This book had some fantastic passages. The detail that Baker captures about the life of a falcon is impressive and offers an interesting window into this bird of prey. But I struggle to see who I can recommend it to. I only see the most bird obsessed people making it to the end.

It’s essentially a collection of detailed journal entries. But it’s not a novel. It’s kinda like a bunch of short stories that start to feel repetitive. While I get the sense that watching a peregrine stoop from high in the sky to kill its prey never gets old, reading about it kinda does.

The forward waxes poetic about how the book waxes poetic which makes me feel like I should be really impressed. In some ways I am. For example, this is a real passage:

With a sudden stab down he was clear of the swirl and was chasing a solitary dunlin up into the sky. The dunlin seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It wassed into his dark outline, and did not re-appear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin’s heart as effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk guided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his prey.

The other piece of context which makes this book significant is that it was written in England in the 1960s and was galvanizing for conservation groups that pushed to protect peregrines who had been decimated by WW II culling to protect carrier pigeons and by the impacts of DDT pesticide use on eggs. So I think this book deserves recognition. The author was apparently an oddly interesting guy who only wrote one other well distributed book. Personally, I am also fascinated by how human development has changed the natural world. The area outside London he describes in the book has been swallowed by a growing, sprawling city.

So in summary, great writing on a powerful animal in an interesting time; but maybe not a fun read for the average person.