Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  It happened to my friend Isabella. She is an artist, and a truly excellent one. When I first met her she was gilding pieces of fresh fruit to make art of their slow collapse over the coming months into corrugated, shining nuggets. I asked her, ‘You hit a deer. What was that like?’ She drew her eyebrows together, just a little. ‘It was like a collision with the divine,’ she said. ‘You’ve read Euripides, right?’ I said, ‘Yes. I have.’ She said, again, ‘Well. It was a collision with the divine.’ Turning on to a fast road at night, lights shone in her eyes from a car in the wrong place. That car had already hit a red deer she couldn’t see. It was lying right across the carriageway. ‘I drove over it,’ she said, shivering with the recollection of the rise and sink of the car’s traverse, feeling the give of flesh and the cracking architecture of ribs. The deer may already have been dead, or perhaps was only stunned, but it was opened up by the weight of her car, which sent a wave of blood across the wet road. Her headlights shone on it. ‘There was so much blood,’ she said. She leaned forward when she told me this, her eyes on mine. ‘So. Much. Blood.’ She told me she could smell the terror of her daughter sitting in the seat next to her. The air around the car that night was foggy, yellow with sodium street-lamps, and there was, there was this sheet of blood running in front of the car for what seemed for ever.

  ‘Was it like The Shining?’ I asked.

  She looked at me levelly, as if I’d not heard a word she’d told me.

  ‘It was much worse.’

  Roads belong to us. We don’t expect things that aren’t us to interact with them, to cross from their territory into our own, and with such brute physicality. Even if you escape unscathed, the effect of a DVC can be life-changing. You can see something of that in the way they are handled in the movies, where they’re scripted narrative shocks, horror-movie jumps, choice dei ex machina that derail narratives as they total cars. Sometimes the deer breaks through the windscreen. There’ll be blood, antlers that fill the car like candelabras, and the dying stag will have its eyes fixed on the character to whom this event has the deepest significance. Sometimes, in movies, the deer lies on the road in the aftermath of the DVC. If the deer is on the road, and the deer is not dead – and it is not very often dead in Hollywood – there’s the matter of how to deal with this. Often it will be making noises that dying deer don’t make. It will be an animatronic deer, for there are companies in Hollywood who will take a dead deer, skin it, flense it of fat, cure it, lay it over a form that contains a mechanism that, once covered with skin, will mimic the slow in and out of breath. DVCs on screen cast a fierce, traumatic light on the innermost hearts of the characters with the bad luck to experience them. And that is often what they do in reality, too.

  All of us know at heart that driving is always challenging fate. We are just very good at pretending it isn’t. A deer in the road is part of the wager we all make and do our best to forget when we drive, as we make our way through life. DVC survivors often maintain that everything changed after the accident, that their life felt recast into something more precious and precarious than before. The deepest ramifications of the DVC are tied intimately to their sense of who they are; they speak of the collision as an event that does not admit the secular, the random, the rational. Often they will not speak of it at all. ‘The car was destroyed,’ they’ll say, or, ‘The windscreen was smashed’, as if mentioning the other participant in the collision was taboo. And that one line, over and over again: ‘It came out of nowhere.’ Fate comes up out of nowhere in the headlights glowing like a goddamned unicorn, and whatever meaning drivers choose to take from the collision falls upon them as inescapably as any medieval allegory. Look at yourself, says the DVC, cutting through all that is quotidian, cutting it all away. Look at yourself. Here you really are. The old dramatists called that moment of self-understanding anagnorisis.

  Most DVCs occur between nightfall and midnight, and again in the small hours before dawn. That’s when deer are moving, but also when we are most prone to oneiric states of mind. Driving in dusk and darkness is a perfect dream of solipsism. Headlights unspool into rises and curves and bulks of fences and passing houses; you call these things into momentary existence, smear them with light and mass before they are gone. And because everything you see is ceaselessly pulled towards and under you, it’s easy to fall prey to the illusion that you are stationary and the world is flowing into you. The fractional somatic forces the terrain exerts, the ghostly burr of the road surface, the small forces of corners and hills are things you feel in your physical frame and the liquids of your ears. And this all means that if a deer appears in front of you, it can feel more than a surprise; it can seem as if some part of you called it into existence, as if it were fashioned by your subconscious mind.

  Since returning from the deer forest, my own subconscious mind is full of DVCs. I have tightened my hands on the wheel in anxious anticipation of disaster as I drive through rural woods. At night I’ve dreamed of roads, of mist, of slicks of oil printed with hoofmarks, windscreens crazed by impacts, herds of running deer. I mention this strange new preoccupation to a friend in an email. ‘Are you OK?’ they reply. ‘Is something bad happening in your life?’ I write back and say, ‘I’m fine; I think I want to write about deer collisions, is all.’ They have a suggestion: ‘Have you checked YouTube? You know there are actual supercuts?’ Of course there are. I don’t want to watch them, just as I don’t want to watch videos of other traumatic events that are clickable currency on the internet, things far worse than the accidental coincidence of a deer with an offside fender. But I sit down, find one of the videos and press play.

  The video is made of dashcam footage from many different vehicles edited into a long montage of DVCs. The first thing it makes me think of is first-person shooter video gameplay, with deer bursting into view so unexpectedly they seem ghostly artefacts on the screen – until they hit metal. It happens again. Another hit. Another cut. Now dusk, the lights of a gas station, the murmur of talk radio. A roe deer colliding with the car, turning over and over in the air before it lands deadweight on the grassy verge. The car slows and halts. A woman gets out. She wears a blue fringed top and a woollen shrug pulled over her shoulders. She walks to where the deer lies, looks down, looks back at the driver, raises both hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. The driver gets out, shoulders set, ignores the deer and leans down to examine the front of his car. Another vehicle, another overheard conversation, another collision, another dashcam dislodged from the dashboard to point upwards at stricken faces. I pause the video, get up, pace about the kitchen. I sit back down, watch some more, stop again. It’s getting harder to continue. Sometimes the deer leaps high over the hood of the car and escapes all harm; most often it does not, and it will fall lengthways onto the bonnet and slide down, or smash the windscreen, or spin balletically away in parabolae of antlers and flesh and bone. I see the puff of fur as a fender makes contact, hear the click of hooves hitting steel. What most surprises me as I watch this repeated, terrible carnage is how high the deer are thrown in the air. Ten, twelve, twenty feet, tumbling end over end, limp and pathetic. Towards the end of the video I start reading the comments beneath it. I expect them to be grim and they are. ‘Cool ragdoll physics,’ says one. Another suggests that deer have very low IQs. Another thinks deer are suicidal. ‘Am I the only one who thinks it’s funny when they B O U N C E off of the cars?’ The answer is no. ‘Oh man,’ writes another, ‘I haven’t laughed this hard at a compilation in a long time, great job seriously.’

  I don’t laugh. I sit very still. It takes me a long while to work out how upset I am. My pet parrot understands what I’m feeling faster than I do; he jumps from his perch on the back of a chair, runs along the tabletop and snuggles against my forearm, extending his soft feathery neck to nibble gently at the back of my hand.

  I’ve witnessed a series of extremely violent deaths, and the bodies of deer are sufficiently large that they can’t help but remind us of our own. But
I don’t think that’s the reason for my upset, not entirely. The tone of the comments is perturbing, but pretty much par for the course on the internet. Besides, inappropriate laughter is not an unusual response to emotional difficulty. No, my upset is more about how the commentators view the deer as obstacles to progress like the random antagonists in videogames; things that have consequential presence but no meaningful existence in and of themselves. And that’s when I realise that most of my upset is directed at myself.

  I’ve valued deer for their capacity to surprise and delight me, which is why I’ve resisted learning more about them. The more you know about something, the less it can surprise you. But it’s hard to feel sympathy with a thing whose reality you have chosen to ignore, which makes my attitude not so very different from those who would write approvingly of the physics of a dying deer, or how the best thing about a deer collision is how funny it can be. Deer–vehicle collisions have gripped me so tightly because they are my own attitude to deer writ large and covered in blood and tattered fur and broken glass: everything about them is made of deer being surprising, deer derailing our expectations of the world. I sit at the table and think of deer that die because they have no conception of the nature of roads. Deer that die because they are creatures with their own lives, their own haunts and paths and thoughts and needs. I don’t think I could ever laugh at the sight of a deer being hit by a car. But I have not been innocent. I close the YouTube window, go to a website that sells second-hand natural history books. I buy a book called Understanding Deer.

  The Falcon and the Tower

  I’m standing on cracked asphalt by a high-security fence at the eastern edge of Ireland. The sky is cold pewter, the salt wind bitter. Though I’ve come all the way here to watch wildlife I’ve just turned my back on the only birds I can see. The miles of sand behind me have been washed by the Irish Sea into a perfect blankness, pearled with gulls and flocks of migrant waders. It’s beautiful. But my friends Hilary and Eamonn have told me to look instead at Dublin’s Poolbeg Power Station, a giant’s playset of brutal turbine halls facing the shining sands. Set amid sewage works, derelict redbrick buildings, wharves, cranes and shipping containers, this is a bizarre spot for a wildlife pilgrimage. Two decommissioned cooling chimneys tower above us, marked with vertical washes of rust and horizontal bands of red and white. Rising from the horizon, they are your first sight of Ireland if you arrive from the east by sea and the last when you leave. Visible throughout the city, they have come to mean home for a whole generation of Dubliners – and for the peregrine falcons that have nested on them for years.

  For a while, not much happens. We watch flocks of pigeons clattering about the roofline in shadowless winter light. My face grows numb with cold. Then, below the chimneys, a pigeon cartwheels like a thrown firework through a broken window into the darkness beyond. There is something horrible about its descent. Had it been shot? Had some kind of fit? It takes me a little while to work out that the pigeon was trying to get inside as fast as possible, and it’s then I know that the falcons have come.

  A narrow black anchor appears, falling fast towards the west chimney as if on an invisible zip wire. Seeing something alive descending to earth at such speed brings a hitch to my throat. A faint, echoing call drifts towards us, the unlikely ee-chip, ee-chip of a swinging, unoiled door. It is the male, the tiercel. He swerves, spreads his wings wide to brake and alights upon the rail by a nestbox that has been fixed to a metal walkway a hundred feet above. He shakes his feathers into place and sits looking towards the estuary, flat-headed, an inverted bullet shape black against the sky.

  ‘Do you want to see?’ Eamonn says, gesturing to his telescope. Through the device, the falcon is oddly two-dimensional, rippling in the bright circle as if seen through water, and my eyes ache as I try to focus on small points of sharpness: the barred feathers of his chest, his black hood, a faint chromatic fringe ghosting him with suggestions of dust and rainbows. He’s exquisite, the colour of smoke, paper and wet ash. He starts preening his feathers, puffs out his belly, half closes his eyes, angles his head back to zip single scapulars through his neat, curved beak. Gusts of wind rising up the chimney face blow his feathers the wrong way. His talons are curled around rusting steel. The wind has ice in it. He looks utterly at home.

  This perch gives him vantage on miles of hunting territory: estuary, docks, city streets, parks and golf courses. The divisions between those things are of little consequence to him. But they are to us. What we are watching is a small, feathered rebuke to our commonplace notion that nature exists only in places other than our own, an assumption that seems always one step towards turning our back on the natural world, abandoning it as something disappearing or already lost.

  For much of the twentieth century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial ruins too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality: mountains, by virtue of their eternity; industrial ruins, by virtue of their reminding us that this, too, in time will be gone, and that we should protect what is here and now.

  Perhaps the peregrine is becoming the imagined essence of landscapes like these. When Eamonn was a child, he went with his father to search for peregrines in the Wicklow Mountains because books told him they nested on cliffs and crags. He saw none at all. His first wild peregrine was sitting high on a Dublin gasometer. Falcons have nested on tall buildings for centuries, but the rise of urban peregrines is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1950s and ’60s, the pesticide DDT sent peregrine populations into free fall across Europe and North America, before it was gradually banned. As their numbers recovered, peregrines moved into cities, lured by flocks of feral pigeons. In the eastern United States, no wild falcons remained, so Cornell University’s Peregrine Fund released captive-bred birds from artificial nests on towers and tall buildings to repopulate their former range. Traditional nest sites on cliffs were deemed too dangerous: lacking parents to protect them, inexperienced youngsters fell prey to great horned owls. When grown, these falcons gravitated to buildings and bridges, searching for nest sites that resembled their own. Additional release programmes followed.

  Today peregrines have become a familiar sight in cities. New York has about twenty breeding pairs, London around twenty-five. Nesting on high-rises, coursing pigeons through city streets, they have developed novel behaviours in response to their surroundings. Some have learned to hunt at night, ascending into darkness to grab birds lit from beneath by streetlights. Urban environments are not without risk: the sheer sides, reflective glass and unexpected gusts of wind around tall buildings can result in crash-landings when young birds take their first flights, and dedicated locals who follow the lives of particular pairs through binoculars, telescopes or webcams sometimes intervene to rescue grounded birds from traffic. Even so, peregrine populations are growing in cities. Perched high on corporate headquarters, scanning the sky and streets below, the falcons can readily be viewed as reflections of our own fascination with vision, surveillance and power. But falcons are not merely handy symbols for human anxieties. Their greatest magic is that they’re not human at all.

  Eamonn comes to this site in Dublin nearly every day and has been doing so for years. He started watching the Poolbeg peregrines after a personal bereavement because it ‘was . . . away’, he told me. I understood what he meant. At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you’re watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world, but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge. These days, working in Dublin, Eamonn keeps one eye on the sky, scanning churches and city towers. Up there, he sees falcons looking down on the streets
below. ‘Bits of eternity,’ he calls them. Sometimes he sees one speeding overhead, a black silhouette over Temple Bar or the Olympia Theatre. In an instant, his city is transformed. Buildings become cliffs, streets canyons.

  Time passes. The tiercel has gone. Now the female appears on the edge of the nestbox. She is larger and paler than her mate. For a minute or two, she sits undecided, looking about. Then she opens her wings, wheels and glides down towards the other chimney. I raise my binoculars, wincing at the difficulty of focusing them with frozen hands. I see her wings flex and her primaries flare. She turns slowly in mid-air. There is a change in the quality of her flight. I’m not sure what it is. Then with a skip of the heart, I see an incautious pigeon flying low towards her, flapping in a leisurely manner. It can’t have seen her. But she has seen it. The world shrinks to the space between the two birds. I hear an intake of breath from my companions as she sideslips and falls towards it with the finality of a rock flung from a bridge. The stricken pigeon dodges, closes its wings and drops to last-minute safety in the buildings below. The falcon circles, climbs and disappears inland.

  We take the binoculars from our eyes and look at one another. We have all been reminded that a day can be cut in two by three seconds of a hunting peregrine and leave you stilled into silence and the memory of each curve of its flight. I’d swear, if I were of a more mystical persuasion, that a hunting peregrine changes the quality of the atmosphere it flies through, makes it heavier. Like thunder. Like slowed-down film in which the grain shows through. The Poolbeg site is about as far as you can get from a thriving natural ecosystem, but the act of watching a falcon chase its prey above the scarred and broken ground below feels like quiet resistance against despair. Matters of life and death and a sense of our place in the world tied fast together in a shiver of wings across a scrap of winter sky.