Every year the meadow grew back and thrived and was as rich as ever, right up until we left the Park in the 1990s. A decade later, I returned on a grey summer afternoon, nervous of what I would find. Driving up Tekels Avenue the passing scenery possessed the disconcerting, diffuse, offscale and uncanny closeness of things in dreams. I was frightened by what I might see when the car crested the curve down to the field. But there the meadow was: impossible, miraculous, still crowded with life.
Then I went back in my forties, less scared now, more certain of myself and what I would find when I got there. But I was wrong. Someone who thought meadows should look like football pitches had treated it like a lawn and mowed it repeatedly for several years until the exuberant moving life I’d known and loved was gone. The meadow now looked how that man thought it should look: blank and neat and flat and easy to walk upon. I cried when I saw it: a woman weeping not for her childhood, not really, but for everything that had been erased from this place.
Losing the meadow is not like losing the other things that have gone from my childhood: Mac Fisheries, Vesta paella, spacehoppers, school lunches, Magic Roundabout toys, boiled sugar lollipops when I’d finished my meals in roadside café chains on holiday trunk roads. You can mourn the casualties of fast capitalism for your own generation, but you know they’ve merely been replaced with other programmes, other media, other things to see and buy. I can’t do that with the meadow. I can’t reduce it to nostalgia simpliciter. When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are. Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.
When Henry Green started writing his autobiography in the late 1930s it was because he expected to die in the oncoming war, and felt he did not have the luxury of time to write a novel. ‘That is my excuse,’ he wrote: ‘that we who may not have time to write anything else must do what we now can.’ He said more. He said, ‘We should be taking stock.’ I take stock. During this sixth extinction we who may not have time to do anything else must write what we now can, to take stock. When I sat on the verge that day and wept I told myself over and over again that he was a nice man, that perhaps he had simply not known what was there. Had not known what was there. And I thought something that I was talking about with a friend just the other day: that the world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be, and burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.
A few years ago the Park was sold to a property developer. Today when I drive past the fence the pull on my heart is partly a wrench of recognition when I see those trees, knowing they are the standing ghosts of my childhood. But it’s also the knowledge that with care, attention, and a modicum of love and skill, the meadow could be incorporated into the site plan and turned into something very like it had been only a few years ago. The pull on my heart is also the pain of knowing that this is possible, but that it is very unlikely. Centuries of habitat loss and the slow attenuation of our lived, everyday knowledge of the natural world make it harder and harder to have faith that the way things are going can ever be reversed.
We so often think of the past as something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength. That messy stretches of species-rich vegetation with all their attendant invertebrate life are better, just better, than the eerie, impoverished silence of modern planting schemes and fields. I wonder how we might learn to align our aesthetic and moral landscapes to fit that intuition. I wonder. I think of the meadow. Those clouds of butterflies have met with local extinction, but held in that soil is a bank of seeds that will hang on. They will hang on for a very long time. And when I drive past the fence these days, staring out at 50 mph, I know that what I am looking for, beyond the fence, is a place that draws me because it exists neither wholly in the past, nor in the present, but is caught in a space in between, and that space is a place which gestures towards the future and whose little hurts are hope.
High-Rise
Dusk is falling over Midtown Manhattan on this chilly evening in early May. I’ve been googling the weather forecast all day, and pull out my phone to check it once again as I walk down Fifth Avenue. North-north-easterly winds and clear skies. Good.
At the Empire State Building the line snakes around the block, and because I’m the only person in it wearing a pair of binoculars around my neck, I feel a little self-conscious. I inch forward for the next hour, up escalators, through marble halls, past walls of soft gold wallpaper, before squeezing into a crowded elevator and emerging on the eighty-sixth floor. At over a thousand feet above the city, there’s a strong breeze and a spectacular sea of lights spilling far below.
Behind the tourists pressed against the perimeter fence there’s a man leaning back against the wall. Above him the Stars and Stripes flap languidly in the night air. I can’t see his face in the gloom, but I know this is the man I’ve come to meet because he’s holding a pair of binoculars that look far better than mine, and his face is upturned to sky. There’s an urgency to the way he stands that reminds me of people I’ve seen at skeet shoots waiting for the trap to fire the next target. He’s tense with anticipation.
This is Andrew Farnsworth, a soft-spoken researcher at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and I’m joining him here in hope of seeing a wildlife phenomenon that twice a year sweeps almost unseen above the city: the seasonal night flights of migrating birds. It’s an absurdly incongruous place for a nature-viewing expedition. Apart from the familiar exceptions – pigeons, rats, mice, sparrows – we tend to think of wild creatures as living far from the city’s margins, and nature as the city’s polar opposite. It’s easy to see why. The only natural things visible from this height are a faint scatter of stars above and the livid bruise of the Hudson running through the clutter of lights below. Everything else is us: the flash of aircraft, the tilt of bright smartphones, the illuminated grids of windows and streets.
Skyscrapers are at their most perfect at night, full-fledged dreams of modernity that erase nature and replace it with a new landscape wrought of artifice, a cartography of steel and glass and light. But people live in them for the same reason that they travel to wild places: to escape the city. The highest buildings raise you above the mess and chaos of life at street level; they also raise you into something else. The sky may seem like an empty place, just as we once thought the deep ocean to be a lifeless void. But like the ocean, this is a vast habitat full of life – bats and birds, flying insects, spiders, windblown seeds, microbes, drifting spores. The more I stare at the city across miles of dusty, uplit air, the more I begin to think of these super-tall buildings as machines that work like deep-sea submersibles, transporting us to inaccessible realms we cannot otherwise explore. Inside them, the air is calm and clean and temperate. Outside is a tumultuous world teeming with unexpected biological abundance, and we are standing in its midst.
Above us, LED bulbs around the base of the spire cast a soft halo of pale light up into the darkness. An incandescent blur of white skips across it. Through binoculars it resolves into a noctuid moth, wings flapping as it climbs vertically towards the tower. No one fully understands how moths like these orient themselves while migrating; there’s speculation that they might navigate by sensing Earth’s magnetic fields. This one is flying upward in search of the right airflow that will allow it to travel where it wants to go.
Wind-borne migration is an arthropod spe
ciality, allowing creatures like aphids, wasps, lacewings, beetles, moths and tiny spiders hoisted on strands of electrostatically charged silk to travel distances ranging from tens to hundreds of miles. These drifting creatures are colonisers, pioneers looking for new places to live, and they’ll make a home wherever they find one. Place a rose bush out on the arid environment of a top-floor balcony and soon wind-borne sap-sucking aphids will cluster on its stems, followed by the tiny wasps that parasitise them.
Insects travel above us in extraordinary numbers. In Britain, the research scientist Jason Chapman uses radar systems aimed into the atmosphere to study their high-altitude movements. Over seven and a half billion can pass over a square mile of English farmland in a single month – about 5,500 pounds of biomass. Chapman thinks the number passing over New York City may be even higher, because this is a gateway to a continent, not a small island surrounded by cold seas, and summers here are generally hotter. Once you get above six hundred and fifty feet, he says, 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 migrating 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.
It’s not just insects up there. The tallest buildings, like the Empire State, One World Trade Center and other new super-towers, project into airspace that birds have used for millennia. The city lies on the Atlantic Flyway, the route used by hundreds of millions of birds to fly north every spring to their breeding grounds and back again in the fall. Most small songbirds tend to travel between three and four thousand feet from the ground, but they vary their altitude depending on the weather. Larger birds fly higher, and some, like shorebirds, may well pass over the city at ten to twelve thousand feet. Up here we’ll be able to see only a fraction of what is moving past us: even the tallest buildings dip into only the shallows of the sky.
Though you can see migrating raptors soaring at altitudes well over eight hundred feet above the city during the day, most species of diurnal birds migrate after nightfall. It’s safer. Temperatures are cooler, and there are fewer predators around. Fewer, not none. Just before I arrived, Farnsworth saw a peregrine falcon drifting ominously around the building. Peregrines frequently hunt at night here. From high-rise lookout perches, they launch flights into the darkness to grab birds and bats. In more natural habitats, falcons cache the bodies of birds they’ve killed among crevices in cliffs. The ones here tuck their kills into ledges on high-rises, including the Empire State. For a falcon, a skyscraper is simply a cliff: it brings the same prospects, the same high winds, the same opportunities to stash a takeout meal.
We stare out into the dark, willing life into view. Minutes pass. Farnsworth points. ‘There!’ he says. High above us is a suspicion of movement, right at the edge of vision where the sky dissolves into dusty chaos. I swing my binoculars up to my eyes. Three pale pairs of beating wings, flying north-north-east in close formation. Black-crowned night herons. I’ve only ever seen them hunched on branches or crouched low by lakes and ponds, and it’s astounding to see them wrenched so far from their familiar context. I wonder how high they are. ‘Those are pretty large,’ Farnsworth says. ‘When you look up into the light, everything looks bigger than it is, and closer than it is.’ He estimates that the herons are about three hundred feet above us, so they’re about one and a half thousand feet from ground level. We watch them vanish into darkness.
I feel less like a naturalist here and more like an amateur astronomer waiting for a meteor shower, squinting expectantly into the darkness. I try a new tactic: focusing my binoculars on infinity and pointing them straight upwards. Through the lenses, birds invisible to the naked eye swim into view, and there are birds above them, and birds higher still. It strikes me that we are seeing a lot of birds. An awful lot of birds.
For every larger bird I see, thirty or more songbirds pass over. They are very small. Watching their passage is almost too moving to bear. They resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire. Even through binoculars those at higher altitudes are tiny, ghostly points of light. I know that they have loose-clenched toes tucked to their chests, bright eyes, thin bones and a will to fly north that pulls them onward night after night. Most of them spent yesterday in central or southern New Jersey before ascending into darkness. Larger birds keep flying until dawn. The warblers tend to come earlier to earth, dropping like stones into patches of habitat further north to rest and feed over the following day. Some, like yellow-rumped warblers, began their long journeys in the south-eastern states. Others, like rose-breasted grosbeaks, have made their way up from Central America.
Something tugs at my heart. I’ll never see any of these birds again. If I weren’t this high, and the birds weren’t briefly illuminated by this column of light cast by a building thrown up through the Depression years to celebrate earthly power and capital confidence, I’d never have seen them at all.
Farnsworth pulls out a smartphone. Unlike everyone else holding screens up here, he’s looking at radar images from Fort Dix in New Jersey, part of a National Weather Service radar network that provides near-continuous coverage of airspace over the continental USA. ‘It’s definitely a heavy migration night tonight,’ he says. ‘When you see those kinds of patterns on radar, in particular, those greens,’ he explains, ‘you’re talking about one thousand to two thousand birds per cubic mile potentially, which is almost as dense as it gets. So it’s a big night.’ After days of bad weather for birds wanting to fly north, with low cloud and winds in the wrong direction, a bottleneck of migrants built up, and now the sky is full of them. I watch the pixellation blossom on the animated radar map, a blue-and-green dendritic flower billowing out over the whole East Coast. ‘This is biological stuff that’s up in the atmosphere,’ Farnsworth says, pointing one finger to the screen. ‘It’s all biology.’
Meteorologists have long known that you can detect animal life by radar. Just after the Second World War, British radar scientists and Royal Air Force technicians puzzled over mysterious plots and patterns that appeared on their screens. They knew they weren’t aircraft and christened them ‘angels’ before finally concluding that they were flocks of moving birds. ‘That was their contamination, right?’ Farnsworth says of radar meteorologists. ‘They wanted to filter all that stuff out. Now the biologists want to do the reverse.’ Farnsworth is one pioneer of a new multidisciplinary science, fit for an era in which weather radar has become so sensitive it can detect a single bumblebee over thirty miles away. It’s called aeroecology, and it uses sophisticated remote-sensing technologies like radar, acoustics and tracking devices to study ecological patterns and relationships in the skies. ‘The whole notion of the aerosphere and airspace as habitat is not something that has come into the collective psyche until recently,’ Farnsworth says. And this new science is helping us understand how climate change, skyscrapers, wind turbines, light pollution and aviation affect the creatures that live and move above us.
At ten o’clock, cirrus clouds slide overhead like oil poured on water. Ten minutes later, the sky is clear again, and the birds are still flying. We move to the east side of the observation deck. A saxophonist begins to play, and in concert with this unlikely soundtrack we begin to see birds far closer than before. One, in particular. Though it is overexposed in the light, we detect a smear of black at its chest and a distinctive pattern on its tail: a male yellow-rumped warbler. It flickers past and disappears around the corner of the building. A little while later, we see another flying the same way. Then another. It dawns on us that this is the same bird, circling. Another one joins it, both now drawn helplessly towards and around the light, reeling about the sp
ire as if caught on invisible strings. Watching them dampens our exuberant mood. The spire is lit with pulsing rivulets of climbing colour like a candle tonight to mark the building’s eighty-fifth anniversary. And these birds have been attracted to it, pulled off course, their exquisite navigational machinery overwhelmed by light, leaving them confused and in considerable danger. After being mesmerised in this way, some birds drag themselves free and continue their journey. Others don’t.
New York is among the brightest cities in the world after Las Vegas, only one node in a flood of artificial illumination that runs from Boston down to Washington. We cherish our cities for their appearance at night, but it takes a terrible toll on migrating songbirds: you can find them dead or exhausted at the foot of high-rise buildings all over America. Disoriented by light and reflections on glass, they crash into obstacles, fly into windows, spiral down to the ground. More than a hundred thousand die each year in New York City alone. Thomas King, of the New York pest-control company M&M Environmental, has had calls from residents of high-rise buildings asking him to deal with the birds colliding with their windows during migration season. He tells them that there’s no solution, but they can talk to their building manager about turning off the lights. It helps. Programmes like New York City Audubon’s ‘Lights Out New York’ have encouraged many high-rise owners to do the same, saving both energy and avian lives.
Every year the ‘Tribute in Light’ shines twin blue beams into the Manhattan night as a memorial to the lives lost on September 11. They rise four miles into the air and are visible sixty miles from the city. On peak migration nights songbirds spiral down towards them, calling, pulled from the sky, so many circling in the light they look like glittering, whirling specks of paper caught in the wind. On one night last year, so many were caught in the beams that the few pixels representing the ‘Tribute’ site glowed super-bright on the radar maps. Farnsworth was there with the Audubon team that got the lights shut off intermittently to prevent casualties. They switched off the ‘Tribute’ eight times that night for about twenty minutes at a time, releasing the trapped birds to return to their journey. Each time the lights went back on, a new sweep of birds was drawn in – the twin towers made ghosts of light visited over and over by winged travellers intermittently freed into darkness before a crowd rushed in to take their place. Farnsworth is a lead scientist in BirdCast, a project that combines a variety of methods – weather data, flight calls, radar, observers on the ground – to predict the movements of migrating birds throughout the continental United States and forecast big nights like this that might require emergency lights-out action.
Vesper Flights Page 4