For years, on and off, I have woken in the dark, shouting out loud, stricken with horror at the impossible fact of death. It has been my most abiding and paralysing terror but it was Stu who banished it from me. At the hospice he looked me in the eye, very seriously, very quietly, and said, of what was happening to him, It’s OK. It’s OK. I knew it was not, that what he was doing was reassuring me, and it was an act of such generosity that for a while I couldn’t find anything strong enough inside me to reply. It’s OK, he said. It’s not hard. Those are the words I am remembering as we walk onward, as the minutes pass, until night thickens completely and there is starlight and dust and the feel of sand underfoot. It’s so dark now I cannot see myself. But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.
Rescue
My friend Judith cuts the head off a dead cricket with a pair of nail scissors and discards its leggy, thorny thorax before dropping the abdomen into a small china bowl on the kitchen table, the kind of bowl that you’d use for olives or pretzels. The cricket’s insides are as white and creamy as soft cheese. Outside, sparrows squabble in the garden, and their chirruping calls back the crunching scythe of blades through chitin and the wet patter of insect parts dropped one by one into the pile. Next to the bowl is a plastic washing-up tub. When I lean over to look inside it, dark eyes stare up at me from a huddle of pale-fringed faces.
The tub is full of baby swifts. Adults might be renowned for their aerial grace, but the baby ones in front of me resemble a cross between subway mice and a pile of unexpectedly animate kindling. Their clawed feet are so tiny that they cannot walk, only shuffle, and their impossibly long wings stick out at a variety of unlikely angles. Judith, a gentle and deliberate woman with silver hair cut in a practical bob, lifts up one of the nestlings and sets it upon a tissue-covered towel. Plucking a lump from the bowl, she touches it to the tip of its tiny beak, which opens into a huge pink maw that swallows the tip of her finger. The cricket vanishes down the bird’s throat. Another follows.
Frowning with concentration, Judith feeds her birds with the calm assurance gained from long experience. Seventeen years ago she spotted what she thought was a pile of feathers by the side of the road while walking her dog. It was a swift chick. She picked it up and brought it home. Numerous experts told her that it would be too difficult to raise and would die. ‘Of course it didn’t,’ she said. ‘It survived. But it was a steep learning curve.’
She’s now so renowned for her swift-rearing skills that orphans are brought to her from all over eastern England. Some arrive from vets, others from members of the public who have found her name on the internet having come across birds that have fallen from their nests. She’s had around thirty in her care this year, and has raised them all on a diet of crickets and wax-moth caterpillars dusted with powdered vitamins. While some don’t make it – usually because they’ve been given unsuitable food by their initial rescuers – most are successfully returned to the wild, triumphing over death. And the chance to observe that particular triumph is why I’m sitting in her small bungalow in a village near the American air base in Suffolk where she used to work in communications and public affairs. If the wind drops later this morning, we’ll set some of her young birds free. ‘It can be very tiring,’ she says. ‘The early mornings! But when you let one go, it’s just sheer magic. And sometimes I’m in the garden in the evening, and I might see twenty, thirty, forty swifts in the air, and I think, I know they’re not, but they could be all mine.’
We tend to physically touch wild animals only when they’re hunted, studied or in serious trouble, and the latter is usually our fault. We dislodge nests, soak seabirds in oil, hit hares and foxes with cars, pick up casualties from beneath glass windows and power lines. When I was twelve I reared a brood of baby bullfinches brought to me by a neighbour who had felled their nest tree. When those chicks flew free, there was a strong sense of having righted a wrong that humans had perpetrated on the world.
Against a backdrop of environmental destruction and precipitous species decline, our social anxieties about the impact we have on the natural world are often tied to tragedies suffered by individual animals. Tending injured and orphaned creatures until they are fit to be returned to the wild can feel like an act of resistance, redress, even redemption. Rearing a single nest of finches in the 1980s didn’t halt the decline of British songbird populations. But my simple sense of the justice of saving them was magnified by coming to see things about them I’d never otherwise have known: how they slept, how they communicated with each other, their myriad bewitching idiosyncrasies.
‘We feel responsible,’ says Norma Bishop, executive director of Lindsay Wildlife Experience in Walnut Creek, California, which operates America’s oldest wildlife rehabilitation centre, founded in 1970. ‘It’s a little like the story of Noah rescuing the animals.’ Rehabbers stress that their animals are never pets, and that their role is to return them to the wild as fast as possible, but inevitably they forge emotional bonds with their charges. British regulations allow individuals to tend to animal casualties themselves provided they adhere to established welfare guidelines. In America, wildlife rehabilitation is confined to licensed experts, often working for charitable institutions. But whatever the rehabber’s position, the dedication involved is immense: keepers of orphaned elephants in Kenya, for example, sleep next to the animals every night, but they take turns with others because too great an attachment to any one keeper risks the baby elephant being overcome by grief when he or she takes the night off.
Why do people rescue wildlife? The eminent veterinarian John Cooper thinks ‘there’s something inside humans when they’re faced with a helpless creature. We have an imperative. A duty.’ Bishop agrees: ‘I believe most people, especially children, simply cannot see an animal suffer.’ The Lindsay rehab centre receives everything from bobcats to snakes, ducklings to songbirds, brought in by concerned members of the public who may have driven many miles to deliver them. Los Angeles-based hummingbird rehabber Terry Masear thinks that rescuing animals draws out ‘raw emotions that unleash our deepest insecurities about our humanity, mortality and place in the natural world’. These insecurities often lead to mistaken attempts at rescue: most ‘lost’ fledgling birds in trees or sleeping fawns in long grass are not lost at all, but are still being fed by their parents.
Rehabbers are often criticised for being too sentimental, their work dismissed as acts of compassion for individual animals with little or no conservation benefit. It’s a reasonable view, but one that misses the point. It’s hard to feel a meaningful connection with creatures whose lives in the wild hardly coincide with our own. Bats are things of unnerving mystery to most of us, flickering aerial presences briefly and surprisingly appearing out of the night. But holding a little brown bat, staring into its bleary eyes from a few inches away, seeing its uptilted snout and delicate, mouse-like ears – that turns it into something much easier to love. The way rehabbers talk about what they do evokes in me precisely the feelings I’ve had about rescue animals in my own life: an intoxicating process of coming to know something quite unlike you, to understand it well enough not only to keep it alive but also to put it back, like a puzzle piece, into the gap in the world it left behind.
Judith has no truck with accusations of sentimentality when it comes to swifts, whose numbers in Britain have fallen by more than 35 per cent over the last twenty years. Each bird she saves, she tells me, may truly be precious to the species’ fortunes. Increasingly, people are blocking up holes in the eaves of old buildings where swifts nest, and modern buildings often have nowhere for swifts to nest at all. Similar problems face chimney swifts in North America as defunct and crumbling chimneys are removed. Many renovators do not know about the swifts’ reliance on our buildings, do not know they are destroying their homes, because they simply don’t know they are there. Seeing a rescued swift can change all that. ‘Once people have seen a swift in the hand, they’re in awe of them,’ Judith says.
Her kitchen is full of cards from well-wishers and people who have brought her swifts, and rescuers drop by to see how their chicks are faring. Some of them have been motivated to build and fit swift nestboxes under their roofs, welcoming these birds into their homes.
The wind has dropped, and the sky above the house is a widening pool of blue. Judith has put seven swifts into a paper-towel-lined pet carrier, where they clump together in a feathery mass. One has reached across to gently preen the mantle feathers of a nest-mate. Watching them I realise I’ve never seen baby birds so desperate to snuggle. It’s as if they’ve been magnetised to press themselves against each other, wing upon wing.
It’s a short drive to Judith’s favourite release site, the village cricket field. We arrive just as a local match is beginning, but after brief, good-natured negotiations, the cricketers stop playing and watch. Judith takes a swift from the box, plants a quick good-luck kiss on its feathery crown and hands it to me. People often presume that the way to release swifts is to throw them high in the air, but this can result in serious injury if the bird isn’t ready to go. The right method is to hold the bird on your raised and outstretched palm, turn so it faces into the wind, and wait. In the bright air the swift looks a weird, unearthly creature, a delicate construction of scalloped feathers and ungainly wings. Hunched into itself, its miniature claws grip my fingers, its deep eyes like reflective astronaut visors. I wonder what it can see: lines of magnetic force, perhaps, rising air and flying insects and the suspicion of summer storms. The flat green beneath it has nothing to do with it at all. I lift my hand higher. All I can do now is wait.
It stares into the wind for a while, then starts shivering. Anticipation. I think. Functional explanations: this bird is warming up its pectoral muscles ready for flight. Emotional explanations: anticipation, wonder, joy, terror. The sensitive filoplumes growing between the feathers of its wings and sleek sides are being brushed by the breeze, feeling their element for the first time.
Nothing has visibly changed, but something is happening, like an aircraft avionics system coming online as it powers up. Blinking lights, engine check. Check. That doesn’t work, though, not quite, as an analogy, because what I am watching is a new thing making itself out of something else. There is no doubt in my mind that this is as much a transformation as a dragonfly larva crawling from water and tearing itself out into a thing with wings. On my open palm a creature whose home has been paper towels and plastic boxes is turning into a different creature whose home is thousands of miles of air.
Then the swift decides. It tilts the pug-sharp tiny tip of its beak upwards, arches its back, and drops from my flattened palm, making an aching series of stiff and creaky wingbeats. For five or six seconds everything feels wrong. The bird is a mere foot above the grass, and my heart is beating fast. ‘Up! Up! Up!’ calls Judith. Nothing is broken. We are just watching a bird learning to fly. Hitching as if pulling into gear, the swift starts to ascend, flickering up and up into a sky streaked with evening cirrus. It describes one careful circle above our heads, then lifts even higher and straight-lines it to the south. The cricketers applaud. I look down at my palm. There’s a little scratch on the meat of my thumb where its claws had gripped tight before letting me go, gripped tight to the hand that was the last solid thing the bird would touch for years.
Goats
As a child I discovered a simple game that’s good to play with goats. You lay your hand flat on a billy goat’s forehead and push, just a little. You push, and it pushes back, and you push harder, and it does too, and it’s a little like arm-wrestling, but much more fun, and the goat always wins.
I told Dad about my love of pushing goats once, just as an aside while we were talking about something else. He must have filed this information away, because about a year later, he came home very crossly, and he was cross with me, and that was a very rare thing. In his capacity as a press photographer, he’d spent the day at London Zoo taking photographs for their Annual Animal Census, and at one point he happened to be standing with the rest of the press pack in the petting zoo.
And there he sees a goat.
And he says to everyone, Watch this.
I hadn’t explained the activity very well. Because he puts his hand against the goat’s forehead, with everyone watching. Then he pushes.
He pushes really hard.
And the goat falls over.
There’s a long silence broken only by the sound of photographers and journalists saying, ‘Jesus, Mac!’ and, ‘What the fuck?!’
The goat gets up, stares at him and runs away. And the press pack never let him forget the time he pushed a goat over in front of all of them and it was all my fault.
Dispatches from the Valleys
There was a TV reality show a decade or so ago called Victorian Farm. I used to watch it with nostalgia and remember what life was like in the winter of 1997. Those were the days. I’d walk up the hill to the house at lunchtime, check the sheep, bring them hay, feed the hens, break the ice on the water troughs and drinkers, fill the scuttle in the outhouse, trudge inside to load the Rayburn range with coal, and then walk back down to the office along a country lane rutted with refrozen snow.
It was the age of The X-Files and Friends, Beck and The Prodigy, Dolly the Sheep and the death of Diana. I’d just graduated from university and had quite enough of libraries and the half-light of college refectories and university bars full of would-be poets. I was young, self-important, extremely self-absorbed. I wanted to live, wanted a real job in the real world, working with real and sensible people. So when I was hired by a falcon conservation-breeding farm in rural Wales, I was convinced I had found my perfect career.
I don’t think of those times often. But they always come to mind if I’m watching a sci-fi movie in which an ill-matched crew with personality issues is stuck on a ship in deep space with nowhere to go. That’s what it was like, although sometimes we all got in a car and went shopping in Swansea. We worked seven days a week, which was not good for our mental health, but at least we were doing what we loved, I’d tell myself, sometimes out loud in incantation, like after I heard the local builder muttering, ‘They should tear this house down, it’s a wreck,’ outside our kitchen door.
The property belonged to our boss and his wife. A pebbledashed box streaked with green algae, it had a pine-panelled kitchen and a low-ceilinged sitting room with the Rayburn, a brown vinyl sofa and eye-bending 1970s carpets that did bad things to you when you were drunk. I liked the house because it was home, even though towards the end of my stay bead-curtains of water pattered on to the carpet from the ceiling when it rained, and once I stood nonplussed as a rat ran out of the oven when someone opened the door. It could be idyllic in the summer, when swallows chattered and preened on the telephone wire outside my bedroom window, but it was often cold enough in winter that I’d need to train a hairdryer into the cave of my duvet to make it sufficiently warm inside that I could sleep. It was not a dry house. I wasn’t allowed to bring falcons back home, the boss told me, because it was unlikely their delicate respiratory systems could cope with the atmosphere the staff lived in.
The house stood in rough pasture at the top of a steep mudstone valley. Behind us were dark woods and tussocky fields where the boss ran a small herd of mixed-breed steers that grew increasingly wild as the months went by. We lost them sometimes. Lost them in that they literally wandered off through gaps in the hedges. None of us were farmers, but we tried our best. In the evenings we’d make the long trek out to the pub for beer and pool and walk back in the small hours until the landlord barred us, as he’d barred everyone else that ever went there, and the pub closed down. At least, I think that’s what happened. A lot of what happened back then has the quality of a fairy tale.
Hawk-obsessed volunteers flocked to us every summer of the four years I worked there. Among them were an aristocratic Mexican veterinary student, a kickboxing champion from the Kyrgyz Republic, and a lad who spent so much time jerking off in the
bathroom we used to hammer on the door and yell at him to stop. All of them were men. And apart from a biologist who left a few months after I arrived, so were the permanent staff. In the office with me was a lanky dark-haired northerner studying for his part-time Ph.D. who ended up in a relationship with me. Everyone else was outside with the birds. There was the enthusiastic Geordie who explained to me that the correct mindset for running out on to a rugby pitch was, Let’s break arms!; the wiry ex-Marine who managed the breeding programme and while expert at the complexities of falcon artificial insemination and incubation was repeatedly dismayed by his inability to cook rice without it sticking together; and a skinny lad who’d grown up on a caravan site and spent his days jet-washing shit-splattered aviaries with resigned good humour – he told me once that if he ever won the National Lottery, he’d buy himself a brand-new Ford Fiesta. There was the ebullient son of a white Zimbabwean tobacco farmer who stomped around in wellingtons and shorts and opined that accepting homosexuals was the symptom of a decadent and doomed society, and a quiet South African who’d make us bobotie and liked Hungarian folk music. He rebuilt the stone walls, cared for a kit of roller pigeons, and eventually acclimatised to our spartan life, though he spent his first night literally hugging the Rayburn to keep warm. This was the real world; these were the sensible people I’d left academia for.
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