Part 11

But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this falcon-raid was that nearly every journalist in London saw the bird; but I saw it first, therefore it is mine.

PEREGRINES IN LOVE

(To E. G. S.)

In the salt winds of the Atlantic, and above their ancient eyrie, the peregrine falcons anchor their flight with easy mastery of the gusty uptrends of the precipitous headland face. When first the celandine came below the hedges, the male hawk mounted high, and stooped at his larger mate like a black and shaftless arrowhead of iron, uttering shrill love-notes the while. Now the dog violets and the red campion flowers are among the grasses; the pink sea-thrift blooms in sheltered places; and still the peregrines pursue each other and kiss with swift fondness over the foamed waters.

The kestrel is considered by some naturalists to be the most scientific hoverer of our British hawks. Certainly he uses with great skill the winds of heaven for his livelihood. He leans upon the moving air, sometimes slipping sideways and losing height, but reassuming poise by quick beats of his chestnut pinions. Our largest hawk, the buzzard, is common in this district by the sea, and with large wings outspread he sails circlewise till his prey is detected, when a slow descent is made to the ground. Often these birds have been observed to hang low over the heather and gorse, motionless, wings arched and bent backwards, for nearly a minute at a time. But the peregrines, so swift and ruthless in flight and habit, out-hover both the kestrel and the buzzard. The hovering of the kestrel is weak, delicately balanced; that of the buzzard clumsily weighty, and only managed in a strong air-current; the peregrine falcon cuts into the gusts, controlling his flight with instant power, unheeding the wind’s vagaries. He can remain still, soar higher, or drift sideways with ease.

The eyrie is a hundred feet down the cliff-face, upon a narrow ledge. For years their young have been taken by the Tiger, a small, wiry man who, descends by a rope attached to a driven crowbar, swings inwards to the ledge, and is hauled to the top with the young falcons in a basket. Yet every year when the celandines come the falcons’ courtship begins, ending only when the scent of the wild thyme fades and the sea-thrift rusts with autumn’s decay. They hunt together, ranging afar. Their stoop is terrible to behold, so swift and shattering its ending. It may be at a rabbit which ventures forth from the holes of the swarded slopes, at a stock-dove beating speedy flight from Lundy Island, or at an immigrant swallow flying from alien wastes to the shore and sanctuary. Nothing is immune from ravage save the larger gulls and the sombre ravens, who croak defiance from their aerial soughing.

The peregrines raid from their base upon the headland to the inland villages, watching for the chance of taking a tame dove from a cot; onwards to the lonely wastes of the sandhills, crowned with spike-grass, where the peewits wail throughout the springtime. They dash up the wide estuary; the ring-plover crouch low among the stones and seaweed as they pass; they even visit Barnstaple itself for the blue-gray pigeons that wheel above its old shipyards. In the skyey loftiness one moment are the hawks, watching and soaring, the male usually the higher; one will close pinions and dive like a dark arrowhead through the air, flattening as a bird is reached; there is a burst of feathers, a triumphant chattering, and the limp victim is borne to the solitudes of the dunes. A week later upon the sand a bleached skeleton will lie, surrounded by a scattered ring of feathers, in company with old bones of rabbits and bead-like shells that tell of ended generations.

The pair rarely separates. Maybe the leading hawk will miss; its mate follows instantly. Sometimes a third striking is attempted. Usually, however, it is not needed, although the course of the dive, once begun, cannot be altered--either the object is missed entirely or secured. In the pools below the cliffs the sea boils, tossing the spray afar. Shags haunt particular rocks, content in the sunlight. The falcons do not molest them, but they may watch the loving couple high in heaven, and so may the gulls that with yelping plaints rise and fall and glide upon the air. Swiftly and with quick wing-beats the peregrines climb, almost vertically, it would appear. Then a sudden speeding at eighty or ninety miles an hour, a downward dash at the rocks, beaks and wings touching; they hiss past the gulls, swoop apart and glide upwards, uttering their sweetly wild mating cries. Nothing matters in the ecstasies of spring. They may pass uncaring within a few yards of a beholder, when he may see the neck and wings, slate-ash in colour, the dark crown and nape, the hooked beak and the barred tail. He may shout and wave his arms in excitement, the ravens croak, the gulls scream, the lone buzzard wail as he circles, but the love-chase continues. On the falcons rush, above the crested waves and the marbled troughs of the ocean, past the crannies and the ledges of the precipice, among the summer cloudlets, over the hills of heather and the slopes of golden gorse, by the mounded sand-dunes and the glistening mud-flats; all the heavenly freeness is theirs to roam. Bold they are, and observe no law, but they hunt openly and in defiance--often cursed by the sporting farmer; and yet all of us are proud of our “pregun forlkns.”

MIDSUMMER NIGHT

(To G. E. R.)

Against the deep blue of the sky a little money spider was taking a line from one veined ash leaf to another. Although so small, he was easily seen in the waning light, a dark speck moving with great care. It was evening time, and the vesper hymn of warblers and thrushes, pippits and blackbirds, was all but sung.

Throughout the day the great vibrant waves of sunlight were plangent on the cornfields and rushing with golden swell over the bee-visited hedgerows and green meadows, vitalising the slender grasses and red sorrel growing in beauty with branched buttercups and incarnadine poppy flowers. Slowly the day-tide of summer’s light and glory ebbed, the sun swung down from heaven and dipped its lower rim into the ocean. The fields and distant oakwood were laved in yellow light, and like a golden sand gleaming in the western sunlight as the sea recedes, the ebbing tide of sunlight left its pools among the woods and the hedges. Far away some children were singing as they went slowly homewards through the closed buttercups and daisies, and their careless cries were in harmony with the evening.

I sat on a gate and watched the rooks flying over the elm trees in the village below, where all was peace and quiet. The wind sighed through the hedge: a dead leaf moved listlessly, twirling as the wind spun it. The tissues of the tree’s dead lung had decayed and sunk into the earth; the winter had been mild, and the invisible hand, composing and decomposing, had not yet touched the filigree web of its brittle frame. On its parent ash tree it hung and quivered, never more to respond to the fire of summer.

Gradually the children reached their homes, and no more cries came from the meadow. The little spider paused half-way between the leaves, and hung quiescent. Perhaps some flaw in his architectural scheme was apparent to him, or he feared that the wind of the summer night would destroy his foundation threads. Born only a few weeks before, without tuition or practice, he knew the angles of his pillars, the proportions of his stanchions, the symmetry and balance of his walls. He had watched no honey-coloured parent at work, yet within his minute brain were the plans of a perfect system to entangle the smallest flying insects, feeble of wing, that would fall against his web.

The pools of gold about the oaks slowly drained away, and the sky above became a more profound blue. Three swifts passed above, wheeling in final flight before creeping to their nests of straw-speck and saliva under the tiles of the church. The songs of the warblers and thrushes as the light drains away, find an echo in the heart of the poet, for they sing of the beauty of summer: the swift’s cries belong to the spectral light of the stars and the mystery of infinite space. The swift is the mystic among birds.

The spider moved on as the first star shone in the sky. Maybe his problem was solved, or that he had waited for the beauteous whiteness of Lyra’s ray. Slowly he travelled to the leaf he had chosen as a base, paused awhile, and crept back across his life-line. The rooks were settled in the elm-tops by the church, and their caa-caas came less often; the prospects of the next day’s forage among the new potatoes had been discussed thoroughly, and were known to all--in satisfaction the colony had settled down to sleep. Gradually the sun sank into the sea, its fire spreading its broad glow through the cloud strata over the far horizon. One by one the stars crept into their places, waiting for the queen-moon to lift her head above the hills of Exmoor. Antares shone in the south; above were Lyra, Aquila, Northern Crown, and all the heavenly concourse: Mars glowed red, with Spica Virginis swung low in adoration and sending its wan green fires to the watcher. Slowly the afterglow drenched in the gray waters, an owl quavered in loneliness as it fanned over the churchyard; a jackdaw answered sharply, querulously, and night had come to the earth.

A pale golden vapour over the Exmoor hills, and the moon rose, like the head of a yellow moth creeping from its case. It swam into view over the dark hills, and I looked into its face, while it shrank into a silver disk. The sky became lavender-coloured, the moon dust falling with the dew and forming a gauzy veil above. The boom of the waves pounding the distant headland was borne on the wind burthened with foam fragrance and the scent of the sweet clover fields beyond the village. It stirred the green corn, came fitfully, then sighed to silence.

The last labourer left the inn and the village slept. The walls of the cottages gleamed white under the dark thatch as the moonlight fell directly upon them. I was alone with the sapling wheat and all was still.

I was alone with the wheat that I loved. Moving over the field my feet were drenched in an instant by the dew. Lying at full length on the earth, I pressed my face among the sweet wistfulness of stalks, stained and glowing as with some lambent fire, pale, mysterious. On each pale flame-blade depended a small white light, a dew-drop in which the light of the moon was imprisoned. Each flag of wheat held the beauty of pure water, and within the sappy blades glowed the spirit of the earth--in the spectral silence a voice spoke of its ancient lineage: of the slow horses that had strained at the wooden plough through the ages, scarring the glebe in long furrows that must be sown with corn; race after race of slow horses moving in jangling harness to the deep shouts of the heavy men. Generation after generation of men, bent with age and unceasing labour, plodding the earth, sowing the yellow grains that would produce a million million berries for mankind. Spring after spring, each with its glory of blue-winged swallows speeding, wheeling, falling through the azure, the cuckoo calling in the meadows, and the lark-song shaking its silver earthchain as it strove to be free. Through all the sowings and the reapings for thousands of years the wheat had known that it was grown for man, and the soul of the wheat grew in the knowledge of its service. Lying there on the cool couch of the silver-flotten corn, with the soft earth under me, sweet with its scent of stored sunbeams, the beauty of the phantom wheat carried me away in a passion of sweet ecstasy. Faint as the sea-murmur within the shell, the voice of the corn came to the inward ear. Ever the same was the earth that it knew, the east washed with faint rosewater in the dayspring, the lark-flight loosened upon the bosom of the dawn wind, and the golden beams of the sun breasting the hills of the morning. It was but a moment since the wild men had goaded the sullen oxen, and with rude implements torn a living from the earth; all the great power of the wheat rested above the growing corn now, of kin to the grains beaten by oxen, and later, by the flails of the wretches who were ever hungry.

The moon floated in the nightpool with the Swan, the distant roar of the surf floated from over the clover fields, and still I lay there, one with the Maker of Life ... a white mistiness flapped in front, beating broad pinions as it hovered, it dropped to the earth, and a shrill scream trembled into the night. Fluttering like a moth, the ghostly barn owl struggled with the rat, held it in a remorseless clutch of powerful talons. Into the wheatfield the rat had come, urged by instinct to seek the means of life, and it had found only death. Dreamily the owl fanned the night with his broad wings and then floated away to his nest in the loft of the cottage near the church. Saddened by the consciousness of life’s tragedy--every form of life depending for existence on the death of another form--I walked towards the village, while a landrail began his jarring crake-crake in the corn, and little moths went down to drink the honey of the night-opening flowers, living their short life while the moon, soon to die, was in its fullest beauty. Antares was a dull red ember in the south: the star of summer that Richard Jefferies loved. My thought was with him--he was near me, though the body had long been lying in Broadwater. Had he spoken to me in this mystic June night, I wondered; and then a blackcap warbler sang in a thorn bush; my thought was as old as its song, and I doubted no longer.

A FEATHERED WASTER

No bird-lovers can but desire the destruction of the Little Owl (Athene Noctua), a prolific bird introduced into England half a century ago by Lord Lilford. It has no redeeming trait. I have watched several pairs, and my observations show without doubt that he is not worth his salt, and deserves not the slightest mercy.

Old Bob, a keeper with whom I am very friendly, showed me a pollard oak standing at the side of a hazel covert, which he suspected as the home of a pair of these birds. I sat down in the dry ditch and waited, while the humble bees swung themselves among the flowering nettles. This was in the early afternoon, and not in the evening or the night; in the bright sunlight, when all self-respecting owls are dreaming in barn-loft or hollow tree. But to the Little Owl time is obviously money, for it was not long before a brown bird, not unlike a large thrush, fluttered out of the tree and flew to a may hedge running at right angles to the covert. A large white cabbage butterfly drifted past, and was captured dexterously by the alien. Now cabbage butterflies are a distinct pest, so one good mark was registered to the accused. Shortly he descended into the sapling corn, probably to take a beetle or mouse, and as these are not yet valuable as human food he was given another good mark.

He flew away after this, and landed a hundred yards down the hedge. Something drew his attention, something that was in the hedge itself. He dropped to the ground, and through my glasses I could see that he was climbing up the branches. When he returned, it was with something in his beak. I ran over the field and found that he had been robbing a chaffinch’s nest of its fledgling young. A weasel will do this, or a rat, and often a crow. But an owl! I was ashamed of my own kin.

I decided to advise the keeper to shoot all Little Owls.

Later in the day the little pirate seized a thrush, nearly as big as himself, and perching on it falcon-fashion, commenced to tear at the breast. I love the thrushes, for they do great good in the spring, destroying snails and worms. Besides, they voice with such ecstasy the joyful spirit of spring returned to the cold earth; in the winter they fill the heart with hope for the future. Most certainly the Little Owl would be outlawed.

During succeeding days I watched the pair eating worms; hunting, stoat-wise, in the ditch for baby rabbits; hovering over the meadow, like kestrel hawks, for mice and rats. Once I saw them catch a frog. And I knew that later on the partridge chicks would be taken. There was no doubt in my own mind that he must be shot and trapped whenever possible. I would tell Old Bob to bring along his twelve-bore.

With this determination in my mind I thought I would look at the nest. Now most owls will fly out when disturbed and leave the eggs or young to their fate. Much to my surprise, this bird sat tight. I broke a twig off and prodded her gently. She refused to budge. I pushed a little harder. With a mew like a distressed cat she left her four eggs and ran quickly to a hidden corner of the platform on which they were laid (the eggs were just visible as I looked down at them through a small hole in the top of the tree).