"The one book I would ask you to read if you want to make films.” — Werner Herzog

“The Peregrine cannot be passively consumed. It sticks in the craw, it rakes the mind.” — Robert MacFarlane

It’s a hard book to describe because it really is that simple: a guy follows around the peregrine falcons that have made his rural English town their home. The main text, the day-to-day tracking of the falcons, takes place from October 1962 to April 1963.

For plot, that’s it. The plot is the pattern, the repetition, going out every day, coming in. At first, the falcons are hard to see and fly away before the author can get close. Toward the end, there is the sense that the falcons are just as curious about him, his comings and goings. By the end of the book, it’s not so much that he becomes the falcon, but more like he learns how to see the world through the eyes of the falcon. Which means he is seeing himself, out of his world, coming into the falcon’s gaze, going out to come back the next day.

Throughout the entire book, there is an overwhelming sense of loss, “an atmosphere of requiem,” according to MacFarlane’s introduction. It’s in the dying elms that line the creek. It’s in the small descriptions of infrastructure around the town, on the roads to the farms and orchards, their disappearing habitat. It’s in the author himself, although we never learn why. There’s one sequence where he tramps his way through a muddy swamp to keep track of the falcon of the day and, after I was done reading the sequence, I looked up whether J.A. Baker was a veteran, that’s how much it evoked trench warfare. He wasn’t. He was a teenager during WWII.

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” That quote is appropriate not just for falcons but also for Baker’s prose. It’s hard to describe how stunning the prose is. At times it’s written like a captain’s log, or like he’s using shorthand. Some of his most interesting language sounds like it’s been scribbled quickly in a notebook out in the drizzle or lost in the fog, clipped and jumbled together. “The tide was low. Mud shone like wet sand…Colour smarted in sunlight.” The writing has its own rhythm and logic, its own syntax. At one point the falcon flying through the pines becomes a fat pike swimming through the reeds.

One of the most quoted passages happens on Christmas Eve day, an extremely cold day. He stumbles upon a heron lying on the ground, wounded or maimed although it’s not clear. Maybe it was shot down? It must’ve been there the entire night because it’s frozen to the ground, “stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together…All was dead but the fear of man. As I approached I could see its whole body craving into flight.”

“No pain, no death is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man…We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.”

Purchase the edition with the Robert McFarlane introduction HERE.

Feb. 2024