The peregrine is the fastest animal in the world. It drops on its prey from above, a 300km/h shard of death. This path, sky to ground, is called a hunting line – a phrase I first saw in JA Baker’s The Peregrine – my favourite book (also Werner Herzog’s, turns out), probably my favourite possession. Book and bird have been indistinguishable to me since: a talisman of what is beautiful and wild.
“They are killers,” Baker wrote in 1967. “That is what they are for.” To find one, look up. See it, as he did, “remote as a star … a small dark knuckle in the flawless sky”. Before it drops:
He seemed to split in two, his body shooting off like an arrow from the tight-strung bow of his wings. There was an unholy impetus in his falling, as though he had been hurled from the sky. It was hard to believe, afterwards, that it had happened at all.
With obsessive – contagious – devotion, Baker described the “loose-limbed panache” of a peregrine on a warm current, the way it seems to enjoy flying higher and further in bad weather (“far” being as far as 500km, according to at least one guide) – how glimpsing those neat curves and tucked feet “slip smoothly” through a gale was enough to make him shout aloud.
Day after day he looked, hoping to see one “clinging to the rippling fleece of the earth as the leaping hare cleaves to the wind”, vanishing into the dusk “like a manta ray flicking along the bottom of the sea”. Now I look too, craning hopefully if some skyward movement catches my eye – spotting one occasionally in a last gleam of sun, “a copper vessel splashed with gold”.
I push Baker’s book on people I love, trade lines with friends. One sent me a video recently, from another friend who was high up a building for work, long before the commuters filed in. The frame zoomed, and zoomed again, and there it was: one small peregrine, dark shoulders hunched in a fluffy crouch as early sun and sea glinted off the skyscraper glass.
Down in Melbourne, there are eggs in the Collins Street nesting box again. Peregrine families have roosted there since the 90s, and during the Covid-19 lockdowns, thousands of people began tuning in to their … peregrinations via live stream (or the evening news). “Understandable and delightful,” one bird expert said at the time. “Imprisoned by horizons, I envied the hawk his boundless prospect of the sky,” Baker wrote more than 50 years earlier.
Female and male peregrines share nesting and feeding duties (and presumably whatever emotional labour is involved in stirring up Qantas union disputes). They mate for life, or are serially monogamous, anyway. If disaster strikes, they are content to move on.
On a jarringly cold December day, not long after I moved to Sydney, I sat at the beach, gritting my teeth through heartache. I saw one. It was on a streetlight, sitting sentinel over the families guarding their chips from the gulls. Its body was striped, just as Baker had it “like sun and shadow”. Even at a distance I could make out the dark eyes, “larger and heavier than human eyes … strangely indolent … rimmed with wine”, could imagine their slight film, “like the bloom on the dark skin of a plum”.
It was a time when not much made sense to me. But the peregrine “sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist,” Baker wrote, “a succession of remembered symmetries.” The bird’s steady, inhuman gaze settled me in a place somewhere outside emotion; its direct, deliberate movements as it took wing called back some language of fierce and electric joy.
Baker invented his own language in this book, Robert Macfarlane wrote in his 2005 introduction, “as instinctive, sudden and aerial as the bird to which it was devoted”. It is this language that made me fall in love with the peregrine – a thing of chance (a publisher’s canny reissue, a propensity for choosing books by their covers), like any private symbology. It’s true my mind flicks as easily to the neat ducking of a cormorant’s slick head, or the silhouette of a pelican on the Coorong, on the drive to my parents’; the funereal dignity of an ibis; the surprise mammalian softness and bandit stripe of a kookaburra outside a bar. How can you choose just one of anything? Except sometimes, a bird picks you.
The Australian bird of the year poll launches on 25 September 2023
