In an interview on Birdwatching

To start off, I asked if you could recommend a book that really captures the atmosphere, the magic of birdwatching, that gives a sense of what it is about it that gets people so addicted. You chose J A Baker’s The Peregrine. Why?

This book caught my imagination when I first read it, which was in the late 1960s. It’s a book about one man’s obsession with a particular bird. He was fascinated with a peregrine that he found locally, and he stalked it for a whole year. He tried to follow it in all its movements and get the bird used to him so that he could approach it more closely than a peregrine would normally allow. It’s the story of this pursuit of the bird and how he came to feel a kind of affinity with it, and how he uses the bird as a symbol for the things he feels, or wants to feel, about the natural world. The writing in the book is really rather extraordinary – it’s a very lyrical, very elevated kind of prose that could completely fail, or become too lush or rich or something. He just about teeters on the brink the whole time, and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s overdone it now!’ and then he gets away with it. I think it’s a magnificent piece of writing that I find very moving.

And it really gets into his mindset; you understand why he becomes obsessed?

Yes. He wants to become the bird, in a sense. And the book finally ends with him approaching the peregrine as it comes to roost. He walks up to within five yards of it, and the bird goes to sleep in front of him. It has accepted him. So it’s a very striking book about what is for many people still a very charismatic bird, the peregrine falcon – which has gone from being a bird of wilderness places, to a bird of our cities. There are peregrines nesting in London and New York now, and many other cities, but they will never be ‘domesticated’.

In an interview on First-Person Narratives

Next up is The Peregrine by J A Baker.

It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast with U and I, although it was written by another Baker. My book The Snow Geese had a lot to do with birds and the non-human world around us, but I didn’t read this book until I’d finished. I wish I’d read it earlier than I did. The way he describes the world outside him, particularly birds, is so electric. It avoids all the traps of rhapsody and the sort of nature writing that Evelyn Waugh satirises in Scoop. You remember William Boot [the protagonist of Scoop]? He writes a nature column that's a terrible, sub-poetic kind of purple-word haze. But The Peregrine is far removed from that.

There’s an introductory chapter about the peregrine falcon, but the main content of the book is a diary, between October and April, as this man goes on his own to a part of Essex in south-east England. He applies himself to watching the peregrine and to being as attentive to the world around him as it is possible to be. He doesn’t name places. The landscape is reduced to elemental, primitive quantities – field, river, estuary, sea, sky. It is inhabited by trees and by birds, and not just peregrines but lapwings, jackdaws, wood pigeons, kingfishers.

You get the sense that this man, who gives away very little about his own circumstances, goes out each morning to follow the peregrine. There are extraordinary descriptions of the peregrine hunting, of what’s known as “the stoop”, when it spots its prey – a bird or small rodent – and plunges down hundreds of feet with its hind claws extended to slash or stab. It’s incredibly dramatic, and the language at these points has a Ted Hughes-like power. Completely robust and incredibly vivid and immediate.

And then you realise there’s something bigger going on. It’s not just a record of these things. The peregrine arrives in England in October, and in April it flies north again to Scandinavia. There are timeless cycles in play, but there’s more to it than that. It’s about a man trying to have a relationship with the non-human world, about trying to efface the difference between the human and the non-human – a distance that’s been growing and growing. Increasingly he identifies with the hawk, and they get closer and closer. In April, at the end of the book, they stand close and the hawk doesn’t fly off. They’re inhabiting the same world.

And yet if one imagines a man standing close to a hawk, one can picture the man imagining what it’s like to be a hawk, but not the hawk imagining what it’s like to be a man.

I don't think he pretends he can imagine the mind of a hawk. They’re standing close but they’re separate. In fact, the hawk is sleeping. He’s indifferent. In The Peregrine you really feel the otherness of the bird, but you also feel we’re breathing the same air. And it’s linked with other accounts of a solitary man or woman’s relationship with their immediate environment, other attempts to apply attention to the world around you: [naturalist] Gilbert White’s letters, [Henry David] Thoreau’s Walden, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrimage at Tinker Creek. But what’s unique about The Peregrine is the way it’s reduced to these mythic quantities – man, sky, bird, sea.