"My Heart in Hiding Stirred for a Bird"

I don’t read a lot of nature-observation books, but I’ve always been intrigued with hawks (we have quite a few around Palookaville) so I found myself drawn into J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine. I’m glad I did it, but what a strange book it is! For just over six months—from October 1 to April 3 (1966?), Baker trekked over the swamps and fens of the Norfolk coastline, observing and recording the behavior of a hawk (or hawks?) in flight.at rest and taking their kill—observed and yes (as Robert Macfarlane says in an empathetic introduction) near becoming a hawk himself, or at any rate longing to become one and regretting that he cannot.

The observation of nature in the raw is luminescent, but their obsessiveness is almost too much too take except in small doses: Baker writes at a pitch of awareness that cannot be sustained for long. Adding to the urgency of it all, as Macfarlane points out, he tells us almost nothing about the rest of his life—where did he sleep? Who did the laundry? What did he pack for lunch? Nothing but the passionate scrutiny and the detailed observation of the bird and its prey.

Under a blackthorn, beside the brook, I found a freshly killed woodpigeon. Blossom was drifting down into the drying blood. A footpath runs between the two woods, and is separated from them by small thorn-hedged fields and a scattering of oak and elm. There is a dead tree to the south of the path: twenty feet of ruined elm, branchless, jagged at the top like a broken tooth. On this mossy fang of the lighter, golden-coloured tiercel was resting. He flew east when I approached, circled, then drifted down towards me in a series of steep glides and stalls. I stood near the dead tree and watched his descent. The big rounded head, suspended between the rigid wings, grew larger, and the staring eyes appeared, looking boldly through the dark visor of the eye mask. There was no widening of the eyes in fear, no convulsive leap aside; he just came steadily down and glided past me, twenty yards away. His eyes were fixed on my face, and his head turned as he went past, so that he could keep me in view. He was not afraid, nor was he disturbed when I lowered and raised my binoculars or shifted my position. He was either indifferent or mildly curious. I think he regarded me now as part hawk, part man; worth flying over to look at from time to time, but never wholly to be trusted; a crippled hawk, perhaps, unable to fly or to kill cleanly, uncertain and sour of temper.

—J.A. Baker, The Peregrine, 162 (NYRB Paperback ed. 2005)

An introductory note says that Baker wrote one other book, ´an exploration of the natural history of [his] native region.” It adds: “[H]e seems to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life. Little else, including the exact year of his death, is known of this singularly private man.”