I’ve spent a lot of time lately staring up at the electricity pylon across the river. Hawks, wrote JA Baker in his 1967 classic book The Peregrine, grow out of dead trees, like branches; I’ve learned that peregrines can also sprout from steel lattice and aluminium alloy.
David, a local birder, pointed out the peregrine on the pylon one morning in late September; it was mantling over a wood pigeon on the lowest crossarm, 15 metres up. Since then, on every visit to the riverside, my gaze has been drawn insistently upward, checking for the falcon’s return.
We have kestrel and sparrowhawk here, buzzard and kite, and a hobby on migration zipped through a couple of weeks ago – but nothing quite matches the peregrine for dramatic oomph. It’s no longer the scarce and totemic wilderness species it once was, but it can still cast a pall of predatory menace over the fields and spinney.
Not that the local wood pigeons seemed especially bothered. Sitting squat and stodgy on the power-lines, raising a clumsy racket in the canopy, they could see, I suppose, that the peregrine had already made its morning kill, and that they were safe for the time being.
Talking later, David and I agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to broadcast the location of the peregrine too widely. We’re in what Richard Mabey called the “unofficial countryside” here, just a few miles from the city, hemmed in by roads, towns, light industry – by people.
There are badgers in the spinney and roe deer in the fields, and I know that there are people who come from the towns and villages to bait the badgers for sport and shoot the deer for meat. There’s a fox’s earth in the undergrowth by the river, and I know that people have been there to dig out the earth and kill the foxes. A different kind of predator, and a different kind of menace.
I crane my neck again. At the very top of the pylon, starlings, neat black shapes against the cirrus, come and go in threes, fours, fives. They sit high up there and bicker and jockey and play their swannee-whistles.
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