Nature Writing - Birds

From The Peregrine by J A Baker

A swallow flits past, purple against the roaring whiteness of the weir, blue over the green smoothness of the river. As so often on spring evenings, no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song. Like all human beings, I seemed to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across that sears away all life. When I stand still, it cools and slowly disappears. Seven o’clock, under elms and hawthorns it is already dusk. 

A bird flies low across the field, coming straight toward me. It skims over the long grass like an owl. The deep keel of his breastbone actually touches and parts the grass as it comes. Its wings beat easily, fanning high, their tips almost meeting above its back. His head is broad and owl like. There is a wonderfully exciting softness and silent stealth in its fast approach across the shadowed field. It's just looking down into grass and only occasionally glancing up to see where it is going. As it comes nearer. I can see that it is a hunting peregrine, a tiercel trying to flush partridges by flying very low.

He sees me and swerves to his right, swings up to a perch in a big wych elm. The last pale sunlight shines on his broad back, which gleams like a cloth of gold. He is alert, avid, never still. Soon he dives smoothly down and flickers erratically away to the northeast. He lands on an overhead cable out in the open fields and stays there for fifteen minutes. He’s very upright and watchful, a bulk of silhouette in the fading light looking back over his left shoulder. Then he flies low and fast across ploughland and behind trees. Accelerating with long cleaving wing-strokes.

Spring dusk; creak of bat’s wings over the steel river; curlew-call of the lemuring owls.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

I was startled by a whizzing sound behind me. Something dark swished past the side of my head at a speed that made me giddy. Hardly had I got back my balance when it came again whistling through the windless air, which eddied round me with the motion. This time my eyes were ready, and I realised that a Swift was sweeping in mighty curves over the edge of the plateau, plunging down the face of the rock and rising again like a jet of water. No one had told me I should find Swifts on the mountain, Eagles and ptarmigan, yes, but that first sight of the mad, joyous, abandon of the Swift over and over the very edge of the precipice shocked me with the thrill of elation. All that volley of speed, those convolutions of delight to catch a few flies. The discrepancy between purpose and performance made me laugh out loud. A laugh that gave the same feeling of release, as though I've been dancing for a long time.

It seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration, but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood. This power of flight to take us into itself through the eyes as though we had actually shared in the motion, I've never felt so strongly as when watching Swifts on the mountain top. Their headlong rush, each curve of which is at the same time a miracle of grace, the swishing sound of their cleavage of the air, and the occasional high-pitched cry that is hardly like the note of an earthly bird, seemed to make visible and audible some essence of the free wild spirit of the mountain.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I'd stalked round the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass under foot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way round to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush.

The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: Goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant too crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

But it wasn't safe. Split-second instant decisions in the hawk’s tactile computer. She slewed round slingshot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge, closed her wings and was gone. Sucked into the black hole of the wood beneath a low hanging larch branch. Everything disappeared. No rabbits, no pheasant, no hawk. Just a black hole in the woods edge. It had gone very quiet. ….

It had been a long while since I hunted with the hawk. But I don't remember it being like this. I was sure to never been like this. I was astounded by the radical change in subjectivity. Is it instilled? How the world dissolved into nothing. It was so real and tangible it almost hurt. How every passing second slowed and stretched, catching us out of time. When I stepped back into road to walk home, I was astounded how the sun had fallen. We've been out less than the hour, but it felt like years.

The Hawk In The Rain by Ted Hughes

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up

Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,

From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle

With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.

While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,

And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs

The diamond point of will that polestars

The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting

Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-

Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still,

That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming from the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,

Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,

The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye

Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.