Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  Kneeling by this glow-worm and transfixed by its light, this encounter in the summer night feels more like the workings of magic than chemistry, though I know that the light is the result of a reaction when the enzyme luciferase acts upon a compound called luciferin in the presence of oxygen, ATP and magnesium. The precise mechanism of their cold luminescence long puzzled natural philosophers. In the seventeenth century Robert Boyle found that the glow was extinguished if they were kept in a vacuum – and went on to muse that the light of his experimental glow-worms, trapped behind glass, was akin to ‘certain truths’ that shine freely ‘in spight of prisons’. In the early nineteenth century, John Murray conducted laborious experiments on Shropshire glow-worms, placing their luminous parts in water heated to various temperatures, or in acid, naphtha, oil or spirits. His accounts of these faintly gruesome experiments are almost as magical as his subjects. One specimen glowed for several nights when suspended in olive oil. ‘Viewed at a distance of about 10 feet, it twinkled like a fixed star,’ he recounted, while ‘the eye steadily and tranquilly observed the beautiful phenomenon’. It is hard to write about glow-worms without recourse to metaphors of stars and lamps; their singular light populates myriad works of literature. These are the creatures of an ‘ineffectual fire’ in Hamlet and the ‘living lamps’ of Marvell’s Mower to the Glow-Worms, courteous beasts who guide wanderers home to safety.

  Glow-worms prefer chalky, limestone habitats and you can find them on old railway lines and embankments, in cemeteries, hedgerows and gardens. But no one knows how many there are in Britain; they often go unnoticed because their light is easily obscured by headlights and torches. Certainly they are threatened by habitat degradation and urban development – males are attracted to streetlights and brightly lit windows, and this particular colony survives partly because the sodium glow of the surrounding town is blocked by quarry walls. Because the females do not fly, colonies are often venerable in age and easily rendered extinct: it is hard for them to move. But where they are known, colonies are often guarded passionately, and glow-worm tours and walks have become a much-loved summer’s-night tradition in many parts of the country: local experts guiding visitors around the natural light show, often with drinks and snacks laid on.

  We live in a world of distracting, endless glowing screens, but even so these shining, tiny beacons retain an allure that draws people out in droves to stand and wonder. It is hard in these days of ecological ruination to find ways to reconnect people to a natural world more commonly encountered on television and video than in its living reality. The greatest magic of these shining beacons that draw people out in hordes to stand and wonder is that it cannot be meaningfully captured on film. Glow-worms are part of our hidden countryside; like Marvell’s living lamps, they are still able to guide distracted wanderers.

  Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres

  I only saw them once. I didn’t know I’d never see them again. I assumed they’d be eternal, like Pan Am, and the Soviet Union, and so many other things in the world that existed when I was born. I went out early that morning, sun glowing faintly through stratus, and drove north-west until shapes rose syrup-slow on the far horizon. They looked like buildings, like aircraft hangars or warehouses, but they were stands of poplars planted in the 1950s by Bryant & May, the safety match manufacturers. Disposable plastic lighters and cheaper wood imports turned the trees into economic relics. But these plantations were beloved of birders because they were the only place in the country you could see breeding golden orioles. They were legendary birds. I’d read about them for years. They’re dazzlingly pretty – the males buttercup yellow with shiny black wings and a strawberry-red beak, the females soft olive green – but much of their glamour came from their rarity. If you live somewhere other than Britain, you might see orioles all the time. There are many in the Americas, and golden orioles are common garden birds in countries across the Palaearctic. But in Britain we only had this one tiny outpost.

  I’d arranged to meet my guide by the entry gate. I’d never met him before, but there wasn’t much doubt that he was the man in a woollen hat waving at me with a pair of binoculars. Peter was a friend of a friend, an expert on these orioles, and he had, it turned out, been sleeping in his car all night on site waiting for daylight. He told me I’d missed the bitterns booming in the reed beds at dawn, that it was the strangest of sounds, like someone blowing across the top of a deep and wide-necked bottle. But, he continued, the orioles were still singing. And as we walked down the dew-soaked track towards the wood, I heard them, fluting, rich, melodic phrases that cut across distance and the rattle of leaves and the loud chatter of singing reed warblers as if they were drifting in from an impossibly remote place. That place, I realised, might be the past, the birds speaking of history. Chaucer wrote of a bird called Wodewale, which has been variously identified by experts as a woodpecker, a woodlark or an oriole. I’m convinced it’s the latter, for the word is such a beautiful phonetic approximation of an oriole’s song: Wo-de-wal-e, wo-de-wal-e, a phrase like the curl of the cut ends of a gilded banner furling over the page of an illuminated manuscript.

  It was easy to hear orioles. Seeing them was a different matter. The poplar plantation resembled, somehow, a scaled-up tabletop cardboard theatre set, and peering into it pulled me into all manner of perspectival tricks and traps. Rows of equally sized grey, columnar trunks marched back to vanishing points in the dim distance, and because poplar branches begin high up, the arches where the leaves met between the rows of trees seemed part proscenium, part cathedral buttress. It was noisy, too, with a near-continuous rattle and clatter. Poplar’s heart-shaped leaves are arranged in little fists of long, flexible petioles that make them twist and flap, flag-like, in the least breath of wind. The whole forest looked as if it were made of torn paper, and somewhere in its leaves were orioles. They called, moved. Sang, then called again, moved unseen to a distant tree, called again, made a different call, a sharp cat-call hzzzt!, moved, called, sang, and then moved once more. They stuck to the very tops of the tree canopy, and after a while I began to wonder if they could throw their voices. We stood there for a very long while, binoculars raised, necks getting cricked, and we saw no orioles at all. Driving home, I held the memory of their song with me like a pebble in the palm of one hand. I hadn’t been disappointed by my morning in the poplars. Even so, I knew I needed to come back and try again.

  This was thirteen years ago, in 2006, and our little population was about to blink into nonexistence. At that point the outpost was only about forty years old: its first colonisers had come here from the Netherlands in the 1960s, where they nested in trees in the Polders just like these. They must have crossed the North Sea and found themselves somewhere that felt like home. They quietly thrived. By the 1980s there were about thirty pairs, but there was already concern for their future, for many of the most expansive poplar stands in the area were scheduled to be felled. People clubbed together to form a group to study, survey and help protect the birds, and some new poplar belts were planted in hope of future colonisation. But the largest block of trees was hewn down all the same, and their numbers plummeted. This coincided with the beginning of a wider decline in oriole populations across their northern range in the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland. It might have been the effect of environmental changes in the Congo, where orioles spend their winters, or perhaps because increasingly early springs in Europe have led to a mismatch in timing between the emergence of the insects that orioles feed upon and when they are most needed to feed their young. In Britain the end came fast. Three years after my visit, only one nest remained, after which there were no more British-bred orioles. They had been a visitation, living in a little snippet of economic history, settling gold on the papery branches, making the fens obliquely glorious with their song. We never thought of these birds as immigrants; this was no Lost Colony. We thought of them as returning natives, and cherished their foothold in our time.

  I returned a week later in hot, thund
ery darkness just before sunrise. The site had been turned into a bird reserve a few years previously, and the carrot fields around the poplar plantations had been flooded and planted with phragmites reeds. My walk to meet Peter ran through these reeds, passing patches of unreflective water, flat pools with surfaces matte with milky pollen-dust, tiny froglets scrambling away from my feet, the grass running with scores of miniature, urgent amphibians. Though beautiful, reed beds are unsettling places. Unlike deserts and open water, they’re not inimical to supporting human life except in a very literal sense. You can walk across deserts, foot by foot. You can’t walk on water at all. With reed beds, who knows? Their stalks are spiky and soft at once, and reed beds do, in some places, become islands, as in the Danube delta, and sail off in matted arks of rot and life. They’re delicate, different and faintly dangerous places. Let no one underestimate the strange effect on human psychology of not knowing whether the ground underfoot is ground at all. Unless you have special, local knowledge, reed beds can be as forbidding and as lethal as mountains.

  As I looked over the reeds I heard a pinging sound, then four or five small, long-tailed birds flew in little musical slurs across the water and landed to catch like little spherical burrs in the reeds right in front of me. They were bearded reedlings, birds utterly reliant on stands of phragmites like these. The adults raise a couple of families a year, and this was a brood of adolescents let loose upon the reeds. Adult male bearded reedlings are legendarily glamorous, possessing grey cowls and long black moustaches. But these youngsters weren’t in grown-up dress; they were sleek and fawn-coloured, as if they were made of very expensive cashmere, and somehow wearing long, black velvet evening gloves. Their tiny waxen beaks resembled the heads of all-weather matches, and set in a thumb-smear of sooty kohl were strange, pale eyes that caught the light oddly as they clambered among the reeds. Their movements were bewitching. They’re birds built for a world of verticals. Their legs are long, black and glint like obsidian, and they have huge, cartoon bird feet. Orioles forgotten, I stood and watched these little cashmere balls bouncing up and down in the reeds, and was delighted to see that quite often a bird hopped from one reed stem on to two, grabbing one stalk in each foot before sitting there happily doing the splits to pick reed seeds from the nearest overhanging frond.

  This time Peter had brought the technology; he had set up a telescope on the bank and already trained it on the nest. The nest adhered to the tree the way that papery burnet moth cocoons adhere to stems of grass. It was shaped something like a half coconut woven carefully from a hammock of thin grass and slung between two whippy branches sixty feet up in the air, and it was like no nest I’d seen before, although for a long while I couldn’t see it at all. Through the telescope there was barely enough ambient light for depth and modelling to appear, but as the sun rose higher, what I saw became something like looking into a Magic Eye picture. Here was a circle, and in it a thousand angles of stalk and leaf and scraps of shade at various distances, and every straight stalk or branch was alternately obscured and revealed as the wind blew. I began to feel a little seasick watching this chaos, but then, as magically as a stereogram suddenly reveals a not-very-accurate 3D dinosaur, the muddy patch just off centre resolved itself into the nest.

  As soon as it happened I tensed with the effort of not losing it again. The telescope’s focus was slightly out for my shortsighted eyes, so it required physical effort to keep what I saw from derealising back into nonsense. I wanted so much to see an adult oriole leaping on to the nest to make it real, the gaping mouths of begging chicks emerging from inside it, the flapping of newly grown feathers. But nothing happened.

  If there were birds inside that nest, at this time of year they’d be close to fledging and leaving it, I thought, so why couldn’t I see anything in it move? They’d be restless, surely, at this hour? I surrendered the telescope to Peter along with my misgivings, spread my coat on the grass and sat down. Our mood grew sombre as we came to suspect, then believe, then finally know that there was nothing in this nest at all. It had been exceptionally windy the previous day, so we wondered if the young had fallen from the nest. After thinking this, there was no question but that we needed to go into the wood and look for the chicks that might be underneath the tree.

  I shrugged my coat back on. The wood was at least five feet deep in stinging nettles. I’d done a lot of birding, and walking, and hawking, in nettles, and knew that the correct way to treat banks of big nettles is to wear reasonably thick clothes and not give a cuss for them. Wade through and be damned. It’s like the Red Sea miracle – with faith, they’ll part harmlessly in front of you. But what I wasn’t used to dealing with was nettles emerging from a swamp. We stepped through rushes growing etiolated through wet black mud, and across places where the ground was so saturated there was no vegetation at all but something akin to quickpeat. Mostly we walked in nettles, their stems so densely packed that neither of us had much idea of what was beneath them as we struggled through. The poplar branches here were low, permitting us only a tiny tunnel of clearance between the top of the stinging nettles and the thatch of twigs and leaves. It felt like river caving, tilting our chins upward to the foot and a half of air between water and rock. It was claustrophobic, intense, the greens rich and dark, and it felt very far away from England. Like Louisiana, perhaps. Mosquitoes descended on us, swarms of big Anopheles whose delicate stripes and long noses drifted purposively towards our faces. We halted at the nest tree, kicked carefully about. There was nothing beneath it but nettles. I slapped away one mosquito after another, noticed there was blood all over my hands.

  Then we heard an oriole. It wasn’t the oriole’s otherworldly song, but a series of short, rasping calls. Then, very softly from the foggy, papery green, a soft hoot hoot hoot was sent back to it – the contact call of a chick. Then came the glorious swirling flute of one of the parents as he swept in from nowhere to feed. And that’s when I saw him. Finally, I saw my oriole. A bright, golden male. It was a complex joy, because I saw him only in stamped-out sections, small jigsaw pieces of a bird, but moving ones, animated mutoscope views. A flick of wings, a scrap of tail, then another glimpse – this time, just his head alone – through a screen of leaves. I was transfixed. I had not expected the joyous, extravagant way this oriole leapt into the air between feeds, the enormously decisive movements, always, and the little dots like stars that flared along the edge of his spread-wide tail. It’s hard to comprehend that in all these views through my binoculars, he was never more than the size of a fingernail at arm’s length. But then a fingernail at arm’s length is, I guess, exactly the size of the visible sun.

  The Observatory

  I never cared much for swans until the day a swan told me I was wrong. It was a cloudy winter morning and I was suffering from a recently broken heart. I sat myself down on a concrete step by Jesus Lock and was staring at the river, feeling the world was just as cold and grey, when a female mute swan hoist herself out from the water and stumped towards me on leathery, in-turned webbed feet and sturdy black legs. I assumed she wanted food. Swans can break an arm with one blow of their wing, I remembered, one of those warnings from childhood that get annealed into adult fight-or-flight responses. Part of me wanted to get up and move further away, but most of me was just too tired.

  I watched her, her snaky neck, black eye, her blank hauteur. I expected her to stop, but she did not. She walked right up to where I sat on the step, her head towering over mine. Then she turned around to face the river, shifted left, and plonked herself down, her body parallel with my own, so close her wing-feathers were pressed against my thighs. Let no one ever speak of swans as being airy, insubstantial things. I was sitting with something the size of a large dog. And now I was too astonished to be nervous. I didn’t know what to do: I grasped, bewildered, for the correct interspecies social etiquette. She looked at me incuriously, then tucked her head sideways and backwards into her raised coverts, neck curved, and fell fast asleep.

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sp; We sat there together for ten minutes, until a family came past and a toddler made a beeline for her. She slipped back into the water and ploughed upstream. As I watched her leave something shifted inside me and I began to weep with an emotion I recognised as gratitude. That day was when swans turned into real creatures for me, and it has spurred me since to seek out others.

  My favourite place to see swans in winter is the Welney Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve. It’s on the Ouse Washes, part of the highly engineered wetland landscape of the East Anglian Fens. The observatory here is far from the usual ramshackle wooden hide. It’s heated and carpeted and even has a glass case of taxidermied swans inside. Age has rendered them nicotine-yellow so they resemble the live birds outside the way smoked kippers resemble live herring.

  Just as unusual are the crowds sharing the observatory with me. There are a few wolfish-looking men with spectacular telescopes of a species common to nature reserves. But there are also impressively bouffanted ladies of a certain age peering through binoculars so elderly they resemble opera glasses. There’s a woman in a wheelchair who sings joyously all the way down the bumpy slope to the door. There are teen Goths and toddlers and couples in their twenties and sixties and eighties and a baby in pink tights and a glittery top. All of us – apart from the baby, who is transfixed by the Goths – are looking out of the panoramic plate-glass windows across a mile of water broken by tiny islands and dotted lines that are the stalks of drowned grasses and huddles of sleeping black-tailed godwits. There are no shadows anywhere out there except in the moving lines between ripples that chase themselves across miles of shallow water. As the light diminishes, distant structures become unmoored and float on the horizon: trees, pylons, wind turbines. Closer, willows are frozen like ice on glass. The lake is mercury-bright and patterned with thousands of birds as far as the eye can see: moving dots of mallard, wigeon, pochard – and miniature bergs that are swans.