The Peregrine

A photograph gives me the form of the bird, but it remains up to me to see the bird as a bird. And that can be difficult. What do we see when we see a bird? 

The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s masterpiece of descriptive prose, provides an answer, an answer that is as much about how we see as it is about what we see when we see birds. Sometimes we pull ourselves into the sight of others and the world emerges as more than its light. We see by being seen.

Baker achieves this kind of seeing both in… show more.

Werner Herzog demands that his film students read this book, and it's easy to see why: it's an act of pure seeing that makes a humdrum English landscape blaze with vivid life. Baker, who seems diffident about humanity at best ("we reek of death," he grumbles) embarks on a quest to know the peregrine falcons who live in—and pass through—the place where he lives, and in describing their lives he finds a luminous and heroic world hidden in the muddy fields and clouded skies of Essex. Ours "is a dying world, like Mars," he writes, "but glowing still."  

The Peregrine is magnificent and widely considered a classic of British nature writing. For me, I love its simplicity: you sit and watch with Baker, observing one of Britain’s most iconic birds through the seasons. The writing is incredibly therapeutic; it delivers you into the moment and keeps you there. Baker’s observations are as shrewd as the bird he writes about. You can read it all at once or dip in and out of it. It’s a book to be kept by the bedside and returned to again and again.