Egg collecting was especially derided in the cultures of natural history operating during and after the Second World War. At that time, British birds were laden with new significance. They were what the nation was made of, what we were fighting for. In this milieu, species with a perilous foothold on British soil, such as avocets, little ringed plovers and ospreys, had their rarity bound up with imperilled nationhood. Thus, the theft of their eggs was seen as an act akin to treason. And protecting the birds from the depredations of collectors seemed analogous to military service. Again and again, in books and films of this period, injured servicemen who have proved their bravery on the field of battle now show their love for their country by protecting rare birds trying to raise families. 1949’s The Awl Birds by J. K. Stanford, for example, where the threatened nest belongs to avocets, or Kenneth Allsop’s Adventure Lit Their Star, published the same year, where it belongs to little ringed plovers. The historian of science Sophia Davis has written on how the villains of these books are egg collectors, routinely described as ‘vermin’ and ‘a menace to England’, and how the nests in their pages are guarded by heroes with the fate of the nation close to their heart. Indeed, gangs of egg protectors guarding the nests of rare birds were a true-life legacy of the war. After years in a German POW camp, the ornithologist George Waterston sat with his colleagues by the first Scottish osprey nest for fifty years and kept it under observation through the telescopic sights of rifles. And in the 1950s, J. K. Stanford wrote of his own experiences guarding avocets. ‘Keyed up by the general air of secrecy,’ he reminisced, ‘we sat till long after dusk, prepared for anything, even an amphibious raid by armed oologists.’ Egg collectors today tend to be seen as beings in the grip of hopeless addiction, simultaneously suffering from great moral failings. These characterisations were firmly codified in the cultures of post-war ornithology as threats to the body politic.
Eggs and war; possession and hope and home. In the 1990s, years after my natural historical collection was disassembled and my childhood home was gone, I worked at a falcon-breeding centre in Wales. In one room were banks of expensive incubators containing falcon eggs. Through the glass, their shells were the mottled browns of walnut, of tea-stains, of onion skins. This was before the advent of newer incubators that mimic the press of a brood patch through hot air-filled plastic pouches. These were forced-air incubators with eggs on wire racks. We weighed them each day, and as the embryo moved towards hatching, we’d candle them: place them on a light and scribe the outline of the shadow against the bright air-cell with a soft graphite pencil, so that as the days passed the eggshell was ringed with repeated lines that resembled tides or wide-grained wood. But I always left the incubation room feeling unaccountably upset, with a vague, disquieting sense of vertigo. It was a familiar emotion I couldn’t quite name. I finally worked out what it was one rainy Sunday afternoon. Leafing through my parents’ albums I found a photograph of me a few days after my birth, a frail and skinny thing, one arm ringed with a medical bracelet and bathed in stark electric light. I was in an incubator, for I was exceedingly premature. My twin brother did not survive his birth. And that early loss, followed by weeks of white light lying alone on a blanket in a Perspex box, had done something wrong to me that echoed with a room full of eggs in forced-air boxes, held in moist air and moved by wire. Now I could put a name to the upset I felt. It was loneliness.
That was when I recognised the particular power of eggs to raise questions of human hurt and harm. That was why, I realised, the nests in my childhood collection made me uncomfortable; they reached back to a time in my life when the world was nothing but surviving isolation. And then. And then there was a day. One day when, quite by surprise, I discovered that if I held a falcon egg close to my mouth and made soft clucking noises, a chick that was ready to hatch would call back. And there I stood, in the temperature-controlled room. I spoke through the shell to something that had not yet known light or air, but would soon take in the revealed coil and furl of a west-coast breeze and cloud of a hillside in one easy glide at sixty miles an hour, and spire up on sharp wings to soar high enough to see the distant, glittering Atlantic. I spoke through an egg and wept.
Nothing Like a Pig
I’m baffled. My boyfriend and I are standing up against a short barbed-wire fence shaded by sweet chestnut leaves. Woods are quiet in autumn: just the sifting hush of a small wind above and a robin making dripping-water noises from a holly bush.
I’m not quite sure what to expect because I’m not sure why I’m here. The boy said he’d show me something I’d never seen before in the woods, which made me raise an eyebrow. But here we are. He whistles and calls, whistles again. Nothing happens. Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.
When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema something unexpected happened when the first dinosaur came on screen: I felt a huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes filled with tears. It was miraculous: a thing I’d seen representations of since I was a child had come alive. Something like that was happening now and it was just as affecting. I’ve seen pictures of boars all my life: razor-backed beasts on Greek pottery, sixteenth-century woodcuts, trophy photographs of twenty-first-century hunters kneeling over them with rifles, ink drawings of the Erymanthian boar in my book of Greek legends. There are animals that are mythological by virtue of being imaginary: basilisks, dragons, unicorns. There are animals that were once just as mythologically rich, but have had so much exposure to us now that their earlier meanings have become swamped with new ones: lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, bears. They’ve been given modern stories. For me, boars still exist inside those older stories, are still emblematic, still rich and passing strange. And now here one was, called into the real world.
This creature was not what I expected, despite its slap of familiarity. It had the forward-menacing shoulders of a baboon and the brute strength and black hide of a bear. But it was not really anything like a bear, and what surprised me most of all was that it was nothing like a pig. As the beast trotted up to us, a miracle of muscle and bristle and heft, I turned to the boy, and said, surprised, ‘It’s nothing like a pig!’ With great satisfaction he grinned and said, ‘No. They’re really not.’
For the first time in centuries, free-roaming wild boars are thriving in British woods, descendants of animals bred for meat that escaped from captivity or were released on purpose. Adaptable and resilient, wild boars are also increasing in number across continental Europe and in places far from their natural range, which spans Eurasia from Britain to Japan. From the first introduction of boars to New Hampshire in the 1890s, boar-like wild pigs have now been reported in at least forty-five states in the United States. In Britain, they have strongholds in Sussex, Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, an ancient hunting preserve that stood in for an alien planet in the movie The Force Awakens. Sixty farm-reared animals were secretly and illegally dumped there in 2004; eleven years later, night-time thermal-imaging surveys suggested the population has grown to more than a thousand.
I lived near the forest some years ago and I went looking for them. My motives were more than just natural-historical curiosity: their presence made me feel I was stepping into something like the wildwood of ancient times. I never saw them, but I did come across signs of their presence: deep ruts and broken ground on woodland paths and grassy roadsides where they’d rooted for food. Boars are landscape engineers that alter the ecology of their woodlands. Wallowing holes fill with rainwater and become ponds for dragonfly larvae, seeds and burrs caught on their coats are spread wide, and their rooting on the forest floor shapes the diversity of woodland plant communities.
Knowing that boars lived in the forest I walked through also charged the English countryside with a new and unusual possibility: danger. Boars, particularly farrowing sows protecting their young, can be aggressive, and will charge and attack intruders. Since the boars’
return to the Forest of Dean, there’ve been reports of walkers being chased, dogs gored, horses newly nervous upon familiar paths. As I walked, I found myself paying a different quality of attention to my surroundings than I ever had before, listening apprehensively for the faintest sounds and scanning for signs of movement in the undergrowth. It made the forest a wilder place but in a sense a far more normal one, for conflict between humans and dangerous wildlife is commonplace in much of the world, from elephants trampling crops in India and Africa to alligators in Florida dining on pet dogs. In Britain, wolves, bears, lynxes and boars were long ago hunted to extinction, and we have forgotten what this is like.
The boar I met up against the fence wasn’t a threat. It was a captive boar, one of a few kept by a local gamekeeper and safely behind wire, but it provoked intense introspection about my place in the world. This creature was one of the semi-legendary beasts charging straight out of the medieval literature I’d read at university, the quarry hunted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, creatures renowned for their formidable ferocity and power. In medieval romances, boars were seen as a challenge to masculinity and hunting them a test of endurance and bravery. When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we’ve heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.
We have a long history of territorial anxiety over wild animals intruding on our spaces. The seventeenth-century English garden writer William Lawson advised his readers of the tools they’d need to keep their properties free of marauding beasts: a ‘fayre and swift greyhound, a stonebowe, gunne, and if neede require, an apple with a hooke for a Deere’. Concerns about the danger of Gloucestershire boars have led to efforts by the Forestry Commission to reduce their population in the Forest of Dean: three hundred and sixty-one were shot in 2014 and 2015, despite anti-hunting activists attempting to get in the way of hunters to prevent the cull. The controversy over how to manage English wild-boar populations points to the contradictory ways that we understand animals and their social uses. Wolves can be depredators of livestock or icons of pristine wilderness; spotted owls can be intrinsically important inhabitants of old-growth forests or nuisances that inhibit logging and livelihoods. These creatures become stand-ins for our own battles over social and economic resources.
When animals become so rare that their impact on humans is negligible, their ability to generate new meanings lessens, and it is then that they come to stand for another human notion: our moral failings in our relationship to the natural world. The world has lost half its wildlife in my own lifetime. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and persecution have meant that vertebrate species are dying out over a hundred times as fast as they would in a world without humans. The single boar appearing from behind the trees felt like a token of hope; it made me wonder if our damage to the natural world might not be irreversible, that creatures that are endangered or locally extinct might one day reappear.
So many things were affecting about this encounter: not just the calling-forth of an animal icon into flesh, but the realisation that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, boar-sentience. And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own. As the boar looked up at me, it was obvious that my knowledge of boars was limited, and only now, face to snout with a real one, its eyes fixed on mine, did I wonder what a boar really was and, oddly, what it thought of me. I had fitted the boar into my medievalist memories, but my friend, who was once a boxer, admired its physique. Talked of its cutlass-curved, razor-sharp tusks. Its small legs and hindquarters that work to steer the huge muscular bulk of the front end. Its manifest, frightening power.
As he spoke, the boar pressed itself up against the fence and sniffed loudly through its wet nostrils. Rashly, I moved my hand towards it. It looked up, flat-faced, with red boar eyes considering, and sniffed again. I drew my hand away. Then, after a while, I lowered it again. The boar stood. It allowed me to push my fingers gently into its arched black back. It felt like a hairbrush with too many bristles and backed with thick muscle, not wood. There was wool underneath the hair. ‘He’ll be getting his winter coat soon,’ said the boy. ‘Six-inch guard hairs.’ I scratched the beast’s broad hump and felt, as the seconds passed, that some tiny skein of aggression in his heart was starting to thrum. I have learned not to distrust intuitions like this. Suddenly we both decided that this was enough, my heart skipping, he grunting and feinting.
Wandering off, he sank on to his knees, nose to the ground, then, with infinite luxury, sat and rolled on to his side. Ripples ran down his hide. I was entranced. For all my interest in this creature, the boar had become bored with me and simply walked away.
Inspector Calls
I’ve a territorial, defensive soul. There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot and then some. After most of the night cleaning the house I was spilling with contagious rage. I’d even considered burning the bastard building to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol dining table.
By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk. The air is soothing, the window open upon cool grey. A red Ford draws up outside and a man and woman get out. The prospective tenants have an eight-year-old son, and he is autistic, my landlord told me. There’s no sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the almost imperceptible restraint of manner born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out my heart folds and falls, not because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper but because he is grasping in each hand a model sea lion.
Downstairs the grown-ups are talking, and the boy is bouncing about in the semi-darkness of the hall. He is totally bored. I look down at his hands. Each of the sea lions has chips of missing paint about its nose where it has interacted with the other, or with something hard, and I ask him if he wants to see my parrot. His eyebrows rise and he waits. A brief, wordless OK from his parents, and we ascend the stairs. He counts each step out loud. And we stop in front of the cage. The bird and the boy stare at each other.
They love each other. The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement. The boy just loves the bird. And the bird does that chops-fluffed-little-flirting twitch of the head, and the boy does it back. And soon the bird and the boy are both swaying sideways, backwards and forwards, dancing at each other, although the boy has to shift his grip on the plastic sea lions to cover both ears with his palms, because the bird is so delighted he’s screeching at the top of his lungs.
‘It is loud!’ says the boy.
‘That’s because he is happy,’ I say. ‘He likes dancing with you.’
And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.
He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect.
‘Lots of people think they are . . .’ he pauses contemptuously, ‘seals.’
‘But of course they are sea lions!’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says.
We glory in the importance of accurate classification.
His parents come into the room. They have decided the house is too small for them and their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.
His mother looks anxious. ‘Come on, Antek! We are going now.’
There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human–animal interaction I have ever seen. Antek nods his head gravely at the parrot, and the parrot makes a deep, courteous bow in return.
A minute later I hear the front door open, and just before they cross the threshold, I can hear clicking that I suspect might be the collision of sea lions’ noses, and then Antek makes an announcement. ‘I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here,’ he says. Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty, in the
hall.
Field Guides
From a high lookout near a spectacular three-tiered waterfall in Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park, the peaks in the far distance reflect sunshine scattered through a haze of aromatic eucalyptus terpenes; the light has turned them a bleached and dusty blue. At my feet the land falls away into a virgin forest of graceful, pale-barked trees that stretches as far as the eye can see. Further up the slope are leggy shrubs with flowers resembling bright plastic hair curlers: banksias, I think. When a small bird appears in the foliage below I fix it in my binoculars. White, black and acid yellow with eyes like tiny silver coins, it’s wiping its down-curved beak on a branch of a shrub with strappy leaves. I don’t know what the shrub is, and I’m not sure what the bird is, either. I think it’s a honeyeater, but I don’t know what anything is, not precisely. Not here. The air smells faintly of old paper and something a little like jet fuel. I feel lost and very far from home.
Vesper Flights Page 2
