I set the tripod down carefully and raise binoculars. I check the boudoir first and, finding no one there, glass slowly westward along the line of crags and grottoes, favored perches signed by cascades of bright whitewash. Nothing. I proceed on to the eyrie itself, hoping but not knowing what I will find. She is there. She is ensconced against the shadowed back wall of the concavity. Sunlight will not penetrate there until midday, but the brightening sky already highlights the golden eyering set against the jet black helmet.
Focusing in recent Aprils on other sites and species, I have not seen her for perhaps two years now, but she looks the same to me, and so familiar. Large even for a female Peregrine, her ebony head in sharp contrast to her gunmetal back, the dark bars across her belly and leggings prominent against a background color not quite white but tan, which glows to coral in the pure, low light of the morning sun, and in this light the ventral feather tract across her chest appears pink beneath its delicate dark speckling. She is a unique and beautiful specimen of the avian world’s most magnificent predator.
We wait together, she in her rocky fastness, I along the river far below, for the day’s main event. I am hopeful, camera ready, and know though it bares my rampant anthropomorphism that she is hopeful too in her own instinctive, primeval way. The sun tracks across the eastern sky. Shadows on the huge wall wane, then disappear. Mergansers ply the river’s shallows, and a Coyote comes to drink, setting off a shorebird’s strident complaints. Thermals arise as the Tonto warms. The first of the desert’s undertakers appear, black Vs tilting across the cloudless blue sky. Moments turn into minutes, passing into hours. We wait and watch.
She sees him, as always of course, before I do, and alerts me to his presence with her sudden eechip calls. He has killed and eaten and perhaps waited for the thermals to trigger his flight from overnight roost to cliff face. He comes in high, sheers vertically down the wall, makes two passes in front of her, then settles on an outcropping boulder high above the eyrie.
She leaves the scrape now and flies to the boudoir, a rock ledge a hundred yards upstream at the other end of the cliff, settles above the copious whitewash, and whines, a high pitched, drawn out solicitation call. He preens, seemingly ignoring her entreaties, but intermittently calls back. He is smaller than she, perhaps a third or more, darker where she is dark, bright white where she is tan. With sharper contrast than she, he is a cleaner, even more stunning bird, and it is only with great restraint that I refrain from swinging the lens to him. I know he will go to her. The camera must remain on her or it will miss the main event.
Finally he leaves his perch and my eye instantly returns to the female in the viewfinder. Only peripherally am I aware that he has dropped almost to the water, leveled out, then swept upward to her ledge. I am waiting, not breathing, delusional that I think I know how she must be feeling! He drops into the viewfinder, and I see him mount her, out of the air, softly with “wrists” turned inward to protect her from his talons, but there is nothing gentle about what follows.
The metadata in the camera indicates it takes but five seconds. Seventy frames. Wailing now, she watches as he leaves. My head is exploding. I collapse on the river beach, humbled by this oft dreamt but never expected glimpse into the secret life of the planet’s most breathtaking raptor.