I find myself telling my children: ‘Daddy’s doing his peregrines.’
It was one of Charles Darwin’s small sons who, on learning that there was no study in his schoolfriend’s house, asked in puzzlement: ‘Where does your father do his barnacles?’. Darwin Senior spent eight years poring over cirripedes (‘I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before,’ he wrote bitterly in 1854); my peregrines have only been with us since the spring of 2020, and they impinge on our family life hardly at all – like the peregrines glimpsed by the poet Kathleen Jamie, these are birds seen only when time allows, through the kitchen window, once the kids’ cereal has been poured out and the dishwasher’s been emptied (‘‘Mum, can we have our breakfast?’ ‘Just a minute …’ Dammit. I’d glanced away for a moment, and when I looked back the peregrine had quit fidgeting and flown’ – from Findings (2005)).
Still, I was doing my peregrines.
Our terraced house is overlooked by the towering chimney of Salt’s Mill, once – when it was built, in 1853 – the world’s largest industrial property and the rattling, clattering hub of Saltaire, Sir Titus Salt’s model mill-town on the Aire. It’s the chimney on my doorstep, rather than any ability or knowhow, that saw me recruited this week into an informal network of local peregrine watchers. Between us we’re trying to keep tabs on our Bradford-Airedale peregrines, see whether they’re likely to breed, figure out if we can do anything to help.
There’s a pair that like to come and sit on the chimneytop, 68 metres up, to scour the lower sky for prey. So I check the chimneytop a few times a day. ‘Can you put Octonauts on, Daddy? Can we play, Daddy?’ ‘Just a sec, pet. I’m on the back step.’ Daddy’s doing his peregrines.
I thought for a long time that there were two schools of writing about peregrines. On the one hand, The Peregrine (1967) by JA Baker, immersive, impressionistic, masterly, overwrought, obsessive, and on the other The Peregrine Falcon (1980) by Derek Ratcliffe, authoritative, comprehensive, scientific, robustly ornithological. I knew there was a lot of chatter about whether the saltmarsh peregrines JA Baker wrote about even were peregrines, whether Baker could tell a peregrine from a kestrel, or for that matter from a hole in the ground – and I knew that Ratcliffe was a proper bird man, and that his monograph was a landmark in raptor conservation, flagging up the terrible impact of unregulated pesticide use on peregrine populations in the mid-to-late 20th century. But then I learned from Hetty Saunders’ 2017 Baker biography that Ratcliffe and Baker in fact corresponded about peregrines, and that The Peregrine is in fact referenced in The Peregrine Falcon (I checked the bibliography in my copy and yes, there he is, below an obscure citation from British Birds, 1928, ‘Peregrine Falcon nesting on the ground in Hampshire’, above an entry from Bannerman’s 1956 Birds Of The British Isles: it’s like finding an entry for Poe, Edgar Allan, in the endnotes of some scholarly work on the raven Corvus corax). ‘Ratcliffe,’ Saunders writes, ‘had seen for himself that what scientists knew about animals by no means accounted for the often eccentric behaviour of individual creatures, any more than it could for humans.’ So much, then, for the two cultures.
My peregrines aren’t Baker peregrines. Mine are killers, of course – they’re peregrines, that’s what they do, that’s what they are – but I don’t consider them terrible in the way Baker considered his terrible. Helen Macdonald has written of recoiling from Baker’s depictions of the raptors in The Peregrine: ‘I saw in it the writer’s awful desire for death and annihilation, a desire disguised as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies… I was frightened of Baker and what he meant.’
Baker’s falcons, Macdonald says, ‘were made of death.’
The falcons on Titus Salt’s chimney are not made of death. They are made of feathers and bone and around a kilo-and-a-half of muscle and blood. They call to each other, yuk-yuk-yuk, and I once saw the female fly up to take a gift of prey from the male’s talons as they both came yawing eastward over the mill roofs. In summer they sing drawn-out love songs that sound like the industrial rending of sheet metal. One of them, the male I think, likes to do a very funny Groucho Marx strut up and down the chimney edge.
They are made, of course, of life.
Re-reading Macdonald on Baker for this piece, I found myself crossing my own tracks, so to speak. I’ve written quite a lot about how fascism and natural history interact and when you do that it’s hard to go far without running up against Henry Williamson, the enduringly beloved country writer and rural Nazi. Baker’s death-hawks made me think of Williamson’s peregrine Chakchek, first seen in a 1922 story. Chakchek meets a banal and brutal death at the hands of a pigeon-fancying landowner (his mate is poisoned, and then Chakchek is stunned with a tennis racket, blinded, and released to die).
Williamson was in some quite profound ways in love with brutality. You can say that this was something he learned from nature; my belief is that you can learn practically anything from nature, if you choose to. In researching him I read Daniel Farson’s apologetic ‘appreciation’ Henry, in which Farson recalls the time Williamson ‘seized a kitten and smashed its brains out on the kitchen floor’ because it had taken some of a fish dinner laid out for a guest. In this, writes Farson, Williamson was ‘in a horrifying way, consistent’ – for this was the the morality of an animal, nature’s way: the kitten would’ve done the same thing to him, given half a chance.
I don’t really think about Baker’s falcons or Chakchek when I’m watching my peregrines, the mill chimney peregrines. They seem far away, they seem a very distant and unrelated thing. It isn’t that there isn’t any truth in those birds; it’s just not a truth I see, up there, while I’m putting the milk bottles out, and the male cocks his tail up and does a crap over the chimneyside, or they’re both there, male and female, calling yuk-yuk-yuk.
This piece was first published in the Literary Review in 2023.
Richard Smyth 