Twice I have seen a peregrine dive at rocket speed, wings folded back, towards a flock of racing pigeons flying unaware below. The latest dramatic occasion was above Bootle, the village that basks below the whale-shaped mass of Black Combe that dominates the coast near Millom. That time the hawk missed by a hair’s-breadth, the pigeons scattering like chaff.
Before that, while climbing on Erne Crag above the Rydal Valley in the 1980s, I saw a similar attack. Again the pigeon escaped as feathers flew, though the screes were strewn with the legs that were all that remained of racing birds following previous onslaughts, their ID rings numbered.
Workington fancier John Walsh tells me of a lucky escape for one of his precious birds flying recently in a race back from France 420 miles away. For 12½ hours its rapid wingbeats had sped it through thunder and lightning, despite the fact that the moon and the sun were in the sky at the same time, a juxtaposition said to disturb the bird’s internal compass. As he watched through binoculars, he saw the peregrine begin its hair-raising 200mph stoop high above the old steel town. It missed and the pigeon flew home unscathed. He is sad that hawk attacks are so prevalent, admirer as he is of the peregrine.
“It’s not that I would like to eliminate these wonderful birds,” he says. “It’s just that a better balance might be struck if they were rather fewer in number.” He breaks off as his birds – that are a world away from the feral pigeons people call “flying rats” – appear from afar. “Come on! Come on! Howay!” he calls, scattering seed on the threshold of the loft as he ushers his fliers in.
His voice has that distinctive tone that marks a football commentator hailing a goal. But then that is his other calling, commentating on football for BBC Radio Cumbria. For now he is thankful his young pigeons are safely home after a training flight.
• Forty Years on the Welsh Bird Islands, the 2015 memorial lecture in honour of the late Country diarist William Condry, will be given in Machynlleth on 3 October by Professor Tim Birkhead.
