The Peregrine (1967, this edition 2017) is nature writing set in Essex, England, mainly on the high ground of Danbury Hill and the flat, marshy shores of the Blackwater Estuary between 1955 and 1965.
The peregrine is one of the fastest flying birds in the world, and a rare winter visitor to the east coast of England. The author tracked the peregrines for ten years – ten separate winters. However, it is written as if only one winter had passed, so his obsessive and meticulous observations are condensed in time. The author readily admits to this time collapse and to having no ornithological training. This left many scientists sceptical about the author’s writings at the time and suspicious about whether he was observing peregrines at all, and not just the kestrels of the region. Therefore, it reads more like a novel, with poetic descriptions, rather than a scientific observation of nature in the traditional sense.
John Alec Baker (1926-1987) is indeed passionate and poetic about the landscape of his homeland. And of the peregrine, there is an abundance of facts and figures, liberally interspersed with elucid descriptions. He describes everything it does – flying, feeding, and feasting. Bathing, basking, and bedding. Soaring, circling, and swooping. ‘Torn flesh, two kills on one day – kingfisher and snipe – the peregrine eats well.’ And sometimes, ‘Nothing happened.’
Being British, the author has evocative weather words: ‘Bleak light, brutal wind, thickening cloud, showers of sleet.’ And on another day: ‘High clouds slowly filled the sky, the morning whitened out, the sun was hidden.’
It is when the peregrine is the air, that the language is crisp and clear: ‘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 stooping horizontally foreward 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 .. . 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 tramps and treads in fields, swampy marshlands, across plains, up a coastal wall, and even, ‘In the flat fens near the coast I lost my way.’
This reads in part like a nature diary, day-by-day, and partially like a memoir of the author’s movements and emotions, and in part like an endless ode to the peregrine. This is an extremely enjoyoyable read for bird enthusiasts, nature lovers, admirers of persistent observation, and wordsmiths alike. It is ‘visual reading’ at its best.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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