J.A. Baker, Mary Oliver, and Loren Eiseley
Seeing and hearing birds provide some of the highlights of my day. Lists of birds seen are less important than observing their lives. Today many bird populations are declining precipitously. During J.A. Baker's life, peregrine falcons appeared doomed to extinction because of DDT and an earlier British government policy of killing the birds to protect messenger pigeons during the second world war. In a quest to record their lives before that potential outcome, Baker spent many days during the years 1954 to 1964 in Britain following the peregrines left in his area and then condensing his observations into the powerful and beautiful language of The Peregrine. Robert MacFarlane praised Baker's accomplishment in both the introduction to the New York Times' edition of The Peregrine and in a later Guardian April 15th book column in 2017. Comparing Baker's descriptions of hawks and owls with those of the American poet Mary Oliver, I discovered some parallels. Baker described the peregrine hawk as a "tiny silver flake on the blue burnish of the sky." The bird was "a dark blade cutting slowly through the blue ice" and changing "color like an autumn leaf, passing from shining gold to pallid yellow, turning from tawny to brown...." In "Hawk", Oliver's bird "is heaven's fistful of death and destruction" that "seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it turned into a white blade, which fell." Finding a barn owl on a post, Baker observed that the "bland meditative mask of its face" was "looking at me from the grey of the field." In the poem "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field", Mary Oliver wrote that her owl was " a buddha with wings" and that it "rose, gracefully, and flew back to the frozen marshes, to lurk there, like a little lighthouse, in the blue shadows." In The Immense Journey, the paleontologist Loren Eiseley mused that "Birds are intense, fast-moving creatures—reptiles, I suppose one might say, that have escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, transformed fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows." A wintering area for many seabirds, Deception Pass is a channel in the Salish Sea with strong currents and whirlpools. According to Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon by Ryan Kelly, Terrie Klinger, and John Meyer, the quality of the water differs markedly between the eastern and western sides of the pass. The water on the eastern side has a higher proportion of fresh water because of the rivers flowing into it while the western side is saltier and colder, and this accounts for the differences in the species living in the two areas. The Peregrine was first published by HarperCollins in 1967 and reissued in 2004 by New York Review Classics. "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field" was published in Owls and Other Fantasies by Beacon Press in 2006. The Immense Journey was published by Random House in 1957.
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AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
April 2024
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