Untimely end of a bird on a wire

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/16/claxton-norfolk-fate-bird-wire

Version 0 of 1.

It's well documented that hobbies are the only falcons with the speed and agility to catch swifts and swallows on the wing. Yet in 43 years I've never seen it. I once saw a hobby flail down among sand martins over Cley Marshes and scatter them like a gust through loose feathers. I once saw a merlin above Burgh Castle spiral in a relentless tight corkscrew as it pursued a skylark that steepled until it was only a dust mote.

Such failed efforts, which are themselves rarely seen, put in context what I experienced recently. A neighbour and I stood on our drive chatting, when a hobby breezed down metres from us and lunged at several perched hirundines. All through last month these beautiful migrants have been threaded down the wires and brought colour and music to the heart of our village. Occasionally they give me notice of passing predators, when the slurred chatter of house martins swells in panic and the swallows make intense, repeated fe-swee notes and spear outwards, flip-flopping side to side as they go.

Somehow this hobby gave no warning. It angled and twisted, talons probing down on a swallow. Still it failed and off it flew, circling away. The martins and swallows fizzed out until the September stillness quieted their nerves. Then from nowhere it burst back among us.

The swallow with its back to the approach can have had no fear, until the moment it was plucked from the wire. My friend had never seen a hobby, and I wondered, as the whole village leaned in upon itself towards this moment, what each of us took from it. I remember most vividly, as the prey was seized, how one lazuline wing fell outwards like a flag; the hobby's wings seemed to chop and paddle and there was this momentary drama-less inelegance to it, then the falcon swept the victim back into the peerless symmetry of its going, and all was done.