Sometimes I used to drive
To work, through farm land –
Through countryside
And often I would see
Sitting up high
Up, on a telegraph pole,
A kestrel,
Readying
To find and fix its prey,
Or launch itself
To hover in the sky
And then:
In a newspaper article I read,
It said
That: “Scientists seek to explain
The mechanism of the kestrel’s hovering …”
By looking
“Inside the kestrel brain.” Yet …
They won’t experiment on living birds,
But only on those they find
By the sides of roads, where
Thoughtless, speeding humanity exerts its will.
A solution to road-kill, perhaps?
Perhaps – perhaps not!
Perhaps the ‘solution’ to road-kill is not to kill.
Still,
They (the scientists) dissect the kestrel mind
Then publish scientific papers,
In academic journals,
On the nothings that they find.
This investigation –
This clinical dissecting eye –
Denies
The randomness and fragility
Of kestrel lives;
The hovering
From the need to feed,
To survive –
Hovering in the breath
Of life;
Of death
Why is it so easy to forget
A kestrel is a bird – a living thing,
Embedded – integral
Not separate
From its surroundings –
Its environment:
The field where it flies?
A nexus of mutual interactions –
A flow of information between
Ground and prey; and
Eye; (and) wind and wing.
And this I’ve seen
At Old Hall Marsh Farm,
In Essex: a kestrel mother
Making two juveniles to hover:
To dodge and dive
At each other,
Above the sea wall,
Where they learn
To catch their Prey
That they might survive
– avoiding Death
By taking Life
To live another day.
And so, now,
If I see a kestrel sitting up high:
Up on a telegraph pole;
Or hovering in the skies,
I know that
If that kestrel doesn’t eat that day –
Doesn’t find and fix and kill its prey
.
.
It dies.
Peter Fowler, November 2019
