I can't rate this book. On the one hand, I can see that the writing might appeal as poetry, that the descriptions are abundant and many people like that, and that a mood is certainly set. It's a well-written book. But I disliked all of that. I found the writing too complicated to read: that included the vocabulary, much of which I didn't know, and the names of all those birds, many of which I had never heard of. I spent a lot of time not knowing what he was talking about. There was too much description, even if I had known what he was talking about. And that mood... for a while I enjoyed that sort of melancholy mist and rain and cold, although for the most part, I was bored. But after a while it became depressing, it was all about killing, not surprising since they spend a lot of their time dealing with their next meal, but still, all those dead birds in the mist and finally in the snow and ice were getting to me.
I feel bad because this book was a gift from a friend. She sent it because she knows I've been following the Cal Falcons, the peregrine family that has been nesting at the top of the Berkeley campanile for several years. Actually it is Annie who has been nesting. Her mates get killed or otherwise disappear and of course the chicks fledge and fly off. But each year around this time, when Annie and her beau start to mate I watch from far away on the internet where they have three webcams set up. I never find them boring.
Why did he repeatedly refer to the peregrines as hawks when they are not hawks. Surely he knows that. It threw me off at the beginning of the book and was the only thing I bothered to look up. It made me wonder if he actually knew much about birds, but it became clear he knew quite a lot.
I read 129 of the 191 pages and called it quits.

I struggled my way through a lot of this, but by the end I felt myself immersed in the world he portrays. He has a really beautiful way of depicting birds and talking about them. My issue is that I'm bad at picturing imagery so the detailed descriptions of how birds look and fly often felt quite difficult for me even when I struggled over them. But the way he talks about bird behaviours and the experience of being around them, how they make you feel... every time it's perfect. ( )

Hunter played while Flossie read from J.A. Baker - bliss in the garden ( )

J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine is a difficult bastard to review. The content is monotonous, dense and at times overwhelmingly pedantic. It calls for a reading experience that is excruciating slow, with each diary entry requiring multiple sweeps to fully substantiate the images Baker weaves together. Brian Eno’s album Ambient 4 is an absolute must for background music, and reading out loud is preferable (while gesticulating excessively and animating your voice with some truly Shakespearean heft and gusto - take up as much space as possible and strut the stage of your bedroom like Orson Welles). You’ll have to push yourself to get to the end, but once you’ve surveyed the landscape you can easily come back and give each passage the necessary closer scrutiny it cries out for. Also, make sure not to watch Herzog talk about it (of course the paradox is you’ll have to watch Herzog talk about it if you want to read the bloody thing in the first place, I’m fairly certain that the majority of this book’s contemporary audience was introduced to it through him) because he reads out all of the best passages - once you get to the places he has already read you’ll internally don his Bavarian breathlessness and feel like you are merely regurgitating already conquered/mastered flights of fancy. ( )

The Peregrine, published in 1967, has become something of a cult classic among aficionados of nature writing. The book follows the author’s intensely personal observations of a pair of Peregrin hawks in eastern England from mid-October to early April. [The observations in question actually took place over a ten year period, but the book telescopes them into a single hunting season for purposes of presentation.]

We learn that the term falcon applies only to the female of the species; her male counterpart, who is considerably smaller, is known as a tercel. All peregrines are fierce, efficient predators whose principal prey consists of other birds, which the hawks usually kill in mid flight. They are extremely fast fliers, equipped with lethal talons and beaks.

The book has remained popular largely because of the high quality of the writing. I opened the book at random, and the first paragraph I encountered contained the following:

“They sailed overhead, three hundred feet up, canting slowly round on still and rigid wings. With feathers fully spread, and dilated with the sustaining air, they were wide, thick-set, cobby-looking hawks. The thin intricate mesh of pale brown and silver-grey markings overlaying the buff surfaces of their underwings contrasted with the vertical mahogany-brown streaks on the deep amber yellow of their chests. Their clenched feet shone against the white tufts of their under-tail coverts. The bunched toes were ridged and knuckled like golden grenades.”

The author is also adept at denominalization (changing a noun into a verb) and other forms of anthimeria, i.e., using one part of speech as another. But there is a problem with this level of description—after 50 pages or so, it begins to cloy; and after 190 pages, it becomes nearly unbearable.

Another problem with the book is that it has virtually no narrative arc. The “story” consists of the author going out each day to observe birds. Sometimes he sees a peregrine, or sees that other birds (described in fine detail) see a peregrine. Sometimes he sees the remains of a bird the peregrine has killed. The next day is the same, as is the next day, and on it goes. Admittedly, there is some (very modest) progression in that as we get deeper and deeper into the book, the author is able to approach the peregrines more and more closely. But nothing else happens.

I would recommend that readers of the book take it a soupcon at a time. Teachers of English or creative writing can analyze randomly chosen passages as examples of virtuoso composition. But for me, the book as a whole is a little too much of a good thing.

(JAB) ( )