Being the indisputable (journalese) truth about the peregrine falcon that came to St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1920.
THE beechwood was ten miles from London. One morning in late September a strange visitor came to it, and perched upon a low branch. A blackbird, feeding below among the dried moss and brown leaves, shrilled a sudden alarm. The blackbird had never seen such an apparition before, but he recognised the family.
The newcomer remained still. He was tired and exhausted after a long journey. Since dawn he had flown high up, his pinions urged on and on by a fierce despair. For his mate had been shot upon Lundy Island, and he had flown straight into the sun’s face as though to find her spirit taken back into its flame that gave all the wild ones life. Swift had he flown, never pausing till he came to the beechwood; seeing it below, and wrapping his wings around him, he had fallen like a great iron arrowhead into its solitude.
The pigeons who roosted were in the stubble: the starlings haunted the water-meadows: the jackdaws flocked with the rocks about the furrows. The beechwood was still, for the blackbird had slipped away.
The stranger flapped his long thin wings, and looked around him.
He was about eighteen inches long, and bluish-ash in colour. His throat and upper breast were white, tinged with yellow, and marked with a few dark streaks. But the most noticeable thing was the eyes. They were large, and keen, dusky; ringed with yellow eyelids. Fierce and remorseless was their expression, aided by the short, hooked bill.
The falcon suddenly stiffened. From the lake below the sloping forest had come a faint trumpet-like call. He knew the call well, for many times had he and his mate preyed upon the wild duck in the Devon estuary opposite Lundy Island.
The next moment he had gone through the trees, a swift shadow. A little vole splitting a beechmast on the ground below crouched in terror. For everything preyed upon its kind. The weasel came by day, and in summer the grass snake; if it left the wood and went to the meadow there was the poised kestrel hawk; in the furrows a fox sometimes ran, snapping at the tiny mice; in the dark night came the great wood owl, and that white devil, the barn owl.
The mouse crouched in terror, but he passed on, a swift shadow: he was a noble bird, and did not take rodents.
Seven duck had flighted, and were going towards the reaches of the Thames. They flew fast and steadily, at fifty miles an hour. The passing narrow shadow became a relentless and swift whirling speck above them, ever climbing.
Then one of the duck was falling, the flight was scattered; the falling one clutched and borne to the beechwood, where the hooked beak tore and ripped.
Thenceforward the wood became a place of terror. One morning the keeper discovered a cock pheasant lying dead on the leaves. A small part of its breast had been eaten. At first he thought that it was the work of a fox—but he was puzzled; he knew that the fox usually ate more of a longtail than a small part of its breast, and always buried his half-eaten victim for consumption on another occasion. And on turning it over, he was still more puzzled. The back was ripped as though a knife had slashed and turned the skin right back.
A hundred yards away he found a carrion crow. The back of the crow was also smashed, although no attempt had been made to eat any section of its body. In other parts of the wood the keeper found slain pheasants, all badly broken; the remains of a squirrel—one forepaw and a bushy tail comprising the remains. Three dead duck floated in the lake. Whatever new and ghastly thing was causing the havoc, he told his head man later, it seemed to delight in destroying and killing for sport.
Gradually the terror became the topic of talk in the inns roundabout Bromley, in Kent. Some of the bolder and more imaginative declared that it was caused by an Arctic owl—one even said that he had seen it stooping at a dog in the twilight. He was a well-known liar.
No one in the district—which was outlying to a large town just outside the suburban area of south-east London—had ever heard of the like.
The mystery was solved in a sudden manner. The keeper had been setting baited traps—of the “gin” variety—tempting the unknown with the entrails of rabbits. But he caught nothing save a mangy stoat, blind in one eye and the other filming over with age. The gins were of no avail.
The keeper kept fowls in his garden. One day he was sitting in the porch of his cottage, smoking after the midday meal, and ruminating on what the squire had said about giving up the rearing of pheasants. His fowls were strutting and scratching: one had recently produced an egg and was proclaiming the fact with unmelodious insistency.
There came a hissing as of something falling: an alarmed curse from a hen. The keeper jumped up, swearing at the bluish tumbling of narrow wings that had gone over the hedge.
One of his fowls was kicking the air spasmodically. There was blood on the path. He picked the hen up—it was headless.
The keeper swore; he knew what had caused the mischief among his longtails and duck. It was a big hawk—of a kind never seen before. So swiftly had it come that the fowl was decapitated by those dagger spikes on the hind claw of the raider’s feet.
One day a journalist was walking in a meadow. The meadow was near to a copse containing a dozen tall elm trees. In the elms were nearly a hundred black patches—a colony of rooks at their old nests. The rookery had been deserted in June, when old and young birds took to the fields and made local migrations.
That morning a mist had lain in the meadow and the rooks had known that it was time to return to the colony.
As the journalist, happy in the October sunshine, passed near the rookery, he was surprised to see the whole flock—some hundreds of birds—rise with harsh imperative cries into the air. The beating of many jet wings caused a vast soughing, and the leaves below the trees rose and flitter-fluttered with the winnowing. As suddenly as it had begun, the outcry ceased. Yet still the birds climbed higher.
Soon they were just specks against the blue, wheeling like a ring of smoke in one great circle. Then the agitated cries came again. One segment of the circle broke into falling and diving, zooming and slipping, birds, as though a strong wind had scattered them every way.
The journalist was mystified. He sat down to watch, and to discover the reason.
Two of the rooks had left the circle, and were diving to earth. As they came nearer he saw that their wings hung limp. They fell a hundred yards away, and he ran over to them. They were dead.
Picking one up, it was warm, the sunlight gleaming on the hues of its wings, glinting green and purple. Their backs were bare of feathers, and gaping with a terrible wound. He was more mystified, then thought that for some inexplicable reason the other rooks had pecked them to death. But why? He was more puzzled as he thought. He was well known for his puzzles.
Looking up, he saw that the circle had swung higher than ever. Gradually it drifted away, silent.
The journalist, who had some knowledge of natural history and ornithology, returned to London the next day and wrote the incident up as a “news story.” But he could give no explanation. The editor was sceptical; said that it was no good. He laughed, and mentioning that it was “punk,” promptly “spiked” it.
Meanwhile something was about to happen in London.
It was half-past five on Saturday afternoon. The journalist, who worked with a newspaper that went to press on Saturday night for publication on Sunday, was passing St. Paul’s Cathedral. He stopped to look at the pigeons strutting and searching for crumbs upon the worn paving stones. He found two months continuous work to be most exhausting. He still was puzzled about the dead rooks. He had been to every paper in London with his “rook story,” but no one would print it. He even got laughed at as a “fake merchant”—a tribute to imagination, but damning as a reputation.
Like chaff before a blast of wind the pigeons scattered. His paper was rumpled by the agitated draught caused by their departure.
Looking up to the dome he saw a flock of about fifty pigeons wheeling in steady flight near the cross at the top. A speck fell with a suddenness that reminded him of a shot aeroplane: like a plunging halbert-head it was; there was a puff of feathers dancing and fluttering—the flock scattered, dived to earth, anywhere, anyhow, and the dark halbert-head became outlined against the sky, perched on the gilt cross that glistened in the afternoon sun.
Then he knew that it was a peregrine falcon, and thrilling with the sight, took a taxi-cab back to Fleet Street (he was young and keen) and “wrote the story up.”
His editor “liked” the idea, but demanded that it should be rendered in what the journalist thought was the most illiterate English. The journalist and the editor sneered at each other about prose for some time: and the editor won. The illiterate account was penned, mauled over by a sub-editor, and finally displayed prominently on the front page of his paper. But the editor only leered when the journalist asked for his taxi-cab fare.
The falcon, leaving the woods near London came once more. The woods were ten miles from St. Paul’s, and it took him eight minutes to fly to the dome.
His end was an epic one, and becomes such a noble spirit. From what the journalist dreamed, he was able to imagine the death, and here it is.
One morning by the lake side stood a gray stump, a tall thing on two stalk-like legs. The gray stump remained motionless, as though watching his own dull image in the water.
It was a heron fishing.
He remained still for many minutes. Something passed in the water, a long neck shot forward, and a gleaming fish, pierced by the beak, drawn from the lake. The heron, who had paid a visit every morning from the heronry at Tonbridge, flew away; a slow-flapping, unwieldy thing, over a yard in length. His feet stretched out behind him, his head was tucked in between his shoulders.
The falcon was about. He stooped at the heron. Perhaps the spirit of ancestors, who left the gauntletted wrists of falconers to fly at the heron of olden times, was about him: for how else should he have dared that pointed beak? Rolling like a ship in a gale, heavily and in distress, the heron turned on his back, and held his beak pointed at the stooping falcon.
The hawk swerved; swept up again; regained height, wrapped his wings about him and plunged. Again the beak met him, once more he swerved.
So the combat went on. Nearer the keeper’s cottage they drifted. Now the heron was calling in distress, Kaa-ack, kaa-ack. Fell the halbert-head, darted the spear-beak, slipped the halbert-head. It was to be a fight to the death, till one should misjudge by the minutest error of time, the plundering heron or the outlawed falcon. The small birds hid themselves in the bushes—the sound of a shot rang out, the heron tumbled in alarm, recovered, flapped away; an eddy of gray feathers swirled in the wind, the echo of the report shivered back from the woods—and the falcon fell on the grass, its beak gaping, and panting for breath.
The keeper picked up the wild one, never more to swoop on “longtail” or “bird,” never more to descend upon terrorised tame pigeon in Barnstaple or the great Dome of London. The proud eyes misted, the noble head fell back—the keeper was surprised to feel how light the bird was; and while he was weighing it in his hand the outlaw died.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this falcon-raid was that nearly every journalist in London saw the bird; but I saw it first, therefore it is mine.