by Simon Barnes
Eventually we left them: whales in the process of making the longest migration known to mammals: 10,000 miles from the Arctic to Baja and back again, 20,000 of them doing it every year. They used to make a similar journey in the Atlantic as well, but the whalers put paid to that: the grey whale went extinct in the Atlantic as early as the 17th century.
The game the following day was good, or at least it was a damn good story; Washington Redskins, the first team to make the Super Bowl with a black quarterback, beat the Denver Broncos 42-10. On Monday I caught the plane for the short hop north up the coast to LA. For some reason, I had a window seat; I normally prefer an aisle, but perhaps I asked for a window for once. Perhaps I already had a plan to look at the ocean from a dizzy height. Certainly that’s what I did, sipping rather than gulping a cold beer that stung the palate agreeably, staring down at the wrinkled sea and wondering how many whales swam and rolled beneath its grey-blue surface. That’s the thing about whales: the conjuring trick: one minute there is just sea; and then, like a Brobdingnagian rabbit from a horizon-filling hat, comes the whale. That something so immense could appear from nowhere is gloriously unsettling, going against all kinds of preconceptions. It seems so utterly unnatural: and at the same time, the most natural thing in the world. That’s the stunningly obvious contradiction that gets to everyone who sees a great whale: that combination of complete astonishment and complete inevitability: of total disbelief and perfect confirmation.
The sea is only alive for us at the surface. All that lies beneath is invisible, inaudible, unimaginable: non-existent, until it forces itself on our attention. We have no conception of what life is like down there, in the aqueous depths; we can’t begin to comprehend how it feels to make a 5,000-mile underwater trek between Arctic and Baja, to make that endless, endlessly repeated journey from A to B and back again. We just see something that breaks the surface: it appears, it materialises: we can’t really come to terms with the idea that it was there all along: and then it is gone again, as baffling as before.
And with their immensity, their fragility. No group of creatures has come to represent the fragility of the earth as much as the whale. In a thousand campaigns across the 70s and 80s, the notion of Saving the Whale was a revelation of the lurking secret immensities of our world, and of the human genius for destruction, a thing still more immense. To view a whale in his might is to see the planet as a thing of perfect fragility.
I looked down over the water pondering such matters: the sea, yes, the dominion of the whales, the kingdom of whales, the – no, come on, the principality of whales, that’s more like it. And I found, as not seldom before, that my response to something immense was to try and write it. I wanted to write those whales. After all, I was a writer, was I not? True, I had written over the past fortnight of Holmes and Tyson and Washington Redskins and Denver Broncos – and also of hate and violence and mercy and race and prejudice and its conquest – but now, I wanted to write these whales. My whales: perhaps I wanted to capture them in the only way I could, to harpoon them with my prose, and thereby to order the turmoil they had raised in my mind. It was, I suspect, an instinct I shared with most of the on-board dads whose need to capture the whales in a photograph was something I mildly despised. We all need not only to see but somehow to claim: above all, to achieve some kind of union.
I wanted to write whales. I wanted to write nature. I wanted to write beasts and birds, I wanted to write wild, I wanted to write my delight, I wanted to tell the world how to savour and to save the great beasts I had just seen.
A few hours later I was at Santa Anita racetrack with a pass that took me to the stables and the horses and the grooms and the work-riders and the hot-walkers and the trainers and all the backstage intimacies of American racing, and I had the opportunity to spend getting-on-for-a-week lurking around and meeting some of the greatest men and horses taking part. I had a wonderful time and got some half-decent stories as well. And all the time, very faint and distant, I could still hear music, the music of the whales’ breath. It was a summoning.
It’s not that sport wasn’t enough. I loved writing about sport: I still do. I have never written much about tactical nuances or transfer sagas: rather, for me, sport is a window into humanity. For me, for all sportswriters, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, their subject is not sport but humanity. Sport shows us such things as, well, hate and violence and mercy and race and prejudice and its conquest and a thousand other things as well. The sportswriter is uniquely privileged among newspaper journalists: because in competition, the athlete can’t help but reveal himself. I had, and have no wish to give up writing about sport. But it is not enough. Not because sport is not enough, but because humanity is not enough.
14. Garden warbler
Sylvia borin
I held the giggling, naked girl close. She was, I think, Chinese. She giggled again, more loudly this time, in a manner that took me back just a little. I was not yet to know then that she would drive me mad, obsess me, possess me, persuade me to take ridiculous risks with my marriage and my professional life. She giggled once again, and I was aware that all was not well. There was something amiss with the giggle. With that realisation, she began to fade, her lovely naked self vanishing inside the enfolding arc of my arms, until, like the Cheshire Cat, only the giggle remained. I was awake now, the sound of the giggle echoing down from the trees above.
The air was full of strange sounds, sounds I had never heard before. I put together the events of the previous night: the long flight, 17 hours delayed, the journey in the dark, all of us crammed into the Land Cruiser, the occasional bizarre sight of a nightjar caught in the headlights. Then the short night, and an awakening through the giggles to a morning concert of still stranger sounds. I had entered a land of enchantment, and from the first I was lost.
I was in the Kafue National Park in Zambia, inhabiting a soundscape that was loud, potent and unfamiliar. It was the sounds that seized me from the first: my hearing, leaping well beyond the walls of my hut and the limits of my vision, greedily gathered information from all points of the compass. Not that I was able to analyse, still less understand that concert: it was a savage jumble with no order and no meaning. I was adrift in a strange sea of sound; I had no point of reference and nothing much to float on save my own sense of wonder.
It was much later that I worked out that the sound of the giggling girl came via a red-eyed dove, a bird with a curious and rhythmic coo, sometimes interpreted as “three cheers for the BBC”. But, still unknowing, I emerged from my dream and then from my hut, but never once, for the duration of that trip – nor for many years afterwards – did I emerge from the trance of wonder in which I had awoken that first morning.
It was not just my first day in Africa. It was also the day I stopped looking at wildlife. Before that day, experiencing wildlife had been a bit like watching television: it was as if there was a sheet of glass between me and it. I was slightly cut off from everything. Locked up inside a single sense, I was an outsider looking in, wanting to belong but forever separate, like the character in The Rainbow looking through the window at the woman he loves. But Africa has a way of taking people beyond their limitations. Africa forced itself on every sense I possessed: compelling me without my volition into a five-dimensional view of the world. I was, at a stroke, an omni-directional, multi-layered, pentangled human, Leonardo’s Vitruvian man with binoculars round my neck, ears aflap and every sense at last awake. The smell of Africa hits everyone. It is beyond analysis: a touch of burn, a hint of spice, a mix of a million other trace elements, a strange nose-tingling curry. The sense of smell is so closely allied to taste that the scent of Africa becomes almost esculent in the heady occasions when you leave the vehicle and walk in the bush, between thorn-bushes and lions, over the neat sugared-almond tracks of antelopes and around the great loaves of elephant dung. Everything feels thrillingly unfamiliar: the grass that swishes at your ankles, the dragon-scale bark of the mopane trees, the sm
ooth surface of the kigelia trees, called sausage tree for their extraordinary fruit, the popadum crunch of the super-dried leaves beneath your feet. The sights astounded me. But it was the sounds that had me, in the immortal words of Brendan Behan, bewitched, bollixed and bewildered.
I remember the cheerful quarrelsome noise of a baboon colony interrupted by a shattering double bark from one vast male, suddenly standing, however precariously, on his hind legs: how others took it up and though I knew nothing of African wildlife or bush-lore, I instantly understood that something astonishing was about to happen. So there, on my first morning in Luangwa Valley, the other side of Zambia from Kafue, a leopard and her cub appeared in full daylight. In my trance I was hardly aware of our luck: I assumed such wonders were available every day, on every such morning in which the world was made new once again.
It was Baron Robert Stjernstedt who first began to isolate individual sounds for me. How shall I describe the Baron? Bob has given his life to the sounds of African birds, making recordings of 571 species in Zambia alone. He was working as a safari guide when I first met him on that unforgettable trip: a mad figure with mended glasses, ragamuffin shirt with patch-pockets with far too many things in them, shorts the crotch of which was a crochet pattern of holes made by burning shards of tobacco from his smouldering roll-ups. I used him as a model for a character in my first novel, Rogue Lion Safaris, but (like the flat in Withnail and I) I toned him down to make him believable. I have since had a number of extraordinary and potentially lethal adventures with Bob, not least the time when we nearly got squashed by a train on a bridge in Wales. Bob began the process that released me from mere vision. Thanks to Bob, I became less of an observer, more a participant. I remembered Bob and the scimitarbill: a dark, elegant, long-tailed bird related to the hoopoes with a beak to match its name. It is a great whistler. Bob engaged it in dialogue by whistling back. Each time Bob whistled, the scimitarbill replied. Bob daringly changed the pitch of his whistle: and the bird responded, changing to tune in with Bob. There was less division between human and non-human out to here in the bush. It was a marvellous first lesson, but the second was still more marvellous. This principle, once established, could be carried out into the wider world.
I never left the Luangwa Valley. I took it away with me, leaving in exchange a small piece of my heart. And as I returned home, so I began to encounter wildlife in a different way. I was no longer a mere looker. You can’t entirely recreate the sensation of standing in the African sun with a beer in your hand and a pride of lions a hundred yards away, not in Hertfordshire, anyway, but you can bring home the lesson learned. This is not a lesson you learn like the multiplication tables: rather, it is something you become aware of almost without knowing it. It is, if you like, a matter of changing your mind: not in the sense of choosing to do or believe in something else, but in the sense that your mind itself is altered. Oh, I tried to alter my mind with drugs in those brief dizzy days in Room Six, but I was never much in love with the means or the process. Africa had hit me with the force of a million-mike acid trip, and this time, I had no thought of resisting. Holding onto my essential sanity was no longer the preferred option. One of the supposed pleasures of the hallucinogens is the opening up of the senses: Ralph feeling every blade of grass, me listening to the birds of Burwalls. But Africa triggered in me a response far deeper, imbued with far more meaning. My senses were not so much exaggerated as keyed in: I was aware of them, and I was aware of what they sensed as never before. The wild world spoke to me, entering through every sensory portal.
I was, then, by the time I got to Minsmere, awakened. It was here I met Jeremy Sorensen, who took me through the next door. Jeremy was chief warden of the RSPB’s nature reserve at Minsmere, in Suffolk, and I was writing a book about a year in the life of the place, for, strange to tell, I was now a wildlife writer, or at least, I had a commission to write a book about wildlife. Every week I would leave my north-north-London fastness and take a train north and east from Liverpool Street, changing to the rattler at Ipswich. From Saxmundham, a taxi took me to Minsmere, and there I did my research. Some of it was walking and talking, but an awful lot more was sitting about with my mouth agape. The most important thing was listening: to Jeremy, to the others who worked on the reserve, and crucially, to the birds themselves.
I had been to Minsmere before. I had spent some enchanted days there with Cind, and we had shared vivid encounters with, among others, kingfishers and marsh harriers. The RSPB had tried to steer me away from Minsmere, because it was famous enough already. But I wanted Minsmere because Minsmere had something special: it had that sense of privilege. It seemed – no, it was – the case that at Minsmere, birds reduced their flight distances. They let humans get closer than they did outside. They had less fear, because the humans they encountered were 100 per cent benign. If you skyline yourself in most low-lying places, you will put the birds to flight: at Minsmere, you can do so without concern. On my first visit a wren took to the top of a small bush and sang his song five yards away from me. Though I saw some fabulous exoticisms that day, this was perhaps the enduring image of the place: a skulking bird flaunting himself in full view of a human. I was no longer a source of fear: I was treated, by a bird, as a belonger.
It was crucial to establish a good relationship with Jeremy, but that presented no difficulties. Not that Jeremy was by any stretch of the imagination a straightforward fellow. He was, in his way, as rum a bugger as the Baron. Jeremy was one of those clever men who had never been over-educated. He had to find it all out as he went along: he had been an effective manager of a chain of shops, while doing a great deal of work ringing birds as a volunteer. He had then cast aside his worldly ambitions in the retail trade and joined the RSPB as a warden, ending up steering the flagship. Affable, Lancastrian, quirky, eccentric, given to unexpected mental leaps, he had taken Minsmere from being a place that was kept cut off, almost secret, almost paranoically wary of visitors, to something not entirely unlike a tourist trap: save that those trapped were not fleeced but given something that could last them the rest of their lives. That is to say, birds; that is to say, the wild world. Minsmere now has a shop and tea-room and a daily year-round invasion of visitors. This is Jeremy’s great achievement: and since he left, the traditions he established have been continued and expanded.
“How good are you on your song and call?”
This was one of Jeremy’s first questions to me, and I had to confess that I was hopeless. Not even a beginner, for I had no idea where to start. I had always thought that birdsong was something, well, a bit soppy, a bit girly, a bit unnecessary, like pressing wild flowers. True, with Bob, I had learned the sound of red-eyed dove, also of African fish eagle and wood owl and one or two others. But back at home, I could scarcely tell a crow from a blackbird. I didn’t even try.
Jeremy continued where Bob had left off: give him a sound, and, like a magician, he produced a bird. Picture me, then, moving from platform to platform at Ipswich station, boarding the rattler to Saxmundham, finding my window seat and cramming the headphones back over my ears, switching on the Walkman to listen, once again, to my tape of the birds of Minsmere, bought in the Minsmere shop. Again and again I played the tape, hoping that I too would become a magician. Hoping to expand my senses, alter my mind, change my world.
I remember with almost perfect vividness the day that I did so. I was out censusing birds with Rob Macklin, then Jeremy’s assistant, now Suffolk area manager. Rob was burly, bearded, once a more than useful cricketer, and a Bothamesque all-rounder as a field naturalist. Censusing has always been his passion: despite his elevated administrative role, he still sneaks off with his maps and his notebooks and his sharpened pencils every time he can get away.
It was the repetition of the real birds that finally got through to me, because Rob stopped to write down every bird he heard. That was the point of the trip, after all. So every time he heard a willow warbler, he stopped and wrote down “willow warbler”, and
every time he did so, I heard the silvery liquid trickle of notes, lisping down the scale, and before very long, I knew that I would always know a willow warbler whether I saw it or not. We came across a little sun-washed hollow full of brambles: here was whitethroat heaven, a perfect habitat for these neat little warblers, and because the shelter and the food supplies were optimal, the birds were there in intense profusion. We counted six of them in a brake you would circle in half a minute: and I knew, again, that the brief, intense, scratchy sound was locked in my mind, and that I would never hear a whitethroat in full song without knowing it for what it was.
All this I took home from Minsmere and tried, falteringly, to put into practice for myself. Alas, the seasons went too fast for me. The year turned, and autumn was on us, and the big singing was over by the time I was getting the hang of it. I recall standing on a train station – Welwyn North, I think – with the leaves already turning and the autumn soloist in full song, and I wanted to shake everybody waiting for the train: “Listen! That’s a bloody robin! And it’s wonderful! Got it?”
When the singing began again the following spring, I was at last able to put myself to the test. One by one, like a man building a wall, I began to construct my edifice of birdsong: the repeating song thrush, the limpid blackbird, the morsing great tit, the trilling wren, the soaring song of the soaring skylark. Then I began to add the migrants as they arrived and began to sing in their turn: the chiming chiffchaff, the willow warbler returning both to England and to me, and then the whitethroat, his song remembered by himself and, to my immense delight, by me as well.