J.A. Baker is a unique character in English literary and ornithological history. Baker wrote two books. The first is a classic called The Peregrine—a book you have never read before. Baker visited a 50-square-mile piece of Essex for years on his bicycle. He meticulously described the movements of the birds, especially the peregrines in the area. Baker is fascinated by the peregrine falcon.

The second book is The Hill of Summer. This book has a broader subject, the south of England.

Werner Herzog and The Peregrine

Director Werner Herzog recommends the book The Peregrine as a lesson in observing, describing, and evaluating viewpoints.

That’s how a filmmaker should see things: in loneliness. He or she or it should see the world with an incredible amount of human pathos and enthusiasm and rapture.

Indeed, the book describes the life of the peregrines in his part of Essex in very attractive terms, both visually and metaphorically.

Personal life

Baker reveals very little about himself in his books. I will need to read his biography, My House of Sky: The life of J.A. Baker by Hetty Saunders.

Throughout his life, Baker lived in Chelmsford, Essex. Baker was a manager at AA and later at Britvic, a soft drink company. In his spare time, he biked around the area and worked on his observations of the nature around him, especially of the birds and peregrines. Baker was a very reclusive person. He married a colleague, Doreen Grace Coe. They did not have children.

He died of cancer, caused by his medication for his severe arthritis, from which he suffered increasingly throughout his life.

The Peregrine

Baker describes his observations from his point of view but also flies with the peregrine. He follows the peregrines through the Essex nature reserve. In particularly poetic prose, he describes the environment, how the birds fly, and how they hunt and kill.

Peregrines are known for their unique killing method: stooping. They fly high up in the air, target their prey, and start a skydive reaching 400 kilometers per hour. Baker describes the kill in clean, surgical, and visual terms.

The peregrine swoops down towards his prey. As he descends, his legs are extended forward till the feet are underneath his breast. The toes are clenched, with the long hind toe projecting below the three front ones, which are bent up out of the way. He passes close to the bird, almost touching it with his body, and still moving very fast. His extended hind toe (or toes — sometimes one, sometimes both) gashes into the back or breast of the bird, like a knife. At the moment of impact the hawk raises his wings above his back. If the prey is cleanly hit — and it is usually hit hard or missed altogether — it dies at once, either from shock or from the perforation of some vital organ.

Prose like poetry

Many passages are pure poems. Not even sentences, just words in a sequence increasing the power of the language.

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.

And more.

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.

I read the book like I read a book of poetry: a few poems, passages, and pages per day. More I can’t consume in one sitting. The prose is too strong. You have to give it room to rest and appreciate. So progress through the book is slow. But there is a difference with poems. For with every new poem, I want to be surprised. But with Baker, the longing is for that feeling to come to you in a new form from the next page. The outliers keep you on your toes, but the detailed, poetic sentences are addictively satisfying.

Identifying with the birds

Baker identifies with the birds. With the hunter, with the hunted. On fear.

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.

Baker often finds himself the hunter, following the peregrine, and they become the same. As we will see, Baker prefers the company of birds and can relate much better to animals than humans. Unconsciously, the hunter starts resembling the hunted.

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.

And despite, or probably because of, his bad eyesight, he identifies with the peregrine hawk scanning the area for prey.

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.

More poems, and unification with bird life.

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.

We are the killers

Death, pain and fear, and his dislike of humans becomes more recurring. The prose becomes darker.

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea- wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide. A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. Then it will drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear.

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

Then, this confession: the peregrine hides for humans, but is it the peregrine hiding, or is it Baker’s aversion to human contact?

I avoid humans, but hiding is difficult now the snow has come. A hare dashed away, with its ears laid back, pitifully large and conspicuous. I use what cover I can. It is like living in a foreign city during an insurrection. There is an endless banging of guns and tramping of feet in the snow. One has an unpleasantly hunted feeling. Or is it so unpleasant? I am as solitary now as the hawk I pursue.

The birds-eye view

He puts himself in the view of the bird. We fly over the fields like in a drone, but much more beautiful.

Looking down, the hawk saw the big orchard beneath him shrink into dark twiggy lines and green strips; saw the dark woods closing together and reaching out across the hills; saw the green and white fields turning to brown; saw the silver line of the brook, and the coiled river slowly uncoiling; saw the whole valley flattening and widening; saw the horizon staining with distant towns; saw the estuary lifting up its blue and silver mouth, tongued with green islands. And beyond, beyond all, he saw the straight-ruled shine of the sea floating like a rim of mercury on the surface of the brown and white land. The sea, rising as he rose, lifted its blazing storm of light, and thundered to freedom to the land-locked hawk.

Idly, indifferently, he saw it all, as he swung and swayed round the glittering gun-sight of his eye’s deep fovea, and watched for a flash or spurt of wings at which to aim his headlong flight.

And like Baker, we cannot get enough of this.

She drifted idly; remote, inimical. She balanced in the wind, two thousand feet above, while the white cloud passed beyond her and went across the estuary to the south. Slowly her wings curved back. She slipped smoothly through the wind, as though she were moving forward on a wire. This mastery of the roaring wind, this majesty and noble power of flight, made me shout aloud and dance up and down with excitement. Now, I thought, I have seen the best of the peregrine; there will be no need to pursue it farther; I shall never want to search for it again. I was wrong of course. Once can never have enough.

When he sees a seal in the coastal waters, he philosophizes how much better such a free life for animals is.

He looked at me, breathed in, and dived below. Slowly he splashed and idled round the bay and out to the estuary again. It is a good life, a seal’s, here in these shallow waters. Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.

On beauty

He can get very dark.

But the pull and twist of his bill to break off a bud reminded me of a peregrine breaking the neck of its prey. Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty is vapour from the pit of death.

Afterword

In Robert MacFarlane’s afterword, some more personal details about Baker are shared, but none go further than what you can find online and summarize on a single page.

This scarcity of personal information about Baker is primarily due to (he would say thanks to) Baker’s own doing. As said, I will have to read his biography now.

About the peregrine: The species has been under pressure in England for almost a century now. During the Second World War, the birds were believed to potentially disturb the Royal Air Force and were actively hunted. After this ban was lifted, insecticides like DDT became the biggest threat. Nowadays, it is the ridiculous English tradition of grouse hunting that threatens the bird population. Baker was right, you would say. We are the killers.