Field Notes: THE KESTREL
Hello and welcome,
If you've found your way here, it means something in this month's Field Note caught your attention, which is lovely to hear.
I’ll confess that writing about the kestrel presented a very different kind of challenge. Unlike the nightingale, whose fame lives in the shadows and high poetry, the kestrel is a bird of our everyday landscapes—a familiar silhouette suspended in the roadside wind. Yet digging into its history revealed a surprising richness: from medieval social satires and the desert trapping traditions of Persia, to the sun-baked catacombs of ancient Egypt. What follows is a collection of the threads that felt most alive to me—the lore, the airmanship, and the unexpected human history attached to this extraordinary little falcon.
Please do hang around and dive into whatever stories catch your eye.
Enjoy,
Emerson
If you've found your way here, it means something in this month's Field Note caught your attention, which is lovely to hear.
I’ll confess that writing about the kestrel presented a very different kind of challenge. Unlike the nightingale, whose fame lives in the shadows and high poetry, the kestrel is a bird of our everyday landscapes—a familiar silhouette suspended in the roadside wind. Yet digging into its history revealed a surprising richness: from medieval social satires and the desert trapping traditions of Persia, to the sun-baked catacombs of ancient Egypt. What follows is a collection of the threads that felt most alive to me—the lore, the airmanship, and the unexpected human history attached to this extraordinary little falcon.
Please do hang around and dive into whatever stories catch your eye.
Enjoy,
Emerson
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Poetry
The Windhover — Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) Written at St Beuno's College in North Wales and subtitled To Christ our Lord. This extraordinary sonnet uses Hopkins' distinctive sprung rhythm to mimic the hovering, swooping flight of a kestrel, finding in the bird's mastery of the wind an expression of divine beauty. It remains one of the finest bird poems in the English language. It's a poem that is better when read aloud, but many renditions out there don't do it justice. The best I could find is here, but if you know of any better, please do let me know. The Kestrel — John Freeman Freeman (1880–1929) was part of the Georgian Poetry movement — not the Georgian era of powdered wigs and Handel, but the reign of George V, a loose group of British poets who favoured pastoral subjects at a time when modernism was pulling poetry somewhere else entirely. He won the Hawthornden Prize in 1920. This poem watches a kestrel hunt across a hill whilst its shadow moves on the ground below. Worth finding. Kestrel — Martha Blue (2022) Winner of the Poetry Society's About Us competition in 2022. Blue's compound coinages — sky-soarer, dawn-breaker, cloud-tearer, wind-rider — are in direct conversation with Hopkins and with the dialect names on this month's extra card. Read it alongside The Windhover. Then look at the names list. The connection is obvious and pleasing. |
Original 1969 Film Poster for UK release
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A Kestrel for a Knave: Book, Film & Score
A Kestrel for a Knave — Barry Hines (1968) Hines grew up in the South Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, anchoring the story firmly in the landscape and speech of the 1960s coalfield. Fourteen-year-old Billy Casper is written off by his teachers, bullied at home, and heading straight down the pit—until he finds and trains a wild kestrel. Far more than just a cult favorite, it stands alongside Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe) as a defining classic of British social realism. It remains a fierce, plain-spoken, and unforgettable portrait of working-class childhood. Kes - Ken Loach (1969) Filmed on location around Barnsley using many local non-actors, Loach worked directly with Barry Hines to translate A Kestrel for a Knave to the screen. The result is a remarkably faithful adaptation that preserves the book's stark social realism alongside unexpected humor—including the iconic school football match, widely regarded as one of the great scenes in British film. It remains a masterclass in capturing the harsh contrast between the confines of Billy’s daily life and the absolute stillness he finds in training his hawk. John Cameron — Kes (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1969) Sparse, lyrical, and almost entirely acoustic—built around Harold McNair’s transcendent jazz flute, acoustic guitar, and a handful of supporting instruments. Cameron composed and recorded the entire score in a single day on a razor-thin budget at Olympic Studios. Unreleased for decades until its cult rediscovery, the music has outlasted almost everything else from that moment in British cinema. Essential listening on its own terms, carrying all the bleak, quiet beauty of a South Yorkshire winter. |
Liz Dilnot Johnson
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Music
Liz Dilnot Johnson — The Windhover (2020) A choral setting of Hopkins's poem commissioned by Ex Cathedra for their Dawn Chorus series. Johnson weaves the raspy, rattling calls of hunting kestrels and the physical sound of wind through wing-feathers directly into the vocal texture and double bass. Featured on the 2024 album Gentle Flame. Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Thomas Bartlett — Kestrel (2019) Recorded for Real World Records, this piece pairs Ó Raghallaigh’s hardanger d'amore with Bartlett’s felted piano. Ó Raghallaigh cited the kestrel's motionless hover as the central inspiration—capturing a soaring, suspended feeling of joyous melancholy. Bibio — Phantom Bricks (2017) Not explicitly about kestrels, but saturated in their habitat. Stephen Wilkinson's ambient project, inspired by decaying industrial sites and forgotten landscapes across Britain, captures the exact atmosphere of the places where kestrels are most commonly seen today—motorway verges, abandoned rail lines, and industrial margins. |
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Books
Richard Hines — No Way But Gentlenesse (2016) Written by Barry Hines’s brother, Richard—the actual boy who raised a wild kestrel in Hoyland Common and later trained the three birds used on set for Ken Loach's film. It’s a grounded, deeply moving memoir about falconry, working-class brotherhood, and how an obsession with a raptor saved him from the local pit. Richard Mabey — The Unofficial Countryside (1973) The foundational text of British edgeland nature writing. Written as modern road networks and industrial estates expanded, Mabey was among the first to document wildlife thriving in urban decay, sewage farms, and canal banks—highlighting the kestrel as the supreme predator of these artificial habitats, hovering effortlessly above city parks and bypass embankments. Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts — Edgelands A celebrated exploration of the neglected spaces where town meets country—retail park boundaries, gravel pits, railway cuttings, and motorway verges. Farley and Symmons Roberts celebrate these unmanaged edgelands as modern Britain's true wilderness, reshaping how we view the ordinary landscapes where urban wildlife now makes its home. Included here because these unloved road verges and industrial margins have become many kestrels' hunting ground. |
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A Kestrel for a Knave — The Medieval Hierarchy
Barry Hines took his title directly from the book's opening epigraph, which cites both The Boke of St Albans (1486) and an earlier 15th-century Harleian manuscript (BL Harley MS 2340). These medieval texts laid out a rigid social hierarchy assigning raptors strictly by rank: an Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King, a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady, a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, and a Musket for a Holy Water Clerk. At the very bottom sat a Kestrel for a Knave—a servant or common laborer. Because kestrels hunt voles and insects rather than game birds, aristocrats saw them as useless for sport, making the bird a fitting symbol for a discarded working-class boy like Billy Casper. The Solar Eye of Ancient Egypt While popular culture links the falcon-god Horus strictly to the Peregrine, archaeological surveys and CT scans of Egyptian animal catacombs—such as Saqqara and Quesna—reveal that Common Kestrels (Falco tinnunculus) make up a massive proportion of mummified raptor offerings. Harder-to-catch Peregrines were rare, so ancient Egyptians actively captive-bred kestrels to meet the massive demand for votive gifts to solar gods like Ra. Their sharp eyesight and ability to hover unblinking above sunlit fields made them living symbols of solar vigilance and divine watchfulness. The Workhorse Falcon of Persia In the classical falconry traditions of historical Iran (documented in traditional treatises on bāzdārī), the kestrel (dalīja) occupied a clever, utility role. While noblemen flew Sakers and Peregrines, trappers and handlers relied on the kestrel's unique flying mechanics. Trappers flew trained kestrels over open ground, using their unmatched hovering ability to create a stationary silhouette that lured larger wild raptors down out of the high sky to be netted. The smallest bird in the mews was used to capture the kings of the sky. |
A Note on How to Find Everything
I've provided links throughout — just tap on the names. For the music, Bandcamp is the best place to find independent artists. They receive a significantly larger share of revenue through Bandcamp than through the major streaming platforms — and on the first Friday of every month Bandcamp waive their own fees entirely, meaning every penny goes directly to the artist. This month that falls on Friday 2nd May — worth timing your purchases accordingly. For the books, your local independent bookshop is always the first port of call. If you need to order online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops across the UK and is a genuinely meaningful alternative to the obvious options. Worth noting they currently deliver within the UK only, so overseas subscribers may need to seek out a good independent bookseller closer to home.
Until Next Month
Thank you for hovering around the Kestrel for so long — I hope something here has made you stop and listen. In the meantime subscribers to Field Notes gain access to an exclusive discount code over on my Etsy shop. Each month the discount will change so just click here to see what is available this month. Discounts will automatically be added to your basket.
I've provided links throughout — just tap on the names. For the music, Bandcamp is the best place to find independent artists. They receive a significantly larger share of revenue through Bandcamp than through the major streaming platforms — and on the first Friday of every month Bandcamp waive their own fees entirely, meaning every penny goes directly to the artist. This month that falls on Friday 2nd May — worth timing your purchases accordingly. For the books, your local independent bookshop is always the first port of call. If you need to order online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops across the UK and is a genuinely meaningful alternative to the obvious options. Worth noting they currently deliver within the UK only, so overseas subscribers may need to seek out a good independent bookseller closer to home.
Until Next Month
Thank you for hovering around the Kestrel for so long — I hope something here has made you stop and listen. In the meantime subscribers to Field Notes gain access to an exclusive discount code over on my Etsy shop. Each month the discount will change so just click here to see what is available this month. Discounts will automatically be added to your basket.