beech and elm and chestnut. His feathers were finely grained and shaded; they shone like polished wood. Trees hid him from me. When I saw him again, he was a hundred feet higher, climbing fast towards the coast. Two hours to sunset, and the tide rising: it seemed likely that he was heading for the estuary. I followed him there an hour later.

The north wind grew, towering over a cold sky, shedding bleak light, hardening the edges of the hills. Rain drifted across the estuary, and islands stood black on striped and silver water. There were fires and shooting to the north, and a rainbow shone. A horseman rode across the marsh and put up the peregrine, which flew north above the smoke of the fires and the crash of the guns. He carried a dead gull. Long after the brown and yellow hawk had merged into the brown and yellow autumn field I could see the white wings of the gull fluttering in the wind.

November 4th

The sky peeled white in the north-west gale, leaving the eye no refuge from the sun’s cold glare. Distance was blown away, and every tree and church and farm came closer, scoured of its skin of haze. Down the estuary I could see trees nine miles away, bending over in the wind-whipped sea. New horizons stood up bleached and stark, plucked out by the cold talons of the gale.

An iridescence of duck’s heads smouldered in foaming blue water: teal brown and green, with a nap like velvet; wigeon copper-red, bla-zoned with a crest of chrome; mallard deep green in shadow but in the sun luminous, seething up through turquoise, to palest burning blue. A cock bullfinch, alighting on a post against the water, seemed suddenly to flame there, like a winged firework hissing up to glory.

For two hours a falcon peregrine hovered in the gale, leaning into it with heavy flailing wings, moving slowly round the creeks and saltings. She seldom rested, and the wind was too strong for soaring. She followed the sea-wall, flying forward for thirty yards, then hovering. Once, she hovered for a long time, and sank to sixty feet; hovered, and sank to thirty feet; hovered and dropped till only a foot above the long grass on the top of the wall. There she stayed, hovering steadily, for two minutes. She had to fly strongly forward to keep in the same place. Then the grass swayed and crumpled as something ran through it, and the hawk plunged down with outspread wings. There was a scuffle, and something ran along the side of the wall to safety in the ditch at the bottom. The falcon rose, and resumed her patient hovering. She was probably hunting for hares or rabbits. I found the remains of both; the fur had been carefully plucked from them, and the bones neatly cleaned. I also found a mallard drake, drab and ignominious in death.

At sunset the tiercel flew above the marsh, pursuing a wisp of snip. They drummed away down wind, like stones skidding across ice.

November 6th

Morning was hooded and seeled with deep grey cloud and mist. The mist cleared when the rain began. Many birds fled westward from the river, golden plover high among them. Their melancholy plover voices threaded down through the rain the sorrowing beauty of ultima thule.

The peregrine was restless and wild as I followed him across the soaking ploughland clay. He flickered lightly ahead of me in the driving rain, flitting from bush to post, from post to fence, from fence to overhead wire. I followed heavily, with a stone of clay on my boots. But it was worthwhile, for he grew tired of flying, and he did not want to leave the fields. After an hour’s pursuit, he allowed me to watch him from fifty yards; two hundred yards had been the limit when we started. Perched on a post, he looked back over his shoulder, but when I moved too much, he jumped up and twisted round to face me, without moving his wings. It was done so quickly that another hawk seemed suddenly to appear there.

He soon became restless again. Partridges called, and he flew across to have a look at them, moving his wings with a stiff downcurving jerkiness, as though he were trying to fly like a partridge. When he glided, he glided like a partridge, with bent wings rigid and trembling. He did not attack, and I do not know whether this mimicry was deliberate, unconscious, or just coincidental. When I saw him again, ten minutes later, he flew with his usual loose-limbed panache.

The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the hawk began to fly faster. At two o’clock he raced away to the east through snaking lariats of starlings. Effortlessly he climbed above them, red-gold shining above black. They ringed up in pursuit, and he dipped neatly beneath them. Beyond the river he swept down to ground level, and starlings rose steeply up like spray from a breaking wave. They could not overtake him. He was running free, wind flowing from the curves of his wings like water from the back of a diving otter. I put up seven mallard from the river. They circled overhead, and to the west, but they would not fly one yard to the east where the hawk had gone. Running across fields, clambering over gates, cycling along lanes, I followed at my own poor speed. Fortunately he did not get too far ahead, for he paused to chase every flock of birds he saw. They were not serious attacks; he was not yet hunting; it was like a puppy frisking after butterflies. Fieldfares, lapwings, gulls, and golden plover, were scattered, and driven, and goaded into panic. Rooks, jackdaws, sparrows, and skylarks, were threshed up from the furrows and flung about like dead leaves. The whole sky hissed and rained with birds. And with each rush, and plunge, and zigzagging pursuit, his playfulness ebbed away and his hunger grew. He climbed above the hills, looking for sport among the spiky orchards and the moss-green oak woods. Starlings rose into the sky like black searchlight beams, and wavered aimlessly about, seeking the hawk. Woodpigeons began to come back from the east like the survivors of a battle, flying low across the fields. There were thousands of them feeding on acorns in the woods, and the hawk had found them. From every wood and covert, as far as I could see, flock after flock went roaring up into the sky, keeping very close, circling and swirling like dunlin. They rose very high, till there were fifty flocks climbing steeply from the hill and dwindling away down to the eastern horizon. Each flock contained at least a hundred birds. The peregrine was clearing the entire hill of its pigeons, stooping at each wood in turn, sweeping along the rides, flicking between the trees, switchbacking from orchard to orchard, riding along the rim of the sky in a tremendous serration of rebounding dives and ascensions. Suddenly it ended. He mounted like a rocket, curved over in splendid parabola, dived down through cumulus of pigeons. One bird fell back, gashed dead, looking astonished, like a man falling out of a tree. The ground came up and crushed it.

November 9th

A magpie chattered in an elm near the river, watching the sky. Blackbirds scolded; the magpie dived into a bush as the tiercel peregrine flew over. Suddenly the dim day flared. He flashed across clouds like a transient beam of sunlight. Then greyness faded in behind, and he was gone. All morning, birds were huddled together in fear of the hawk, but I could not find him again. If I too were afraid I am sure I should see him more often. Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood.

Halfway to the coast, lapwings went up as a hawk flew above them. They kept in small flocks, and soon there were ten flocks in the air together, scattered across a mile of sky. Those that had been up longest flew higher and wider apart, drifting downwind in tremendous circles half a mile across. The most recently flushed stayed lower, wheeling faster and in narrower circles, closely packed, with only small chinks of light between them. When hawks have gone from sight, you must look up into the sky; their reflection rises in the birds that fear them. There is so much more sky than land.

Under sagging slate-grey clouds the estuary at low tide stretched out into the gloom of the east wind. Long moors of mud shone with deep-cut silver burns. The marshes were intensely green. The feet of grazing cattle sucked and shuddered through craters of dark mud. Several peregrine kills lay on the sides of the sea-wall. I found the remains of a dunlin, dead no more than an hour. The blood was still wet inside it, and it smelt clean and fresh, like mown grass. The wings, and the shining black legs, were untouched. A pile of soft brown and white feathers lay beside them. The head, and most of the body flesh, had been eaten, but the white skin – pimply from careful plucking – had been left. It was still in breeding plumage, which would have made it different from the majority of the flock and so more likely to be attacked by a hawk.

Later, a peregrine flew low across the marsh towards the dunlin he had killed not long before. A black-headed gull rose frantically up in front of him, taken by surprise. (Surely ‘taken by surprise’ must originally have been a hawking term?) The gull was not quite taken, however, for it strove up vertically, with wildly flapping wings. The hawk glided under its breast and wrenched a few feathers away with its clutching foot before sweeping over and beyond. The gull circled high across the estuary, the hawk alighted on the sea-wall. I walked towards him, but he was reluctant to fly. He waited till I was within twenty yards before he went twisting and zigzagging and rolling away in a most spectacular manner, dodging and jinking across the rising tide like a huge snipe. Shaped against the white water, he glided with wings held stiffly upward from his deep chest, as though he were cast in bronze, like the winged helmet of a Viking warrior.

November 11th

Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud, gulls bone-white in ashes of sky. Sparrows shrilling in tall elm hedges near the river.

I moved slowly and warily forward through the flicking shadows of twigs, and crept from cover to find the tiercel perched on a post five yards in front of me. He looked round as I stopped, and we both went rigid with the shock of surprise. Light drained away, and the hawk was a dark shape against white sky. His sunken, owl-like head looked dazed and stupid as it turned and bobbed and jerked about. He was dazzled by this sudden confrontation with the devil. The dark moustachial lobes were livid and bristling on the pale Siberian face peering from thick furs. The large bill opened and closed in a silent hiss of alarm, puffing out breath into the cold air. Hesitant, incredulous, outraged, he just squatted on his post and gasped. Then the splintered fragments of his mind sprang together, and he flew very fast and softly away, rolling and twisting from side to side in steepling banks and curves as though avoiding gunshot.

Following him across the river meadows and over the fields by the brook, I found eight recent kills: five lapwings, a moorhen, a partridge, and a woodpigeon. Many fieldfares flew up from the grass. Golden plover and lapwing numbers have increased, and there are more gulls and skylarks now than there were a week ago. Fifteen curlew were feeding in stubble near the brook, among large flocks of starlings and house sparrows.

At one o’clock I flushed the hawk from a post by the road. He flew low along a deep furrow of ploughed field to the west, and I saw a red-legged partridge crouching a hundred yards ahead of him. It was looking the other way, oblivious of danger. The hawk glided forward, reached one foot nonchalantly down, gently kicked the partridge in the back as he floated slowly above it. The partridge scrabbled frantically in the dust, wings flurrying, righted itself, stared about as though completely bewildered. The hawk flew on without looking round, and many partridges began calling. He swooped down and kicked another one over as it ran towards the covey. Then he flew off towards the river. Peregrines spend a lot of time hovering over partridges, or watching them from posts and fences. They are intrigued by their endless walking, by their reluctance to fly. Sometimes this playful interest develops into serious attack.

November 12th

Very still the estuary; misty skylines merged into white water; all peaceful, just the talk of the duck floating in with the tide. Red-breasted mergansers were out in the deep water, diving for fish. They suddenly doubled over and down in a forward roll, very neat and quick. They came up, and swallowed, and looked around, water dripping from their bills; alert, dandified, submarine duck.

A red-throated diver, matted with oil, was stranded in a mud-hoe. Only its head was visible. It called incessantly, a painful grunting rising to a long moaning whistle.

I walked along the sea-wall between marsh and water. Short-eared owls breathed out of the grass, turning their overgrown, neglected faces, their yellow eyes’ goblin glow. A green woodpecker flew ahead, looping from post to post, clinging like moss, then sinking into heavy flight. The marsh echoed with the hoarse complaint of snipe. I found six peregrine kills: two black-headed gulls, a redshank, and a lapwing, on the wall; an oystercatcher and a grey plover on the shingle beach.

An oval flock of waders came up from the south; fast, compact, white wing-bars flashing in the dull light: ten black-tailed godwits. They lanced the air with long, swordfish bills, their long legs stretched out behind. They were calling as they flew – a harsh clamorous gobbling, a heathen laughter, like curlew crossed with mallard. They were greenish-brown, the colour of reeds and saltings. They were dry-looking, crackly, bony birds, with everything pulled out to extremes; beautifully funny. They did not land. They circled, and went back to the south. In summer, their breeding plumage glows fiery orange-red. They feed in deep water, grazing like cattle, and their red reflections seem to scorch and hiss along the surface.

From the big marsh pond came the murmur of the teal flock, like a distant orchestra tuning up. They were skidding and darting through the water, skating up ripples, braking in a flurry of spray. They sprang into the air as a peregrine came flickering from inland. By the time he reached the pond they were half-way across the estuary, their soft calls muffled like a chime of distant hounds. The peregrine disappeared. The teal soon came back, swooping and swirling down to the marsh, rising and falling like round stones skimmed across ice, humming, rebounding, vibrating. Gradually they settled to their feeding and musical calling. I moved nearer to the pond. A pair of teal flew up and came towards me in that silly way they have. The duck landed, but the drake flew past. Suddenly realising he was alone, he turned to go back. As he turned, the peregrine dashed up at him from the marsh and raked him with outstretched talons. The teal was tossed up and over, as though flung up on the horns of a bull. He landed with a splash of blood, his heart torn open. I left the hawk to his kill; the duck flew back to the pond.

November 13th

I flushed two woodcock from hornbeam coppice. They had been sleeping under arches of bramble. They rose vertically into sunlight, their wings making a harsh ripping sound, as though they were tearing themselves free. I could see their long down-pointing bills, shining pink and brown; their heads and chests were striped brown and fawn, like sun and shadow on the woodland floor. Their slack legs dangled, then slowly gathered up. Their dark eyes, large and damp, shone brown and gentle. The tops of the hornbeams rattled, twigs swished and snapped. Then the woodcock were free, darting and weaving away above the trees, glowing in the sun like golden roast. Black mud beneath the brambles, where they had squatted side by side, showed the spidery imprint of their feet.

Under pylons, in a flooded field between two woods, I found the remnants of a rook that the peregrine had eaten. The breast-bone was serrated along the keel, where pieces had been nipped out of it by the hawk’s bill. The legs were orange, though they should have been black. When so reduced, a rook’s frame and skull seem pathetically small compared with the huge and heavy bill.

By four o’clock, hundreds of clacking fieldfares had gathered in the woods. They moved higher in the trees and became silent, facing the sun. Then they flew north towards their roosting place, rising and calling, straggling out in uneven lines, the sun shining beneath them. And far above them, a peregrine wandered idly round the blue cupola of the cooling sky, and drifted with them to the dead light of the north.

Half an hour before sunset I came to a pine wood. It was already dark under the trees, but there was light in the ride as I walked along it from the west. Outside it was cold, but the wood was still warm. The boles of the pines glowed redly under the blue-black gloom of their branches. The wood had kept its dusk all day, and seemed now to be breathing it out again. I went quietly down the ride, listening to the last rich dungeon notes of a crow. In the middle of the wood, I stopped. A chill spread over my face and neck. Three yards away, on a pine branch close to the ride, there was a tawny owl. I held my breath. The owl did not move. I heard every small sound of the wood as loudly as though I too were an owl. It looked at the light reflected in my eyes. It waited. Its breast was white, thickly arrowed and speckled with tawny red. The redness passed over the sides of its face and head to form a rufous crown. The helmeted face was pale white, ascetic, half-human, bitter and withdrawn. The eyes were dark, intense, baleful. This helmet effect was grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl. As I looked at those grape-blue eyes, fringed with their fiery gold, the bleak face seemed to crumble back into the dusk; only the eyes lived on. The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been startled out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Neither of us could bear to look away. Its face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man. I moved. I could not help it. And the owl suddenly turned its head, shuffled along the branch as though cringing, and flew softly away into the wood.

November 15th

Above South Wood, a small stream flows through a steep-sided valley. The northern slope is open woodland, rusty with winter bracken, silvered with birches, green with mossy oak. The southern slope is pasture, unchanged for many years, rich with worms, lined by small hedges, freckled with thick-branched oak. Two hundred lapwings, and many fieldfares, redwings and blackbirds, were listening for worms as I went down to the stream, which was loud in the quiet morning. There was no ploughing in the river valley, and I expected the peregrine to hunt the lapwings in the higher pasture.

A hard tapping sound began, a long way off. It was like a song thrush banging a snail on a stone, but it came from above. In a hedgerow oak, at the tip of a side branch, a lesser spotted woodpecker was clinging to a small twig, hammering a marble gall with his bill, trying to hack out the grub inside it. To the six-inch-long woodpecker this gall was the size a large medicine ball is to a man. He swung about freely on the twig, sometimes hanging upside down, attacking from many angles. His head went back at least two inches, then thudded forward with pickaxing ferocity. His black shining eyes were needle bright as he looked all round the yellow gall. He could not pierce it. He flew to another oak and tried another gall. All morning I heard him tapping his way across the fields. I tapped a gall with my fingernail, and with a sharp stone, but I could not reproduce the woodpecker’s loud cracking sound, which was audible a hundred yards away. He was fairly tame, but if I went too near he stopped, and shuffled farther up the branch, returning when I moved back. When jays called in the wood, he stopped hammering, and listened. Lesser spotted woodpeckers are wary of predators; they fly from cuckoos, and take cover from jays and crows.

Jays were noisy all day in the wood, digging up the acorns they buried a month ago. The first to find one was chased by the others. Several woodcock were feeding at the side of the stream, where the flow of water was checked by fallen branches and dead leaves, and I flushed many more from their resting places in the bracken. During the day, they like to lie up on bracken slopes facing south or west, usually near a cluster of sapling chestnuts or small birches, occasionally under holly or pine. Some birds prefer bramble cover to bracken. Woodcock go up suddenly, after one has been standing near them for a time, as little as five yards away. They may wait for a minute or more, till they can bear the uncertainty no longer. You can flush a greater number by making frequent stops. When trudging straight on through the wood, you put up only those directly in your path. Watching its first steep ascent, you can, for a second, capture the woodcock’s colour. Held in a sudden yellowness of light, the blended browns and fawns and chestnuts of its back stand out in relief, like a plating of dead leaves. In the middle of the ridged and stripy back, behind the head, there is a tint of greenish bronze, like verdigris. They may seem to go right away into the distance of the wood, but in fact they pitch steeply down to cover as soon as they are screened by trees. A sudden zigzag and downward flop, over open ground, can be deceptive. They may fly low for a time, rising again when out of sight. Thousands of years of escape practice have evolved these crafty ways. It becomes easy to guess where woodcock are resting, but the actual catapulting ejection from bracken or bramble always startles. One is seldom looking in the right direction.

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.

November 16th

The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory. Fifty herring gulls flew north along a thin icicle of blue that wedged the clouds apart. Solemn-winged and sombre, moving away into the narrow pincer of blue, they were a splendid portent of the day to come.

By ten o’clock the blue wedge had widened, and defeated clouds were massing in the eastern sky. Lapwings and golden plover circled down to feed in a newly ploughed field near the river. The first rays of the morning sun reached out to the plover, dim in the dark earth. They shone frail gold, as though their bones were luminous, their feathered skin transparent. The peregrine, which had been hunched and drab in the dead oak, gleamed up in red-gold splendour, like the glowing puffed-out fieldfares in bushes by the river.

When I looked away, the peregrine left his perch, and panic began. The southern sky was terraced with mazes of upward winding birds: seven hundred lapwings, a thousand gulls, two hundred woodpigeons, and five thousand starlings, dwindled up in spiral tiers and widening gyres. Three hundred golden plover circled above them all, visible only when they turned and glinted in the sun. Eventually I found the hawk in the last place I thought of looking – which should have been the first – directly above my head.

He flew southward, rising: four light wing-beats and then a glide, an easy rhythm. Seen from below, his wings seemed merely to kink and straighten, kink and straighten, twitching in and out like a pulse. A crow chased him, and they zigzagged together. As he rose higher the hawk flew faster; but so light and deft was his wing flicker that he looked to be almost hovering, while the crow moved backwards and down. He fused into the white mist of the sun, and a mass of starlings rose to meet him, as though sucked up by the vortex of a whirlwind. He began to circle at great speed, swinging narrowly round, curving alternately to left and right, sweeping through intricate figures of eight. The starlings were baffled by his sharp twists and turns. They rushed wildly behind him, overshooting the angular bends of his flight. He seemed to swing them around on a line, shaking them out and drawing them in, at will. They all climbed high to the south and were suddenly gone, expunged in mist. This evasion flight – which the hawk seems to enjoy as a form of play, and could so easily escape if he wished – is similar to one of his ways of hunting, and is greatly feared by the birds below. Starlings not actually mobbing sky up violently. They fly to trees or whirl away down wind.

An hour later, there was panic again to the south and west. Plover and gulls spiralled above, blackbirds scolded, cockerels called from farms half a mile apart. The peregrine drifted down to the dead oak to perch, and the calling birds were silent. He rested, preened, and slept for a while, then flew across the open fields north of the river. Tractors were ploughing, and hundreds of gulls were scattered on the black-brown earth, like white chalk. A few sere stubbles still shine between the crinkled darkness of the ploughlands, but the elms are bare, and the poplars tattered yellow. Beagles were silently webbing out on to the wet surface of the fields. Huntsmen and followers were still and waiting. The hare was an acre away, sitting boldly in a furrow, big slant eyes shining in the sun, long ears bending and listening to the wind. The falcon flew up, and hovered above the hare. A distant shot made her flinch and lose height, as though she had been hit. She dropped down, and flew fast and low across the fields. I have never seen a hawk fly lower. Where the headland grass was long, she brushed it with her wings as she passed over. She was hidden by every dip and undulation of the ground. She disappeared along ditches, fanning the long grass outward, flying with her wings bent up, so that the keel of her breast-bone sheared the grass or skimmed an inch above the ground. Suddenly she seemed to fly straight into the furrows. There was no perching place within a quarter of a mile of the spot where she vanished, but I could not find her again, though I diligently quartered every field. Subtle as a harrier, soft-winged as an owl, but flicking along at twice their easy speed, she was as cunning as a fox in her use of cover and camouflage. She clings to the rippling fleece of the earth as the leaping hare cleaves to the wind.

All the gulls left the fields and spiralled silently away to the south. Cinctures of golden plover glittered round the clear zenith of the ice-blue sky. The sun was free of the mist at last, the rising north wind very cold. Beagles had scented the hare and were streaming over the leaf-stained plough, the hunt running behind, and the horn sounding. The tiercel circled low to the north, looking like a tawny kite cut from the earth beneath him, yellow as stubble, barred with dark brown. He rose slowly, and drifted down wind. The falcon flew up to join him, and they circled together, though not in the same direction. He moved clockwise, she anti-clockwise. Their random curving paths twined and intersected, but never matched. As they came nearer to the river, where I was standing, they quickly rose higher. Both were burnished by sunlight to a warm red-gold, but the falcon had browner plumage and was less luminous. They sailed overhead, three hundred feet up, canting slowly round on still and rigid wings, the tiercel thirty feet above the falcon. They stared down at me, with their big heads bent so far under that they appeared small and sunken between the deep arches of their wings. With feathers fully spread, and dilated with the sustaining air, they were wide, thick-set, cobby-looking hawks. The thin, intricate mesh of pale brown and silver-grey markings overlaying the buff surfaces of their underwings contrasted with the vertical mahogany-brown streaks on the deep amber yellow of their chests. Their clenched feet shone against the white tufts of their under-tail coverts. The bunched toes were ridged and knuckled like golden grenades.

They moved to the south of the river, and red-legged partridges began calling. Each hawk swung up into the wind, poised briefly, then drifted down and around in a long sweeping circle. Twice the tiercel swooped playfully at the falcon, almost touching her as he flicked past. He was the shorter in length by two to three inches, and the lighter in build, with relatively longer wings and tail. He had grace and slender strength, she power and solidity. As they dwindled higher, and farther to the south, perspective flattened their circles down to ellipses, and then to straight lines, gliding incisively to and fro across the sky. Their course seemed curiously inevitable, as though they were moving on hidden wires, or following some familiar pathway through the air. It is this beautiful precision, this feeling of pre-ordained movement, that makes the peregrine so exciting to watch.

Now the tiercel drew steadily away from the falcon, rising to the east, while she curved round to the west, and kept lower. Between circles she stayed motionless in the wind. From one of these pitches she turned away as usual, then slanted downwards. Something contained and menacing in her movement made me realise at once that she was going to stoop. She swept down and round in a spiral, wings half bent back, glancing down through the air, smoothly and without haste, at a forty-five degree angle. In this first long curving fall she slowly revolved her body on its axis, and just as the full turn was completed, she tilted over in a perfect arc and poured into the vertical descent. There was a slight check, as though some tenuous barrier of unruly air had been forced through; then she dropped smoothly down. Her wings were now flung up and back and bending inwards, quivering like fins in the gale that rushed along her tapering sides. They were like the flights of an arrow, rippling and pluming above the rigid shaft. She hurled to earth; dashed herself down; disappeared.

A minute later she rose unharmed, but without prey, and flew off to the south. Against blue sky, white cloud, blue sky, dark hills, green fields, brown fields, she had flashed lightly, shone darkly, wheeling and falling. And suddenly the cold, breath-catching air seemed very clear and sweet. The calling of small birds blended with the chiming bark of the beagles and the thudding away of the hunted hare. It streamed through a hedge and flung into the river, splashing in like a spadeful of brown earth. It swam to the far bank, and limped away to safety.

Where the tiercel still circled to the east, the sky was drifted with gulls and plover and curlew. The sharp glinting speck of the hawk faded slowly out above the hills, sweeping majestically towards the sea. The alarmed birds descended, and the great flight was over.

I followed the falcon, and found her again at half past three. Smoked out by dense clouds of starlings, she flew from the ash tree by ford lane pond and flickered low across fields where tractors were working and sugar beet was being cut and carted. Where the ground had been cleared, hundreds of gulls and lapwings were feeding; I lost the hawk among them as they rose. Ten minutes later she flew north-east, passing high towards the river, black against the lemon-yellow sky. She veered to the east, flying higher and faster, as though she had sighted prey.

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.

November 18th

In the morning I walked east along the sea-wall, from the estuary to the sea. The water was pale grey and white under high cloud. It became seamed and veined with blue as the sky cleared and the sun came out. Waders, gulls and rooks fed by the tide-line. Bushes near the wall were full of larks and finches. Three snow buntings ran over the white shingle and sand, like waders, unwilling to fly, brown and white as the sand beneath them. When they ran on to darker ground, they flew at once, calling. Their long white-barred wings flashed up into sunlight, their hard, pure calls chimed faintly down.

All morning, I had the wary, uneasy feeling that comes when a hawk is near. I felt that he was hidden just beyond sight; in time and distance barely outpacing me, always dropping below the horizon as I moved up over the curve of the flat green land. By one o’clock I was heading south, and the sun was dazzling. Suddenly I seemed to be walking away from the hawk instead of towards it. I went down into the fields and across to the estuary again, not thinking, moving only on the rim of thought, content to see and absorb the day. Turning through the hedge-gap, I surprised a wren. It trembled on its perch in an agony of hesitation, not knowing whether to fly or not, its mind in a stutter, splitting up with fear. I went quickly past, and it relaxed, and sang.

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 feed over their thin grey legs. Where they were not grey, they were white; bleak, leaden birds, phantoms of summer green, suddenly aloof and beautiful in flight. Slow rain fell from mid-grey, light grey sky. A deceptive clarity and brightening at eleven o’clock meant that the rain was really setting in. For an hour, till greyness covered all, the water shone like milk and mother-of-pearl. The sea breathed quietly, like a sleeping dog.

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 wings tightened and bent back, and he slid away to the east, a dark blade cutting slowly through blue ice. Moving down through sunlight, he changed colour like an autumn leaf, passing from shining gold to pallid yellow, turning from tawny to brown, suddenly flicking out black against the skylinee. White fire smouldered in the south as the sun glared lower. Two jackdaws flew high above. One dived, went into a spin, looped the loop, and fell towards earth as though it had been shot, a tossing bag of bones and feathers. It was playing at being dead. When a foot from the ground, it spread its wings and dropped lightly down, superbly nonchalant.

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 sea. Gulls flew southward towards their roost. They came in fast-moving flocks of thirty or forty, and they would not fly directly overhead They split up as soon as they saw me, scattering to left or right, like woodpigeons. I had never seen them do that before. Repeated attacks by the peregrine, at morning and evening, had made them very wild, and suspicious of danger from below.

I followed the peregrine to the east. Fieldfares clacked and whistled above me on their way to roost by the river. From a small stream I put up a green sandpiper. It towered into the dusk, calling, veering and swaying about like a tipsy snipe. Its call was a wild, whistling ‘too-loo-weet’, indescribably triumphant and forlorn. The peregrine stooped as the sandpiper rose, but he missed it by a yard. He may have been following me so that I could flush prey for him. All the stoops he made today were slow and inaccurate. Perhaps he was not really hungry, but was compelled by habit to practise a ritual of hunting and killing.

The sky cleared after sunset. Far above, there was a sound like a distant striking of matches. Many rooks and jackdaws were calling as they flew slowly, peacefully, westward, high in the cold blue dusk, small as the first stars.

December 12th

High clouds slowly filled the sky, the morning whitened out, the sun was hidden. A cold wind rose from the north. The horizon light became clear and vivid.

The remains of a herring gull lay at the roadside, between two farms, half on the grass verge and half in the dust and grit. The peregrine had killed it in the night, or in the morning dusk, before there was any traffic on the road, and had found it too heavy to carry to a safer place. Since then, the passing cars had squashed it flat. The shredded flesh was still wet with blood, and the neck gaped redly where the head had been. To hawks, these gritty country lanes must look like shingle beaches; the polished roads must gleam like seams of granite in a moorland waste. All the monstrous artefacts of man are natural, untainted things to them. All that is still is dead. All that moves, and stops, and does not move again, then very slowly dies. Movement is like colour to a hawk; it flares upon the eye like crimson flame.

I found the gull at ten o’clock, and the peregrine a quarter of an hour later. As I expected, after eating so large a bird he had not gone far away. Looking very wet and dejected, with feathers loose and bedraggled, he was slumped on a tree by the ford lane pond. His tail dangled beneath him like a sodden umbrella. The pond is small and shallow, and contains the usual human detritus; pram wheels, tricycles, broken glass, rotting cabbages, and detergent containers, overlaid by a thin ketchup of sewage. The water is stagnant and greasy, but the hawk may have bathed in it. Normally he prefers clear running water of a certain depth and quality – and he will fly long distances to find it – but sometimes he seems deliberately to choose water containing sewage.

Three tractors were ploughing in the big field to the south. One of them was passing up and down, a few yards from the hawk, without disturbing him at all. Hawks perch near fields where tractors are working, because that is where birds are constantly on the move. There is always something to watch, or something to kill if the hawk should be hungry. They have learnt that the dreaded man-shape is harmless while the tractor is in motion. They do not fear machines, for a machine’s behaviour is so much more predictable than man’s. When the tractor stops, the hawk is immediately alert. When the driver walks away, the hawk moves to a more distant perch. This happened in the field by the pond half an hour after I arrived there. The hawk flew slowly south-east, lifting and swinging his wings like heavy unwieldy oars, and drifted down to rest at the top of a roadside elm. He did not see me coming till I was almost below the tree. Then he gaped, and started in alarm, and flew back towards the pond. He still moved slowly and carefully, as though fearful of spilling something, gliding with wings drooped down in limp, ignoble curves. This heavy waterlogged flight was like a crow’s, with the tips of the wings giving the air a light, quick touch at the end of the wings’ deep oaring.

I found him huddled in the oak that overhangs the lane, between the pond and the ford. He did not move when I passed beneath him. With eyes close, and drying feathers ruffled by the wind, he perched very upright and wooden, looking dingy and comatose, as though long-dead and rather moth-eaten. When I clapped my hands, he roused and flew down to the copse by the ford. Flushed from there, he flew back to the oak. Three times this manoeuvre was repeated. Then I left him to rest in the oak while I watched from the edge of the copse. He slept for another hour, waking at one o’clock to preen and look around. The colour of his feathers lightened as they dried. The tail was narrowly barred with pale fawn and pale brown; the back, mantle, and scapulars, were pale yellowish brown, flecked and barred laterally with glowing burnt sienna. The bars were close and narrow, and the whole surface had a luminous red-gold sheen. The crown of his head was pale gold, flecked lightly with brown. The tips of the folded wings reached just beyond the end of the tail; exceptionally long, even for a tiercel peregrine.

He left the tree at half past one, but was immediately chased back there by a crow. He called loudly in flight: a shrill petulant sound. When perched, he called again: a deeper, more challenging cry. At two o’clock he became restless, moving his head up and down and shifting his feet about. He took several minutes to bring himself to it, but when he finally flew he was fast and decisive. He swung out and round in a rising arc and went steeply up over North Wood, striking the air smartly with his wings; earlier, he had merely stroked it. Jackdaws, that all day had been playing and feeding unconcernedly in pastures by the brook, now flew up in panic, circled high, and dispersed hastily.

Rain fell for an hour, but I stayed by the copse, waiting. At three o’clock the peregrine returned, flying fast and savagely into the cold north wind, throwing up gulls and lapwings. A lapwing was cut off from the flock, and the lean brown tiercel cleaved behind, low to the ground as a running hare. The two birds seemed to be looped together, then seemed to swing apart. The lapwing turned in its own length, but the hawk wheeled out on a wider arc and whipped back in again with frenzied wings. Suddenly the tethering cord was broken. The hawk rushed up into the sky, the lapwing tumbled forward. The hawk turned on its side and stooped, as though hurled down through a hole in the air. Then nothing. Nothing at all. However it had ended, it was over. There was only silence and the hissing of the wind. The tortuous coiling of the hunter and his victim seemed to hang in the gloomy air.

As I went up the lane from the ford I saw a bird’s wing fluttering in the grey-twigged crown of a pollard ash. When I was two yards away, the peregrine flew out, his wings drumming in a frantic effort to wrench himself clear. For a second he was very close, and I could see the satin smoothness of his underwings and the thickly quilted feathers, spotted with brown and cream. He flew south across the fields, veering and swaying erratically. His legs hung down, and there was something white between them that fluttered like paper. Through binoculars I saw that he was carrying the dead lapwing, gripping it with both feet, so that it lay up against his tail, breast upward and head foremost, with its wings lolling open to show their black and white undersides. He flew easily, carrying his half-pound load, but he was troubled by the strength of the wind. He sagged a little in the gusts, and his wings beat in quick short jabs. He landed in a tree near the lane. When I disturbed him, five minutes later, the lapwing was smaller and easier to carry. He flew into another pollard ash, and there I left him to finish his meal. Three tractors were still ploughing in the field beside him.

At sunset, ten curlew rose and flew east, calling loudly. The tractors went back to the farm, and the last gulls flew south. The peregrine circled high in the dusk, and flickered out into the darkness of the hill. The hawkless valley bloomed with the soft voices of the waking owls.

December 15th

The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge. The stark horizon, fringing the far edges of the wind, was still and silent. Its clear serenity moved back before me; a mirage of elms and oaks and cedars, farms and houses, churches, and pylons silver-webbed like swords.

At eleven o’clock the tiercel peregrine flew steeply up above the river, arching and shrugging his wings into the gale, dark on the grey clouds racing over. Wild peregrines love the wind, as otters love water. It is their element. Only within it do they truly live. All wild peregrines I have seen have flown longer and higher and further in a gale than at any other time. They avoid it only when bathing or sleeping. The tiercel glided at two hundred feet, spread his wings and tail upon the billowing air, and turned down wind in a long and sweeping curve. Quickly his circles stretched away to the east, blown out elliptically by the force of the wind. Hundreds of birds rose beneath him. The most exciting thing about a hawk is the way in which it can create life from the still earth by conjuring flocks of birds into the air. All the feeding gulls and lapwings and woodpigeons went up from the big field between the road and the brook as the hawk circled above them. The farm seemed to be hidden by a sheet of white water, so close together were the rising gulls. Dark through the white gulls the sharp hawk dropped, shattering them apart like flinging white foam. When I lowered my binoculars, I saw that the birds around me had also been watching the hawk. In bushes and trees there were many sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and thrushes, looking east and steadily chattering and scolding. And all the way along the lanes, as I hurried east, there were huddles of small birds lining the hedges, shrilling their warning to the empty sky.

As I passed the farm, a flock of golden plover went up like a puff of gunsmoke. The whole flock streamed low, then slowly rose, like a single golden wing. When I reached ford lane, the trees by the pond were full of woodpigeons. None moved when I walked past them, but from the last tree of the line the peregrine flew up into the wind and circled east. The pigeons immediately left the trees, where they had been comparatively safe, and flew towards North Wood. They passed below the peregrine. He could have stooped at them if he had wished to do so. Woodpigeons are very fast and wary, but like teal they sometimes have a fatal weakness for flying towards danger instead of away from it.

In long arcs and tangents the hawk drifted slowly higher. From five hundred feet above the brook, without warning, he suddenly fell. He simply stopped, flung his wings up, dived vertically down. He seemed to split in two, his body shooting off like an arrow from the tight-strung bow of his wings. There was an unholy impetus in his falling, as though he had been hurled from the sky. It was hard to believe, afterwards, that it had happened at all. The best stoops are always like that, and they often miss. A few seconds later the hawk flew up from the brook and resumed his eastward circling, moving higher over the dark woods and orchards till he was lost to sight. I searched the fields, but found no kill. Woodpigeons in hawthorns, and snipe in the marshy ground, were tamed by their greater fear of the hawk. They did not fly when I went near them. Partridges crouched together in the longest grass.

Rain began, and the peregrine returned to the brook. He flew from an elm near the bridge, and I lost him at once in the hiss and shine of rain and the wet shuddering of the wind. He looked thin and keen, and very wild. When the rain stopped, the wind roared into frenzy. It was hard to stand still in the open, and I kept to the lee of the trees. At half past two the peregrine swung up into the eastern sky. He climbed vertically upward, like a salmon leaping in the great waves of air that broke against the cliff of South Wood. He dived to the trough of a wave, then rose steeply within it, flinging himself high in the air, on outstretched wings exultant. At five hundred feet he hung still, tail closed, wings curving far back with their tips almost touching the tip of his tail. He was stoopping horizontally forward at the speed of the oncoming wind. He rocked and swayed and shuddered, close-hauled in a roaring sea of air, his furled wings whipping and plying like wet canvas. Suddenly he plunged to the north, curved over to the vertical stoop, flourished his wings high, shrank small, and fell.

He fell so fast, he fired so furiously from the sky to the dark wood below, that his black shape dimmed to grey air, hidden in a shining cloud of speed. He drew the sky about him as he fell. It was final. It was death. There was nothing more. There could be nothing more. Dusk came early. Through the almost dark, the fearful pigeons flew quietly down to roost above the feathered bloodstain in the woodland ride.

December 17th

The low sun was dazzling, the south a polar blaze. The north wind was cold. The night’s frost was un-melted, white on the grass like salt, and crisp in the morning sun.

The falcon peregrine flew tentatively up wind, and hovered over the still, white fields. The air would not be warm enough for soaring for another hour at least; till then, she was simply passing the time. Her hovering was desultory. She moved idly from tree to tree. You can almost feel the boredom of a hawk that has bathed and preened and is neither hungry nor sleepy. It seems to lounge about, stirring up trouble, just for the sake of something to do.

The morning was strange and wraith-like, very pure and new. The frosted fields were quiet. The sun had no grip of warmth. Where the frost had gone, the dry grass smelt of hay. Golden plover were close, softly calling. A corn bunting sang. The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges, and smote through the thorny gaps. A woodcock swished up from the darkness of a ditch into the stinging gleam of light. It flew north with deep, sharp wing-beats, then looser, shallower ones. The falcon went after it, in a leisurely disinterested way. She did not come back, so I went down to the river.

At midday she rose from the willows and floated up into the wind, gliding briefly, or moving the tips of her wings in small paddling circles. They quivered rapidly, as though they were merely vibrating in the wind. The growing warmth of the sun had told her she could soar. She was delicately feeling her way forward till she found the first rising of the warmer air. Over the dead oak she glided very slowly, then spread out her wings and tail, and turned down wind. In wide sweeping arcs she drifted to the south, circling a hundred feet above me. Her long, powerful head, like a hooked pike glaring from reeds, flexed slowly round as she scanned the fields below. The two deep-brown moustachial bars shone glossily in the sun, hanging down each side of the bill like strips of polished leather. The large dark eyes, and the bare white patches of skin in front of them, glinted black and white like wet flint. The low sun glowed the hawk’s colours into rich relief: copper and rust of dead beech leaves, shining damp-earth brown. She was a large and broad-winged hawk, a falcon unmistakably, spreading her long wings like a buzzard to win lift from the warm air rising from melting frost and from fields now steaming in the sun. I could almost hear the hiss and rustle of the parting air as she swished round in her taut muscular gliding.

Quickly she circled southward, turning in smaller arcs. I was afraid I would lose her in sun-dazzle, but she rose above it. She was moving faster, beating her wings between short glides, changing direction erratically. Sometimes she circled to left and right alternately, sometimes she went round clockwise. When circling alternately, she looked intently inwards or down; when she went round in the same direction, she looked outwards or straight ahead. She leaned round in steep banking curves. Over the roofs of farm buildings warm air was rising faster. Thrusting her wings in quick pumping movements, and gliding at steep upward angles, the hawk climbed to a thousand feet, and drifted south-east. Then her circling stopped. She floated on the white surface of the sky. Half-way to the woods she circled up as before, adding another five hundred feet to her height, till she was almost hidden in mist and distance. Suddenly she glided to the north, cutting away very fast, occasionally beating her wings in a flurry. She flew a mile in much less than a minute, sweeping down through the sky from South Wood to the river, following the line of the brook, till she pierced the horizon in a puff of white gulls. Throughout this long flight, over three miles of valley, she rose so far and fast that perspective did not level her down to earth, in spite of the distance covered. I saw her only against the sky. To trace her movements I had always to lower the binoculars through thirty to forty degrees to pick out the landmarks beneath. She was wholly of the sun and wind and the purity of sky.

Birds were still restless when I reached the place where she had descended. Gulls circled along the rim of the valley; lapwings flew over from the east. Remote as a star, the falcon glided out towards the estuary, a purple speck kindling and fading through the frost-fire of the sky.

December 18th

The silent east wind breathed white frost on to grass and trees and the edges of still water, and the sun did not melt it. The sun shone from a cobalt sky that curved down, through pale violet, to cold and white horizons.

The reservoir glittered in the sun, still as ice, and rippling with duck. Ten goosander launched upward from the water in crystal troughs of foam, and rose superbly through the sky. All were drakes. Their long red bills, sleek green heads, and narrow straining necks, led their heavy, lean, bomb-shaped bodies forward under the black and white flicking fins of their wings. They were splendid imperial duck, regal in the long reaches of the sky.

The harsh whistling of goldeneyes’ wings sounded constantly over the still water. When they were not flying, the drakes called ‘ung-ick’ through their noses – a thin, 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.