A falcon’s first flight

Text 1: Leaving the Ledge, by Owen Brightwell

An original contemporary article.

The chick has been standing on the edge of the ledge for forty minutes. From the pavement, two hundred feet below, he is a speck of grey fluff with legs, and the crowd gathered around our telescopes has been holding its breath for so long that people have started to look faintly purple.

I have volunteered at the cathedral watchpoint every spring for six years, and I still cannot quite believe the peregrines chose this place. The spire is all carved saints and stone leaves, built by men who expected heaven to be the only thing looking down on the city. Now the most efficient killers in the sky nest among the gargoyles, and the steps are littered with the feathers of pigeons who misjudged the neighbourhood.

Above the chick, his mother circles. She is not anxious. Peregrines do not do anxious. She simply waits, a dark anchor in the wind, while her son shuffles forward, flaps, thinks better of it and shuffles back. A little girl beside me whispers ‘Go on’, as if he might hear her.

And then he goes. There is no decision you can see; one moment he is on the ledge and the next he is in the air, tumbling, wings working furiously, too fast, too low, falling past the clock face like a dropped glove. The crowd gasps as one. Somebody actually screams. Then, just above the roof of the bank, the wings catch, the fall becomes a glide, and he lands, clumsily, triumphantly, on a chimney stack across the square.

The applause is ridiculous, and wonderful. A bus driver has stopped in the road to watch. On the chimney, the chick shakes out his feathers and glares at us all, as if he meant to do it that way.

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