4 ideas
Baker followed peregrines across the Essex estuary flats and farmland over roughly ten winters in the 1950s and 60s, then collapsed those years into a single diary running from 1 October to 4 April. The composite season lets the book show a gradual, continuous process of the watcher's habituation and transformation that no single real winter contained. It is evidence that a narrative can be made truer to an experience by falsifying its chronology.
Baker argues that the observer's human presence is the obstacle to seeing the bird, so he wears the same clothes, moves at the same times and follows the same routes until the hawks accept him as part of the landscape. As the season goes on his prose shifts from describing the peregrine to speaking from inside its perceptions, including its hunger, its fear of humans and its view of the ground below. Obsessive attention sustained long enough stops being observation and becomes a kind of self-erasure.
Baker describes the estuary as the peregrine would experience it, as a field of prey-lines, wind, light and killing distance, rather than as scenery. The same fields and sea walls read as a hunting geometry once you ask what they offer a hawk. Changing whose attention organizes a place changes what the place is.
Baker wrote while organochlorine pesticides were poisoning British peregrines and collapsing their numbers, and he treats the bird he follows as a dying species. The grief and urgency of the book come from this: close attention to the peregrine is also witness to its disappearance, caused by human contamination of the prey it eats.