Birds of East Kent: Kestrel

Latest in an occasional series of posts discussing the different birds that can be found in East Kent and how easy (or not) it is to get a decent picture of them.

I don't usually bother with top-ten lists or stuff like that, but if I had to choose a favourite bird it would undoubtedly be the Kestrel. It's not the biggest (or smallest) bird of prey; nor is it the most colourful. It's not even the only British bird that hovers, though the other contenders can't hope to match its precision or its tenacity. But, more than any other bird, it's always been a small part of my life in some shape or form. It was there on the striking red badge I received when I joined the YOC:

It was there in Ken Loach's famous film (adapted from the novel by Barry Hines) that I saw in my early teens. And it was there at the start and end of the summer holidays, glimpsed from the side window of a car; a bird that seemed to defy not just gravity but time itself as it hovered above the roadside verges while the twentieth century flowed around it.

I've had the privilege of seeing a wild kestrel up close on a couple of occasions, most recently in February of this year when I encountered one perched in a small tree by the North Foreland golf course. I took some photos and continued on to Botany Bay to see if there was anything interesting on the shore. When I turned around to walk back I was surprised to see the same kestrel standing on a fence post. Naturally, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take some more photos:

From badges to films to poetry (see: The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins) there is something about the kestrel that seems ingrained in the British psyche. A good example of this can be found in Powell and Pressburger's 1944 wartime classic A Canterbury Tale. In the film's prologue, a group of medieval pilgrims make their way towards Canterbury while a voiceover narrates a passage from Chaucer's text. A falconer stops to release a kestrel into the sky. The bird dips and soars ... and transforms into a Spitfire flying above the English countryside. Four hundred years of history spanned in a single cut.

If the description of that scene rings a bell it's because Stanley Kubrick used the same trick in the famous bone-to-spacecraft transition in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Coincidence, homage or blatant rip-off? It's a question that's been debated for fifty years, and will probably be debated for fifty more. In the meantime, the kestrel continues to soar above fields, along cliff-tops, and across marshes - hovering, observing, sometimes descending for prey, and then moving on, seeing colours that no human eye can see as it patiently constructs its daily map of the world.

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. 

Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

See also:
More of my Kestrel photos on Flickr
Kestrel (RSPB)
Kestrel (Birdforum)
Kestrel (Birdguides)

Birds of East Kent: Peregrine Falcon

Latest in an occasional series of posts discussing the different birds that can be found in East Kent.

The peregrine makes its presence felt long before you see it: a dead pigeon lies on its back on a windswept beach, its wings spread and its breastbone stripped of meat; a golfer notices your camera and calls out to tell you that you "just missed a peregrine"; fulmars cackle their disapproval as a crossbow-shaped shadow glides over their nests and across the cliff-face. You walk and you walk until finally you see a hunched, powerful-looking bird poised on an outcrop of flint. On the beach below a man is walking his dog, blissfully unaware of the apex predator right above his head, but when you peer through the lens you see that the peregrine is looking at you, not the dog or its owner. A peregrine sees everything and misses nothing. It spotted you the moment you stepped into its field of view, and now that it knows you're looking at it, the peregrine alone will decide how close you will be allowed to get.

Thanks to works like J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, the eponymous falcon enjoys a near-mythical status unmatched perhaps by any other British bird. Baker's account (I can't really call it a memoir since the author effectively excises himself from the narrative) condenses a decade's worth of observations into a single year, a structural choice which also has the effect of condensing his patient study of the peregrine into a singularly obsessive quest. Reading it, you're left in little doubt that Baker - short-sighted and afflicted with a rare and rather unpleasant form of arthritis (I speak from experience on the latter) - wishes he were a peregrine himself:

Free! You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light. Along the escarpments of the river air he rose with martial motion. Like a dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus.

Like dark chocolate, Baker's dense, synaesthetic prose is probably best savoured in small chunks. And yet, for all the linguistic fireworks on display, the narrative is tinged with a wistful, elegiac tone. Baker had good reason to be pessimistic; at the time he wrote his book the peregrine was in serious decline - its numbers ravaged by persecution and pesticides.

But for once, the story has a happy postscript (albeit one that Baker himself didn't live to see). Peregrine Falcons have enjoyed a spectacular resurgence and you can now see them right across the country, repopulating urban environments as well as their more traditional hunting grounds. If you live near a cathedral or a high chalk cliff, there's a good chance you also live near a peregrine. And when you see one for yourself you'll understand why these majestic birds inspire such reverential prose.

See also:
More of my Peregrine photos on Flickr
Keith Ross's YouTube channel (includes a series of short films on the Ramsgate Peregrines)
Peregrine Falcon (RSPB)
Peregrine Falcon (Birdforum)
Peregrine Falcon (Birdguides)

The Company of Kestrels

Getting sharp photos of birds in flight is difficult enough with conventional lenses, let alone with a manual-focus telescope, which is why - as much as I appreciate Marsh Harriers, Sparrowhawks, Hobbies, Buzzards and the like - Kestrels will always be my favourite bird of prey.

I saw this handsome specimen working the cliff-top at North Foreland, but I had to follow it all the way to Kingsgate Bay before I got the shot I was looking for (above). It then proceeded to tail me all the way back to Stone Bay. A case of a raptor using a photographer to flush out potential prey? Wishful thinking on my part perhaps, but it's nice to imagine that it wasn't just me who got something out of the encounter.

Now if only other birds could master the art of hovering in one spot...