Plenty has been written about humans bonding with dogs (Old Yeller, The Call of the Wild, The Voice of Bugle Ann) or with horses (National Velvet, The Black Stallion), but not much about humans bonding with birds. Which seems strange, since falconry certainly has an ancient pedigree (the earliest evidence of it dates to the eighth century B.C.).

Nowadays birds are pretty popular. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, nearly 48 million Americans have taken up bird-watching as a hobby. Throughout the pleasanter months of the year a good many of those millions will take to field, forest and wetland to renew their acquaintance with the feathered flocks.

Most will engage in just looking at them, hoping to add another name to the list of those they’ve seen. But avian encounters can prove a good deal more profound than that, as two books in the outstanding NYRB Classics series conclusively demonstrate.

One, The Goshawk, is by T.H. White, best known for his retelling of the Arthurian legends in The Once and Future King. It was written in 1936, but not published until 15 years later. White turned his attention instead to another book, which was published in 1938: The Sword in the Stone.

The other book, The Peregrine, is by one J.A. Baker, about whom little is known. Born in 1926, he married in 1956, and his book is dedicated “To My Wife.”  He is said to have been a librarian — and that’s about it.

White’s book, which chronicles his attempt to train the largest of the true hawks, is the more immediately accessible. He was a professional writer, a skilled entertainer with words, and it shows on every page. Here he is describing a passage hawk (a grown hawk captured in the wild, not taken from the nest as a fledgling, as White’s — named Gos — had been): “He had been educated by nature into perfect poise and sensibility: he, by curved beak and sudden gripe, had learned to be a natural gentleman, an epicure, a confident noble, as we by means of civilization had ceased to learn to be.”

Both White and Baker were misanthropes, though White disguises this by his urbane tone. Baker, whose book is a diary of a single winter of observing peregrines in the peninsular region of England known as East Anglia (including Norfolk and Suffolk), makes no such attempt. “I avoid humans,” he tells us, opining that “man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood.”

The books sometimes echo each other. “I was as free as a hawk,” White declares, while Baker is pleased to note that “I am as solitary now as the hawk I pursue.”

Deftly written and engaging as it is, White’s book is no match for Baker’s preternaturally incandescent prose. Phrases leap out: a cry is “serrated,” starlings form “snaking lariats,” a soaring peregrine is “fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of sky.” The division between poetry and prose is obliterated: “Dry leaves wither and shine, green of the oak is fading, elms are barred with luminous gold.”

Baker’s book takes time to read. One simply needs to pause from to time to savor the precise expression of his observations. This, for instance:  “Under the wind, a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted till death.” Or this: “A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a mad puritan with a banana in his mouth.”

Baker’s identification with the falcon becomes unsettling, but no less compelling for that. In fact, one reads of it with riveted fascination:

I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days here in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.

Both books teach several lessons well worth learning. One is that to encounter nature truly, one must enter it in solitude, not with a crowd of companions, and certainly not with a chattering guide. Another is that one must learn to observe, not just look around. This takes patience and steadiness, not expensive equipment, and certainly not secondary sources. The primary sources are right before your eyes.

We have become accustomed to having experience mediated for us. We go to a museum to see an exhibition of paintings and instead of simply looking at them — they are, after all, a visual art — we slap on a set of earphones and hear about them. But what you see for yourself is infinitely more precious than anything any expert can tell you. Suppose you see a bird behaving in a way that runs counter to what a guidebook says. Well, to the extent that what the guidebook says runs counter to your experience, the guidebook is wrong.

So forget about adding another name to your life list. Start paying attention to the birds right outside your window, even if they’re only scruffy and scrappy house sparrows. See what you can learn about them strictly on your own, as if you were looking at them, in Dylan Thomas’ phrase, “after the birth of the simple light / In the first spinning place.” Write down what you see and, if necessary, bend the language to record what you have noticed as precisely as possible. Don’t read about them. Do that later — much later — when you can judge what you read in terms of first-hand experience.

In short, put Yogi Berra’s axiom to the test: Find out how much you can observe just by watching. Really watching.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

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