by Simon Barnes
When I hear a song thrush, are we listening to a survival machine? Or a musician?
Both.
Obviously.
Stately sky-dance of marsh harriers. Excuse me, madam – is that man hovering you?
Joseph, being a musician, had bought himself a new musical instrument. Not a guitar this time, but a sitar. It had been custom-made for him and all he had to do was collect it. The snag was that it was in Kolkata. Joseph and I had been talking about doing the trip together, but then, to my complete amazement, Cindy wondered aloud about going herself. That was against all precedent. I had done all kinds of travel, most of it for work, during Eddie’s lifetime, while Cindy kept the show going at home. Now she was wondering about the possibilities of reversing these apparently fixed-for-all-time roles. I was astounded. I was delighted that she was up for this adventure, though I was also a little intimidated. How would Eddie cope with so long an absence? How would I? But no matter which way you looked at it, this was clearly a good thing for all concerned. Joseph and Cindy set off on a ten-day jaunt, leaving me and Eddie on a long bachelor weekend. It was a challenge for us all, but a good one.
It wasn’t as if Cindy had skimped on the preparation. In Eddie’s bedroom there was a pile of clothes for every single day. On the fridge there was a list of activities: Hilary would take him to his drama group, Brigid would take him to Clinks, Joe and Cilla would take him to church. And they were gone.
So, with exemplary courage, Eddie got on with coping. We were trying to manage a solar system without the sun – and the moon, for that matter – but he faced the difficulties with immense good cheer. It was an adventure. We were all of us having an adventure. We’d be great, would we not?
We were. After supper Eddie and I brought the horses in together: he mixed the feeds, put them in the stables and then led the horses in. Especially Molly, of course. Every evening, a little after the horses were settled, there was a FaceTime call from the travellers, so he could talk sensibly to his mother and engage his brother on a different level: ‘You’re fat! You smell!’ And we coped. We coped well. We had laughs. We had affectionate moments. We got up on time and left the house on time properly dressed. Last thing at night we would go through the bedtime rituals without anxiety or clinging. It was all going to be fine.
It was a bit like my anxiety for the heronry. It was worth being anxious about, I suppose, but it turned out to be much more all right than I dared to hope, and with remarkably little input from me.
We took walks round the marsh when we had time – Eddie had quite a schedule – and on one of those occasions we accidentally flushed a green sandpiper from one of the dykes. These are smart little waders, not noticeably green at all. They’re relatively unusual, and they love freshwater. When they fly they show black with white bums, like an oversized house martin – so if a house martin flies up from a pool or a ditch, you’ve probably found a green sandpiper. They’re also birds that show you that you’ve got some aspect of the management right.
A couple of years earlier a green sandpiper spent six weeks on the lower meadow. There was a giant puddle there for all that time, and he took a shine to it, feeding in concentrated bursts in the mud around the edge. If I’d been managing the place as a wetland I’d have a right to be pleased, but this was supposed to be pasture, so I had somewhat mixed feelings. It was as if the green sandpiper was mocking me for my inadequacies. Some time later we got a contractor to come in and drain it. It was not a complete success: in heavy rain the puddle comes back, admittedly only half the size, but it still makes for a pretty poor meadow.
Eddie and I also had the classic butterfly moment of early spring: a flash of white tinged with orange. A male orange-tip butterfly is always in the most tearing hurry: like a sailor charging down the gangplank for a spot of shore leave, they are all agog for sex and drink. Butterflies compartmentalise their lives: the eating part they do as caterpillars, and they are utterly single-minded. Then they change their state of being and live in a quite different way: abandoning leaves for flowers, abandoning crawling for flight, abandoning eating for reproduction, fuelled by drafts of nectar.
Is it possible for any creature to look more unlike a butterfly than a caterpillar? How can a fat, soggy, lumpen, many-footed eating machine become an explosion of colour and airiness? These transformations have always enthralled us humans: the idea of shape-shifting gets to us on a relatively deep level. Transformation is at the heart of more or less every superhero story.
I remembered that an old friend of mine, at the age of 21, heard for the first time that caterpillars turn into butterflies. I don’t know how he had managed to avoid learning such a fact during a prolonged and expensive education, but it was so, and the truth shook him.
‘No wonder people love nature.’
He should have listened to Mike Heron’s song with The Incredible String Band, ‘Cousin Caterpillar’:
My cousin has great changes coming
One day he’ll wake with . . . wiiiiiiings!
The pride of the peacock is the glory of god . . . a butterfly passes on Blake’s wings of excess.
It was our last evening as bachelors. Cindy and Joseph would be home the following day, so great excitement. The evenings were noticeably lighter: it was close to bedtime when we set off to do the horses.
We prepared the feeds, Eddie as helpful as always, both of us in great good cheer. We had done it, had we not? Coped without disaster, coped without tears, coped without irritation. What a team, eh?
I led Mia in. Eddie led Norah in. And then at last Molly. And Molly . . .
Molly was walking all wrong. Oh God. She had lost control of her hind legs, she was staggering from side to side. She looked likely to fall any second.
‘OK, Eddie, I’ll lead her. You stay with her though.’
We got her back to her stable and even that felt like a triumph. I called the vet. Molly looked desperate. So did Eddie. Molly – beloved, beautiful Molly – was about to fall over, and when she did, she probably wouldn’t get up again. Her eyes were full of bewilderment.
It was past Eddie’s bedtime, but bugger that. ‘We’ve got to help Molly, and the best way we can help Molly is by being strong and brave. Molly needs you. And she needs you strong. So go and talk to her and comfort her and let her know you’re around.’
He knew the truth of that all right. So he made a massive, visible effort and went and stood at the door of Molly’s box. She stuck her nose over the door and he talked softly to her and stroked her big face. And she got a little calmer.
Emily the vet, also making a huge effort, came in an hour or so. Holding for the vet is part of the horsey life. You put your hands on the head-collar and attempt to keep the horse relaxed and still while the vet does difficult, often uncomfortable and sometimes painful things. Molly was easier with Eddie than with anyone else in the world, and so I told him to do the holding. He did it brilliantly.
A lot of veterinary medicine is about treating everything that it could possibly be; sometimes a hard diagnosis is impossible, since horses are unable to speak. So Emily did exactly that, and gave us complex advice about the caring regimen that we needed to follow over the next few days. I could see from her manner – she was very careful about her words – that she didn’t expect much. It looked as if Molly was a goner: but she hadn’t gone yet. And when, under instructions, I gave her a little food, she ate it. She ate in the manner of someone quite keen on the idea of Not Dying.
Eddie went to bed in a sombre mood. We’ve had horses die on us before: horsey death is, alas, part of the horsey life. He would prefer Molly to be exempt, but what can you do?
I sat up for a while after Eddie had gone to sleep, amazed at the strength he had shown: at the strong, calm horsemanship, at the way the emergency had brought out qualities greater than I knew. Resilience. Toughness. Coping with a bad situation: coping with his own emotions. Knowing that it wasn’t about him: and that’s a huge concept to take on.
&nb
sp; Russet, silver and sable: the marsh harrier reclaims the spring.
Next morning Molly was alive, brighter in the eye and even up for a little breakfast. Emily the vet made a second visit a few days later and was frankly amazed. Cindy and Joseph came back and there was a great reunion. The sitar was a thing of beauty. It sounded even better than it looked.
A day or so later a new bird arrived on the marsh. It seemed to be bright silver, picked out with a little chestnut and sable: but it was the pallor, the silver that dominated. It was a male marsh harrier: a bird handsome even by the elevated standards of his kind. It seemed to me the most beautiful bird I had ever seen, the most beautiful bird in the entire world.
A couple of days after this perfect moment, I saw the male again: high above the marsh. With him was one of the females. I could just hear shrill cries they made to each other in their excitement, in their joy. This was the ballet of the marsh harriers, the sky dance, in which they show off their full range of aerial skills, swooping on each other, evading each other with the neatest body-swerve, sometimes going talon-to-talon with each other and tumbling together like an enormous shuttlecock. At the high point – though not on this occasion – they pass food one to the other as they fly: the male showing that he is a good provider.
They had flown very high to perform this ballet. When you have the entire sky – the entire sky of Norfolk – for your stage, you don’t have to keep close to any ground-bound observer. This was not a moment of intimacy for me: it was like being an astronomer, marvelling at two distant stars.
Spring was changing gear on us. Spring was getting serious. The maddest and most intense time of the year was almost upon us. It seemed to me that the entire marsh was vibrating like a gong, except that the sound didn’t die away; rather it gained in volume: ringing with new life, the sound, already loud, still expanding and dilating in volume.
11
THE RING OF POWER
Fighting a frigid fearsome wind and winning – swallows!
The one great lunar festival of the Christian calendar of the conventional European year seems oddly incongruous: out of step with modern life. It provokes a sharp nostalgia for times we never knew, times when the moon played a genuinely significant role in day-to-day, night-to-night, month-to-month life.
The moon was full. As I got back home late after a visit to a wetland on the other side of the country, I could hear a fox baying in classic fashion, whether in response to the moon – or rather, the phenomenon of nocturnal light – or to some hidden evolution of vulpine politics, I couldn’t say.
When it’s a full moon, many of the terrors of the night are lessened. What a treat it must have been for our ancestors on the savannah, to be able to see the lions in the hours of greatest danger, to be able to respond to them and move away or try and frighten them off. In the centuries before street-lighting, the moon expanded the possibilities of the night: making it safe. You could find your way easily, avoid any dangerous obstacles, and you were less likely to be surprised by dangerous men. Samuel Pepys was always keen on the moon: on good moon nights he was able to live a quite different life: ‘So back to my aunt’s, and there supped and talked, and staid pretty late, it being dry and moonshine, and so walked home.’
Easter Day falls on the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the March equinox. That was decided at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and it remains the case today. So Easter dodges about from year to year, within a margin of four weeks, the length of a lunar month.
Easter marks the spring as Christmas does winter. The marsh that seemed dead in the winter was now ringing with life. It’s a new beginning: but, thrillingly, only a beginning. There is more, much more to come – and perhaps, at least in human terms, the best few weeks of the year.
My father came up for a few days and great festivities were planned. On Good Friday, he accompanied me and Eddie around the marsh. Eddie’s speech can be difficult to follow, and my father is pretty deaf these days, so you’d have thought communication between them would be impossible. But it isn’t: showing what can be done by the power of the will.
Perhaps communication is more an act of will than anything else in life: and it’s a great help if the will is shared. Communication is about accepting the fact that the other party concerned has something worth listening to. Communication is one of the things that floods over the species barrier, heedless of the scientists and philosophers who tell us it can’t be done. I’m pretty good at understanding what horses are saying and how they are feeling; I’d have been seriously injured or worse had that not been the case. People who have dogs and cats are accustomed to reading their moods and their needs. That is obviously a two-way process: the animals we choose to share our lives with inevitably grow pretty good at understanding what is going on with us, and they respond accordingly.
This notion of achieving a rough-and-ready understanding of creatures of a different species in the course of our domestic lives helps us to tune in to wild creatures. I’m always prepared to go along with the idea that the animals I see have something to say and that it’s worth listening to. I’m prepared to accept that they have lives full of meaning: that they aren’t pre-programmed automata. The sky-dancing harriers were dancing not only under the compulsion of their genes, but also for the love of the dance and for the joy of being half of a pair. And who can’t relate to that?
There is a difference between mad anthropomorphising – he understands every word I say – and accepting that dogs and marsh harriers and song thrushes have stuff in common with us. We humans also have blood and bones and brains, we also know pain and pleasure, we also seek to reproduce, we also sing and dance.
And just then a song broke out. It came from the tall clump of sallows, the one I keep thinking we should thin out or cut down. There, quite marvellously sweet, trickling down the scale with just the hint of a lilt, the song of willow warbler.
Just think of it. That little bird, singing hard from cover, had made his way from Africa, from way south of the equator, in order to get to our sallow trees and to sing on our marsh. He was tiny – not that I made any effort to set eyes on him, for I had no wish to disturb him in the fullness of his song – and yet his tiny wings, as Mrs C. F. Alexander wrote in the hymn, had carried him 7,000 miles: across the Sahara, round the rim of the Mediterranean finally to come to a small patch of marsh in Norfolk. Had he sung the same song in the same place last year? Had his father?
Good Friday is the most sombre day of the Christian year: here was one of the most exuberant moments in the year of the marsh. Either way, and no matter what you believe, it’s all about the celebration of new life.
On Easter Day the swallows are back in Aldeburgh. We’re not from London, you know.
On Easter Day, showing immense courage and a reckless form of trust, we took lunch outdoors on the seafront in Aldeburgh. The weather responded with unexpected generosity: out of the wind, we found ourselves in a little suntrap and feasted with immense cheerfulness. Afterwards we took a stroll round the excellent RSPB reserve of North Warren and there, skimming the grazing marsh, we saw the year’s first swallows: as good a symbol of Easter – of spring and new life – as any bunny.
They were the first European swallows I had seen since I was in Zambia. And when we all got home from our outing, there were house martins swooping low over the marsh: easily differentiated from swallows by their white bums, but clearly not green sandpipers.
Swallows and martins are closely related. They’re both hirundines, both hunters of aerial plankton: flying insects and other invertebrates that fill the air. But there’s no aerial plankton to speak of in the winter, so the hirundines fly south: warmer weather and plenty of food. Why don’t they stay down in Africa and compete for the insects throughout the year? After all, a good few species of hirundines do exactly that. But that means the niche is a little crowded – and besides, that annual bonanza of flying food draws the hirundines in when it becomes available. Someone’s go
t to eat the stuff. Where there’s a living to be made, the wild world has a habit of finding the species to do the job. It’s not true that every possible ecological niche is filled, but an awful lot of the possibilities are being worked.
The swallows’ annual bonanza is about wings. Flying is very expensive in terms of energy, but very economical in terms of distance. It’s harder to fly for an hour than to walk for an hour: but it’s a hell of a lot easier to fly for a mile than to walk for a mile.
So if you’re a bird and there’s no food where you are, you can always fly off and try to find some in another place. Sometimes this happens on an unpredictable basis, like the waxwing that turned up in the meadow: this is an irruptive species, one that responds to changes on an ad hoc basis rather than one with deep-set patterns of regular journeying. The blackbirds that ate our apples in the winter had made a relatively short migration, from Scandinavia and northern Europe.
And some birds fly colossal distances. Of the world’s 10,000 species of birds, around 1,800 are long-distance migrants: birds who make twice-yearly journeys between continents. Swallows, house martins and willow warblers are all in this category: and you could hold all three in your cupped hands with room to spare.
Migration is barely within the confines of our imagination, even though we can make the same journey as a swallow in less than a day. How much more extraordinary it must have seemed in the days before easyJet and duty-free and priority boarding. No wonder Gilbert White, the great 18th-century naturalist (his book about his own local patch is still in print, so there’s something for an ambitious author to aim at) eventually and rather reluctantly convinced himself that swallows hibernate, spending the winter buried in the mud at the bottoms of ponds and lakes – because after all, when you first see them in spring, they’re almost always flying over water, aren’t they? They do so because it’s a good place to find flying insects, of course.