Finding the feather was the culmination of feeling that I was always a step behind the hawks, always arriving just after they had left. So I decided, as I had done with the sea eagles on Oronsay, to stop my wanderings and instead sit tight and wait for the sparrowhawks to come to me. Twice a week, just before first light, I would position myself at the end of the track where I had found the feather, tuck myself in to a tall hedge, and wait. From there I had a clear view of the eastern and southern edges of the wood and also a large swathe of the canopy where the wood stretched away from me to the north and west.
In 1841 MacGillivray is upgraded. It is about time. By the end of the 1830s he has written himself tired. His great friend Audubon has returned to America for the last time. Money is still a struggle and by 1841 there are nine children (two have died in infancy, William and Marion’s tenth and last child is born in 1842). The first three volumes of A History of British Birds, pummelled by the critics, are a flop and his publishers are stalling on bringing out the final two volumes. There are hints of the impact of these pressures expressed in a letter MacGillivray wrote to Audubon in 1836:
You desire to know how I am ‘going on with the world.’ The world and I are not exactly as good friends as you and I, and I am not particularly desirous of being on familiar terms with it. I have got rather into difficulties this year, but I do not exactly know the state of my affairs, and must take a few days among the hills by myself before I can understand how I am situated.
The godsend, in 1841, is that MacGillivray is appointed to the Regius Chair of Civil and Natural History at Marischal College in Aberdeen. The appointment is a hugely impressive coup for MacGillivray. Competition for the post is fierce but MacGillivray gets the nod and his family move from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, to the city of his birth.
Aberdeen is: MacGillivray walking everywhere, walking his students out of the lecture hall and into the fields and hills. Now in his late forties, he teaches on the move. Students who were taught by MacGillivray recall always struggling to keep pace with him on those outdoor lectures. His advice to one student on an excursion: Keep your knees bent as you climb a mountain. You thus avoid having to raise your body at each step. If you passed MacGillivray walking along the street in Aberdeen between his home and college, sometimes to St Machar’s Cathedral, where he loved to sit and listen to the scriptures being read, you would notice a small, thin man walking quickly. Lately he has been walking so much and sleeping so little his clothes have become loose about him. Eyes fixed on the ground in front, he would not look up as you passed one another. Usually alone, to bump into him by mistake would be to nudge the greatest ornithologist in Europe into polite apologies and earnest concern for you. He was deeply (unusually so for the time) concerned for his students. One of them wrote of MacGillivray’s teaching:
His interest in the habits of his students was remarkable. If he saw a good student careless he would remonstrate with him privately; while earnest attention gained his favour. With his rapid power of observation he could detect even a temporary lapse from diligence. His lectures were carefully written out, and he dictated an epitome of them once a week. Now and then he gave out a subject for an essay, say ‘The Sparrow,’ and he indicated a preference for a paper bearing on its habits and life on the street and on the wing. As an examiner he was patient, tender and gentle, unwilling to say an angry word. He would rather help out the hesitating student; but it was easy to see that carelessness was an abomination to him.
His lectures are so popular students and members of staff from different faculties enrol to hear them. His pupils come to him, as if he were some sort of oracle, with specimens of rock and mollusc for MacGillivray to identify for them.
In Aberdeen MacGillivray’s writing is re-energised and books and papers start to flow again. A Manual of British Ornithology in 1842 (revised and published in a new edition in 1846); A History of the Molluscous Animals of the Counties of Aberdeen, Kincardine and Banff in 1843; a revised edition of Thomas Brown’s The Conchologist’s Textbook in 1845; Portraits of Domestic Cattle of the Principal Breeds Reared in Great Britain and Ireland in the same year. In the summer of 1850, aged fifty-four, MacGillivray makes a six-week field trip to the valley of the Dee and the Cairngorms to study the geology and botany of the region. His son Paul, and latterly one of his daughters, Isabella, accompany him and together they climb the mountains, collecting plants from the high corries.
A year after the trip to the Cairngorms MacGillivray’s doctor orders him to spend the winter of 1851–2 in Torquay, rather than expose his fragile health to the blasts of an Aberdeen winter. From Torquay, he writes in the preface to volume IV of A History of British Birds, finally published in early spring 1852:
As the wounded bird seeks some quiet retreat where, freed from the persecutions of the pitiless fowler, it may pass the time of its anguish in forgetfulness of the outer world, so have I, assailed by disease, betaken myself to a sheltered nook, where, unannoyed by the piercing blasts of the North Sea, I had been led to hope that my life might be protracted beyond the most dangerous season of the year. It is thus that I issue from Devonshire, the present volume which, however contains no observations of mine made there, the scenes of my labours being in distant parts of the country.
While he is still in Devon, MacGillivray’s wife, Marion, dies suddenly in Aberdeen in February 1852, aged forty-seven. Audubon had died a year earlier in America. MacGillivray’s health deteriorates further and he returns home to see out his final days in Aberdeen. Volume V of A History of British Birds is published in the summer of 1852; in its conclusion MacGillivray writes:
Commenced in hope, and carried on with zeal, though ended with sorrow and sickness, I can look upon my work without much regard to the opinions which contemporary writers may form of it, assured that what is useful within it will not be forgotten, and knowing that already it has had a beneficial effect on many of the present, and will more powerfully influence the next generation of our home ornithologists. I had been led to think that I had occasionally been somewhat rude, or at least blunt, in my criticisms; but I do not perceive wherein I have much erred in that respect, and I feel no inclination to apologise. I have been honest and sincere in my endeavours to promote the truth. With death, apparently not distant, before my eyes, I am pleased to think that I have not countenanced error, through fear of favour. Neither have I in any case modified my sentiments so as to endeavour thereby to conceal or palliate my faults. Though I might have accomplished more, I am thankful for having been permitted to add very considerably to the knowledge previously obtained of a very pleasant subject. If I have not very frequently indulged in reflections of the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as suggested by even my imperfect understanding of his wonderful works, it is not because I have not ever been sensible of the relationship between the Creator and his creatures, nor because my chief enjoyment when wandering among the hills and valleys, exploring the rugged shore of the ocean, or searching the cultivated fields, has not been in a sense of His presence. ‘To Him who alone doeth great wonders,’ be all glory and praise. Reader, farewell.
William MacGillivray dies in Aberdeen on 8 September 1852; he is fifty-six.
MacGillivray’s writing, for me, is a way of seeing. He misses nothing. And he misses nothing out in his descriptions of the birds. His accuracy is so unflinching I use his guides to the birds to check and identify what I see (or think I’ve seen) in the field myself. He brings the birds into view, his descriptions more acute than any illustration or photograph. Sometimes I just want to hand everything – how to find the birds, identify them, how to write about them – over to him.
If, sometimes, he appears daunting and off-putting, to an extent he brings this on himself. In the preface to volume V he describes his ambition for A History of British Birds:
Accordingly, each of our many ornithologists, real and pretended, has a method of his own, one confining himself to short technical descriptions as most useful to students, anot
her detailing more especially the habits of the birds, as more amusing to general readers, a third viewing them in relation to human feeling and passions, a fourth converting science into romance, and giving no key to the discrimination of the species, bringing his little knowledge of the phenomena under the dominion of imagination, and copiously intermingling his patch-work of truth and error with scraps of poetry. The plan of this work is very different from that of any of these and is not by any means calculated to amuse the reader who desires nothing more than pleasant anecdotes, or fanciful combinations, or him who merely wishes to know a species by name. It contains the only full and detailed technical descriptions hitherto given in this country. The habits of the species are treated of with equal extension in every case where I have been enabled to study them advantageously. The internal structure has been explained in so far as I have thought it expedient to endeavour to bring it into view, and, in particular, the alimentary organs, as determining and illustrating the habits, have been carefully attended to. If imagination has sometimes been permitted to interfere, it has only been in disposing ascertained facts so as to present an agreeable picture, or to render them easily intelligible by placing them in relation to each other.
Resolute, ambitious, impatient of others who did not share his approach (some just found him rude), he did not exactly court the favour of his fellow ornithologists. So it’s not surprising that they, in turn, relished the opportunity to lay into MacGillivray when A History of British Birds was published. But his writing – his approach – is never as austerely technical as his preface to volume V implies. And although MacGillivray may not approve of converting science into romance, he himself turns science into poetry on every page. Describing a night-time walk returning from Loch Muick, a moderate weight of granite specimens rattling in his pockets, MacGillivray reached up towards the clear sky, and wrote:
One beautiful cluster of stars I put into my vasculum among the plants.
At a ceremony held on Tuesday 20 November, 1900 in the Natural History classroom at Marischal College, Aberdeen, several people who had been taught by him and some who had latterly been inspired by his work assembled to pay tribute to William MacGillivray and to erect a tablet in his memory. Many subscribers, among them former students and relatives of MacGillivray, contributed to the cost of the memorial tablet, and at the same time they commissioned the granite tombstone which was erected above MacGillivray’s grave in the New Calton cemetery in Edinburgh. For forty-eight years, before the monument was commissioned, MacGillivray’s grave had simply been marked with the letters W. M. on the grave’s lower cornerstone. So the ceremony at Aberdeen, and the commissioning of the gravestone in Edinburgh, was an attempt to secure William MacGillivray’s legacy, to halt the slide into oblivion. One of those who spoke at the Aberdeen ceremony, Professor Trail, who had studied MacGillivray’s work whilst a student at Aberdeen University, addressed the gathering:
I did not know Professor MacGillivray personally, but I have learned to know him in a way that, I think, perhaps not very many know him, through his works; and through these I have learned to revere the man and to love his memory …
The last to speak was Professor J. Arthur Thomson, then the Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University:
Every one in Britain who cares much about birds does, in a real sense, know MacGillivray, for he left a lasting mark upon ornithology. May I explain in a minute why one says so. It is because, until 1837, no one in Britain had seriously tried to found a classification, or natural system of birds except upon external characters; while MacGillivray – a trained anatomist – got far beneath the surface and showed that a bird is not always, nor altogether, to be known by its feathers …
Add to these tributes: Alfred Newton’s comments in his book The Dictionary of Birds:
I may perhaps be excused for repeating my opinion that, after Willughby, Macgillivray was the greatest and most original ornithological genius save one (who did not live long enough to make his powers known) that this island has produced.
One night MacGillivray dreamt that four hooting owls dropped down his chimney, alighted on his dissecting table and began to rummage about in the midst of all his books and papers:
They [the owls] had probably been attracted by the odour emanating from a Buzzard’s skull which I had recently dissected.
In his dream the owls proceed to bicker and complain about what they find on MacGillivray’s desk. They criticise his work as being too preoccupied by technicalities, as not inhabiting – not sufficiently imagining – their lives:
‘Nothing here but dry sapless stuff. MacGillivray’s Raptors, etc’ observed one of the owls; ‘Gutts and gizzards’ quoth another, ‘fit only for Turkey vultures’ tedious technicalities and objectless digressions,’ shrieked the third. ‘Besides’ said the fourth, ‘the fellow ought to imitate us, he has no respect to the majesty of nature …’
The dream ends abruptly when, as MacGillivray recalls,
Hardly knowing to laugh or cry, I awoke.
The owls are far too harsh on MacGillivray, he is anything but the tedious technician they dismiss him as. His genius, as Professor Thomson stated in his memorial address, was to get far beneath the surface of the birds. And it is not solely through his anatomical scalpel that he achieves this. Much more so, it is the way MacGillivray responds to the birds, the way he describes them in their natural setting, the ways he uses language to get far beneath the birds and lift them into being:
A flight of sandpipers is a beautiful sight; there they wheel around the distant point, and advance over the margin of the water; swiftly and silently they glide along; now, all inclining their bodies to one side, present to view their undersurface, glistening in the sunshine; again, bending to the other side, they have changed their colour to dusky grey; a shot is fired, and they plunge with an abrupt turn, curve aside, ascend with a gliding flight, and all, uttering shrill cries, fly over the stream to settle on the shore that settles out towards Barnbogle ruins.
The great loss is that some of MacGillivray’s writing has not survived. There are three journals in existence: one that records the year he spent in the Outer Hebrides between 1817 and 1818; one that records his walk from Aberdeen to London in 1819; and another which records a journey he undertook while working for the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, who commissioned him to visit and report on other museums in Scotland, England and Ireland in 1833.
Though only three survive, everything points to MacGillivray having kept a journal throughout his life. He spent his whole life walking, exploring the natural world; it seems improbable that he did not keep a written record of these expeditions. In his book The Natural History of Deeside he describes an incident where he is suddenly enveloped in a thick mist on the summit of Ben Macdui. In order to describe the mountain in more detail, MacGillivray then quotes in the book from the notes he made in his 1830 journal in which he had sketched an outline of the geology and appearance of Ben Macdui:
Now this Ben-na-muic-dhui on which we now stand ‘consists,’ as I find recorded in my journal of 1830, ‘of a huge rounded mass of granite, which on the western side, towards the summit, presents a corry formed by a semicircular range of precipices, the rocks of which are marked by nearly perpendicular fissures, with transverse rents, covered toward the base by débris, and sloping into a small lake named Lochan-Uaine (green little lake), the waters of which are singularly clear, and have a bluish-green tint, which has a remarkable effect as contrasted with the ordinary tints of the Scottish lakes. On these precipices, as well as on other parts of the mountain, patches of snow remain unmelted during the summer and autumn. On the opposite side the mountain declines irregularly toward the head of Loch Aain, terminating in a magnificent range of precipices.’
So there is proof that he kept a journal in 1830. But I’m sure there must have been shelves of his journals stretching right back to 1817 (the year he began his Hebridean journal), perhaps earlier. And I’m sure, to
o, that MacGillivray must have drawn on his backlist of journals as he might an encyclopaedia, to shake his memory, to check the name of a plant he had momentarily forgotten.
In the Hebridean journal of 1817–18 MacGillivray mentions a long walk he plans to make once he leaves Harris, walking through Skye, the Western Highlands and the far north of Scotland. If he did manage to complete that walk it is a great shame his journal of it does not survive. I would have loved the chance to read his account of these landscapes, their extraordinary geology, their birds and plants. To have MacGillivray as a guide to these unique, dramatic landscapes: what a thing that would have been.
The assumption is that after MacGillivray’s death his son, Paul, took all of his father’s journals and papers with him when he emigrated to Australia and that the journals were later destroyed in a fire there. If this is indeed what happened to MacGillivray’s journals then it is a tremendous loss to the natural history writing of these islands. But read them – those journals that have survived – and, like Professor Trail in his memorial address, you cannot help but to revere the man and to love his memory.
Sparrowhawk
There it comes, silently and swiftly gliding, at the height of a few feet, over the grass field, now shooting along the hedge, now gliding over it to scan the other side, and again advancing with easy strokes of its half-expanded wings. A beautiful machine it is certainly, and marvellously put together, to be nothing but a fortuitous concourse of particles, as some wise men, believing no such thing themselves, would have us to believe. As if suspecting the concealment of something among the grass, it now hovers a while, balancing itself with rapid but gentle beats of its wings, and a vibratory motion of its expanded tail; but, unable to discover any desirable object, away it speeds, bounds over the stone wall, and curving upwards alights on that stunted and solitary ash, where it stands in a nearly erect posture, and surveys the neighbourhood.
Raptors Page 26
