I can feel him. My skin tingles. His shadow snapped me out of my daydream and now his aura is hauling me in on a rope. For once he hasn’t seen me. Normally you can’t fool birds of prey. Their eyesight is so fierce, so finely tuned, so instantly absorbent to every twitch of life that our feeble efforts at concealment are a worthless gesture.
I raise my binoculars and scour the profile of his blunt little face. He is brand new under a hood of blue slate. His primaries are blades of black, crossed behind his back like a schoolmaster’s hands. The grey tail is long and dipped in black ink, except at the very tip, where a crescent of copper shines through. The nares are a golden glimmer crowning the arc of the neat, downward-tucked bill; yellow rings encircle dark orbs as round and glossy as puddles on a moonlit night. They dominate his brain. Behind those limpid lenses a continuous interrogation simmers and seethes.
He hasn’t seen me because he is intent, staring down. Something below him in the grass close to the foot of the pole has tracked its image up through the sunlight into the glowing sponges of his retinas. He is drinking it in; motionless – no, stiller than that, he is frozen. It’s as though a sculpture in polished slate and copper has been placed on the top of the pole. So intense is his concentration that for the moment I am safe; I can shift my awkward position and lean back against the rain-laundered bark of a birch.
Anxious for her own future, a hen chaffinch decides to brave the vivid statue that has invaded their sunlight. She flutters out to mob the kestrel, uttering a broken little cry edged with hysteria and adopting a quite un-finch-like flight, hesitant and dithery in a way that impresses no one; certainly not the kestrel. He doesn’t flinch. His gaze is as fixed as his stance. He ignores the chaffinch, not even bothering to acknowledge her presence. She dances twice around the pole, gives up and returns to the birches. The day is silent again.
Only later will I properly comprehend the emergent mini-drama that is being enacted here. For now all I see is a kestrel perched on a pole. My thoughts return to the sun. It has been at work for several hours, streaming photons my way. The ground is drying, the leaves unbuttoning their tulip wraps and motorways of chloroplasts are flooding in to work. I am forced to acknowledge (reluctantly) that only some of that solar radiation is for me. Happy though I am with my slice, I know that others are stirring too. The great tits and chaffinches have raised their song, breasts swelling, syrinxes oscillating, hurling it out, choiring the day with spontaneous, sun-charged exultation. Beside me the delicate petals of wood sorrel are lifting; their shamrock leaves are widening to soak in the soft confetti of sunlight that sprinkles the woodland floor.
There is a solemn explosion of life everywhere I look. Chemical reactions are raising their game. Protoplasm is busier than it’s been for months. Decay is smouldering underground. Insect pupae are squirming inside their leathery wraps. Egg cases are splitting. Sap is ascending the birch stems to match the call for water and minerals from high above. Every opening leaf needs the hydraulic turbidity of filled cells to stiffen and grow. Columns of liquid power are answering a call to arms. Trance-like, the kestrel stares. With the patience of a gravestone he stares into the grass.
Somewhere underground, in some secret cranny of its own, a reptile blinks and stirs – stirred by some cryptic alchemy of electro-chemical sentience. Waking from long sleep it feels the surge of the warming earth around it. Its dreams had been of pure sun. There was nothing blind about this instinct. For all heliotropic reptiles that have to raise their body temperature to get going, the sun is an imperative, an irresistible call. They have no choice. To feed, to grow, to mate, they have to find the sun. Such is the lot of the slow worm.
Normally the slow worm (actually a legless lizard) doesn’t bask in open sunlight as crocodiles and many lizards and snakes do; it prefers to absorb heat from stones. Beneath a sheet of old corrugated iron is a perfect place to heat up quickly and in safety – a quick warm for a slow worm. I have found dozens in such places – have even laid sheets down for that very purpose. Boy-naturalists indulge strange pursuits. You come back later and take a peek. You lift the sheet. Suddenly exposed to the light, slow worms look put out and urinate to make the point. And they are slow; they can’t hurry off, are easy to catch. You learn quickly it’s important to let them urinate before you put them in your pocket. Reptile urine has the rancid odour of over-stewed cabbages. As a boy I smelled permanently of school kitchens.
But this is May and the sun is high. There are no corrugated iron sheets available, nor, apparently, suitable stones. Slowly our worm-lizard ventures out into full sun. This ponderous legless lizard, who feeds mostly on small slugs, is stiff and slow. In the hand it has none of the taut, muscular flexibility of a grass snake or an adder or those almost prehensile, broad underbelly scales that zip snakes along so efficiently. Stiffly the slow worm levers his silvery inches between stems and stones using friction and the extended ‘S’ of his long body to slither forward. His black tongue flickers, testing the air. His blunt little head, the hazel-ringed eyes and pencil-dot nostrils prise through the grass like a bodkin. He is all metal, the thickness of a man’s forefinger forged in shining blue steel. And he is utterly harmless – unless you happen to be a slug. But before he can do anything else he needs the sun.
I knew none of this. I saw only the statue staring into the grass. Then it fell. It was as though the sculpture had been tipped forward by an unseen hand. Still staring, on closed wings it fell through empty air to the earth. The earth rose to meet the copper falcon in a collision that would surely bring its death. In a single burnished dart it dived to the long grass, head first. I missed the yellow talons thrust forward. I was too slow to see the black-banded tail feathers fan to brake the fall. It vanished. I was sure it must be dead. How could it plummet to earth without dashing out its brains? I stood up. There was no sign of the kestrel. The grass had swallowed it up.
The kestrel is a falcon, a member of that elite of raptorial, hooked beaks, all of which vie with the eagles for precedence. The vain and competitive aristocracy of the raptor world have never conceded a jot. Led from the front by the gyrfalcon and the peregrine, for dash and verve the falcons have it; for power and imperial splendour the golden eagle and its huge cousin the sea eagle cannot be matched. Hardened birders can never agree; the jury has long since given up and gone home. The kestrel and the merlin are the smallest falcons on the British list. Both can dazzle with aerobatic skill. Of the two the kestrel is the commoner, so familiar on our roadsides and motorway verges hovering for voles and mice, hawking the air for insects. The windhover is its old country name. It can face into a gale with wings half closed, holding its position with barely a quiver for minutes at a time. It stoops like a flash of bronze.
I peer through my binoculars. The grass reveals nothing. The whole thing was a sun-dream; I begin to think I imagined it all.
And then this little falcon, this flash of kettle, rises from the earth. It ascends on stiffly flickering wings. It rises and rises. Clenched in one black-taloned fist is a lanyard of legless lizard. Its yellow grab-foot had closed around a slow worm. The needle talons grip its tail. Sunlight glints from silver scales. It rises with the kestrel, twisting its head and thorax in an aimless confusion of defiance and despair. The kestrel circles the pole once and returns to its perch. Landing on one leg it shifts its grip, now pinning the squirming tail down with the other foot too. The slate-blue head bends to its prey and the grey bill opens; the hook curves downward like a claw. The slow worm inscribes one last, desperate loop. Levering against nothing but air it curls and flails and breaks. It breaks free. I see a flash of red and the broken body twists and falls, arcing through sunbeams to the ground.
The kestrel looked bemused. He stood with a squirming tail in his talons. Its bloody stump thrashed even more vigorously than before. The falcon looked first at the tail clenched in his feet, then down at the grass below. A sharp, yickering cry vented his frustration. He seemed to know that the prize was gone; gone the way of the survival game – some you win, some you lose.
The slow worm had played its last card. Its past and its future had collided in a moment of terrible truth. By sheer luck it had been caught by the tail. Evolution had handed it a trump to play when the chips are finally down: cast your tail.
Break free and go forth tailless into the future. Inside its tiny, metallic