by Simon Barnes
The scientific name of Cetti’s warbler is Cettia cetti: the genus Cettia is in the family of Cettidae, which contains a couple of dozen species. So there’s glory for you.
So I’m always ready to raise a glass to Padre Cetti. Imagine having your life commemorated by something as wonderful as a living bird. In its way it’s a form of Not Dying.
Morning chores. It seemed an unpromising sort of day to me but what do I know? The blackbird sang out anyway.
The miracle of the shape-shifting peacock butterfly – the butterfly that becomes an owl – is a classic example of the marvellous nature of everyday life. How many miracles can you find in a single back garden? As many as there are living things, I suppose. When our eyes pass over something as if it were beneath our notice, we demonstrate only our ignorance. The plain dunnock, belting his plain old song out from the bottom of a bush, is no one’s idea of a thrilling bird: especially not in a place where marsh harriers roam and Cetti’s warblers shout out their songs.
But the passionate and violent nature of dunnock life has been made clear in recent studies, and they have almost overtaken the robin as everybody’s favourite example of the barbarity of non-human life. Robins have a revisionist reputation for uncompromising violence, but with the dunnock, it’s about uncompromising sex. Here is a brownish bird with greyish head, and a rather monotonous song: and yet, while all this singing is going on, there are multiple infidelities and the violent routine of cloacal pecking – a direct assault on the genitals.
All birds, amphibians and reptiles have a cloaca: a single bodily opening for the purpose of urination, defecation and reproduction. A few mammals have the same system: platypus, echidna, tenrecs (a diverse group of mammals found in Madagascar and some parts of the African mainland), golden moles and marsupial moles. Dunnocks have an intense taste for extra-pair copulation – what we humans call infidelity or cheating – so copulation tends to be preceded by cloacal pecking: the male deftly removing sperm deposited by previous partners.
The moral of that, I suppose, is that no species is boring, and that every common thing is exotic. We humans have always loved contradictions. We rejoice at the security and comfort of the familiar; we also thrill to the exotic and unfamiliar. Marsh harriers cross the marsh more or less every day: I have watched them do so in sunshine and snow and rain, at midday and at dusk. It is a deep and rich privilege to live alongside them.
But a peregrine passing through is a special excitement – and for the exact opposite reason. They are occasional birds here; they acquire glamour by means of their absence. They also have the swankiness of being the fastest of all flying birds: in a vertical plunge after prey – flying birds – they have been timed at 200 mph and there are still more fabulous claims. In a stoop they not only use gravity: they power vigorously into the descent, gaining speed as they hurtle down, and when they strike, the targeted bird is likely to die from the sheer shock of the impact.
There’s also a shape-shifting thing going on with peregrines, though unlike the peacock butterfly, it’s unintended and exists entirely in the human brain. Many times – perhaps every day – I see a wood pigeon and fancy for a second that it’s a peregrine: they can be confused so long as you see the bird badly enough. And often enough I have seen a kestrel and wondered for a moment if it wasn’t a peregrine: both are falcons, one the hoverer and the other, the bolt of doom.
Sometimes it works the other way, though rarely. I once saw a pigeon take wing from the Tate Modern – I was on the Millennium Bridge – and as I watched, it turned into a peregrine. And the same sort of thing happened out on the marsh: I raised the binoculars to enjoy a kestrel and in an instant, it had revealed itself as the burly speedster with the cad’s moustache.
I wonder: would Gerard Manley Hopkins have written a poem even more brilliant than ‘The Windhover’ if he had seen a peregrine on his morning walk, rather than a kestrel? Would the greater exoticism of a peregrine have stirred him to still greater heights of genius? Or was the comparatively homely nature of a kestrel essential to the perception of the wonders he saw in and beyond the kestrel:
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air
Two things. He wrote the poem in 1877 at the height of the Victorian persecution of birds of prey, so perhaps the kestrel really was a mad exoticism so far as he was concerned, while peregrines were so well shot up as to be unobtainable. And secondly, a hovering kestrel makes a cross. Sometimes they hover without moving their wings at all: gliding at the exact speed of the wind they are facing. So perhaps it was a combination of the exoticism of the kestrel and its apparent eagerness to become a religious symbol that allowed him to write that most ecstatic poem.
I have often felt the ecstasy in the falcon’s flight – when reading the poem and when seeing a falcon in action. For me too the falcon is a symbol – of falcons, of wildness, and perhaps of hope.
I went up to the workshop to tell Cindy about the peregrine and found her completing a gorgeous kestrel, its outline cut from wood. It was painted in gold-vermillion, and surrounded by the words of Hopkins in wild calligraphy.
Riding out, we caught this morning morning’s minion.
There were lions on the marsh.
Two females, resting up under a tree as lions will. They were lying on their breastbones, as if in Trafalgar Square, front paws extended, heads up, inspecting the lion-coloured vegetation of mid-March.
For a good length of time – maybe half a second – I was convinced of this. I could see their shapes, as beloved as they are feared: I could see their eyes, dark in their sandy faces, I could see their whiskers, I could feel the glorious, confident, slouching manner in which a lion faces the world.
The double-take is a standard piece of comic business. A character sees something and then makes a violent adjustment to look at it again: for what he has seen is shocking, unbelievable, impossible. There’s a YouTube clip of Patrick Stewart teaching the quadruple-take: a fine demonstration of physical comedy.
So naturally, when I saw those two lionesses on the marsh, I performed a double-take – maybe even a triple- or a quadruple-take. My eyes had sent a visual message to my brain, and the brain had interpreted it. Wrongly.
The lions were a classic error. When I had completed my double-, triple- or quadruple-take, I realised that the lions were fallen trees, part of the work of storm Doris.
Doris had struck us a couple of weeks earlier: a ferocious wind that took down half a dozen of our trees. Those that fell on the marsh were left to rot or regrow. When I show people round the marsh, there’s fallen willow I always point out with immense pride as the only argument with Cindy that I have ever won. The tree fell during our earliest days here. She suggested that we get it cleared and chopped for firewood; I said we should leave it to lie there and do what it wanted. It’s now a cheerily living if horizontal tree. It was out there Not Dying and was already putting out this year’s new shoots. A Suffolk farm-worker once told me: you can’t kill a willa. This tree had no interest in death.
But there was a dead willow on the marsh, and one I had always had a rather good feeling about: a landmark 12 feet high. I remembered Norman Stills, who converted a vast carrot field into a fen for the RSPB. During this almost magical conversion of Lakenheath Fen, he found an enormous chunk of bog oak buried in the earth: long-dead and preserved by the peat. So he had this set up on end, to provide a kind of eminence, declaring: ‘One day an osprey will perch here.’ And eventually one did.
I had the same ambition for the 12-foot willow stump, but it was now a six-foot willow stump. Doris had whacked it in half. No osprey had ever perched on it, to my knowledge, but I had always enjoyed the thought that one day one might. Would this much lower perch be quite as attractive?
My eye, or rather my brain, had not yet completed the job of storing the images of the marsh in its post-Doris state. So when I glimpsed, in my peripheral vision, the sun catching a pair of
stout new-fallen branches, my brain supplied not the image of the marsh, but of the savannah: of the Luangwa Valley where I had been five months earlier. It was like the experience of greeting someone you know slightly and then realising you’re talking to a stranger.
I could feel my brain’s embarrassment, and its quick covering-up of its faux pas, replacing this preposterous image of Norfolk lions with one of fallen willow branches. I felt a pang of tenderness for the beloved Valley, and with it I felt a strong sense of remembered fear. Me and lions, we go way back.
The wood says chiff and the wood says chaff. The overture is over: let the concert begin.
As I have cheered for a goal, for a wicket, for a double straight somersault dismount, for a victory, so I have often cheered for wildlife. It’s one of the deep human instincts: that moment of exaltation in which you can only just bring yourself to believe what’s happening before your eyes. ‘My heart in hiding stirred for a bird,’ wrote Hopkins of his kestrel, and my heart was stirring for everything that spring brought us.
The blue whale!
David Attenborough’s great soul-cry as the gorgeous monster from the deep came to the surface right beside his tiny boat: his joy instantly becoming everybody’s joy, especially Eddie’s. That too was a form of cheering: of shouting hurrah at the marvellousness of the living world. I once told him – we both have an association with the excellent charity, World Land Trust – that when I met my own blue whale, I wasn’t anything like so eloquent.
Fuck!
‘Well, I thought that,’ he said generously.
Eddie’s love of the blue whale began with that classic Attenborough moment. We watched it again one evening – it’s a regular treat – and he remembered our visit to the blue whale of South Kensington a few weeks back. So he decided to write a poem for the man who has inspired both of us. Cindy put it in the post, and a week or so later we received a letter – handwritten, that being David’s generous way – thanking him. That too was worth a cheer.
There were also primroses to cheer, little yellow suns lurking in hollows and dips by the roadside. A red admiral, then another. Then, tearing another Molly-Bloom Yes from my throat, a brimstone: a butterfly in pale yellow, the colour of butter, in fact, and so giving the name to all of his kind. I saw a bat on two separate occasions, one small, the other large. That’s almost as deep as my identification skills go with bats: I suspect the small one was one of the three pipistrelle species found here, and that the other was a Daubenton’s, a species that loves water.
I kept seeing herons on the marsh. There was a comical sighting, just the head visible, the rest of him concealed in a dyke. Increasingly I saw herons flying towards the wood, and occasionally I saw activity going on within the wood.
There are a thousand special moments in the spring – each one, it seems, a lethal blow to the winter. But there are one or two signs that seem to mean more than the others. It’s a human choice, a personal choice, depending on what kinds of wildlife you look at most. Ralph once told me that I looked at the wild world in the manner of a cat: I don’t notice anything unless it moves. ‘Or makes a noise,’ I corrected.
I know what he means: for him early flowerings and sproutings tell him more about the turning of the year than any bird. But for me, there is a big moment that comes with the first chiffchaff: and there he was, hammering out his simple song as if calling the world to sanity. Chiffchaffs are warblers. They migrate, but only to southern Europe and northern Africa, and so they are usually the first migrant that returns to our land: that’s worth a special cheer, it seems to me.
These days, with climate change, increasing numbers are overwintering in Britain, but that fact doesn’t dilute the glory of that first chiffchaff, saying its name again and again.
The snag was that my knee was worse. Walking was becoming less attractive, or indeed possible for any serious distance. I was still able to ride: that didn’t seem to put any stress on the knee. I was riding home on a fine morning of early spring but, despite that, I was glooming away to myself, wondering how much longer my body and my nerve would hold up. How many more times will I be able to get on a horse?
A horse can jump six feet sideways in about half a second: a fact I wish more drivers were aware of. Miakoda, though strong and confident in traffic, will every now and then perform a spook for no reason that’s apparent to her rider.
We were about 200 yards from home after a nice ride – spring, chiffchaffs, primroses – when she did it. She was walking, I was holding the reins by the buckle, having deliberately passed the controls to her. (If you never trust a horse, how can you expect a horse to trust you?) I was pondering my misfortunes and riding with a slightly vacant expression, relaxed and deep in the saddle, when she jumped. Here’s what I did: absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Well, I must have used the muscles required to stay in balance, but my position on the horse remained exactly the same. One second we were walking along the left-hand side of the road; the next – no traffic on our lane – we were doing the same thing on the right. I suspect my slightly vacant expression was also just the same: like Buster Keaton walking through the landscape of collapsing buildings. It was one of those powerful messages from the non-human world: for God’s sake, shut up whinging! It’s bloody spring!
Deeply soothed by this reprimand, I rode the rest of the way home and put the horses out into the field. Was that a flush of new growth in the grass?
Morning ride. My horse is swift but she can’t outrun the peregrine.
Eddie wanted to record the lunchtime species-count in his diary. Cindy came out onto the marsh with us. There were four curlews, two buzzards, two chiffchaffs singing antiphonally, two crows, two black-headed gulls, and two stock doves.
‘Noah’s ark!’ said Eddie.
Then there were two oystercatchers: spring birds for us, arriving from the coast with splendidly loud and assertive piping to claim a place for their own: black and white, carrot-beaked and with a profound dislike of silence. Not calm birds, oystercatchers: there seem to be no small disasters in their lives. Everything is an emergency, especially spring.
And from the heronry we could hear the odd throat-clearing bark and a clattering of bills. It seemed that life was continuing there as well. There was no longer any reason to doubt this. The pleasure of this realisation went astonishingly deep. I raised my bottle of beer in their direction.
‘Cheers to herons!’ said Eddie, who loves a good toast.
The Blue Whale
David showed me the skeleton
of a Blue Whale
the Blue Whale
eats a lot of food he said
the Blue Whale is so big
it can only live in water
I see the Blue Whale
in the sea
I feel happy
excited
to see blue blue sea
and light
shining on the Blue Whale
I see its food
krill
small like my little finger
the Blue Whale eats a lot
a lot
of little krill
the Blue Whale
lives in the ocean
all the time
men search the seas
for the Blue Whale
to take photos
films for people
like me
thank you
David Attenborough
10
BOUNCEBACKABILITY
Hurrah! Shooting Times is now following me. Or is that stalking?
Sometimes all you see is the vulnerability. So you miss the strength. The resilience, the toughness, what a football manager called bouncebackability.
Vulnerability is a fact of daily existence, and looking after is still necessary. But if you only see the vulnerability you’re not seeing the whole. Two more or less simultaneous events proved this point: Eddie’s ECG and heart check-up, and the return of the herons to the heronry.
They said Eddie’s heart was a damn good thing: beating away like anything, doing its job just as a heart should. And that’s remarkable. When he was born his heart had two bloody great holes in it. He had open-heart surgery at four months. I have the most powerful physical memory – what sports psychologists call a psychokinetic memory – of holding him across my left shoulder in the time before the op: a little flop of nothing with scarcely the energy to breathe, just enough to continue the task of Not Dying. He carries the scar right down his chest: ‘my zip’, he calls it. I remember the serene confidence of the medical staff: they knew the problem and they knew how to fix it, and their attitude made the process a good deal easier to deal with.
They fixed it all right. And that revealed the strength that lay behind it all: Eddie’s desire to live. It wasn’t that we were wrong to worry, or wrong to be fearful, but it was the strength, the resilience that dominates our memories of that time – and, for that matter, our experience of the present. It’s the future that brings worry: when we concentrate more on vulnerability than on strength. Perhaps that’s the right way to look at it.
We could now hear the herons not only every day but most of the time as they re-established themselves in their lofty nests a quarter of a mile away. The nests were mostly hidden from us by the budding twigs and branches: but we could see the big birds flying in, hear the barks of greeting and warning, and occasionally see a wing rise up higher than the trees.
I’m not about to get Panglossian on you, telling you that everything is all for the best, and all we have to do is wait for the appropriate bit of strength to manifest itself. I have walked in places where rainforest once stood, I have seen oiled birds drowning, I have seen an extinct bird. But there is strength as well as vulnerability in nature, and given half a chance it will make a fight of it. The herons were back in the heronry, a life-affirming thought. And here’s another: Red Nose Day was coming and Eddie had decided to go to school as Slash the guitarist. Two good things, then. Cindy found a dressing-up wig and doctored it accordingly; Joseph lent him a Slash trademark top hat, which he had once worn on stage, some years back as a homage.