Falcon's Flight
While I have never seen a Gyr falcon, and have only watched peregrines at an extreme range, 1 think that few birds of the falcon breed can have more fascinating and graceful flight than the kestrel. The wonderful sailing and planing would do credit to any sea-bird. Just when one is making the comparison the kestrel takes a long, swift and oblique dive—not a stoop, but a dive that takes him across country for half a mile—and then he swings up into the higher air again without so much as a beat of his wings. To see a kestrel hovering and stooping one would think that he never finds food, for he seems to alight rarely. His hovering is second nature, and half his stoops are false. Only when one examines the ground beneath the trees adjoining his nest does one realise how lethal he can be, how tireless the pair are in feeding their young, but, even so, I still like to think that half the kestrel's flying is for the sheer delight in sweeping down through the sky, feeling that rush of air as he turns and rises at the imperceptible flexing of a wing-tip.
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