Let it die as it was born…

I didn’t even have time to focus my binoculars. The shock slammed them hard against my surprised spectacles: anomalous barriers carving the amazement unhesitatingly into my face. The squabbling, squeaking sparrows didn’t even have time to hide: lined up ‒ as they were – regularly, innocently, spaced along the fence-top as fairground targets are… (although these ragged rascals were – it turned out – surprisingly safe: protected by perspective and pathological fledgling hunger; paradoxically, those wiser, those hidden, those mute, were not). The air didn’t even have time to part – literally playing its supporting role to perfection: greasing the event, the skimming of its constituent atoms, of the life it fires. Of one life concluded.

“Never begin a sentence with ‘suddenly’,” admonished Mr Whittle; “it’s just lazy.” But no thesaurus could repair such experience, such horrored admiration, such surprise. Suddenly… there had been silence: one of those silences where every sound in the world is – suddenly… – sucked away; inhaled deep into the Earth’s core; and any breeze just stops. Suddenly. To the parent birds – blessed with faster heartbeats and visions than mine – metabolisms meant to help with such events… – that extraction of noise forewarned them. Huddled deep as they could within the shrubs, they were safe. They thought. They should have been.

Suddenly. Faster than a migraine can floor me. Literally in the blink of an eye; in the blink of my eye. Suddenly. A quantum happening: matter seemingly in two places at one time; superimposed; entangled. Suddenly. Had I had time to measure its velocity, spin, or mass, somehow I do not think I could have perturbed its motion in any way: its one fundamental mission was too precise; set too deep within its instincts. Had there been a threshing of wings, the world could, would not have rotated any differently.

But what does he understand? Does he really ‘know’ that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel – as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white – that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.

I have never seen a bird move (so faint a word for so dark a purpose) so quickly, so smoothly, so bullet-like; never had one slice open such a new, hollow, soundscape. I dropped my arms just as the blur on the distant roofline materialized into a hollow-point explosion of birds and bushes: some sparrows – only dazed – even spattering the windowpane with the force: our cat scrambling from its glass-side perch clumsily: frightened, instinctively, by the unknown sudden sound and motion; its usual gracefulness erased. The younger passerines, aligned as they were, had been perpendicular to the villain’s vantage: and therefore – I presume – too difficult to visually disentangle. One older, though, not quite tangled or huddled enough, high in the rose’s silhouette, was now taken. Taken with the precision of the practised hunter. The proficient killer – adept at sating its needs – now nowhere in sight.

And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending – hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and snow filling the bill’s wide silent scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk’s beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away.
    And for the hawk, resting now on the soft flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of the beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within.
    And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed.

I still cannot confirm whether peregrine or sparrowhawk. The size, the shadow, measured against the woodpigeon which usually haunts that same wide vantage, posits the latter – but I saw no flash of rich-red-brown. (But it was the simultaneous appearance of this shape, this ‘jizz’, on so many retinas, which soaked up all sound. Too momentary for my senses, the wiser sparrows seemed to have it etched with significance. All I knew was that… – with such an absence of the pigeon’s scrawny, ever-rotating neck; with such taut, muscular, transitory stillness; such focus… – was that terror was newly at hand.) That speed, that accuracy, though, posits the former. Both are aliens in these skies: only buzzards, kestrels, and the increasingly comfortable red kites, inhabitants.

I have witnessed, though…

The swallows mobbing a stubbornly-stupid sparrowhawk – which, eventually, was driven away by their constant barrage, accompanied by excited, machine-gunned ‘splee-plink’ and ‘flitt-flitt’ alarm calls (although they actually appeared to be enjoying themselves…). A birdfight, rather than a dogfight.

…that hawk clumsy, perhaps, with youth. The peregrine, though, is familiar in flesh only from JA Baker’s astounding book (those first two quotations, above – in language which surges past, overflows, any fluidity I could muster – indubitably, intensely his). And yet, still, even now, I am not certain. I am told that the sparrowhawk “usually hunts by stealth, waiting in hedges or other cover… and will pursue prey through vegetation”; whereas the peregrine “feeds primarily on birds which it takes in midair after a steep, swift dive from above them”. Whichever it was (and my fuddled gut still clings to the peregrine’s wings), the harsh, talon-sharp memory – unique, oft-replayed – but so far fixed – remains (but remains unresolved).

Others’ powers of recall are easily weathered, though, it appears. For a week or so afterwards, all of the sparrows, regardless of age – and there is a generational group of anywhere between one and two dozen on any given day… – seemed to flock deeper within the shrubs that overlook our neighbours’ feeding station; and fewer went to feed at one time. The adults remain there (thoughtlessly pecking at the resident blackfly): ensconced in habit and habitat; but the youngsters, eager to feed on tastier morsels – now their parents have refused to respond to their over-eager squeaks and no-longer-soft-and-yellow beaks – all throng together, again, atop the open fence. Easy quarry, one would think: but there seem to be no obvious vantage points from which to take them; and our mysterious villain shows no signs of returning. Yet.

How do prey become aware of an unfamiliar predator? And how did the adults form their strategy (which I would presume is successful for the majority of occasions: reducing their visibility, and therefore supposed risk)? No permanent or obvious long-term change seems to have taken place in any of the sparrows’ feeding routines. But, at some point, I presume the youngsters will simply follow their parents’ usually prudent – and perhaps genetically-programmed – actions: with this vivid (to a human) occasion playing no part in their behaviour.

What intrigues (and, to be honest, stuns) me most is that – from over thirty metres away; and with its prey partly obscured by moving leaves of a similar size – this predator selected and obtained its target so swiftly and accurately. Part of me wishes to see it do so again. Just for the thrill. But – if there is a next time – I hope the sparrow ducks.