My favourite sentence in JA Baker’s The Peregrine is “The hardest thing of
all to see is what is really there”.[1]
It comes at the start of chapter two, where Baker turns his attention towards a
discussion of what a peregrine is and the data of his observations. The
methodology, if you like, behind the book’s slow unhinging from the human
world, to that of the falcon’s. It is my favourite sentence not because it
encapsulates the bird or the book in its entirety but because it encapsulates the
writing. You can read The Peregrine
many times and it will change and shift. You will notice new things, new
sentences, overlooked details. It is like going birding, repeatedly in the same
spot, and seeing different birds every time.
I spent the summer working with The Peregrine exploring the archive of
pollution in its writing, within the toxic context of writing about polluted places.
As usual at the end of a long project I can’t retreat back into books. Instead
on holiday with my girlfriend and her family in Cornwall, at the wet,
salt-glazed selvedge of England, we retreated into wildlife and the basic
elements. Sea breeze, salt air, granite and heather again. We found three
peregrines. A big adult female skimming the fields between Cape Cornwall and St
Just. A bulky swarthy juvenile bludgeoned through a rainbow off the Lands End
cliffs. The most spectacular was another juvenile, a small tiercel, tussling
with a raven: stooping at a bird it couldn’t possibly catch, flashing its
talons, carving up the air every side of it. The raven rolled over, raised its
claws and barked. The falcon thought again and circled through the air, tucked
its wings in and fell to earth like a dead weight.
I never saw if it was a successful stoop. I
think it probably wasn’t – it is not the first time I have seen a young
peregrine repeatedly circling, hassling and stooping over prey it has no hope
of catching, as if it was playing, practicing, sharpening its reactions on the
whetstone of actual living prey. At the same time, if I hadn’t seen it, I
probably wouldn’t have believed it. Peregrines playing with ravens? Yeah right.
Once a birder, always an incorrigible sceptic.
When I first read The Peregrine I regarded it as the ornithological gospel truth. The
second time I read The Peregrine I
thought it was an extraordinarily written piece of fiction, unavoidably stringy
(string: the birding slang for made up, hoax observations). Ever since then,
every time I read it, I change my opinion about it. My inkling is that its more
contentious observations will eventually be proven true, or at least possible.
In the past few years urban peregrines have been recorded hunting woodcock
after dark, which Baker mentions. I recently came across a short paper about a
peregrine hovering – again behaviour mentioned by Baker that I had in the past
regarded as being impossible. These behaviours might
be really there, but the hardest thing to see.
Baker is, in the terms of Immanuel Kant, an “enlightened” observer – committed
to the truth of his own impressions, observations and thought, without relying
on received wisdom – or myth.
Yet the question of authenticity and Baker never
goes away, though I dearly wish it would. Nothing is gained or taken away by
pronouncing on the veracity of a text with a rubber stamp of truthful
authenticity or fiction. That is as bad as people who would reduce the text to
being about one thing, confidently pronouncing on the meaning of The Peregrine as if it was a fixed,
easily pigeonholed story.
Having spent the summer exploring it as a
depiction of its time and place, I still think it’s a pre-eminent example of a
portrayal of a landscape poisoned by “the filthy, insidious pollen of farm
chemicals” (15), a place where for the falcons “foul poison burned within them
like a burrowing fuse. Their life was a lonely death, and would not be renewed”
(118). Derek Ratcliffe, the naturalist who discovered the eggshell-thinning
effect of DDT, wrote in his monograph The
Peregrine Falcon, that had the decline of the peregrine in the 1950s and
early 60s continued unabated, “extinction of the Peregrine in Britain could
have occurred by 1967”[2]
— the year when The Peregrine was first published. It is important not
to forget this, or forget about the persistence of chemicals in the
environment.
Due to DDT’s chemical stability it remains present in the environment to the
point where in 2002 still “No living organism may be considered DDT-free”.[3]
Baker’s
writing persists due to its potency. In its synthesis of science and poetry it
is, I think, unparalleled – a pre-eminent example of how to write about nature.
Six years ago when I first read of his aim to follow the peregrines of Essex “till
my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of
colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye” (41). I thought, for
six years, that deep fovea was just a poetic expression of the materials of
vision, one with a nice tang of Romantic mystery about it. It wasn’t until a
week ago, reading Tim Birkhead’s excellent Bird
Sense that I discovered falcons have two foveae. The fovea is the part of
the retina where the visual image is sharpest. Where a bird has two, one works
for close up and one does distant vision. In Birkhead’s words, “the deep fovea…
acts like a convex lens in a telephoto lens, effectively increasing the length
of the eye and magnifying the image to provide very high resolution”.[4]
The hardest thing of all to see… Baker attracts
light. Writers Robert Macfarlane, Mark Cocker and the academic David Farrier
have all discussed Baker’s prose in terms of light – as luminous, or flaring –
as well as his use of light. Where we have light, vision follows. Macfarlane
also describes Baker as having “an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the
eyeball”,[5]
adding that “One of the many exhilarations of reading The Peregrine is that we acquire some version of the vision of a
peregrine” (154). The more I learn about peregrines the more I realize the
extent to which Baker’s writing embodies them. Further and deeper than just the
aerial perspective Macfarlane talks about. Baker’s writing is like the
magnified, high-resolution vision of the peregrine’s own deep fovea.
[3] Vladimir Turosov, Valery Rakitsky, Lorenzo Tomatis, ‘Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
(DDT): Ubiquity, Persistence, and Risks’, Environmental
Health Perspectives, V. 110, No.2 (February 2002), 125-128 (125).
[4] Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird (London,
Bloomsbury, 2012), 17.
[5] Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2015), 141.
