READING: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

A few years ago, Darbie got me the first third of the New York Review Classics catalogue. The series, described by the NYRB as "an innovative list of fiction and nonfiction for discerning and adventurous readers," is full of interesting, overlooked, often out-of-print oddities, the kinds of things that fall into the "strangely compelling" category.

The Peregrine details a winter J.A. Baker spent obsessively shadowing two peregrines, a falcon (female) and a tiercel (male), near his home in the English countryside. It's strange. He doesn't explain the origins of his interest, doesn't give any details about his personal life, doesn't once, in the course of the book, describe an interaction with another human. His fixation is complete, and works slowly to transform his consciousness. "Wherever he goes, this winter," he writes early in the book:

I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

Later, his transformation progressing, he describes himself investigating the corpse of a woodpigeon recently killed by the tiercel:

I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. 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.

It wasn't surprising to learn that, after writing The Peregrine, Baker wrote one more book, The Hill of Summer, then disappeared into obscurity. From the cover page: "...he appears to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life. Little else, including the exact year of his death, is known..."

Shortly after reading The Peregrine, I took a walk by the Hudson and flushed a red-tailed hawk. I watched him alight in a tree fifty yards ahead, kept my eyes on his outline, and started slowly approaching him. He wasn't startled by passing cars, but when I got anywhere near, he took off again. I followed him from tree to tree for an hour, trying, and failing, to get close without annoying him and pushing him away. Once, when I lost him high in the branches of a black locust, I noticed a mob of crows cawing in agitation and knew, after reading Baker, to look there for my hawk. I think I'll look for him again later this week...

Reading The Peregrine made me want to revisit another NYRB book I read a while ago: The Goshawk by T.H. White. Rather than tracking a hawk in the wild, White (the author of The Once and Future King) attempts to train one using a book called Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, which was written in 1619. The method requires the austringer (is to hawk as falconer is to falcon) to "watch" the hawk, which means sitting with her on his glove, preventing her from sleeping until she loses the will to resist and agrees to eat from his hand, and thereby "breaking" her. White watches Gos (his goshawk) for four sleepless nights before he has any success, and he and the hawk end up sharing in a strange delirium, which continues through various trials and travails.

In the post-script, written years later, White concedes that using instructions from 1619 for anything, including hawking, may not be the best idea:

Imagine the Tudor staircase in a country house, with all its coats-of-arms and carved balusters and heraldic griffins: compare it mentally with the chromium staircase in a modern hotel: and you will have imagined the difference between what I had been doing to Gos and what a reasonable austringer would do today.

Part of what makes me love both The Goshawk and The Peregrine is precisely that they're not reasonable. They're not written by reasonable people. Rather, both beautifully chronicle the dedicated pursuit of unreason.

First Time Birding

Begin your trip at dawn, going first to a freshwater marsh. Rails, bitterns, and other marsh birds are most active and vocal at that hour, and a few minutes in a marsh at sunrise can be more productive than several hours later in the day. From the marsh you can go to the woodlands, fields, or thickets. Until the middle of the morning most songbirds are busily searching for food and singing and are relatively easy to see...

-- National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds Eastern Region --

Sunday morning I got up at 4:30 and rode the subway all the way to Inwood. I met my friend Jack at dawn, and together we climbed the hill that peers out over the northern tip of Manhattan. We wandered through the woods, down to the salt marsh, over to the fork where the Harlem River splits from the Hudson (called Spuyten Duyvil). In the middle of the park, there's a rock, pictured above, which marks the place where Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians. We were trying to find birds.

Birding isn't easy. I think it's going to take hours and days and years of practice. You have to know where to look and what to look for. Once you spy a bird in the foliage, you have to train your binoculars on it despite the dizzy and disorienting change of perspective. I rarely managed the transition from naked eye to 10 x 50 magnification successfully. My neck got sore fast.

We would have done just as well, maybe even better, if we had started our trip well after dawn. We didn't find a freshwater marsh, or see rails or bitterns or an abundance of songbirds. We were probably a few weeks too early for any of those birds. But we did see thousands of robins, hundreds of bluejays, lots of cardinals, a handful of woodpeckers, and a few red-tailed hawks. And walking in the woods early in the morning, eyes and ears tuned to the smallest sights and sounds, is reward enough.

I love field guides. They feel great in your pocket, even better when you pull them out to read about something as you look at it. The red-tailed hawk's voice is a "high-pitched descending scream with a hoarse quality, keeeer." Red-headed woodpeckers (we saw one, our rarest find, flitting around a mammoth dead tulip tree) "often fly-catch, swooping low across a highway of along the shoulder of a road after flying insects," and "frequently are driven off by aggressive European Starlings, which occupy their nest holes."

Every so often, we would catch a tiny bird flitting high up in the branches. It was hard to find. Neither of us could hold still enough to get a positive fix on its features, let alone determine its identity. An Eastern Wood-Pewee? They are "more often heard than seen because of their dull coloration and because they frequent the dense upper canopy of the forest." My sore neck suggests it's a distinct possibility. Though it could have been a wren, a warbler, a vireo...