Nearly every year I read news reports of the arrests of working-class men who have been keeping illegally trapped British finches. Their depredations must have a negligible impact compared to the ravages of habitat loss and agricultural chemicals on bird populations, but that’s not the point. What they have done is not simply illegal, but considered highly immoral. Species perceived as animate elements of the British countryside have been deprived of their freedom and confined to cages for the delight of the working classes, for whom these birds possess very different meanings. There’s a tender domesticity attendant to birdkeeping that cuts through familiar stories about working-class masculinity. Cages are cleaned, babies are tended, droppings are scraped, food is weighed, and birds are held quietly in the hand to be minutely and lovingly examined, activities that mirror the cleaning and housekeeping, cooking and child-keeping roles more familiarly ascribed to women. It’s always struck me that people who keep and breed goldfinches, for example, have a far more detailed knowledge of their habits, their intraspecific variations, their breeding behaviour and songs than that of most birdwatchers, to whom goldfinches tend to be birds clinging to feeders in suburban gardens, or flocks that rise from stands of seeding thistles. I grew up watching birds, not keeping them. To me, redpolls have always been delicate and distant entities, small dots flitting around the tops of alder trees. I would never have known that redpolls are a thousand times more charismatic and full of personality than goldfinches had I not had the experience of seeing both kinds of birds close up in aviaries and cages.
It’s not birdkeeping per se that is the problem. Some forms of it have almost entirely escaped censure because they have traditionally been the province of those of high social status. You can keep a singing goldfinch in the smallest of caravans, but you need money and land to keep lakes of swans and diving ducks. Waterfowl luminaries have included the aristocrat Lord Lilford; the artist-conservationist Sir Peter Scott; and the eponymous founder of British department store John Lewis, who maintained an enormous collection of ducks and geese on his Hampshire estate. It’s still legal in Britain to ask a vet to pinion a young duck or goose or swan, to cut off the last joint of one wing so that forever afterwards it can walk and swim but never fly, a literal amputation to the nature of a migratory species whose wild cousins fly thousands of miles over tundra and ocean every autumn and spring. I have always wondered if a pinioned goose on the lake of a stately home might be experiencing hardships of the same order as that of a goldfinch confined to a cage.
Unlike finches inside houses, the waterfowl in such collections are not treated as an intimate part of the household, but as part of a wider demesne, as landscape-scale additions to an estate. Captive ducks swimming on a lake look pleasingly wild, even if they have had the end of one wing cut away to stop them escaping. An enormous amount of work is involved in creating this elite version of nature, which, as in the eighteenth-century landscape-garden tradition, is designed specifically to look untouched, eternal, natural and unaffected by human artifice, even though that is exactly how it has been made.
Conversely, as journalist Henry Mayhew wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘The buyers of singing-birds are eminently the working people.’ He went on to describe the species that various classes of tradesmen and artisans preferred to keep – blackbirds and thrushes, for example, were favoured by grooms and coachmen. ‘The fondness of a whole body of artificers for any particular bird, animal, or flower, is remarkable,’ he concluded. It’s the term artificer that sings, here, and of a matter that is at the heart of the class system: taste. Keepers of small birds love them not only as individuals but as possibilities and potentialities; over the years they design complex strategies of pairing and selecting to breed birds of particular shapes and patterns and colours and songs. Birdkeeping gestures towards the future as much as it does to those moments in the present when a goldfinch mule raises its head, puffs out its throat and pours forth song. It is, in ways that are not trivial, a deeply creative art. Obvious artifice is the issue: unlike the carefully constructed apparent naturalness of waterfowl kept on country estates, working-class birdkeepers delight in artificiality, creating hybrid finches and thrushes whose beauty is judged in how richly and elaborately it deviates from naturalness.
‘Mine!’ says the birdkeeper, of the goldfinch. ‘Mine!’ says the birder, of the same. ‘Mine!’ says the estate owner, of his flock of pinioned European geese. Outside the bird show, I hear a goldfinch singing from the top of a sapling behind me. While my boyfriend walks on to the car, I stop and listen for a while to a bird that is calling a claim to the whole of its life. It sings of seeds and thistledown, of mates and flights and the fragility of eggs in a moss-and-cobweb nest, and of territorial battles and parasites and sparrowhawks and scarcity and stress.
Hiding
A wildlife hide: a building whose purpose is to make one disappear. This one is a rustic wooden box with bench seats and narrow slits along one side. Walking up to it, it looks almost exactly like a small, weather-beaten garden shed.
I’ve made myself disappear in hides for as long as I can remember; structures like it are found in nature reserves all over the world, and they seem as natural a part of these places as trees and open water. Even so, a familiar, nervous apprehension flares up as I reach for the door, so I pause for a few seconds before opening it. Inside the air is hot and dark and smells of dust and creosote.
There’s no one else here. I swing my legs over the bench-seat and lower the wooden window blind to create a bright rectangle in the darkness; as my eyes adjust, the space before me resolves into a shallow lagoon under streets of cumulus clouds. Almost automatically, I scan the scene with binoculars, ticking off species – three shoveler ducks, two little egrets, a common tern – but my mind is elsewhere, puzzling over that odd sense of apprehension, trying to work out what causes it.
Wildlife hides are not innocent of history. They evolved from photographic blinds, which in turn were based on structures designed to put people closer to animals in order to kill them: duck blinds, deer stands, tree platforms for shooting big cats. Hunting has shaped modern nature appreciation in myriad unacknowledged ways, including the tactics used to bring animals into view. As hunters bait deer and decoy ducks, so preserve managers create shallow feeding pools that concentrate wading birds near hides, or set up feeding stations for wary nocturnal mammals. In the Highlands of Scotland, one celebrated hide gives visitors a 95 per cent chance of seeing rare pine martens – lithe arboreal predators – munching on piles of peanuts.
What you see from hides is supposed to be true reality: that is, wild animals behaving perfectly naturally because they do not know they are being observed. But the side-effect of turning yourself into a pair of eyes in a darkened box is to distance you from the all-encompassing landscape around the hide, in so doing reinforcing a divide between human and natural worlds, encouraging us to feel that animals and plants should be looked at, never touched. Sometimes the window in front of me resembles nothing so much as a television screen.
You don’t need to be invisible to see wild animals behaving entirely naturally. As scientists studying creatures like meerkats, chimps and the small brown birds called Arabian babblers have long known, with time you can habituate them to your presence. But hiding is a habit that is hard to break. There is a dubious satisfaction in the subterfuge of watching things that cannot see you, and it’s deeply embedded in our culture. When wild animals unexpectedly appear close by and seem unbothered by our presence, we can feel as flustered and unsure about how to behave as teenagers at a dance.
A few years ago, I was walking with my friend Christina through a park in a small English town when characters I’ve only ever seen in bird hides began to appear: camouflage-clad photographers with 300-millimetre lenses and expressions of urgent concentration. We looked where the cameras were pointed. Three yards away, two of Britain’s most elusive mammals were swimming in the shallow river running through the park. Otters
! They didn’t seem to see us; they certainly didn’t care. Their wet flanks gleamed like tar as they rolled in the water. They broke the surface to crunch fish with sharp white teeth, showering droplets from stiff whiskers, then slipped back beneath the surface to swim down the river, the photographers chasing them like paparazzi and intermittently running backwards because the lenses they’d brought were the wrong ones for such close views. It was thrilling. We followed the otters downstream and stopped by a woman with a toddler and a baby in a pushchair, who were watching them, too. She told me she loved the otters. They were part of her town. Part of her local community. They’d eaten all the koi carp from the fishpond in the big house, she said, amused. ‘Drove them bonkers, the people that lived there. Those fish were really expensive!’ Then she tilted her head at the photographers. ‘Aren’t they weird?’ she asked. Outside a hide, they did look ridiculous; so accustomed to their binoculars, camouflage and high-zoom lenses, they were compelled to use them even when they were entirely unnecessary.
While hides are places designed for watching wildlife, they are equally rewarding places to watch people who watch wildlife and to witness their strange social behaviour. One of the reasons I hesitated before entering the little hide is that I was worried there would be other people in it. Walking into a crowded hide is rather like arriving late at a live theatrical performance and trying to find your seat. There are unspoken rules in hides. As in a theatre or a library, you are required to be silent, or to speak in a low murmur. Some rules are ostensibly in operation to prevent animals detecting your presence – there’s a general prohibition on telephone calls, slamming the door too hard, extending your hands out of the window. But others are more curious and they stem from a particular problem: your job in a hide is to pretend you are not there, so when there is more than one person in the hide, the sense of disembodiment the trick relies on is threatened. Regular visitors to hides often solve this conundrum spatially. When she started visiting hides for the first time, Christina – who is from Melbourne – wondered why people chose to sit at the far edges, leaving the seats with the best view unoccupied. ‘I thought it was self-sacrificing English etiquette,’ she said, ‘before I realised that people sat at the far sides of the hide because they wanted to be as far from everyone else as possible.’
There’s a constant monitoring of others’ expertise in the hide as its inhabitants listen to one another’s hushed conversations about the things they can see outside. It’s an agony when people get things wrong. I remember the chill in the air one spring day in Suffolk after a man confidently told his companion that what he was watching was a water vole. Everyone else in the hide knew this lumbering creature with a long tail was a large brown rat. No one said anything. One man coughed. Another snorted. The tension was unbearable. With impeccable British reserve, no one felt they could correct his mistake and lessen him in the eyes of his friend. A few people couldn’t bear the atmosphere and left the hide.
The uses of hides are as various as their inhabitants. You can sit with a camera hoping for the perfect shot of a passing harrier or owl. You can sit with a proficient naturalist and hear whispered identification tips, or use it as a place to sit down midway through a long walk. Most people sit and scan the view with binoculars for a few minutes before deciding there is nothing of sufficient interest or rarity to keep them there. But there is another kind of hide watching that I am increasingly learning to love. It is when you embrace the possibility that you will see little or nothing of interest. You literally wait and see. Sitting in the dark for an hour or two and looking at the world through a hole in a wall requires a meditative patience. You have given yourself time to watch clouds drift from one side of the sky to the other and cast moving shadows across ninety minutes of open water. A sleeping snipe, its long bill tucked into pale-tipped scapular feathers and its body pressed against rushes striped with patterns of light and shade, wakes, raises its wings and stretches. A heron as motionless as a marble statue for minutes on end makes a cobra-strike to catch a fish. The longer you sit there, the more you become abstracted from this place, and yet fixed to it. The sudden appearance of a deer at the lake’s shore, or a flight of ducks tipping and whiffling down to splash on sunlit water, becomes treasure, through the simple fact of the passing of time.
Eulogy
By nine the sun has set behind the King’s Forest. The sky is a soft Tiffany blue, darker above us, and there’s not a breath of wind. Judith knows the place well, leads us through deep woodland to a few acres of open land, a block of head-height young pines growing through grass and brambles, surrounded by walls of mature trees.
We’re waiting for something that won’t happen until the light is nearly gone, so we amble for a while along the sandy paths. As night falls, our senses stretch to meet it. A roebuck barks in the distance, small mammals rustle in the grass. The faintest tick of insects. The scratchy, resinous fragrance of heathland grows stronger, more insistent. As we pass clumps of viper’s bugloss we watch the oncoming night turn their leaves blacker, their purple petals bluer and more intense until they seem to glow. The paths become luminous trails through darkness. White moths spiral up from the ground, and a cockchafer zips past us, elytra raised, wings buzzing.
Soon all colour will be gone. The thought is a hard one. Over the last few weeks I’ve spent much of my time visiting Stu in a local hospice. He and his partner Mandy are among my dearest, closest friends. I first met him in the 1990s on a raw December morning at a falconry field meet in the East Anglian Fens. He was a giant of a man with curly hair and a huge old goshawk and he was formidable and faintly scary. But as I watched him handle his hawk and his dogs, I saw there an extraordinary gentleness and care. So many of my memories of Stu are of this gentleness; the way he’d look at his family, the expression on his upturned face as he followed his falcons’ flight, the tender way he’d clean their hooked beaks between finger and thumb. He was a strong man, a strong-willed man, who carved his own, inimitable path through life, and he had an astonishing capacity to reassure, to teach, to inspire.
Stu was so ready to see magic in the world. He told me once, shaking his head in wonderment, that he’d watched a white stag stepping across the road at midnight like something out of a medieval legend. About the time he caught a bat in his motorcycle leathers while biking at top speed, and how he was so amazed and delighted he put it in his pocket and brought it home to show everyone before letting it go. And how, after he had been diagnosed with the illness that he knew would take him, he’d been walking with his pointer dog Cody across fields when she’d found two just-born leverets, twin baby hares, tucked in the grass. Stuart was the strongest of men, but he told me about them with tears in his eyes. They were so small. So new.
Now, watching the slow diminishment of sense and detail around me, I’m thinking of Stu and what is happening to him, thinking of his family, of what we face at the end of our lives’ long summers when the world parts from us, of how we all, one day, will walk into darkness. Then the sound begins. It spools out from the trees behind the sapling pines, and I catch the flash of a smile on Judith’s face in the gloom. The noise resembles a sewing machine running at top speed, or an unspooling fishing reel, but such mechanical analogies fail to capture its rich musicality. It’s a deep and beautiful churring that lasts for four or five seconds before the creature that’s making it breathes in, briefly lowering the pitch, and then starts up again. Judith cups a hand behind each ear and turns her head to pinpoint the source. She gestures out in front of us, a little to our left. Somewhere in that direction, sitting lengthways on a branch, his throat puffed out to raise this strange song to the night, is a nightjar.
Imagine a slim bird as long as your hand from wrist to fingertip, and with huge, black-ink anime eyes. Imagine its plumage is patterned with all woodland things rolled together: bark, rotting wood, the tips of dry fern fronds, cobwebs, the bright ends of broken twigs, dappled shadows, dead leaves. Nightjars are cryptic beasts for whom s
ubtlety is safety; during daylight hours they rest and nest upon ground that so perfectly matches their feathers they are almost impossible to detect, even from a few feet away. Their neat beaks look ordinary enough until they open their mouths into a huge, froglike pink gape surrounded by bristly feathers that help them catch their flying prey: moths, beetles, other insects. The bird we’re hearing spent his winter in Africa, has come here to mate and rear young in this chequerboard landscape of coniferous forest and heath before he heads back south in late August or September. Another churr begins, then another. Five birds, six? It’s hard to tell, but they’re calling all around us. It’s exquisite music, but I’m hoping we get something more.
We do. There’s a soft call, a different call, the one they make in flight. I whistle something like it back into the darkness. The call comes again, closer now, and as I strain my eyes into the noisy black I see the barest suggestion of a bird flying towards me, wings as thin, wavering lines appearing and disappearing over the distance between the noise and my upturned face. And then, sailing out just above our heads, dark against the sky, is a nightjar. It’s remarkably odd, the shape of a skinny falcon, but somehow the quality of its flight makes it look like a paper aeroplane. It’s so light in the air it seems to have no weight at all, and there’s something mothlike about it too. I can just make out the barring of the underside of its wings, the lack of white near their tips – it’s a female – and we watch as she hunches herself in mid-air, curls down to the left and hovers, briefly. A male joins her, white wing-patches blurring; they circle for a few seconds before breaking apart and disappearing into darkness. We hear a quick, flat clapping noise as the male slaps the top of his wings together in flight, a display that sounds like quiet applause, and then they are gone, slipping back into the nothing around us.
Vesper Flights Page 21
