J.A. Baker’s centenary
John Alec Baker was born 100 years ago, on 6 August 1926. His book The Peregrine is a classic of nature writing.
A couple of weeks ago I watched three newly-fledged peregrines circling around, calling shrilly, not far from where I live. Twenty years ago I would have been astonished; now it is no great surprise – they have been breeding successfully in urban Yorkshire for well over a decade, and they were bound to find suitable places in this more rural area sooner or later.
J.A. (John Alec) Baker would have been even more surprised. In 1967 Baker, whose centenary falls on 6 August this year, wrote The Peregrine, a ground-breaking piece of nature writing that still wields a powerful influence today.
Baker died in 1987, and throughout his life, the peregrine was a rare bird everywhere, hardly known in his home county of Essex away from the coast, and there only in the wintertime. It had been persecuted by game shooters since Victorian times and from the late 1950s, it became an unintended victim of DDT and other weapons of mass destruction in the chemical warfare against insects.
The Peregrine begins and ends darkly, framing an exhilarating if obsessive pursuit of quarry. But by the time it was published, the peregrine had gone from the Essex coast and from most of its former haunts across the UK. By condensing ten winters’ worth of peregrine-watching into one notional six-month period, Baker turns the normality of a single season in the birds’ lives into an allegory for their inexorable demise over time. Spring comes every year and with it an emptiness relieved by the birds’ eventual return in the autumn; until they stop coming. Baker’s last entry is dated April 4th:
…dark clouds gloomed low in the cold north wind, and the light was very bad. The falling tide was far out across the saltings. The fields were as grey and bleak as the distant sea. Land and sea had been beaten flat into the same dull toneless metal. I love the desolate, but this was beyond desolate. It was dead.
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
Illegal persecution persists in certain heather-clad cultural backwaters – including some of the grouse moors within a few miles of here. Overall, though, attitudes have changed, and peregrines have started to move more freely in the populated lowlands. They have been breeding in central Sheffield since 2012; they have nested on or around Wakefield Cathedral since 2015, and there are two pairs in Huddersfield. All of these places are a short flight from where I live.
A couple of years ago an immature male – the bird in the main photo at the top of this blog – killed a wood pigeon in mid-air, and the dead bird landed two fields away from our house. For the next two hours the raptor stood guard, maintaining a no-fly zone against the attempts of local crows and buzzards to steal it.
By pure coincidence my book Windhover will be published in Baker’s centenary year, a few weeks after his hundredth birthday. As I point out in the book, falcons and humans evolved in the same place at the same time – in the newly opened-up grasslands of the East African savannah two-and-a-half million years ago. Kestrels evolved to hover over prairies, peregrines to charge along cliff-edges; humans went on to create analogues of both, with our fields and our cities, which suited the birds, too.
