Michael Price has forwarded this excerpt to the Peregrine Update folks.
This is an excerpt from John Baker's book, _The Peregrine._
Once again, Michael Price-- one of our most creative
guides to birding-- helps us find the right words. (I've just been
reporting events; I'm still nervous from last year, probably, with all
the sad news.) But this year, there is a lot of good news.

The Baker book is a wonderful book for Peregrine fanatics. Check it out.

Please enjoy the excerpt that MichaelP sends along!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 95 18:11 PDT
From: Michael Price <michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca>
Subject: Re: Baker's book The Peregrine...

...the book ..describes this [fledging] beautifully, and it has the kind of
fare-thee-well, valedictory feeling that seeing these little tykes fledge
might evoke. Well, I realise by this choice I'm anthropo-whatever. Heh, who
cares. It begins on p 175 of the Baker book, from the University of Idaho
Press edition (no date, unfortunately), the one with the Bateman cover of a
Peregrine about to finish off its stoop on a pair of White-throated Swifts,
its strangler's hand beginning to reach out, eyes expressionless as a
bureaucrat's. If you get a chance, check out the original painting, you'll
fall in, there's so much space in it, unlike the cover illustration.
****************************************************************************

March 28th. All day the south-west wind rose. The warm, sun-lit air of
morning towered away to clouds. At eleven o'clock, two hundred woodpigeons
clattered up from the orchard as the dark brown tiercel arrived there from
the south. I had just entered at the eastern end. We met by the brook. For
an hour he watched and hovered, perching on many trees. He caught a mouse.
To me he was still apparently indifferent, but he kept me in sight, when I
moved, by following or flying higher. He has found a meaning for me, but I
do not know what it is. I am his slow and moribund companion, Caliban to his
Ariel.

Each time I have seen him he has tried to soar, but the weather has not
been favourable. His attempts have been feeble and tentative. At half past
twelve he tried again. He rose to three hundred feet, turned, and glided
down wind. He wanted to pull out of the glide into an upward circle, but he
was travelling too fast. He flashed above the orchard, folded his wings
back, and stooped to perch in the hazel hedge. After another half hour of
restless flying and hovering, he returned to the hedge. I sat with my back
against an apple tree, watching the hunched, unhappy-looking hawk. The sun
was hot, the grass dry and warm. Skylarks sang, white clouds drifted above.
Down by the brook, a green woodpecker called. The hawk looked up at the sky,
shifted his feet about, looked down at the hedge, then flew. He had not seen
prey. He flew very lightly, buoyantly, his wings just surfing the breeze. He
slanted and jinked upward like a snipe, touching air deftly, delicately,
seeking wing-hold on its gliding smoothness.
In the lower slope of the or chard there is a slight hollow where no trees
grow and the grass is scanty and short. The ground there is sheltered from
the wind, and warm air rises from it. The hawk spread his wings and tail
above this hollow, leaned slowly round into a long half-circle, and turned
down wind. He drifted away, and higher. Soon he was high and small and black
above the northern end of the orchard. After weeks of skulking, of perching
and hovering, he was released, afloat, aloft; he had wrenched himself free.
An abrupt and narrow turn, and he was suddenly still, head to wind, a
thousand feet up. For five minutes he hung motionless, tensing and flexing
his swept-back wings, dark anchor mooring white cloud. He looked down at the
orchard beneath him, twisting and turning his head, mobile, menacing, like
the head of a snake looking out of a rock. The wind could not move him, the
sun could not lift him. He was fixed and safe in a crevice in the sky.
Loosened suddenly out into air, he straightened his wings and circled
slowly higher. He slowed, steadied, balanced, and again was still. He was a
small speck now, like the pupil of a distant eye. Serenely he floated. Then,
like music breaking, he began to descend.
He slid forward and down to his left for two hundred feet, and then
stopped. After a long still pause, he came down two hundred feet to his
right, then stopped. In this vertical zigzag, from wing-hold to wing-hold,
he slowly descended the sheer face of sky. There was no hesitation or
checking. He simply dropped, and then stopped, as a spider drops on a
thread, or a man on a rope. At last the long exhalation of descent was over.
He was back in the thick-rinded air of earth.
I thought he would rest, but above open ploughland he rose again, unable
to resist the basking warmth of the sky. Very slowly he rose, for he was
still unpractised. His wings strained out and spread to their utmost, his
head stretched forward, his eyes looked upwards. After the first wide circle
he knew he was safe. He relaxed, and looked down again. Under a big white
cloud he wound away northward, dwindling up in his long sweeping circles.
But he was reluctant to leave the orchard and he would not keep up with the
cloud. He glided slowly back, through a thousand feet of sunlit air, to
perch in a tree near the brook. There he rested, after forty minutes of
flight, but he did not sleep. When I went closer, he did not notice me. He
did not look at anything. His eyes were open, but unfocused. He flew south,
moving like a sleepwalker, gazing forward enrapt. His wings just touched and
skimmed the air. The sun shone upon him, and he gleamed like a shield of
silver water, glowed purple-brown and wet like dark ploughland after rain.
Beyond the line of poplars, he circled and began to soar again. This time
he pulled across the wind, rising swiftly to the north-west, moving far out
and very high above the river valley. Gliding, spiralling, hovering,
sculling, he seemed to freed at last from his orchard obsession. Free! You
cannot know what freedom means until you have seen a peregrine loosed into
the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light.
Along the escarpments of the river air he rose with martial motion. Like a
dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured
through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus. When my
arms were aching, and I could watch him no longer, he blurred into a tiny
speck and vanished from the bright circle of my vision. Soon I found him
again, and saw him grow larger. Gradually, steadily, he grew larger. From
thousands of feet above the valley he was diving back to the orchard, which
he was not yet ready to leave completely. He grew from a speck to a blur, to
a bird, to a hawk, to a peregrine; a winged head shouldering down through
the wind. With a rush, with a flash, with a whirr of wings, he came down to
the hedge ten yards away from me. He perched, he preened, he looked around;
not tired, not tested even, by his half-hour of festive flight. With the
whole valley to choose from, he had chosen to come back to the orchard where
I was standing. There is a bond: impalpable, indefinable, but it exists.
It is now four o'clock. The sun is still warm, the sky almost cloudless.
The tiercel looks upward. Following his gaze, I see a falcon circling over
from the east. In the purity of sunlight, her clenched feet, and the pale
feathers above them, gleam out in ivory and gold. The whole bird shines with
a solid Aztec radiance, as though it were cast in bronze, not buoyant and
feathery and hollow-boned. She saw the tiercel circling, and has come from
the estuary to join him. That was the purpose of his flight. He rises from
the orchard, and together they float slowly overhead, drifting, drifting and
calling. Their harsh calls strike hard on the flinty sky. Peregrines often
call when they first come to their winter home and again when they leave it.
Slowly their slack circles tighten. Soon they are circling at great speed,
one high above the other. In long sweeping arcs they rise away to the
south-east, fast glides alternating with many deep, chooppping wing-beats.
There is urgency and strength in every movement. The sunb and wind command
them no longer. They have their own power, and know their course at last.
Now they can see the coast of Holland, a hundred miles away. They can see
the winding mouths of the Scheldt, the white lines of the dykes, and the far
glitter of the Rhine, standing in the shadow of the night to come. They are
leaving the familiar pattern of woods and fields, rivers and coloured farms:
leaving the estuary, its green islands and the never ceasing movement of its
serpent mud; leaving the tawny outgrowths of the saltings, the sudden
straightness of the coastline, the sharp sunlit edges of the land. These
vivid images sink into a rainbow of crushed colour, and set below the
horizon of their memory. Other images arise, as yet like mirages distorted,
to be made clear in the long whiteness of the continental coast, in far
islands now in darkness, in cliffs and mountains sailing out from night.

************************************************************************
Damn, that's good.


michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca