It is indeed a stupendous read - I rate it in the class of Solzhenitsyn & Steinbeck. Thank you for the reprint. (A great read on a long haul plane).
Further enquiries may be made here I would think -
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/zoology/tring/birdgroup.html
As far as the original now - it is about £75 I believe, this review of it is interesting
http://www.8083.co.uk/servlet/f/sid/120/template/w,NwReviews.vm
ORIGINAL PRINT
The Peregrine
Collins 1967
Kathleen Jamie reviews JA Baker
This is a book which concerns itself with peregrine falcons in the wild, not a falconer’s captives. It’s neither an ornithologists’ field guide, although it shows us how to see birds, nor is it a novel, although it is a gripping read. Presented as a diary kept through a long winter, it’s a sustained, keening evocation of an English landscape and its birds. To write it, JA Baker spent a long time learning how to enter into that landscape, how to look and listen, how to make himself invisible.
‘Nov 6th: Morning was hooded and seeled with deep grey cloud and mist. The mist cleared when the rain began. Many birds fled westward from the river, golden plover high among them. Their melancholy plover voices threaded down through the rain the sorrowing beauty of ultima thule.’
Note that lovely ‘hooded and seeled’. Not a misprint, but a falconer’s term.
At that time, the late 60’s, it was genuinely believed that peregrines and other birds of prey were disappearing, so it’s almost as an elegy that JA Baker writes. From October till April Baker was out creeping in ditches, hiding behind trees, following the peregrines as they bathed, roosted, hunted. Of the male peregrine itself, here is a section taken almost at random:
‘He hovered, and stayed still, striding on the crumbling columns of air, curved wings jerking and flexing. Five minutes he stayed there, fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of sky. His body was still and rigid, his head turned from side to side, his tail fanned open and shut, his wings whipped and shuddered like canvas in the lash of the wind...’
Mercifully, peregrines have not vanished. What have become all but extinct, for good or ill, are men like JA Baker. His manner of writing, and his manner of seeing are rare to find now. Like Ted Hughes, who was writing Crow at much the same time, JA Baker has what might be called a masculine poetic, though unlike Hughes he doesn’t glory in death. Baker strives for immediacy. He says ‘What is now must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree’. The diary section of his book gives 150 pages of quivering intensity: there is no narrative reason to keep turning the pages yet one does, drawn into this over-wrought, beautiful, almost religious evocation of an English winter. He has the most wonderful sense of colour.
‘Dead leaves are crisp with frost. The silence is fretted with the whisper and lisp of tits feeding in the high branches. A goldcrest comes close, a tiny flicker of green in the dark wood, tonsured with a sliver of gold leaf. When it is close the thin ice-needles of its call ring out with surprising vehemence...’
What will date this book – other than the quivering intensity - is the author’s self-eradication. JA Baker tells us nothing of himself. In a literary climate which encourages revelation or confession, it is strange to read. Who, we wonder, is JA Baker? A glimpse is all we get before he dips back into cover. Has he no job, no family? No sense of humour? Is this book non-fiction at all? He knew his birds, he watched birds, and he enables us to see them too, that’s all we can say for sure.
Though this book is held as a classic of English nature writing, it is out of print. It’s interesting to consider what has changed since the 60’s. Possibly, our sense of what it is to be a man, and also what ‘nature’ is. There is less of that high masculinity about, less loner-ism, and ‘nature’ is now ‘the environment’ - not a place of near mystical communion with weather and birds of prey. But for a well-to-do English shamanism, a long sustained hymn to the falcon’s ‘world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water’, JA Baker’s The Peregrine remains unmatched.
