The Peregrine

Description

From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk. It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.

Promotion info

"A powerful evocation of East Anglia's winter landscape, and an unforgettable portrait of a man's passionate engagement with the natural world." -London Review of Books

Reviews

'John Alex Baker was something of a mystery and not a great deal is known of his private life, ... But few people have gained - and successfully shared - such a deep understanding of a wild animal, and for that Baker will never be forgotten.' -- Fergus Collins BBC Countryfile

Author description

J. A. Baker is also the author of The Hill of Summer. He was a native of Essex, England. Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind (2003), about wilderness and the Western imagination, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian First Book Award, among other prizes.