~ Anne Kilgannon
“The great eyes look into mine. When I move my arm before his face, they still look on, as though they see something beyond me from which they cannot look away. The last light flakes and crumbles down. Distance moves through the dim lines of the inland elms, and comes closer, and gathers behind the darkness of the hawk. I know he will not fly now. I climb over the wall and stand before him.” In the end, Baker stands emotionally stripped before this alien being he has sought for so many months, a bird he knows intimately and not at all. The hawk belongs to the wide arc of sky, his acute vision beyond human comprehension, but in his not-knowing, Baker comes closer to understanding—to feeling—as anyone possibly could, the nature of peregrine-ness.
Baker’s knowledge is bone-deep; it courses in his blood, and fills his dreams and first-waking thoughts. He traversed miles through fields, upland woods, along streams and trackless estuarine beaches of his native Essex in eastern England, from October into the cold and wet winter months and then into the growing light of spring, searching for and following by foot and bicycle a pair of peregrine falcons as they soar and hunt over the land. He does not explain how he came to be obsessed with tracking these fierce birds of prey but his near-daily detailed reports grip the reader with the same tension and awe that drove him; we need no justification for our full immersion as we follow Baker in his quest. It is a deeply magical, austerely spiritual, and wild journey.
He is changed by the experience, transformed and made wild, freed and yet tethered, willfully, to his need to be with the peregrines, to witness their lives and absorb their energy, their high-soaring dazzling flights and their stunning high-velocity dives that pluck their prey out of the air. Baker exults in their acrobatics and longs to feel in his own body the clench and release of muscle, their stretch of wing and the sear of wind in their passage. He marvels at the play of light on their distinctive feathers and, moment by moment, strives to capture in words exactly how their colors absorb and reflect the shifts of sun and cloud and shadow. Baker tosses out a flush of poetic comparisons: like this and like that, knowing all the while he can’t pin down the rush of impressions—that human language cannot convey the peregrines’ stark beauty or their wild, wild nature. Still, mesmerized, he tries. We engage too, following his attempts, knowing the truth that only by being present, physically there, can we know the peregrines. Second-best is still intensely awe-inspiring, shattering and unforgettable. We read on, bidden.
And that truth would be so for any bird we might choose to know. Not many of us could dedicate ourselves as thoroughly as Baker, going out for hours every day in all weathers, searching the woods and skies for a sight of our bird-quest. But not all birds are as far ranging or fierce; some live close by in our gardens and neighborhood parks, like, say, robins. There is a lot to know about a bird we think we’ve seen our whole life but yet have not really studied. Baker may inspire us; he sets a high bar on “knowing,” but we could start “where we are” as is often advised.
In her keynote talk for the Puget Sound BirdFest, given this last September, Black Hills member and author of Rare Bird on the life of the Marbled Murrelet, Maria Ruth proposed, for instance, that instead of throwing oneself into a Big Year of collecting and listing as many birds as extravagantly orchestrated travel permits, we attempt a year of dedicated observation of just one species. She mused, “From your deeper understanding, you will feel a kinship develop with the robins or your chosen bird. This kinship will come naturally. You will delight when you see or hear your birds every day; you will miss them when you don’t. Eventually, at the end of your Single-Species Big Year, you may find yourself wanting to take steps to ensure that you see your birds every year. You’ll do a little more of this and a little less of that to help them thrive and survive on the rapidly changing planet.”
Baker alluded to a peril endangering his peregrines, that of farmyard poisons that were insidiously threatening all that he loved, prey and predator alike, but he was writing in the 1960s when not enough was understood about the danger. Now we know so much more; Audubon has documented the calamitous cascading numbers of dying and missing birds as pollution and habitat loss decimate both large hawks and small songbirds alike. Baker knew well every bird and mammal, every stream and hedge that made up the world of the peregrines; they did not exist in a vacuum of sky. Every bird lives in a particular place even if it is our back yard. We too need those granular close-up studies of robins and bushtits, swifts and dabbling ducks to save birds, bird by bird. What’s your fancy? What’s there in plain sight that needs our keen eye, and our care?
*50th Anniversary Edition published 2017 by HarperCollinsPublishers
Photo : A peregrine falcon (falco peregrinus) flying off the White Cliffs of Dover., by Nilfanion Own work, from Wikipedia.
