A copper-headed blonde

“A lightweight flying machine and professional killer of beetles, worms and small rodents … a copper-headed blonde, full of slim curves, with a piercing, needle-pointed wit”


Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

LAST night Kessie came to stay. She had been found earlier in the day, crouching low in long grass, bedraggled and exhausted, and was later delivered to our door. She arrived in a small wicker basket, the top of which was covered with the remnants of an old net curtain, so that although we could discern her shape her true beauty was unknown. We peered through a small gap at her yellow legs with their feathered pantaloons and at her rag of a tail, the fibres frayed and soiled from spending too much time on the ground.
Kessie is a kestrel, a lightweight flying machine and professional killer of beetles, worms and small rodents. She is a copper-headed blonde, full of slim curves and a piercing, needle-pointed wit. I saw myself in her liquid eye, an oblique reflection of all that is wrong with her world.
She gazed at me impassively, with neither affection nor malice, before launching herself at the kitchen window with a few struggling half-flaps of scimitar wings. She hit the glass but without power, and came to rest on top of a potted violet and sat there as an awkward comic, her beak slightly agape, talons clutching thin, green leaves and each other, her shoulders drooping in something like abjection. Only that eye was firm and bold and fearlessly proud, and I was proud, too, to have my reflection within it once more, albeit for a fleeting moment.
She was weak and reluctant to fly further. I picked her up gently, her few small ounces, and held her two wings close to her body. She was too tired to protest. Her crop was empty, but the hour was late, and we had no ready access to her preferred diet. We had to improvise somewhat. What would she think of a king prawn supper?
At first she resisted, turning her head away from our offering. When we persisted she showed us her displeasure, threatening fingers with her opened beak. A small piece of prawn was slipped in. She held it a while, then swallowed. How small did she want it? We fed her slivers for a while, each of which she held for a few seconds before gulping hungrily. Within two minutes she had progressed to lumps half a centimetre across and was starting to look for the next piece, tilting her head back in the manner of a nestling.
One king prawn, I felt, was enough, for not only was this something alien to her, it was also something I had been looking forward to myself. I daresay she would have taken more.
Although we do not like to think it, it seems that she might be an elderly bird and weak with age. My wife has determined otherwise, finding signs of youth in that begging attitude. I looked hard at the plumage where I found nothing juvenile, just rags of feathers in need of preening. The legs and feet look healthy enough, neat and trim as such appendages ought to be. The head is neat and rather too pale for this to be an immature bird; likewise, the beak, with its yellow cere above, is such as belongs to an adult kestrel (the cere is a bony plate just above the beak; on an immature kestrel it has a greenish tint).
Her eye is timeless, ageless and instinctively wild, from a world of which we know nothing.
I sat outside to write in lamplight under a sizzle of rain, the sound of which ebbed and flowed like the tide. Stars glimmered briefly, and the moon sent gentle shimmers of light through broken cloud. The night was essentially quiet, full of the ancient smell of damp woodland and the sound of distant curlew and a somewhere-hunting owl.
This morning Kessie had worms for breakfast. She ate heartily, and appears brighter in herself. She seems half tame. In a day or so she might fly free. We shall see.