Ordinary pets held little interest for Knight. He was interested in wild animals: the ones you had to tame. In his books, he defined the term with care. First, he explained, animals might pass as tame, but not be; they might turn. And domesticated animals might appear to be tame, but they are liable to turn spiteful and difficult. Starving animals could also appear to be tame, but aren’t; hunger has merely deadened their fear. These animals are not trustworthy. To trust an animal, he wrote in Taming and Handling Animals, one must tame it oneself, make it ‘gentle and tractable’:
The accent is on the word ‘make’ because to tame a wild creature means that we have to gain its confidence, remove its natural fears, and in many cases even inspire affection, so that the animal concerned will feed readily and regularly; will look well; will refrain from biting and other forms of attack and will accept us as well disposed towards it – or possibly as one of its own kind.
One of its own kind. There’s a world of counter-subversion right there, a ghosting of the topologies of his secret life. In his books, Knight wrote of the correct relationship between animal and handler in almost exactly the same terms he’d used to describe the correct relationship between agent-runner and agents – one in which the officer must ‘at all costs make a friend of his agents’ and the ‘agents must trust the officer’. Most important of all, in both animal-taming and agent-recruiting, ‘a basis of firm confidence must be built up’.
Our model of animal-keeping today commonly rests on an empathetic understanding between handler and wild creature. Knight’s does not. For him, the lines between animal and human were sharply drawn. His animals were mirrors only so far as they reflected their keeper’s expertise, and their tameness and trust were to be valued as evidence of the character and abilities of their owner. ‘A fool of a person,’ he said, ‘will never own an intelligent pet; a nervous person will never succeed in winning the confidence of any wild creature.’ And apart from demonstrating how skilful you were at gaining trust, animals had other uses: they were epistemological puzzles to solve. They allowed you to ‘observe such things as the comparative intelligence of different species’, or ‘their readiness to adapt themselves to conditions of captivity’.
The boundaries between Knight and his animals were firmly policed, just as they were with his agents. In both cases, the aim was a familiar, expert, yet distanced, knowledge. Joan Miller, one of Knight’s agents and his long-term companion, acerbically commented that ‘M was always curious about animals, not fond of them; though ours, of course, were always loved sincerely by me’.
Knight’s distanced model of animal-keeping ran into trouble when he decided to raise a cuckoo. It was a species for which Knight had a special regard. It’s not difficult to see why. Cuckoos doubled as symbols not only of deep and abiding Englishness (their spring arrivals noted each year in the letters page of The Times), but also of suspicion, mystery and deceit. They laid their eggs in other birds’ nests and their newly hatched chicks, after ejecting the eggs and chicks of their hosts, were raised by foster-parents that seemed quite unaware of the deception played upon them.
Parasitic, scientifically baffling, the cuckoo’s ambiguous moral status revolved around concepts of cuckoldry, duplicity, sexual confusion and even species boundaries themselves: in books and in heated correspondence in the Spectator, the redoubtable Bernard Acworth, doyen of the Creation Science Movement, repeatedly claimed that cuckoos were, in fact, hybrids between male cuckoos and the female birds of host species.
The cuckoo also starred in a spectacular piece of popular science of the period. Using new techniques of flash photography, Eric Hosking and Stuart Smith’s Birds Fighting (1955) made overt the place of the cuckoo in fables of nationalism, aggression and defence. Smith begins by quoting Pliny’s description of the cuckoo as a ‘common object of hostility among all birds’ because ‘it practises deception’. The book is a sort of ornithological death-match, a series of staged fights, photographed in blow-by-blow detail, of well-known, well-loved British songbirds tearing apart stuffed cuckoos in a frenzy of defensive aggression and ‘extreme fury’. This was total war in the ecological realm: birds defending their families against an infiltrating enemy. The cuckoo – standing in for an invasion of the body politic – incited extreme violence in birds that were icons of rural Englishness.
Hosking and Smith wanted to find out what triggered this furious response. How does a bird recognise the enemy? What signifies ‘cuckoo’ to a wrathful nightingale? They made sectional cuckoo models, painted cardboard cutouts, and stuck stuffed cuckoo heads on sticks, then conducted a series of experiments born of cultural anxieties reflected on to a post-war nationalised avifauna. What they discovered was that British birds were reassuringly adept at uncovering dissimulation: a nightingale will still recognise and attack a stuffed cuckoo even if it has been draped in a spotted handkerchief.
This was the post-war cuckoo: a clandestine bird of deception and quiet murder. The enemy within. Knight, naturalist and counter-subversion specialist, was, of course, desperate to own one.
In A Cuckoo in the House (1955), Knight tells the story of how this came to pass. His networks of secret watchers and agents had been replaced by a vast team of natural-history informants recruited through the radio. When one wrote to him of a cuckoo chick in a back garden, Knight jumped at the chance to ‘rescue it’ from cats. He’d wanted to hand-rear a cuckoo for years. Why? Because they are interesting, he explained, and because they are familiar, but not well known. Though everyone knows the cuckoo’s call, he continued, the bird itself was ‘not thoroughly understood’. It is ‘mysterious’, he explained, with evident relish.
And indeed, the cuckoo’s life beautifully mirrored the concerns of Knight’s own. First, its sex life was mysterious and secretive. So was Knight’s: for years, according to Joan Miller, he’d maintained a hearty heterosexual façade while picking up rough trade in local cinemas and employing motorcycle mechanics for reasons other than repairing motorcycles. Second, cuckoos were the avian equivalents of the officer-controller of penetration agents; they ‘insinuated’ their ‘chameleon eggs’ into the nests of their ‘dupes’. A single cuckoo might lay eggs in as many as twelve nests, Knight explained, finding them by perching on a ‘convenient lookout post from which she spies out the land with a sharp and particular eye’. Cuckoos were also ‘competent and ruthless’, and their secret identity was never compromised. Knight didn’t share Smith and Hosking’s conclusion that birds had an ‘innate concept of “cuckoo”’. Far from it. He maintained that birds never knew they were cuckoos at all. Cuckoos lived their cover. Knight’s view was that other birds attacked them because they resembled, or ‘passed’, as hawks.
As Knight reared Goo, his cuckoo, the careful boundaries he’d drawn between the worlds of animals and man, between agent and handler, began to crumble. He was delighted to observe the fledgling’s initial aggression turning to absolute tameness and trust. Goo also had a ‘very remarkable’ discriminatory ability, and was easily able ‘to sort out its regular friends from newcomers’. The words Knight used to describe Goo’s behaviour were highly charged: friends, newcomers, handlers – all categories from his secret life. And not just his career in the intelligence services, but his love life, too: Knight’s ‘friendly advances’ to the cuckoo were ‘reciprocated in full’. ‘Plumage, voice, and soft peckings showed quite plainly that he was pleased and satisfied, and strokings and murmured soft words were much appreciated too.’ Reading Knight’s book you sense his delight that this mysterious cuckoo has been turned, but also his disconcerted half-knowledge that what it has turned into is a strange, feathered proxy for Knight himself. For the first time, Knight admits, troubled, he is not sure that the ‘gulf which exists between humans and other animals . . . is quite as wide as some people think’.
A Cuckoo in the House ends, of course, with the defection of Knight’s avian agent. Young cuckoos migrate to Africa. Flying free in Knight’s garden, Goo returned to his h
andler less and less frequently. Knight attached a numbered ring to the bird’s leg to identify it, should it return the following spring, and when Goo left to fly south, Knight mourned his loss. The cuckoo, he said, was ‘the most fascinating bird pet’ he had ever owned. Of course it was: he identified with it hugely, saw it mostly as himself.
The story of the cuckoo and the spymaster tells us that our understanding of animals is deeply influenced by the cultures in which we live. But it shows, too, that we can – and do – use animals as our proxies; we use them to speak for us, to say things that we cannot otherwise articulate. It also reveals that the meanings we give animals can be strangely robust. Just as Knight’s cuckoo was never just a bird, the cuckoos trapped and tagged as part of the British Trust for Ornithology’s current project are never solely data points on a map. No matter how precisely they are tracked on their long migrations, they are still birds of mystery, things much greater than small bundles of bones and muscle and grey feathers. They tell us things about ourselves, about the way we see our world; and they carry their strange human histories with them on their way.
The Arrow-Stork
Displayed on a small plinth in a university museum in the German city of Rostock is a famously gruesome exhibit: a stuffed white stork whose sinuous neck is pierced by an iron-tipped wooden spear from Central Africa. This unlucky bird survived the attack and flew back to Germany, only to be shot by a hunter in the spring of 1822. Newspaper reports revealed the spear’s distant origin, and the newly christened pfeilstorch, or arrow-stork, became celebrated for solving the puzzle of where German storks spent their winters.
In the eighteenth century, many experts still held Aristotle’s view that birds hibernated during the cold months and believed fishermen’s claims that clumps of live swallows could be pulled from beneath the ice of winter ponds. It wasn’t until later in the nineteenth century that European naturalists began sustained research into bird migration, fitting the legs of birds with numbered metal bands and carefully plotting the locations where they were later recovered. The Rostock pfeilstorch is an early, macabre example of the workings of wildlife-migration science. From unintentionally carried spears to GPS and satellite tags, tracing animal movements requires augmenting the animals with human technology.
Many thousands of animals and birds carry tags today. They’re attached to sea-turtle shells with marine epoxy glue and fired from boats into the blubber of passing whales. Swans and bears wear tags on collars, and smaller birds are fitted with harnesses that mount solar-powered transmitters high on their backs. Each tag communicates with a network of satellites to fix the location of the animal.
By discovering the routes animals take during migration, scientists can assess the threats they face, like regions affected by habitat loss or the activities of hunters. But the movements of tagged creatures are no longer followed solely by the eyes of experts. For the rest of us, the increasing availability of visualisations of their journeys makes the world a more complicated and wondrous place. I’m able to sit at my computer and watch how great white sharks tagged in Californian coastal waters migrate over a thousand miles to spend their winters in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean now known as the White Shark Café, read of how Amur falcons might survive on their journey over the ocean between India and Africa by following swarms of dragonflies making the same trip and feasting on them in flight.
There are many websites on which the public can name, sponsor and follow tagged animals. I regularly visit one run by the British Trust for Ornithology, which tracks the annual journeys of individual cuckoos between Britain and Africa as part of a larger project investigating the species’ rapid population decline in Britain: more than half have been lost since the 1980s for reasons that are still unclear. Today the internet informed me that a cuckoo called David has reached his home in Wales, though it’s hard to know what home means to a cuckoo, for the project has shown that some spend only 15 per cent of their lives in their countries of origin. I click on David’s photograph, and then those of sixteen other tagged cuckoos, nervous, golden-eyed bundles of grey feathers held in scientists’ hands, so different from the fast-flying, sharp-winged silhouettes that flicker between trees near my house in spring. Each cuckoo’s current position is represented on screen by a clickable icon on a Google Earth map. Coloured lines trace their flights from England across Europe and North Africa, over the Sahara and into the humid forest zone where they spend their winters. The default satellite view on the website has no overlays indicating cities or countries. It encourages me to see the world as an animal does: a place without politics or borders, without humans at all, merely a series of habitats marching climatically from cool northern mountains to the thick rainforests of Angola and Congo.
Projects like this give us imaginative access to the lives of wild creatures, but they cannot capture the real animals’ complex, halting paths. Instead they let us watch virtual animals moving across a world of eternal daylight built of a patchwork of layered satellite and aerial imagery, a flattened, static landscape free of happenstance. There are no icy winds over high mountain passes here, no heavy rains, soaring hawks, ripening crops or recent droughts. Despite these simplifications, following a tagged animal on a map is an addictive pursuit. It’s hard not to become invested in its fate. The bird might die, the tag might fail. You do not know where it will travel next. The bird is unaware of the eyes that watch its progress, and you veer from a sense of power at your ability to surveil at a distance to the knowledge that you are powerless to influence what happens next.
The more you watch, the more you feel that you are somehow also taking the cuckoo’s journey, are engaged on a virtual exploration of the globe. The fantasy of a borderless world is quickly replaced by visions of heroic exploration. You take up the part of a lone traveller engaged on an arduous quest to cross countries and conquer unknown spaces on the map. Because satellite tracking is expensive, we can follow the progress of only a few named animals. You become attached to them as they make their astonishing journeys. You watch young cuckoos find their way to Africa with no parental help, see loggerhead turtles swim seven and a half thousand miles from feeding grounds off Mexico to the beaches of Japan; discover bar-headed geese migrating over the Himalayas, in doing so enduring extreme and sudden changes in elevation that would disable or kill a human. You can marvel at the bar-tailed godwits that make a nine-day, eleven-thousand-kilometre nonstop flight from Alaska to New Zealand across the Pacific Ocean. To us, these appear remarkable feats of physical endurance. We cannot help measuring the capacities of animals against our own.
Our unconscious desire to see ourselves in the lives of animals is shared by the scientists engaged in these projects, who often think of the tagged animals as colleagues and collaborators. Tom Maechtle, a biologist and environmental consultant who has worked on raptor migration at the University of Maryland, has spoken of how satellite tracking ‘turns the animal into a partner with the researcher’ and suggested that you can think of tagged falcons as biologists who have been ‘sent out to find and sample other birds’.
Increasingly, animals are seen not only as proxies for scientific researchers but also as scientific-research equipment functioning like sensors or probes. In one project studying climate change in West Antarctica, for example, elephant seals with tags glued to their foreheads collect and transmit data on ocean conductivity, temperature and depth that is used for weather forecasting and climate research. This notion of autonomous biological-sampling devices confuses the distinctions between technology and living organisms, quietly erasing the animal’s agency.
Tagged animals carry more than human technology; they carry human ways of visualising the world. Hybrid beasts, they perfectly fit our modern conception of the planet as an environment under constant watch, where eyes in the sky track animals moving from one country to another and plot them on a map just as they do moving ships and aircraft; a world where Defense Department researchers in the US are working
on autonomous flying robots that mimic the flight of hawks and insects, where scientists fit electronic backpacks on giant flower beetles that enable them to be flown and steered by remote control.
Early pioneers in the remote tracking of animals sought military funding for their efforts and suggested that bird-migration studies could be used to improve navigation and missile-guidance systems, and the development of technology suitable for animal surveillance came from a microelectronics industry with strong early links to the military. 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.
If the stuffed pfeilstorch in the German museum is the iconic bird of early animal-migration science, I think today’s equivalent is another stork, a young bird called Ménes that was satellite-tagged in Hungary in 2013 as part of an avian-migration tracking project sponsored by a European cross-border cooperation programme. After leaving his nest, Ménes travelled south across Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel, landed in the Nile Valley in Egypt, and was there captured by a fisherman and taken into police custody. The stork, carrying a ‘suspicious electronic device’, was suspected of being a spy.
I’ve spent a long time looking at photographs of Ménes behind bars, half in shadow, beak lowered and toes spread upon concrete, a mournful casualty of a country in the grip of the deepest political tensions. Security experts cleared the stork of espionage, and he was released, only to be later found dead on an island near Aswan, a draggled corpse of a stork that had become a poignant avatar for human fears and conflicts. Media reports of his plight cast his story as one of almost comical paranoia. But although the stork was innocent – an unwitting player in a geopolitical game of surveillance and intelligence – the hybrid being made of the stork and device was far less clearly so.
Vesper Flights Page 18