I was looking up the different meanings and uses of the word 'pitch' the other day, [check them out there are so many!] and came upon the above, which struck a chord.
For years I have thought of the flight of a bird as a way of thinking about space in the landscape. Envying, as I arduously trudge about, the apparently effortless ability to be at one with such an airy medium. Raptors have had an imaginative hold on me ever since I was a thirteen-year-old avidly reading a book by the fly fisherman, naturalist and broadcaster Oliver Kite who mentioned seeing a Red Kite at Pontrydfendigaid, where as a family we were about to camp. Getting out of the car and looking up there was this huge fork tailed hawk, so exciting! It felt like it had been waiting for me. A common sight on the M40 now but then the national population was less than 20 and all of those were in Wales.
In my early twenties I worked on a hill farm high up on the Black Mountain near Llandovery where a pair were nesting [still so rare that the RSPB had a van parked on the road nearby to ward off egg thieves] and I would see them often at eye level swooping through the valley as I went about my shepherding. Later, in my thirties I was involved in establishing a sculpture trail in the Chilterns just as the captive breeding and introduction programme there was beginning to fill the sky with Kites. I now live on the Downs in Sussex and the Kites are joining the Buzzards, Peregrines, Sparrow hawks and Kestrels that I see as I cycle the hills surrounding home.
One year recently and on several occasions, when driving down the lane from our house a Sparrow Hawk would drop down from its telegraph pole perch and fly just in front of the car, at bonnet height, and then veer off over the hedge to ambush its prey. It was using the car as a decoy. Watching this through the frame of the windscreen is perhaps as close as I have come to soaring like a hawk, but it speaks of the pleasure found in driving, cycling, and painting my sun dappled and tunnel like rural back road subject matter.
A body desirously and imaginatively swooping through space.
Nick Bodimeade 2025
