On warm summer evenings swifts that aren't sitting on eggs or tending their chicks fly low and fast, screaming in speeding packs around rooftops and spires. Later, they gather higher in the sky, their calls now so attenuated by air and distance that to the ear they corrode into something that seems less than sound, to suspicions of dust and glass. And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vespers flights, or vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought “vesper flights” the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue. For years I've tried to see them do it. But always the dark got too deep, or the birds skated too wide and far across the sky for me to follow.
Written as assignments or for friends, “for the joy of exploring a subject, for piecing together a story or investigating something that troubled or fascinated”, the forty-some essays in Vesper Flights cover an array of naturalist topics – very often autobiographical, very often political – in the beautifully lyrical writing style of Helen Macdonald that would be instantly recognisable to fans of her acclaimed memoir, H is for Hawk. I was fascinated by the range of scientific topics here and inspired by Macdonald's travels – not only through space, from experiencing the top of the Empire State Building with an Ornithologist to camping in Chile's Atacama Desert with an Astrobiologist, but also sharing Macdonald's travels through her own interior landscapes – and it all solidly underpins her ultimate quest for “finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.” Helen Macdonald has lived a rich and curiosity-filled life, and being a poet, a naturalist, and a historian, she has the factual knowledge and literary skills to make persuasive art out of her experiences. Exquisitely suited to my own tastes and interest. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. I know it's unfair for me to excerpt so extensively here, but passages are preserved for my own future recollection of what inspired me, and are not to be considered authoritative. Mea máxima culpa)
When I was a child I'd assumed animals were just like me. Later I thought I could escape myself by pretending I was an animal. Both were founded on the same mistake. For the deepest lessons animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.As “an odd and solitary child with an early and all-consuming compulsion to seek out wild creatures”, Helen Macdonald felt privileged to grow up on an estate complete with woods and meadow, teeming with wildlife for her to observe, engage with, and explore. This compulsion seems to have never left her and these essays cover a huge range of the places and species, mostly birds, that Macdonald has sought out around the world. It would be impossible to offer a summary of everything these pages contain, so what follows are just some of the bits that I found personally engaging in Macdonald's philosophy. And one of the main threads of that philosophy seems to be that we humans are blind to the diversity of life around us; and that which we don't see, we don't concern ourselves with. We find ourselves fascinated by raptors (and especially in urban landscapes):
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.But something like the fungal networks underpinning forests – some of the oldest and largest organisms in the world – are all but invisible to us:
We are visual creatures. To us, forests are places made of trees and leaves and soil. But all around me now, invisible and ubiquitous, is a network of fungal life, millions of tiny threads growing and stretching among trees, clustering around piles of rabbit droppings, stitching together bush and path, dead leaves and living roots. We hardly know it is there until we see the fruiting bodies it throws up when conditions are right. But without fungi's ceaseless cycling of water, nutrients and minerals, the forest wouldn't work the way it does, and perhaps the greatest mystery of mushrooms for me is in how they are visible manifestations of an essential yet unregarded world.I was particularly intrigued by Macdonald's trip to the top of the Empire State Building for night bird watching; a glimpse at an annual teeming swirl of life going on mostly unobserved, far above human notice. As she notes, insects travel above us in extraordinary numbers (half a billion a month over a square mile of English farmland – making up nearly three tons of biomass – a number estimated to be higher over New York City as “a gateway to a continent”), and in the wide open air over Manhattan's skyscrapers, it is said, “Once you get above six hundred and fifty feet, you're lofted into a realm where the distinction between city and countryside has little or no meaning at all”:
During the day, chimney swifts feast on these vast drifts of life; during the night, so do the city's resident and migratory bats, and nighthawks with white-flagged wings. On days with north-west winds in late summer and early fall, birds, bats and migrant dragonflies all feed on rich concentrations of insects caused by powerful downdraughts and eddies around the city's high-rise buildings, just as fish swarm to feed where currents congregate plankton in the ocean.Whether writing about how she lives in denial of the symptoms of oncoming, crippling migraines (which Macdonald then extrapolates to explain how humanity can live in denial of the biggest threats to our collective existence), or writing about viewing a solar eclipse and feeling an overwhelming sense of community, Macdonald makes many surprising connections here. And as I opened with, many of them are political connections: Conservatism and Swan Upping, deer as jingoistic symbolism, waiting for a thunderstorm like waiting for the next Brexit or Trump, “Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history”. A few examples that gave me pause, as in the morality of tagging and tracking migratory animals:
In our age of drone warfare, it is hard not to see each animal being tracked across the map as symbolically extending the virtues of technological dominance and global surveillance.Or watching a gathering of migratory Eurasian cranes in northeastern Hungary and contemplating the razorwire on that country's southern border, meant to keep out Syrian refugees:
Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety.Or the flaw in thinking that a species is native just because it's familiar:
The history of hawfinches in Britain reminds us how seamlessly we confuse natural and national history, how readily we assume nativity in things that are familiar to us, and how lamentably easy it is to forget how we are all from somewhere else.Several times Macdonald returns to the idea of people conflating natural and national history and it made me wonder if it reflects a new idea – a pushback against globalisation and freer borders by those who idealise a return to some “purer” past – but she also shares older stories, like the farmers during WWII who attacked migratory birds that gleaned their fields: “No protection for the Skylark” ran the headlines in the local press: “Skylarks that sing to Nazis will get no mercy here.” She writes about the glamour she assigned to Bewick's swans when she was a child – because they migrated from the Soviet Union, “crossing the Iron Curtain with absolute unconcern”. And she tells the fascinating story of a book she loved as a child and found more insidious when she revisited it as an adult: A Cuckoo in the House by Maxwell Knight – a former MI5 intelligence officer known as “M'; yes, he was the inspiration for the James Bond character – was a popular book about the bird famously known for its nestly subterfuges, and Knight not only hid within its pages the vocabulary of his secret world of agents, runners, and handlers, but its release somehow transformed Knight into an avuncular naturalist who began a second career on BBC radio, encouraging children to observe, explore, and report on their environments, in a way that incidentally was training the country's next generation of spies and spooks. I suppose this conflation of the natural with the national has always been with us.
If there is a common theme here, I suppose it's a call to be more aware – of both the hidden ecosystems around us and the hidden biases we harbour – and through this awareness, to spread more of that notion of love that Macdonald opens with; to see with the eyes of others and rejoice in the complexity of things. Thoroughly worthwhile read, beginning to end.
