Reading About the Peregrine Falcon by Carol Greene

After a day in the field, he would retreat to the spare room of his Chelmsford terrace house, and write up the details in journals that together run to more than 1,600 manuscript pages. He learned to predict the peregrines’ locations by means of an intelligence that began as logic and ended as instinct, and in a relationship that began as fascination and ended as obsession.Įven the savage winter of 1962–63 – when the sea froze for two miles out from the shore, and spear-length icicles hung from eaves and trees – didn’t deter Baker from his quest. He carried Ordnance Survey maps on which he marked in ballpoint pen the locations of his sightings, with circled capital letters – P, SH, HH, BO – recording raptors by species (M is for Merlin, K is for Kestrel). He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped and roosted. For around a decade – from 1954 to 1964 – a myopic office worker from Essex tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. The story of The Peregrine’s writing is remarkable, and has a mystery at its heart.

It has haruspicated our present, and I suspect its prescience is not yet all used up.

Baker’s book – strewn as it is with eviscerated birds, obsessed as it is with prediction – is a text of killing and foretelling: of seeing the future in blood and guts. In ancient Rome a haruspex was a person trained in a form of divination based on inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. It reads now as uncannily prophetic: of the Anthropocene (our geological age, in which human activity is now the dominant influence on the environment), of extinction events, of dark ecology – even of virtual reality. In the half century since its publication, this fierce little book has only tightened its talon grip on us. J A Baker’s The Peregrine is 50 years old, but it feels as if it were written yesterday.

Reading About the Peregrine Falcon by Carol Greene