Vesper Flights
Page 1
ALSO BY HELEN MACDONALD
H Is for Hawk
Falcon
Shaler’s Fish
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Helen Macdonald
Jacket design by Suzanne Dean
Jacket photograph © Chris Wormell
Some of these pieces have appeared in different form in the New York Times Magazine, New Statesman and elsewhere.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Jonathan Cape
First Grove Atlantic eBook edition: August 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
eISBN 978-0-8021-4669-4
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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Contents
Cover
Also by Mike Lawson
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Nests
Nothing Like a Pig
Inspector Calls
Field Guides
Tekels Park
High-Rise
The Human Flock
The Student’s Tale
Ants
Symptomatic
Sex, Death, Mushrooms
Winter Woods
Eclipse
In Her Orbit
Hares
Lost, But Catching Up
Swan Upping
Nestboxes
Deer in the Headlights
The Falcon and the Tower
Vesper Flights
In Spight of Prisons
Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres
The Observatory
Wicken
Storm
Murmurations
A Cuckoo in the House
The Arrow-Stork
Ashes
A Handful of Corn
Berries
Cherry Stones
Birds, Tabled
Hiding
Eulogy
Rescue
Goats
Dispatches from the Valleys
The Numinous Ordinary
What Animals Taught Me
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Back in the sixteenth century, a curious craze began to spread through the halls, palaces and houses of Europe. It was a type of collection kept often in ornate wooden cases, and it was known as a Wunderkammer, a Cabinet of Curiosities, although the direct translation from the German captures better its purpose: cabinet of wonders. It was expected that people should pick up and handle the objects in these cases; feel their textures, their weights, their particular strangenesses. Nothing was kept behind glass, as in a modern museum or gallery. More importantly, perhaps, neither were these collections organised according to the museological classifications of today. Wunderkammern held natural and artificial things together on shelves in close conjunction: pieces of coral; fossils; ethnographic artefacts; cloaks; miniature paintings; musical instruments; mirrors; preserved specimens of birds and fish; insects; rocks; feathers. The wonder these collections kindled came in part from the ways in which their disparate contents spoke to one another of their similarities and differences in form, their beauties and manifest obscurities. I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder.
Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us. Before I was a writer I was a historian of science, which was an eye-opening occupation. We tend to think of science as unalloyed, objective truth, but of course the questions it has asked of the world have quietly and often invisibly been inflected by history, culture and society. Working as a historian of science revealed to me how we have always unconsciously and inevitably viewed the natural world as a mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, thoughts and hopes. Many of the essays here are exercises in interrogating such human ascriptions and assumptions. Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
Science encourages us to reflect upon the size of our lives in relation to the vastness of the universe or the bewildering multitudes of microbes that exist inside our bodies. And it reveals to us a planet that is beautifully and insistently not human. It was science that taught me how the flights of tens of millions of migrating birds across Europe and Africa, lines on the map drawn in lines of feather and starlight and bone, are stranger and more astonishing than I could ever have imagined, for these creatures navigate by visualising the Earth’s magnetic field through detecting quantum entanglement taking place in the receptor cells of their eyes. What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.
These are terrible times for the environment. Now more than ever before, we need to look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world. We’re living through the world’s sixth great extinction, one caused by us. The landscapes around us grow emptier and quieter each passing year. We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play. But we need literature, too; we need to communicate what the losses mean. I think of the wood warbler, a small citrus-coloured bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species’ decline. It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are, and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone. Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.
Nests
When I was small, I decided I wanted to be a naturalist. And so I slowly amassed a nature collection, and arranged it across my bedroom sills and shelves as a visible display of all the small expertises I’d gathered from the pages of books. There were galls, feathers, seeds, pine cones, loose single wings of small tortoiseshells or peacock butterflies picked from spiders’ webs; the severed wings of dead birds, spread and pinned on to cardboard to dry; the skulls of small creatures; pellets – tawny owl, barn owl, kestrel – and old birds
’ nests. One was a chaffinch nest I could balance in the palm of my hand, a thing of horsehair and moss, pale scabs of lichen and moulted pigeon feathers; another was a song-thrush nest woven of straw and soft twigs with a flaking inner cup moulded from clay. But those nests never felt as if they fitted with the rest of my beloved collection. It wasn’t that they conjured the passing of time, of birds flown, of life in death. Those intuitions are something you learn to feel much later in life. It was partly because they made me feel an emotion I couldn’t name, and mostly because I felt I shouldn’t possess them at all. Nests were all about eggs, and eggs were something I knew I shouldn’t ever collect. Even when I came across a white half-shell picked free of twigs by a pigeon and dropped on a lawn, a moral imperative stilled my hand. I could never bring myself to take it home.
Naturalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely collected birds’ eggs, and most children who grew up in semi-rural or rural surroundings in the 1940s and ’50s have done it too. ‘We only used to take one from each nest,’ a woman friend told me, abashed. ‘Everyone did it.’ It’s simply an accident of history that people two decades older than me have nature knowledges I do not possess. So many of them, having spent their childhoods bird’s-nesting, still see a furze bush and think, Linnet, and can’t help but assess the ability of last year’s laid hedge to hold a chaffinch or robin’s nest. They possess different wordless intuitions from me, ones relating to how one holds the landscape between head and eye and heart and hand. In my own history of the countryside, nests weren’t things that were made to be found. They were carefully maintained blind spots, redacted lines in familiar texts. But even so, they had special salience when I was very young. For children, woods and fields and gardens are full of discrete, magical places: tunnels and dens and refuges in which you can hide and feel safe. I knew, when I was small, what nests were about. They were secrets.
I followed the flights of blackbirds and tits and thrushes and nuthatches through my garden. And every spring their nests changed how I felt about home. To have the presence of these birds shrunk down to that one point of attachment, the nest, made me anxious. It raised questions of vulnerability, made me worry about predatory crows and cats; made the garden a place of threat, not safety. Though I never searched for nests, I’d find them all the same. I’d be sitting at the kitchen window eating a bowl of Weetabix and I’d spot a dunnock flit into the forsythia, a mouse-sized bird, all streaks and spots and whispers. I knew I should look away, but I’d hold my breath at my transgression and track the almost imperceptible movement of leaves as the disappeared bird hopped up and across through twigs to its nest. Then I’d see the blur of wings as the bird slipped free of the hedge and was gone. And once I’d determined where it was, and saw that the adults were gone, I needed to know. Most of the nests I found were higher than my head, so I’d reach my hand up and curl my fingers until their tips touched what might be warm, glossy smoothness. Or the unbearable fragility of small flesh. I knew I was an intruder. Nests were like bruises: things I couldn’t help but touch, even though I didn’t want them to be there. They challenged everything that birds meant for me. I loved them most because they seemed free. Sensing danger, sensing a trap, sensing any kind of imposition, they could fly away. Watching birds, I felt I shared in their freedom. But nests and eggs tied birds down. They made them vulnerable.
The old books on birds that lined my childhood shelves described nests as ‘bird homes’. This confused me. How could a nest be a home? Back then I thought of homes as fixed, eternal, dependable refuges. Nests were not like that: they were seasonal secrets to be used and abandoned. But then birds challenged my understanding of the nature of home in so many ways. Some spent the year at sea, or entirely in the air, and felt earth or rock beneath their feet only to make nests and lay eggs that tied them to land. This was all a deeper mystery. It was a story about the way lives should go that was somehow like – but not anything like – the one I’d been handed as a child. You grow up, you get married, you get a house, you have children. I didn’t know where birds fitted into all this. I didn’t know where I did. It was a narrative that even then gave me pause.
I think differently of home now: it’s a place you carry within you, not simply a fixed location. Perhaps birds taught me that, or took me some of the way there. Some birds’ nests are homes because they seem indivisible from the birds that make them. Rooks are rookeries – birds of feathers and bone that are also massed assemblages of twigs in February trees. House martins peering from the entrances of their nests under summer gables are beings of wings and mouths and eyes but also all the architecture of gathered mud. But some birds’ nests seem so far from nests at all that the word itself drifts and almost loses purchase. The form of one such nest is: chips of old rock and bones and hardened guano, where the overhang supplies shade. The form of another is: a raft of weeds that rises and falls with the ebb and flow of water. Another: a dark space under roof tiles where you can crawl on your mouse feet and your wings drag like feathered blades the colour of carbon steel. Peregrine. Grebe. Swift.
Nests increasingly fascinate me. These days I wonder about how they seem to be one kind of entity when they contain eggs and a different kind of entity when they contain chicks. How nests and eggs are good things to think about when considering matters of individuality, and the concepts of same, and different, and series. How the form of a nest is part of the phenotype of a particular bird species, but how local conditions foster beautiful idiosyncrasies. How we humans are intrigued when birds make nests out of things that belong to us: house finches lining their nests with cigarette butts, nests of Bullock’s orioles fashioned from twine, kites decorating their tree platforms with underwear stolen from washing lines. A friend of mine found a ferruginous hawk’s nest wrought almost entirely from lengths of wire. It’s satisfying to consider the incorporation of human detritus into the creations of birds, but it is troubling, too. What have they made out of what we have made of this world? Our world intersects with theirs and our habitations are strangely shared. We have long rejoiced at birds building nests in unusual places. We love the robin rearing chicks in an old teapot, a hen blackbird sitting tightly on a nest tucked above the stop bulb on a traffic light: these are nests that gesture towards hope, as birds use our things for their own ends, making our technologies redundant, slowed down, static, full of meaning that is no longer entirely our own.
But that is what nests are. Their meaning is always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human, and as the cup or wall of a nest is raised, it raises, too, questions about our own lives. Do birds plan like us, or think like us, or really know how to make knots, or slap beaks full of mud in series, or is this merely instinct? Does the structure they’re making begin with some abstract form, a mental image, to which the bird plans, rather than thinking, step by step, There, that is where that goes? These are questions that pull on us. We make things according to plans, but all of us also have that sense of where things should go. We feel it when we arrange objects on mantelpieces, or furniture in rooms. Artists feel it when they construct collages, when they sculpt, when they bring pigment to bear on a surface, knowing that the dark smear of paint just here provides or provokes a sense of balance or conflict when viewed in relation to the other marks upon the scene. What is it in us? We are fascinated by the difference between skill and instinct, just as we police the differences between art and craft. If pigment is smeared on to a guillemot’s eggshell as it rotates before being laid in drip-splashes that resemble in their exuberance and finesse the paintings of Abstract Expressionists, what is our delight in those patterns saying about us? I think of that need to collect that sometimes is billionaires hoarding de Koonings and Pollocks and sometimes tradesmen hiding plastic margarine tubs full of exquisitely marked red-backed shrike eggs beneath beds and floorboards.
We see our own notions of home and family in the creatures around us; we process and consider and judge, and prove the truth of ou
r own assumptions back to us from a hall of twigs and mud and shells and feathered mirrors. In science, too, the questions we ask are commonly woven this way. I think of Niko Tinbergen’s eminence in the field of ethology – and remember, too, his patient attention to the way ritualised gestures appeased aggression in colonies of nesting gulls, and how they related to his anxieties about the relationship between overcrowded cities and human violence. I think of the young Julian Huxley, full of all the sexual confusion of youth, spending one spring watching the courtship of great crested grebes, speculating on mutual sexual selection and ritualised behaviour. And I see interwar anxieties about marriage in Henry Eliot Howard’s work on bird behaviour; he puzzles over the concept of territory, of nest building, of extra-pair copulations, and is desperately keen to understand the reasons behind the sexual attractiveness of particular females who lure males from their established mates. And, in literature, too, everywhere. Nesting birds naturalising the English class system in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where seabird-nesting cliffs of auks and kittiwakes make ‘an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world’, exclaiming phrases like ‘Is me hat on straight?’ and ‘Crikey, this isn’t ’arf a do!’ while White’s skeins of aristocratic pink-footed geese pass high over the slum, singing Scandinavian goose-themed sagas as they fly north.
Friends of mine who grew up in marginal rural communities mostly have little truck with the mainstream rules of nature appreciation and the laws that enforce them. Most of them hunt with longdogs. Some of them are poachers. Some have collected eggs. Some of them probably still do, though I don’t get to hear about that. Most have limited financial or social capital, and their claim on the landscape around them is through local field knowledge, rather than literal possession. Egg collecting in this tradition makes me wonder about the terms of ownership, investment and access to pleasure that economically deprived communities are allowed to have in the natural world. I think of Billy, the boy in Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, who refuses to play football, refuses to work down the mine, rejects all the models of masculinity he’s given. What opportunities for tenderness does he have? He strokes the backs of baby thrushes in their nest. He keeps a kestrel that he loves. What kinds of beauties can be possessed? If you are a landowner, you get the whole compass of the watered-silk sky and the hedges and the livestock and everything in it. But if you’re a factory worker? There’s the rub. Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world. It can become an obsession for minds gripped with stilled beauty. It is a practice that halts time. The collectors grant themselves the power to withhold new lives and new generations. And egg collecting is also, at the same time, one in the eye for the elite and all their rules about what is and what is not an acceptable way to relate to nature.