In their recent masterwork, The Peregrine Falcon, Richard Sale and Steve Watson devote 83 pages to this predator’s diet. They let me appreciate, as I looked out over mudflats dividing Spurn from Grimsby on the Humber’s opposite shore, that almost every bird here – from finch to goose – was at risk from a female falcon flying overhead.
If I didn’t know it was such a deadly serious business, I could have judged the differences in mood of peregrine and potential prey as comical. High above, she flew in long undulations, surging down and rising up the cold bluffs of northerly air with a windsurfer’s ease.
Below, however, was mayhem. Waders, mainly knots and dunlins, twisted or veered in extended lines. Beyond these skeins, towards the far tide at low-ebb, I could see thousands more in amorphous bird shoals, so atomised by distance and wind-shimmer that they appeared as little more than a rippling visual disturbance, like heat haze.
The most compelling were the knots. Their Arctic breeding dress is sumptuous brick-red, but come winter they’ve turned mud-grey above and white below. When feeding, knots pootle across the flats in tightly packed units, pecking and trotting in rough unison. They have the delightfully humorous aura of busy clockwork toys.
Then they fly and you realise how these funny little creatures are also perfect. It’s presumably a predator-avoidance strategy that as the flock turns, presenting the two tones of the plumage, it blinks in and out of view. If the sun is out, they don’t flip from grey to white, the collective underwings shine like dazzling tin sheets.
A flying knot flock has another trick. While they adhere as a dense globe of birds, each is not necessarily in step with its neighbours. One may be rising as others descend; knots have this extraordinary capacity to sheer down, wingtips held vertically or even temporarily keeled over, as if they might fly upside down. The lines of their outstretched wings create momentary fractal patterns that are forever in flux.
The whole is exhilarating but also – and perhaps here’s its evolutionary point – confusing to eye and brain, both human and raptorial.
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March 07, 2023 at 12:30PM
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Country diary: The comical knot achieves perfection in flight - The Guardian
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