Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  In early winter, mistle thrushes turn full Smaug: they’ll claim possession of particularly fine yew trees, hollies, mistletoe clumps or bushes full of berries and defend them against intruders, chasing them away with strident, football-rattle calls of fury: the better they defend their hoard, the earlier and more successful their breeding attempts tend to be the following spring. But not all birds are so territorial. At this time of year our local blackbirds are joined by small flocks from Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe, and they’ll feast on berries together. In the presence of such bounty they’ll tolerate, if not entirely welcome, each other’s presence.

  With exceptions like dogroses and brambles, most shrubs and trees flower and fruit on that year’s new growth, so the traditional yearly trim of hedgerows in autumn will deprive a whole community of valuable winter foodstuffs. But increasingly, as hedgerows become valued for wildlife rather than simply as stock barriers, they are cut on two- or three-year rotation, which ensures a supply of berries through the coldest months. Some berries are more palatable than others. Autumn blackberries disappear fast; by winter they’ve gone except for furry, frost-dried knots. Hawthorn and blackthorn, too. By late winter, few berries are left. Wood pigeons feast on the black fruits of ivy, clambering awkwardly on thin twigs and later depositing bright purple droppings under their roosts. As winter progresses, some berries ferment and become alcoholic, and it’s not uncommon to see faintly disoriented birds wandering around beneath affected shrubs.

  Among the last berries to be eaten in winter are those on ornamental shrubs and trees, either because they are relatively unpalatable or because they’re coloured so unusually that many native birds do not recognise them as edible. It’s these berries that become the targets of the unpredictable visitations of a bird that more than any other means winter’s wonder to me. The last time I saw them was five years ago in a small pedestrian precinct in Alton, Hampshire. It was a bitter February day, everyone hooded and hatted, heads down, trudging stoically between shops. I was asking my mother where she’d like to meet for coffee after our errands were done when I heard an unearthly trilling noise, like a carillon of silver bells, and like a gravity-stricken whirlwind a pack of fat birds swirled down from the blank sky on to a slim twelve-foot sorbus tree right above us. They were waxwings, irregular visitors from the far north. They’re neither pink nor grey nor brown but something in between that’s no colour the way winter skies are no colour. They glommed on to the tree and began stuffing their maws with white berries, every so often rising en masse to the sky before resettling on the branches in a slightly different arrangement. They had elegant crests, bandit-black masks and flashes of russet, their black tails and wings patterned with daffodil yellow; and on their wing coverts, rows of the bizarre ornaments for which they’re named, small waxy red protuberances that look exactly like the heads of matches. They’re both highly classy and fantastically trashy to look at; no Christmas decoration could ever approach their absurd, animate beauty. Their magic isn’t simply in the surprise of their comings and goings – some years they appear, often they don’t – but where they’re most often seen. They are particularly drawn to the fruits of tree cultivars beloved of town planners, so every winter there’ll be reports of waxwing flocks on the internet that read something like: Twenty birds, Aldi car park, or small flock behind PC Warehouse!

  My mother and I stood entranced. No one else noticed them, even though the nearest bird was two feet from our faces – they’re so unconcerned by people they will even feed from apples held out in one’s hands if they’re hungry enough – and a few seconds later the winter vision swirled upwards again like leaves and was gone, leaving a bare tree and faint trills over the shopping-centre roofs.

  Cherry Stones

  Autumn 2017 has seen an unprecedented invasion from Europe. It’s been reported all over the British press and set internet message boards on fire. People have left their homes expressly to search for the immigrants and some have set up microphones to detect their calls at night. Between mid-October and mid-November, fifty passed through Greenwich Park in London and more than a hundred and fifty were seen at one location in East Sussex. They’ve made their way to Britain because of food shortages in their countries of origin, and there’s a general hope among those who look for them that they’ll find what they need here, settle in and stay.

  The immigrants are hawfinches, starling-sized finches on steroids dressed in tones of salmon pink, black, white, russet and grey. Their enormous, cherry-stone-cracking beak resembles a pair of side-cutting steel pliers and is quite capable of severing a human finger. With coppery eyes set in an ink-black bib and mask, overall their appearance always reminds me of an exquisitely dressed pugilist. They’re rare and declining in Britain – around eight hundred pairs breed here. The first time I ever saw one was on a winter’s evening in the late 1990s while driving through the Forest of Dean in a rainstorm at dusk. As I rounded a corner, a single bird flew up from the verge. Caught in my headlights, its pied wings strobed through bright lines of falling water before it disappeared back into the dark. The encounter was every bit as ghostly and strange as the species’ reputation among British birdwatchers, for hawfinches are legendarily mysterious, secretive and difficult to see. Local populations frequently disappear completely for a number of years before reappearing in their old haunts for no obvious reason. They’re most often detected by their call alone: a short, metallic, emphatic szick! They’re easier to locate after the leaves have fallen, but are so skittish that most of my sightings have been tiny silhouettes set on the topmost branches of distant winter trees.

  But things are very different in mainland Europe. Walking through Berlin’s Volkspark Friedrichshain on a cold spring day some years ago with a friend who lived in the city, I stopped in frank astonishment under a cock hawfinch singing on a lime twig a few feet above my head. It’s a hawfinch! I breathed. ‘Yes, there’s loads of them here, all over the place,’ she said, casually, and shrugged. I waved my hands in frustration as the bird continued to sing. Faced with this absurdly tame creature, as much at home in the city as a feral pigeon, there was no way I could explain to her how enigmatic hawfinches were supposed to be.

  The recent influx to Britain is likely to have been spurred by a failure of the hornbeam crop across Eastern Europe, though some blame it on unusual weather. One British Trust for Ornithology spokesman suggested that warm air pulled north-west by one of this year’s biggest storms, Ophelia, has brought the hawfinches here. Whatever the cause, this unprecedented irruption of avian refugees fascinates me partly because it speaks so obviously of current issues – it’s a truism that birds know no political borders – but also because it reminds me of how closely human concerns inform our understanding of nature. Today, our small population of resident hawfinches lives mostly in ancient woodlands or as small colonies in the forests and parklands of stately homes, to such an extent that I once heard a birder call them National Trust finches, after the heritage conservation charity that administers so many of Britain’s most magnificent historic estates. So closely are hawfinches tied to these symbolic British landscapes that for years I assumed they were the last remnants of a native, much decreased ancient population whose present-day rarity was a function of modernity. My mind was blown when I found out that Britain had no breeding hawfinches until the mid-nineteenth century, when a number of prospecting pairs from mainland Europe started a nesting colony in Epping Forest. They spread from there until fifty years later there were birds in almost every English county taking advantage of apple orchards and leafy deciduous woodlands full of their favourite food sources: hornbeam, beech, maple, elm, yew, hawthorn and cherry. British hawfinch populations reached their peak in the 1950s, after which they went into precipitous decline.

  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. The loss of suitable habitat is one important factor in the decline of British hawfinches, but another is nest predation by grey squirrels, commonly seen as unwanted foreign invaders. Ironically, they appeared in the British landscape at about the same time as hawfinches.

  Perhaps the immigrant finches will stay and raise young here. That’s what a lot of people are hoping. I certainly am. But for now, what is most joyous to me about this once-ina-lifetime influx is that birds renowned for their attachments to ancient woods and country estates are turning up in unexpectedly everyday places. They’re clambering about yew branches in local churchyards and foraging in the leaf litter of suburban parks. In late November, eight were spotted at Mill Hill Sports Centre in London. ‘At last!’ wrote Ms Sue Barnecutt Smith in a comment to one newspaper article about the invasion. ‘I couldn’t work out the identity of a bird my son spotted at my allotment last week (near Putney Bridge, west London). Now we know.’ These spectacular refugees have eschewed the venerable treetops of stately homes to spend their time instead with sparrows, feeding happily upon sunflower hearts and peanuts scattered on garden bird tables.

  Birds, Tabled

  The strangest thing about the Bird Fair, Britain’s premier birding event, is that there are no birds there. ‘Yes there are!’ hissed the man in the entry line behind us, though I’d been speaking only to my mother. ‘There are ospreys.’ It’s true that wild ospreys live on the lakes at Rutland Water, the site where the Bird Fair is held, but there are no birds at the Bird Fair. What there are instead: thousands of people, the sweet scent of trampled summer grass, shaded marquees inside which are tables and touts for bird tours to every part of the Earth. Binoculars and spotting scopes. Books. A refreshment tent. An art tent. Tents for lectures. Every time I go to the Bird Fair I see people I know and love. But no birds.

  A few years ago I drove to the West Midlands with my boyfriend, a birdkeeper, to visit a different kind of bird fair: a bird show. We parked in a Staffordshire field beside two hangar-like halls. The men walking past us looked nothing like the men at the Bird Fair, who tend to be pale and urgent of face and dressed in hiking boots and technical trousers. These men were laughing as they lugged boxes and cages and the tops of trestle tables. They wore rugby shirts, lumberjack shirts, hooded tracksuits, fishing waistcoats. There were tattoos and many baseball hats. There were no binoculars at all.

  But there were a lot of birds. The halls were full of show cages. Far smaller than the cages and aviaries these birds lived in at home, they were designed to display the beauty of the creatures within. There were hooped wire ones like tabletop Victorian aviaries inside which hopped stout canaries; vertical stacks of wooden boxes fronted with the tiniest gauge wire for minute owl-finches and waxbills; bigger cages for pigeons and chickens and quail. A few tables of huge-headed, feather-perfect show budgerigars with spotted gorgets, birds that looked far more artificial than the plastic feed trays in their cages. I watched in awe as a man walked past holding a tight-feathered white pigeon the size of a baby. He told me it was a Hungarian Giant House Pigeon, and instantly my own house seemed the poorer for not having one.

  An industrial propane heater roared in a corner and the halls echoed with Tannoy announcements instructing exhibitors to ensure that water and feed bowls were filled and their birds weren’t too hot, or too cold, and showed no signs of distress. Wandering about from table to table I sneaked photos on my phone using all the tactical guile my father taught me from his years as a photojournalist. Keeping the phone low at my hip, maintaining eye contact and smiling with stallholders, I took a series of blurred and tilted shots using one thumb. Birdkeepers are wary creatures. I didn’t want them to know what I was doing, for if the culture of watching wild birds has all the social acceptability of drinking wine, birdkeeping feels more like legalised cannabis use. Both involve a deep love of birds and displays of natural-historical connoisseurship, but birdkeeping is considered by many to be morally dubious and, at its fringes, prone to lawlessness.

  Thankfully, all the birds at this fair were domestically bred. Legislation in the 1980s made the keeping of wild-trapped British birds illegal, and the international trade in wild birds has declined by 90 per cent since the European Union banned imports in 2005. That was a trade made entirely of heartbreak – I will never forget looking up at the window of a warehouse in West London’s Cromwell Road as a child and seeing the flurried wingbeats of scores of distressed, disoriented, recently arrived cockatoos.

  One section of this bird show was dedicated to what birdkeepers call British: native species, the same kinds as those that sing in our woods and gardens and forests and fields. Insectivorous and fruit-eating birds like blackbirds and thrushes were displayed in cages painted white inside, often with embellishments that hinted at their natural habitat, such as rocks for wheatears or a sheet of forest bark for redstarts. The show cages of British finches had glossy black exteriors and were painted inside with Brolac Georgian green, a mossy tone particularly favoured by interior designers in the eighteenth century. Inside them were goldfinches, linnets, redpolls, siskins, bullfinches, hawfinches.

  One of these cages was attracting considerable attention. Inside it was a pied goldfinch, its plumage broken with freakish patches of white. Unusual colour mutations like these are highly prized among British bird aficionados – goldfinches with a white spot under their chin are called peathroats; those with an entirely white throat, cheverals. A group of Irish Travellers clustered around this cage, engaged in animated discussion about the merits of the bird while a pile of twenty-pound notes was counted out upon the table. Seven-colour linnets, they call goldfinches; it’s a very old name, hardly ever used by birdwatchers. This one was likely destined to breed mules, a kind of bird beloved by Romani and Traveller birdkeepers. The offspring of a wild finch (usually a male goldfinch or linnet) mated with a domesticated canary, they’re known as mules because like the offspring of a horse and a donkey, they’re sterile. They’re treasured for their intensely beautiful songs, which combine sweet, wide-ranging canary trills with the varied, sharp, metallic notes of their wild fathers.

  A few years ago I spoke to a man who confessed to me that he used to trap wild goldfinches when he was younger, despite knowing it was illegal. ‘I didn’t keep them – I was catching hormone-addled males for muling,’ he said. ‘I’d pop them in a cage with a female canary, long enough for them to mate, then let them go. They’d be in the trap, in my hand, in the cage, for only a few minutes. Where was the harm in that? The problem is,’ he said darkly, ‘they don’t like us keeping British at all.’

  His use of the term they helps us understand one aspect of the difference between the Bird Fair and the Bird Show: that our attitudes towards nature are shaped by history and class and power. These two events mirror a longstanding division in the ways we relate to the natural world. One view is that nature is something pristine out there that should only be observed or recorded; the other sees it as something that can be brought into interior spaces and closely interacted with. It runs along the same lines as the division between field scientists and lab scientists, or between hunters and farmers. Such divisions are freighted with social meaning. Like so many battles about nature, at heart they’re about who has the right to define what a creature is, who has the right to interact with it, and how.

  Birding, along with similar forms of observational nature-appreciation, has near-universal cultural acceptability in the present day – there’s considerable media coverage of the Bird Fair, for example – but the keeping of small native birds does not. It has long been a hobby associated with working-class and minority communities, like miners, immigrants, East End Londoners, Romani and Irish Travellers. The last long conversation I had about birdkeeping was with a Romanian taxi driver on the way to an airport very early on a Sunday morning. In the darkness the screen of his iPhone glowed with a photograph of a bird with a black cap, a pugnacious beak and a chest the colour of young red wine.
I told him I thought it was a beautiful bullfinch, and he was beside himself with delight: You know what it is! This is my bird! And we talked about his birds for the rest of the journey. He’d got into it late, he said. When he was a young man he had no idea how perfect birds were: like precious stones, but alive. And their songs! He explained that his birds are his life, and they are like children in two ways: because he loves them and because he cannot remember the person he was before them.

  The great anti-cagebird campaigns of my childhood were in part the crusade of bird lovers like Peter Conder, then Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who had spent years behind wire in German prisoner of war camps. But that’s not the only reason we don’t like to see birds in small cages. Those cages radically attenuate the possibilities of a bird’s life. I can’t look at birds in them without my heart aching fit to burst, even if those birds look otherwise healthy and happy and well-adjusted. But we limit the lives of captive animals in myriad ways, and don’t always judge their impacts according to the needs of the creatures involved. The high-density broiler operations of chickens kept in locked sheds, for example – birds bred to gain weight so fast that after only a few weeks many find it difficult to walk – are something hardly any of us see, and are thus easy to ignore. Moreover, we often fail to see many of the other cruelties we visit on animals because we don’t consider what an animal’s world ought to contain – the lives of single rabbits kept in cramped garden hutches have always broken my heart, no matter how beloved those animals might be.