Baker’s The Peregrine immerses readers in a bird’s world

J. A. Baker’s “The Peregrine” immerses readers in the sensory world of birdwatching, ERR’s review by Aliis Aalmann says. The review was published in Värske Rõhk.

Published in Estonian by Kaarnakivi Selts in 2025 and translated by Liisi Rünkla, the book brings together Baker’s observations of birds from 1954 to 1963. The observations are presented as one continuous journey, as though they took place over a single year. This allows readers to move in rhythm with the peregrine falcons and the nature around them without a sense of fragmentation.

The book demands time and patience, Aalmann writes. It should be read “feather by feather,” like a peregrine falcon plucking its prey, piercing it with its beak and picking the meat from the bones while carefully watching its surroundings. By the end, the reader’s hunger, she believes, may be satisfied.

Although the subject may initially seem simple, the reviewer says Baker’s style is rich in imagery and highly precise. She describes the book as almost a masterclass in literary devices, with similes, metaphors, personification and epithets that could be used to teach these forms to a primary school student.

Baker’s precise images allow the reader to enter both the inner world of birdwatching and the environments being described, while leaving the human ego in the background. The experience creates the feeling of existing as one of the birds, perceiving the world more sharply and in more varied ways than a human being.

The book engages all the senses. A reader can sense the smell of frost, autumn or a human being. A day may smell “bitter and metallic,” while the carcass of a black-headed gull smells “fresh and sweet, like a mixture of raw beef and pineapple.”

The descriptions form a kind of cocoon that pushes the rest of the world aside while the book is being read. Streams appear silver, water is “pale grey and white,” and the morning is trapped beneath a deep-grey cloud hood or grows brighter as it fades. The land is rust-coloured with winter ferns, silver with birches and green with moss-covered oaks, while ploughed soil is “dark as malt.”

Wigeons are copper-red with chrome-yellow stripes, the eyes of a tawny owl are grape-blue, and the male peregrine is “lion-coloured.” Colours seem to sting in the sunlight, Aalmann writes, and during reading they appear to sting before the eyes because the images are painted so vividly.

Sounds emerge alongside the colours and smells: shrieks, a deep song, squeaks, the nasal rasping of a goshawk, the hoarse roaring call of a long-eared owl, the “lamenting, suffocating braying” of lesser spotted woodpeckers, the “gurgling, throaty conversation” of cormorants and the rough, loud bubbling of black-tailed godwits.

Every description of a smell, colour or sound has been carefully considered, making the world of the book increasingly precise. The sounds can also be imagined as belonging to the wind, rain or bodies of water. The rustle of wings is always present as birds rise and fall.

In strong contrast to these natural sounds are those made by humans. “Guns were fired in the forest all day, and at dusk every strip of roadside bushes was lined with guns,” Baker writes. This pulls the reader back from a natural paradise into reality, where human beings cannot be escaped.

At times, the reader is reminded that the observer is also human. In one passage, a peregrine recognises “my shape, the hostile human shape.” Generally, however, the birdwatcher and author blends into his surroundings.