I stumbled bleary into the still cold of after dawn, chicken food in hand, eyes screwed by a low sun. A shreiking rasping crackle of air being shredded by feathered wings shocked my dithering senses, spinning, I saw a bird plummet almost at my feet before boomeranging up and skywards to be joined by another, smaller Peregrine. They circled around our roof tops kekking, awake now I remembered my camera "handy by" in the back seat of the car. Almost too late I just caught one drifting away, what a way to start a day!
As a child in the Vale of York I would spot the sickle wings of a falcon and race my bike to follow it fascinated as it hung and hovered. Totally beguiled of the little Kestrel, I read all I could on raptors and longed one day to see a Peregrine. It was a faint hope in the mid 1960's as seed corn laced with PCB's had exterminated them from the broad Yorkshire skies.
Dinas Island, May 1979 was my first, a bold straight flying Falcon weighty with a talloned pigeon, wonder of wonder, flying with prey straight to its eyrie above the sapphire blue of Fishguard Bay.
April 1995, I arrived in Pembrokeshire to stay and clambered the coast path finding our local peregrines and studying them year on year untill another obsession with finny things overtook me.
And now today that magic was re-awakened by a small dramatic reproof for ignoring my first love!