Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  A lake the size of Loch Lomond appears here every winter and drains to wet pasture in spring. Famed for wildfowling and winter skating, it’s become a traditional wintering site for thousands of swans that come to feast on potatoes left in the ground after harvest, on sugar beet, on winter wheat. These aren’t the familiar mute swans of town parks and lakes, not the species that came up to me and made its presence known. They’re whooper swans and Bewick’s swans, birds that breed in arctic Iceland and Siberia, and they are very different beasts.

  Whoopers cross the North Atlantic non-stop to get here, flying for twelve hours at around twenty thousand feet through icy and oxygen-poor air. They’re huge and impressive creatures. But it’s the smaller species here, Bewick’s swans, that are the favourite of WWT warden Shaun, who has come into the observatory to talk with us before the evening feed. Shaun is a stockman, of sorts. In summer he looks after cattle that graze on the Washes. When it is flooded, he looks after the swans. ‘The yellow from their beaks continues up and around their eyes,’ he says reverently of his Bewick’s. ‘Like yellow eyeliner. They’re such pretty little birds.’

  Near the case of swans in this observatory there’s a bronze bust of the WWT’s founder, Sir Peter Scott. He loved them too. Fifty years ago he noticed that every swan had a different pattern of yellow and black on its bill. Fascinated, he started to name them and paint tiny swan reference mug-shots of each bird. This developed into a ‘face book’, a visual catalogue of individual swans that is continued today. Even now, WWT researchers memorise birds by sight, and Scott’s initial tracing of swans and their family trees has become one of the longest-running wildlife studies in the world. In conjunction with radio-tracking and ringing studies, the data it produces is crucial for conservation. While whooper populations are healthy, Bewick’s are not: climate and habitat change seem likely factors in their rapid decline.

  When I was small, Bewick’s swans were strange and glamorous because they migrated here from the Soviet Union, crossing the Iron Curtain with absolute unconcern. I’ve often wondered what lay behind Peter Scott’s fascination with them. To an ex-naval officer, explorer’s son and champion glider pilot, the heroic North Sea flights of whoopers would certainly appeal. But it’s tempting to imagine that a particular strand of English conservatism influenced his desire to individuate Bewick’s swans, to turn them into families rather than flocks, trace their family trees and give them names like Casino, Croupier, Lancelot, Jane Eyre and Victoria, before they returned to the Soviet Union each spring. Politics are so easily caught up in science, the Cold War unwittingly pleated into swans’ rushing, beating wings.

  Now the floodlights are switched on and the water shivers. There’s a hush of anticipation as Shaun leaves the observatory and reappears pushing a wheelbarrow along the shoreline, casting great scoopfuls of corn into the lake. We crowd to the window. A raft of winter wildfowl is feeding busily beneath us: conker-headed pochards, mallards, scores of whoopers and Bewick’s with cloudy pinions and snowy necks. These birds are entirely wild, yet here they are, tame as farmyard ducks, feeding on a wet stage lit up like a West End theatre. The experience is joyous, but messes with your everyday notions of what a wild animal is, what wildness is at all.

  But something is missing. I’m chasing something like the feeling the Cambridge swan had given me, and it isn’t here, though I have an intimation of where I might find it. Leaving the observatory I head for the old wooden hides next door, raise a narrow window and let in the soundscape outside. What do thousands of arctic swans sound like? A vast amateur brass band tuning up in an aircraft hangar. My heart soars. Every few seconds comes a carillon of new voices. The swans are coming home to roost in little family groups, silhouettes that rise over the observatory and plane down to the black water. They are calling to each other in the night, these beautiful migrants, some of their faces stained yellow, some dark with potato-mud, their broad webbed feet splayed to brake as they descend. They land, call, flap their wings, squabble, dip their heads under the water, preen, drink thirstily. This is why I came. It’s impossible to regard the natural world without seeing something of our own caught up in it. Back on that wintry riverside, a swan had come towards me and offered me strange companionship at a time when I thought loneliness was all I could feel. And what comforts me now, watching these arctic swans in our era of rising political nativism, is how clearly they are at home.

  Wicken

  On a foggy morning a long while ago, I took my brother and very young niece for a walk around one of Britain’s oldest nature reserves. Wicken Fen is a tiny fragment of the lost marshland ecosystem that once covered around two and a half thousand square miles of eastern England. We spent a couple of hours in its mosaic of grassland and sedge, strolling in wet fields cut with scrub-shadow and water. It was spring, and everywhere was bursting with life: singing nightingales, snipe winnowing and bleating through the upper air, cuckoos tilting from the tips of willows and water rails squealing and grunting in reeds. As we crossed one of the fen’s ancient waterways, a barn owl floated past us, mothy wings shining through particulate mist; at our feet a drinker moth caterpillar inched furrily across the path like a cautiously mobile moustache. We knelt to watch its progress. Then my niece turned to me and asked, curiously: ‘Auntie Helen, when they made this place, where did they bring the animals from?’

  I didn’t understand at first.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are so many animals here. Did they come from a zoo?’

  That was when I realised her intuition was a perfectly rational one, for the countryside that my niece knew was mostly green desert.

  ‘They always lived here,’ I said gently. ‘All the countryside used to be like this. Little bits like this are all that is left.’ And her frown made my heart break.

  I have been coming to Wicken for many years, bewitched by its strangeness and beauty. And today I’m back again, walking its paths under drifts of pallid cloud, still haunted by my niece’s reasonable inability to understand that the life that is here was once everywhere. But that was, after all, why we had come. Nature reserves are places in which we can experience the past – the British environmentalist Max Nicholson once described them as outdoor living museums. Fen landscapes are unstable places where familiar categories of water and land are disconcertingly confused, and they feel temporally unstable, too, rich with a sense of their layered ages. Walking in them is an act of virtual time travel.

  I think of the natural wealth of the eleventh-century fens, where fish and wildfowl existed in such astonishing plenitude that local debts were settled with payments of eels – known as fish-silver – and Saxon warlords hid in the swamps from Norman invaders. I think of seventeenth-century villagers who were at home here, who cut sedge and reed for thatching and dug peat for domestic fuel. In the nineteenth century naturalists flocked to Wicken in search of insects. So many people brought lamps to attract moths at night that there were complaints that the fen looked lit by streetlights. Charles Darwin collected rare beetles from Wicken-cut reeds sent to Cambridge in boats to light university fires, and sugar-smeared poles stuck in the ground by amateur entomologists specifically to draw moths to their sweetness took root and grew into today’s vast willows. I pass one of these trees at the corner of the path, lately fallen, its split trunk spilling with old bee honeycomb. It had been planted by a visitor to the fen whose relationship to nature was very different from that of my niece. To him it was something to collect, fix and catalogue. To her, it is a thing separate from us, something to revere and observe from a remove.

  It is pleasurable to imagine that you can commune with the past in a place like this. But there are consequences to feeling that kind of pleasure. If you start to see ecologically rich habitats as temporally separated from us, then the lack of wildlife in modern landscapes seems unremarkable. Why bother reducing pesticide use on farms, or preventing housing development at the edge of a city, when a reserve exists a few miles away?
Living museums may be comforting to visit, but the problem is that they cannot ever be really insulated from the present. Dam construction outside the McCloud River Preserve in California, for example, rendered the river’s native bull trout extinct. In the Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve in New South Wales, Australia, many species have been lost through habitat degradation and predation by foxes and cats. Once they are gone, these species cannot recolonise, because the small reserve is now an isolated island in a sea of impoverished habitat.

  The wildlife and vegetation around me here are not frozen remnants of another time but things with their own histories, moving and shifting ceaselessly in response to local conditions, and able to return to places where we thought them gone. Humans have shaped this fen for centuries, halted its natural processes of ecological succession and maintained its delicate and complicated life. During the past two decades, the custodians of Wicken Fen have undertaken an ambitious century-long rewilding project to enlarge the reserve by slowly returning about thirteen thousand acres to its former wetland state. The project is already winding time backwards: in the years I’ve come here I’ve seen farm fields turn back into wetlands and meadows. But it’s also turning time forward. Herds of Highland cattle and Polish konik ponies now live on the fen, their grazing shaping its vegetation as part of a management regime designed to let the land develop over time. It is impossible to predict in detail how the course of this rewilding will run, but our separation from it is intrinsic to the plan. There will be no return of the intensive local human interventions that once shaped the fen. This rewilded landscape will be a place for humans to visit, not to live and work.

  At Sedge Fen, the path narrows between walls of high reeds, its surface steeped in tea-coloured water that reflects the sky piecemeal from my feet, and the ground rocks with every step. When one boot sinks calf-deep in black mud, I’m forced to turn back. Places like this resist modern assumptions that everything is visible and accessible. When I first came here years ago, I found it frustrating and sometimes even boring. The reed beds were flat expanses of impenetrable vegetation, undulating in the breeze like the sea. Like the sea, I couldn’t see into them. I couldn’t walk in them. And like the sea they teemed with invisible life: warblers, bitterns, spotted crakes, otters, water voles and marshland insects like reed leopard moths.

  At first I used to watch the ditches and droves that cut through the reeds like streets between skyscrapers, waiting for animals to appear. Then I saw my mistake. I learned to stop needing to see. I learned to listen, to tune in to noises and let them guide my eyes. I’d hear the faintest creak or splash or call, and fix on that spot. I might sit there for minutes and see nothing. But sometimes things would appear. Most often I caught only the briefest glimpses. A brown flash in the stems that could have been a reed warbler, a sedge warbler, a Cetti’s warbler. That tiny squelching noise that might be a teal feeding in a pool obscured by reeds. An almost imperceptible disturbance moving slowly across the reed bed that could be an otter, a bittern or a snake.

  Wicken Fen has taught me not only that I won’t always see the animals that I know live there, but that sometimes knowing where an animal is but not knowing what it is can be better than seeing it. I’ve learned how to identify birds in pieces, through scraps of colour and shape glimpsed through undergrowth: an eyebrow stripe, a wing-bar, an up-cocked tail. I’ve come to know the inhabitants of this place through a long series of brief, partial encounters in which the animal in question becomes more and more distinctive over time, and never once resembles the flat portraits in field guides.

  Wicken does let me visit the past, but it’s not the past of a Saxon warlord, a Victorian naturalist or an imagined unsullied wilderness. It is an older way of observing animals, distinct from the way they are usually viewed today, through binoculars, from behind hides and blinds, or in close-up footage on television screens. It’s nothing like visiting a living museum or a zoo. This way of watching wildlife is full of difficulty and mystery, and it makes the landscape seem intrinsic to what its creatures are: things in the present moment – bewitching, complicated and always new.

  Storm

  Driving on the M25 on a summer evening I found myself headed for a wide column of storm-lit rainbow above Heathrow. The sky was congested and bruised, and even at seventy miles an hour, the pull of wind towards the storm tugged at my car, rushing across the elevated motorway section to fill the vacancy left by air pulled up thousands of feet to the cloud’s blossoming apex. I couldn’t see its white top stroked windward, but I could see the small crosses that were transatlantic jets steering their courses around the storm’s perimeter. Half-feared for them. There were clips of lightning through this atmospheric carnage, and small turquoise pools of clear sky. And across one of these I saw a flock of parakeets flying straight and fast, with clipped wingbeats and streaming tails straight out behind them. It was a moment cut from a few seconds of moving history that will hang bright in my mind forever.

  Most summer weather seems to me merely a backdrop to half-remembered scenes: a sun-baked lawn, misty mornings by the sea, city streets in the rain. All my clearest summer memories are of storms. The afternoon in the early 1980s on the Kennet and Avon Canal when I heard my first nightingale singing into charged grey air, accompanied by distant thunder that swung closer and seemed a voice answering the bird. Or that hot week in Gloucestershire in the 1990s when thunderstorms came every evening so the air turned sepia at six and before the first drops of storm rain sent pollen-dust up in puffs from the skylight I’d open the windows and wait for thunder while little owls called through the thick air, and in the morning tiny white dots of storm-blown blossom covered the house with wet French lace. I’ve measured all my summers by their storms.

  There are people in America who climb into cars to chase thunderclouds across the Great Plains. But part of the thrill of British summer storms is not that one seeks them out, but that when the conditions are right, they come to you. For all the anxiety that spreads within you as you hear the crackling static of lightning breaking through voices on the radio, or smell the petrichor of newly soaked ground borne in on a rising wind, the predictability of the life-cycle of a thunderstorm is strangely reassuring. Stand far enough away and you can watch a summer cumulus, a thing born of sun-warmed air and water, grow into an entity the size of a mountain, unleash hail and brilliant hell, then disappear. A thundercloud takes perhaps an hour or so to cycle through its life, first stretching and pushing upwards until its top hits the troposphere and is pushed sideways and brushed into ice. As water droplets are pulled up into the cloud they freeze, eventually growing too heavy to ascend further, and so they fall, bumping into smaller fragments on their way up. Each collision transfers electrons, so that the lower parts of the cloud collect a negative charge while the upper parts collect a positive charge. Eventually lightning leaps across these differentials between the cloud’s top, its base and the ground, casting out shockwaves of superheated air that make the sound of thunder. The destructive power of storms forces you to recall the vulnerabilities of your human frame, and all the limits, safeties and certainties of your everyday world. Unplug your television and telephone. Get out of the bath. Do not shower. Stand away from windows.

  But storms are made of more than stuff. They’re also things of metaphors and memory. Storms distressed my grandmother; to her, thunder recalled the terror of the Blitz. But to me thunder still carries that glowing moment as my father explained to small me how storms are born from sunlight and hot earth, moving air and water, and how you can count the seconds it takes between lightning and thunder – one Mississippi, two Mississippi – to work out how far away the storm is. Five seconds is a mile. You can calculate its progress towards you. And even now when I count those seconds, I feel a slow wonder that is as much connected to the passage of years as it is to that of a cloud over rain-soaked ground.

  Summer storms conjure distance and time but conjure, too, all the things that come towards us over which
we have no control. Such storms have their place in literature; the heavy air and mood of suppressed emotion as the storm brews so often standing for an inevitable catastrophe. A murder in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles or Leo’s revelation in Hartley’s The Go-Between. No weather so perfectly conjures a sense of foreboding, of anticipation and waiting, as the eerie stillness that often occurs before the first fat drops of rain, when storm light makes luminous all roofs and fields and strands black silhouettes of trees on the horizon. This is the storm as expectation. As solution about to be offered. Or all hell about to break loose. And as the weeks of this summer draw on, I can’t help but think that this is the weather we are all now made of. All of us waiting. Waiting for news. Waiting for Brexit to hit us. Waiting for the next revelation about the Trump administration. Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history.

  Murmurations

  Words to accompany Sarah Wood’s 2015 film Murmuration x 10

  I lost my passport. Blind panic. I needed one fast. So one morning I drove up the A14 north past the sex shops and service stations half-buried in fog and the convoys of container trucks Maersk Sealand Hanjin with an envelope containing two photographs of myself, one signed by an accountant, and my details in capitals in black biro on three pages of orange paper. And at 9.15 a.m. somewhere near Wisbech a flock of plovers flew low in front of the windscreen and hung there before vanishing into nowhere. Seamless fog. No visible land or sky. And I thought of the blank air-age globes they sold in the 1930s that had no geography on them at all, that were perfectly white except for the printed names of airports because we were all to look skyward back then, for history had brought us wings and borders would fade into obsolescence. Hope was a thing with feathers.