The
peregrine falcon escapes me again. I wake listless
and without enthusiasm. Later, some way recovered, I go down to the salt marsh
in search of the falcon, a great big bird perched in a skinny tree, but the
bird has absconded. This time I have my camera. He must have known I was coming. (Photo borrowed from the web.)
The bird
first made an impression on me a couple of weeks ago when we saw him on the sand at
Wollaston Beach. A rather thin strand of beach with the tide up high, and some
of the ice from one of our cold spells scattered at the various wrack lines of
wind and tide. He was easy to spot because two photographers were already paying
him considerable attention. They were good enough to stay far enough away not to drive the bird away from the sight of the rest of us. Anne and I were the
only other passersby who stopped to look.
The bird,
grayish winter coat, large head and beak, appalling killer eye, barred a lighter
color, some beige maybe, across the breast, was finishing a measured repast of
something that, judging from the feathers at its feet, had once also been a bird
itself. Now it was lunch.
The bird
did not appear disturbed by the two men, one of whom stood on the sand and had settled in for a good, long observation. This one was
obscured behind an enormous photographic enterprise. Tripod supporting a barrel
lens so long it looked like some sort of new weaponry, something between a
flare gun and a mortar. I have no idea what it looked like to the falcon.
Nothing
happened while we watched. The man behind the camera on the sand may have
been focusing, massaging his lens, waiting for just the right light, waiting
for the bird to do something special: raise a wing and give him the finger with
his claws, maybe. I wouldn't want anyone to watch me stand over the remains of
a meal of feathers and airy bones, gull maybe. Our beach has plenty of gulls to
spare.
The other
man, young, quiet, with the intensity of birders who do not appear to wish to
share the experience, held a good looking but more modest-sized camera. I
presume he'd already taken his shots.
Since I didn't know what kind of amazing bird these two were staring at -- I thought it
might an osprey because of its impressive size, and because an osprey had
blissfully ignored our staring in Florida last spring -- I asked this man what
kind of bird it was. He spared me a word: "Peregrine."
This is
what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an impressive online source, says about this
creature. "Peregrine Falcons are the largest falcon over most of the
continent, with long, pointed wings and a long tail. Be sure to look at shape
as well as size—long primary feathers give the Peregrine a long-winged shape.
As with most raptors, males are smaller than females, so Peregrines can overlap
with large female Merlins or small male Gyrfalcons."
I said,
"I didn't know the peregrine was so big."
Their
measurements are given in centimeters. To the best of my conversion ability, they
can be two feet long. The wingspan is between thee and five feet. Simple
translation: they're big.
Two days
ago I saw him (or her) again, on a brittle-cold steel-gray afternoon when I was feeling
so bad about my decision to take a walk that I was already contemplating
turning back after a hundred yards. I looked up at the thin bare trees between
the side street and the salt marsh, thinking, well I'll never see anything moving in there today when there was the big, gray, roundish mass of raptor.
Peregrine,
I said, why don't I ever have my camera when we meet?
I was about
a dozen feet away from his tree. He was up in a branching about fifteen feet
from the ground, singularly uninterested in my presence.
I came back
the following afternoon, the day not much warmer, with the camera in my pocket. I
saw a jay in the tree. No peregrine.
Peregrine
The bird sits in his tree with a deadly eye upon the world
It has nothing to lose
It is, not the Stoic we sometimes imagine,
But Epicurean, pursuing happiness
Death is nothing to you, bird
Happiness, or its pursuit, is all we ever have
The falcon stands on the sand of Quincy Shore
Feathers of its prey at his feet, or claws
Gull, maybe. It pursues medium-sized birds, I read
I pursue large ones
Two men take its photograph,
One with the world's longest telescope lens
Other birds flee us
Peregrine stays for lunch
Days later, a cold week feels longer,
I find him again, perched not very high
in a tree neither tall, nor far from the road
None can see you, bird
You are safe with us
We're the killers here
One day you will take us to
Bird Spirit
Land
No comments:
Post a Comment