Ashes
On a dank January day in the mid-1970s, I stood on an English hillside with my mother and watched men with chainsaws cutting up wrecks of trees and tossing brushwood on to fires. I was five years old, amazed by the roaring blades and drifting smoke, and troubled too.
‘Why are they burning them?’ I asked her.
‘It’s Dutch elm disease,’ she said, pulling at the knot of her headscarf. ‘All the elm trees are dying of it now.’
Her words confused me. I’d assumed until then that the countryside was an eternally unchanging place. At that time, Dutch elm disease was spreading across continents, blight had killed four billion American chestnuts, and catastrophic new tree diseases were to follow. Last week that cold hillside of my childhood came to mind as I drove through rural Suffolk, past painted farmhouses and arable fields sloping under a haze of summer clouds. The ash trees on this stretch of road were obviously dying. Their once-luxuriant crowns had thinned to an eerie transparency; instead of a shifting canopy of pinnate leaves, bare twigs showed stark against the sky.
It was my first sight of ash dieback disease, a new and virulent fungal infection that has spread westward across Europe and will likely kill nearly all the ashes in Britain. In America, the effects of the invasive emerald ash borer beetle have been just as devastating. Globalisation is the culprit. While there have always been outbreaks of tree disease, about as many have appeared since the 1970s as in all recorded history. The accelerating scale and speed of international trade has brought numerous pathogens and pests to species with no natural resistance to them. If you are a tree, death comes hidden in wood veneer, in packing material, in shipping containers, nursery plants, cut flowers, the roots of imported saplings.
Later that night, I compulsively searched for images of elms on the internet, seeking their buoyant, ragged silhouettes in snapshots of village fields or half-hidden behind actors in 1960s films. I saw trees like frozen cumulonimbus clouds towering over cricket matches at English public schools; postcards and photographs of elm avenues in Massachusetts and coastal Maine, lofty branches shading summer streets and suburban Oldsmobiles. These trees were the ghosts of half-remembered landscapes, and looking at them I realised that living trees could haunt you, too. That drive in Suffolk had changed the meaning of ash trees for me. From now on, each one I saw would mean death, no matter how healthy it might be.
But should they contract a mortal disease, trees cope better than we do. Many can regenerate. The vast Appalachian chestnut forests crowned with white flowers have all but disappeared, but fallen trees still sprout new shoots from their roots. As soon as they reach a certain height they again become susceptible to blight and die. Chestnuts and elms living in this endlessly youthful state are less fruitful than mature trees, and they trouble us because they are not what we think trees should be. We use trees to measure our own lives, to anchor our notions of time. To most of us, they represent constancy and continuity, living giants that persist through many human generations. We want them to achieve maturity; we want them to tower above us.
The spectral elms on the internet were images of a different kind of extinction from that of the passenger pigeon or dodo: the extinction of a landscape. For days afterwards, I found myself looking out at the blank brows of local hills, imagining there the billowing shapes of elms. I was preparing myself to think about what it would look like here when all the ash trees were gone. It was painful to force myself into a kind of anticipatory solastalgia, a term coined by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to refer to people’s emotional distress when their home landscapes become unrecognisable through environmental change. He was speaking of the effects of drought and strip mining in New South Wales, but solastalgia can arise in landscapes as varied as melting tundra and south-western states stricken by wildfire. Like droughts, tree diseases bring economic loss and ecological impoverishment while at the same time stripping familiar meaning from the places we live in. Writing about the slow death of American forests from a hundred years of tree diseases in his book Nature Out of Place, the writer Jason Van Driesche found himself almost mute: ‘This is my home. How can you put something like this into words?’
But there are trees that can offer solace. I looked for photographs of them on the internet, too: the last few big American chestnuts, some of which have been given names. The Adair County Chestnut, found in 1999 in Kentucky, for instance. Rounded in form, it does not much resemble the gigantic, spiralling cathedral-columns of ancient Appalachian trees, but it is beautiful, spreading dark limbs and long, serrated leaves towards the sun. Around five hundred are left: the Hebron Chestnut in Maine; an unnamed chestnut in Ohio. People seek out these singular chestnut trees that have cheated death; some even steal leaves and pieces of bark from them as mementoes. The precise location of these trees must often be kept secret – encountering one, it is said, is an experience akin to finding Bigfoot.
Dedicated scientists, volunteers and nursery workers have spent many decades trying to restore the American chestnut with the aim of recreating the landscapes we have lost. Some organisations, like the American Chestnut Foundation, are backcrossing American trees with resistant Chinese varieties to produce seedlings that resemble American chestnuts but have sufficient Chinese qualities to survive the effects of blight. Others, like a team at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, insert genes from wheat and other plants into chestnut embryos to change their chemistry and make them more resilient to attack. Despite the increasing success of projects like these, some commentators regard them as a diversion, believing instead that it would be better to put resources into preventing new diseases than attempting to cure old ones. Their position makes sense if you think our reasons for wanting to restore the trees are merely ecological. Of course, they are not. They shape the landscapes of our lives and are a matter bound up with our sense of identity.
Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. Virulent tree diseases hit the headlines, but smaller, less visible disappearances happen all the time. The flycatchers that nested in my neighbourhood a decade ago have vanished; meadows in my hometown that were full of all kinds of life have become housing developments full of nothing but our own. People of a certain age tend to look back elegiacally at the things that have gone: the shop you used as a kid that closed, the room that became a memory. But those small, personal disappearances, however poignant, are not the same as losing biodiversity. Changes to city skylines are not the same as acres of beetle-blasted trees: though they are caught up in stories about ourselves, trees are not ever just about us. They support complex and interdependent communities of life, and as forests slowly become less diverse, the world loses more than simply trees. It has been suggested that the rise of Lyme disease in many parts of North America and Europe is in part because less diverse forests favour the ticks that carry it.
I am old enough to remember elms and the landscapes they made; people only a few years younger than me do not, and to them the elm-free fields are reassuringly normal. Are we now becoming inured to a new narrative of nature, in which ecosystem-level change in accelerated timescales is part of the background of everyday life? Children who are growing up watching glaciers retreat and sea ice vanishing, villages sinking, tundra wildfires raging and once-common trees disappearing – will they learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world? I hope it is not so. But perhaps when all the ash trees are gone and the landscape has become flatter and simpler and smaller, someone not yet born will tap on a screen, call up images and wonder at the lost glory of these exquisite, feathered trees.
A Handful of Corn
White-haired, soft-featured, and in possession of a faintly aristocratic glamour, Mrs Leslie-Smith lived alone in a wooden bungalow full of books and glossy houseplants a few doors from my childhood home. On a warm autumn evening more than thi
rty years ago, she invited my mother and me to watch her nightly ritual. She ushered us to chairs set before glass doors into her garden, picked up a biscuit tin, prised open the lid, then went outside to scatter handfuls of broken biscuits on the flagstones of her patio, where they glittered dustily under the light of an outside lamp. Back in the darkened room we sat and waited. We didn’t talk; the event had all the hush and ceremony of theatre. From the edge of the illuminated lawn, a striped black-and-white face appeared and then retreated into darkness. Soon afterwards, two badgers trundled across the grass out of the night to crunch up the cookies, so close to us we could see the curves of their ivory teeth and the patterned skin of their noses. They weren’t tame – if we had turned on the light, they would have bolted – but they were so close I had an urge to press my hands to the glass to make them understand I was there. The space between us in the house and these wild creatures in the garden was filled with unalloyed magic.
We didn’t feed badgers in our childhood garden, but we fed the birds. So do a fifth to a third of all households in Australia, Europe and the United States. Americans spend over three billion dollars each year on food for them, ranging from peanuts to specialised seed mixes, suet cakes, hummingbird nectar and freeze-dried mealworms. We still don’t clearly understand how supplementary feeding affects bird populations, but there’s evidence that its enormous increase in popularity over the last century has changed the behaviour and range of some species. Many German blackcaps, for example, soft grey migratory warblers, now fly north-west to spend the winter in food-rich, increasingly temperate British gardens rather than flying south-west to the Mediterranean, as their ancestors had done, and feeding may be behind the northward spread of northern cardinals and American goldfinches.
Putting out food for birds in your back garden can attract predators, and virulent diseases like trichonomosis and avian pox can be spread through contaminated feeders. But even if its impact is not always positive for wildlife, it is for us. We give food to wild creatures out of a desire to help them, spreading cut apples on snowy lawns for blackbirds, hanging up feeders for finches. The writer Mark Cocker maintains that the ‘simple, Franciscan act of giving to birds makes us feel good about life, and redeems us in some fundamental way’. That sense of redemption is intimately tied with the history of bird-feeding, for the practice grew out of the humanitarian movement of the nineteenth century, which saw compassion towards those in need as a mark of the enlightened individual.
In 1895, the popular Scottish naturalist and writer Eliza Brightwen gave instructions on how to feed and tame wild red squirrels to become ‘household pets of their own free will’. In Britain, garden feeding was popularised by the formation of the Dicky Bird Society, a late-nineteenth-century children’s organisation that required its members to take a pledge to be kind to all living things and to feed the birds in wintertime. The society was highly influential, even receiving letters from workhouse children explaining how they carefully saved crumbs from their own meals to feed the birds outside.
In the United States, one of the most significant figures in the new movement was the Prussian aristocrat Baron Hans von Berlepsch. A book detailing his ingenious bird-feeding methods, How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds, described how you could pour melted fat mixed with seeds, ants’ eggs, dried meat and bread over conifer branches for birds to feed from in winter. ‘Kindhearted people,’ he wrote, ‘have always taken pity on our feathered winter guests.’ During the First World War, feeding American birds became something of a patriotic duty, for it helped them survive the winter so they could go on to eat insects that threatened agricultural production. By 1919, the nation’s garden birds were to be considered, according to the ornithologist Frank Chapman, ‘not only our welcome guests but our personal friends’.
Today, the opposite is true: close and intimate contact with animals is increasingly rare. We permit only a few types of animals to enter our homes as pets; interactions with wild animals tend to be restricted to experts like biologists or park rangers. But gardens and backyards are special trading zones that span the imaginary boundaries between nature and culture, domestic and public space. They are shared territory, places that both humans and wildlife consider home. Even so, when we feed animals, we want it to be on our terms, not theirs. We expect them to respect their place in an unspoken social order. When a wary squirrel or bird trusts you sufficiently to take food from your hand, it’s gratifying and special, a reaching across the border between us and them, wild and tame. But if a squirrel runs unbidden up your arm demanding food or a seagull snatches a sandwich from your hands, it often generates an emotion close to outrage. Back in the early days, proponents of bird-feeding had to fight against the conviction that animals would become ‘spoiled’ by artificial feeding and would ‘no longer do their work in nature’s household’. Even today, it’s hard to read articles giving advice on wildlife feeding without suspecting that they might be about something else entirely. We’re told to feed foxes sporadically, so as not to cause dependence, for example, and we’re warned that feeding them can make animals lose their ‘natural respect’ for us.
There are acceptable animals and unacceptable animals, as there have been deserving and undeserving poor, and the lines of respectability are drawn in familiar ways, through appealing to fears and threats of invasion, foreignness, violence and disease. As usual, animals reflect back at us our own assumptions about the natural structure of the world. ‘Feeding foxes is one of those things you don’t talk to people about,’ one blogger confessed online, worried that her neighbours would find out her secret. To purposely feed the wrong animals – sparrows, pigeons, rats, raccoons, foxes – is an act of social transgression that’s liable to get you reported to officials by whistleblowers who are concerned with mess, or health, or noise, or are powered by sheer indignation. Of course, with sufficient social capital, you can get away with whatever you like. Actress Joanna Lumley not only feeds tame wild foxes in her London garden but lets them into her house; newspapers have printed photographs of one fast asleep upon the cushions of her living-room sofa.
Feeding animals can be a deep solace to those who, for reasons of social or personal circumstance, find contact with others difficult or impossible. People who feed urban pigeons tend to be isolated and socially marginalised: older people, lonely people, homeless people. Sociologist Colin Jerolmack has memorably described such encounters with pigeons as ephemerally dissolving people’s solitude, and some of the saddest wildlife reports in the media are those about individuals who have been fined or jailed because they refuse to stop feeding birds in their gardens. ‘They are my whole life, because all my relatives are gone,’ explained Cecil Pitts, a sixty-five-year-old fined five hundred dollars for repeatedly feeding large flocks of pigeons at his home in Ozone Park, Queens, in 2008. He is one of many people who have come to identify with the unloved denizens of their neighbourhoods, creatures that are ignored or despised, living behind the visible workings of the modern city.
Growing up with bird tables outside my window taught me a lot about animal behaviour – context gave meaning to the aggressive flicking of a squirrel’s tail, the precise posture of a courting robin – but it taught me, too, that curious blend of familiarity and otherness that we see in wild creatures. Animals are not human, but they are enough like us to grant us a strange and strong sense of kinship. Mrs Leslie-Smith’s badgers brought her the company of many guests keen to see these rare creatures at close quarters, but the company, too, of wild animals that chose to spend time at her house. This morning, as I filled the feeders in my garden, a flock of small passerines hopped about in the hedges while three jackdaws perched expectantly on the eaves above. One looked down at me, shook its dusky feathers and yawned, and I found myself yawning, too, in a moment of contagious fellowship. The birds that choose to come to my garden make my house a less lonely place. And that is why many of us feed animals – not merely because it’s satisfying to feel we have helped them, b
ut because it surrounds us with creatures that know us, are able to forge bonds with us, have come to regard us as part of their world.
Berries
On the first of December, I dragged my old artificial Christmas tree down from the attic and plugged it in. Instantly it glowed with light. On went my collection of odd Christmas baubles: a bescarfed tweed sausage dog, a golden stegosaurus, a crystal stag, a small ceramic robot and a handful of glass spheres dusted with glitter. The whole thing took less than five minutes, which left me feeling obscurely cheated by the ease of my seasonal effort. So later that afternoon, the light dying and the air outside thick with woodsmoke, I went out with a pair of secateurs to collect greenery from the big holly tree near my front door. It’s tall, wreathed in ivy, and this year heavy with fruit. I shook each cut branch to rid it of wintering insects, dragged the whole lot inside and started laying down boughs on sills and mantels. The gloss of lamplight on the leaves and the gemlike clusters of berries made the house look spectacularly festive, but I felt a pang of guilt at bringing the outside in: those berries were meant for birds, not for me.
Berries grow to be eaten, not used for interior decoration. Most, packed with fats and carbohydrates around the seeds at their hearts, have evolved as vegetable offerings to birds; some even contain alkaloid compounds toxic to mammals. Passing through avian digestive systems, the seeds are carried far and wide before being deposited in droppings to take root and flourish. The little lights of haws, the fat dusty globes of sloes amongst blackthorn needles; hips like miniature lamps, the tiny-apple handfuls of rowans and whitebeams; and then the weirder berries like the pale, gelid orbs of mistletoe or spindleberries, the last looking as if Pucci decided to make tiny popcorn ornaments out of pink and orange wax. Blackcaps, plump little warblers, adore mistletoe berries. They pick away at their sticky flesh until their beaks are covered in goo then clean them on branches, where the seeds adhere and grow. In recent years German blackcaps that have started spending winters here rather than in Africa may be directly responsible for spreading mistletoe to new areas of the British Isles.
Vesper Flights Page 19
