Restless Brilliance

Masters of the air, the peregrine falcon reveals the wild beauty hidden in our everyday skies

- Jim Crumley

IT began with a long stillness. The watcher had not seen the bird's arrival, but without doubt the bird had seen his. It was there, among skyline rocks a few hundred feet above, where the habit of decades instructs the watcher to look for it. There is a certain rock, a blip on the watcher's skyline, from where he chooses to sit. Rock and eyrie are at the high point of their crag.

In relation to the eyrie's barely visible overhang, the rock offers the standing bird all it needs to see and tells it all it needs to know. The bird maintains its long stillness, offering the watcher most of what he needs to see and tells him most of what he needs to know in order to write down what follows.

Bird and watcher have one further factor in common: each is familiar in the eyes of the other. Biological reality insists that, in order to go some way towards equalising the efficiency of those two sets of eyes, the watcher needs the 10 times magnification of good binoculars. The peregrine falcon needs nothing more than the eyes it is born with, for these are unarguably among the most efficient in all the wild world.

Bird and watcher each wear their own plumage. One wears the shades of rock and Scottish skies, the other the shades of rock and woodland.

The watcher's approach to his habitual rock is slow, deliberate, ritualised. The bird appears to trust it, or at least appears unthreatened by it.

The watcher has never seen the bird approach the rock and never seen it alight there. He has his theories about what the approach might look like, but the habit of decades has yet to tell him if he is right. He likes that element of the unknown, the unexplained, the still-to-be-discovered. His favourite theory is that, on any four consecutive occasions when the bird perches there, it approaches from four different directions.