On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  Those teachers are doing a job that matters and one not everyone would want to do.

  But as for Eddie – well, let’s just say that there’s always more than you think.

  Nearly packed. In a couple of days we would be going to Cornwall. Eddie was looking forward to gannets and clouded yellows, treats unavailable on a Norfolk marsh. Last-minute tasks were being done, the backlog of work finished off. It was a time of drawing a line, blotting the last page, pressing Save and pressing Send.

  The start of the summer holidays feels like the end of something. It was a break from the day-to-day observance of spring on the marsh, spring turning from promise to fulfilment to autumn. It was as if we had done our job: a contract had been fulfilled; nature had done what comes naturally. Creatures of many kinds had made more, perhaps many more of their kind. That was all great: and now we move on.

  But not in too much of a hurry. There was a plague of butterflies – an infestation of beauty – and it needed savouring. A brief succession of warm, still days filled the garden and the marsh with small tortoiseshells and red admirals, with large and small whites, with common blues. It was as if a stained-glass window had deconstructed itself, each separate tiny pane taking wing across the cathedral of the marsh.

  In front of my hut a heron stood staring at the water, trying to look as if it knew what it was doing. It had the height and the beak and the legs, it had the fierce yellow eye: but there was a little down on the leading edges of its folded wings. It was a half-grown thing, a teenager newly fledged from the heronry trying to be a grown-up. It was the nearest a heron could ever get to looking sweet.

  I suppose all wild sounds are equally wild if you think about it logically, but some sounds seem startlingly untameable. The cries of young kestrels are like that: reckless commitment to the wild air, to the life of swoop and pounce and hover. Now the young birds were working, by means of a period of loud and swaggering play, at the skills they would need to survive when they came to live by the wing. Only the best of them would survive the hard winter . . .

  But hard to think of death when the sky was full of the wild, yelling joy of being a young kes. Life is hard, for humans and for kestrels and for everything else, but that doesn’t invalidate the moments of delight that come our way. The ecological holocaust continues, we lose species, we lose abundance. We know all that, we accept all that, and most of us do at least something to make things better or to stop them getting worse – but these hard, unpleasant truths don’t invalidate our moments of delight in the wild world.

  A kiss from your beloved doesn’t cure all the harms in the world, but for an instant it seems to.

  17

  THE MAD CONDUCTOR

  The stable door has become a gun that fires deadly volleys of swallows.

  There were rosehips along the lane. Blackberries too:

  Blackberry, Blackberry, mind the prickles!

  We don’t like it when you tickles!

  An extract from ‘The Blackberrying Song’, composed and performed by Eddie and me.

  It had rained a fair bit while we were away on our tour of the West Country: the dykes were fuller, the reeds were taller. The marsh had been growing and changing behind my back, much as Eddie does when I’m away.

  There seemed to be young birds everywhere, hopping and flitting about naively, as if they hadn’t yet made up their minds about flight-distances and the trustworthiness of humans. Sometimes they came astonishingly close, as if they didn’t see us as threats at all. And what’s more, they were right. Eddie and I had no interest at all in catching Robin Brownbreast – a robin not yet in adult plumage – and making a meal of him. But when – if – the bird at our feet became an adult, he would be a good deal more circumspect.

  Robins are more trusting than most birds: they have worked out that there’s profit to be made from foraging around a working human. The robin on the spade handle is a truth as well as a cliché: a tribute to their adaptiveness. When I’m mucking out, there’s generally a robin on the muck-heap, looking for scraps: when I’m sweeping the yard, there’s generally a robin cleaning up the spiders.

  But what if these young birds, still closer and more confiding, failed to lose this excessive trust in humankind? I can tell them with great authority that if they did so, very few people in Britain would raise a hand against them. Would the forces of natural selection favour ever-bolder robins?

  You can see changes in bird behaviour where there is a local tradition of tolerance. Sometimes at an outdoor cafe, sparrows will come to the table and feed on crumbs. In Barbados I was able to lure the lovely little yellow birds called bananaquits down to my breakfast table by scattering sugar. Bill Oddie can sit in his small, gnome-thronged Hampstead garden and feed great tits and blue tits by hand: he has convinced them of his trustworthiness.

  How long since small birds have been safe from humans in this country? When did we stop netting them and bird-liming them? Perhaps a century ago. But you can’t explain to the birds, as Withnail did to the invading Uncle Monty: ‘We mean no harm!’

  Often a pair of mallards come and sit on the small pond in the garden: almost always they fly when I walk past, despite my best Withnail imitation. You can explain that, I suppose, by the fact that people still shoot ducks and do so with immense ferocity less than a mile away. But equally often, sometimes in the course of the same 50-yard walk, I pass a pheasant that scarcely bothers to step out of my path – and the destiny of this bird is noisy slaughter at human hands. So explain that.

  It’s true the birds on the marsh, even when they have reached maturity, are comparatively tolerant of human presence and prepared to be convinced that we mean no harm – so long as we don’t get uncomfortably close. There’s a small sense that on the marsh, the normal rules have changed just a little: that flight-distances can be reduced, at least to an extent.

  This is a good thing for the birds: it means they don’t have to burn energy on needless escapes. It’s good also for humans, in that it gives us this treasured vision of Eden, the fleeting feeling that the lost paradise – every paradise is by definition lost, whether it is Eden, childhood, a holiday, a long-ago love affair, or the perfect pub – is within reach once again, and can be regained.

  As birds get fewer and humans get more numerous, perhaps evolution will favour birds who are more comfortable around humans. Perhaps we can see a future in which, with every sit on a park bench, a human will feel like Adam or like Eve: surrounded, as in the picture by Rubens and Brueghel, by the living throng. Perhaps my dreams of avian plenty are a foretaste of some future time when birds, of necessity, accommodate themselves to human life.

  Of course, they already do this. The dove – the same species that appears in white form as a symbol of the Holy Spirit – has come to our cities to live alongside us . . . only to be despised and, where possible, exterminated. City pigeons, feral pigeons and all forms of racing pigeons and ornamental doves have been bred from – are – the same species as wild rock doves. The white doves in a dovecote, along with the fantails and tumblers and pouters, are all genetically rock doves.

  But still, as I sat out on the marsh, relishing the start of autumn – though it was still Eddie’s summer holidays – I enjoyed the notion of the robin on the table, the sparrow on the ground, goldfinches along the back of the bench, mallards in the water, an egret at the water’s edge, and perhaps, on my shoulder, a singing blackcap.

  I was getting foolish. As soon as a bird gets bolder around humans we invent new names for them. Pest. Vermin. We dream of a lost time when we lived at one with the wild world and non-human life: and yet when there is any chance at all of recovering even a small part of that vision, we reject it with horror and take lethal measures.

  Time to get back to the house. Cook supper. Pour a drink.

  Morning ride. A small green dragon flies alongside us. Not a woodpecker at all . . .

  Movement, movement. It seemed that the whole world was on the move. Birds have wings
and that frees them from the tyranny of place. The grass snakes of the marsh have limited options in terms of distance; some of these birds have half the earth at their command.

  That restlessness, that sense of transition. Birds that had been paired-up were now forming flocks: and there was a flight of 100 goldfinches, flying over in that bouncing way that finches go in for and tinkling urgently to each other in encouragement and solidarity.

  Evenings were marked by large movements of gulls flying to roost on the open water on the far side of the river. We tend to feel that black-headed gulls are beneath our notice: but those evening formation-flights would be considered a sight of breathtaking beauty, if only the birds had the decency to be rare, if only they had the decency to be more wary of humans.

  I looked up as 200 of them passed together in a series of wide, shallow vee-shaped straggles. They were mostly black-headed gulls, but there were also herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls among them: all the gulls you would expect, in short. And from the heart of them I heard – or did I imagine it? – a sort of pantomime dame’s expression of mild surprise and disappointment.

  Eoh!

  I listened out for a repetition, but it never came. And that was mean of it because I’m pretty sure it was a Mediterranean gull. But you can’t go counting every prob and poss that comes along, that’s cheating. Too-light winning makes the prize light, after all. So Med-gull failed to make the list while I plumed myself on my honesty, like a golfer marking the position of his ball with fanatical correctitude.

  There had been two other close calls that week. A flight of a dozen linnets – also bouncing in the finchy manner – had me checking the list. And then quite distinctly I heard the triple-note of greenshank. It’s a sound I associate with the Luangwa Valley: as soon as the river level begins to fall and the beaches appear again below the banks, greenshanks come winging in, confirming their presence with that cheery piping. A bird that in this country is associated with windblown winter estuaries always reminds me of the belting heat of the end of the dry season in the Valley when the midday temperature is around 45 degrees.

  But both these species had turned up on or over the marsh before. Lists may not be a big deal for me: but all the same, that century, achieved this year, was important. When a cricketer scores a century, the only thing that matters, in strict sporting terms, is what it does for the team, and whether or not it helps the team achieve victory or avoid defeat.

  And these few acres of marsh are managed for the sake of the team, for the sake of the wildlife of the world. But all the same, the century tells us that the marsh is doing a good job. It’s a deserved honour for the marsh itself.

  Now, as the autumn movements gathered pace, its job was to provide winter food and shelter for those that needed such things.

  Morning ritual. Nice cup of tea; great spotted woodpecker.

  If you want to learn more about the wild world, don’t take a field guide, take Eddie. For a start, you might not be out there at all without Eddie’s insistence. The combination of his curiosity, his frequently unexpected ways of understanding what we find, and his gift for contemplation are all fine ways of approaching nature. What you see is great, but the greater thing is being out there. Not what you look at but what you’re part of. And that is the greatest gift the marsh brings to us. We’re not audience, we’re participants.

  It’s like experimental theatre of the 1960s, when the relationship between cast and spectator is challenged. The fourth wall no longer exists, the proscenium arch has been torn down; this is theatre in the round, the audience promenading, joining in the songs, half-guilty witnesses of atrocity, half-courageous supporters of what’s right, part-innocents caught in the crossfire, or part of the silent conspiracy of those who know they ought to speak out but daren’t.

  The difference is that theatre is illusion and pretence, while what happens out on the marsh is as real as anything ever could be. And you know a theatrical performance will start at 7.30pm, whereas out on the marsh the performance is endless.

  If this is theatre, who is the star? You can’t have a show without a star, can you? It has to be the marsh harriers: large birds of prey compel the attention more effectively than most other species on the planet. And when the bird in question has overcome extinction (or near-extinction) not once but twice in the past century, they acquire a certain added charisma. First the guns wiped the bird out altogether from England, and then the pesticides brought the bird down to that single pair. Now they cruise with the greatest nonchalance in all the watery places of East Anglia.

  That distinctive silhouette has become a kind of signature: an autograph, scrawled in the sky with a mixture of flamboyance and understatement. It’s a single initial, a vee, a shallow vee, and if it’s not a long signature it’s utterly distinctive and impossible to forge. You see that vee scrawled onto the page of the sky, forever low, for they are birds that prefer to operate at crop-dusting height. It’s there, above the reeds, above the grazing marshes, the eternal, abiding image of this marsh, this part of England. There is land, forming the bottom inch or so of the picture, the reeds making their endless verticals: a thin gold line. Above them that vee, like a double brushstroke, between the low reeds and everything else. Because the rest of the picture is sky, all sky, coloured and recoloured, reworked every day, every hour, sometimes it seems every minute, with 50,000 shades of grey and blue.

  I was pretty sure that Pale had nested away to the left and Dusky on the right – Dusky with the female with green wing-tags, and Pale with the unmarked bird. And there, as Eddie and I sat on the marsh, beans consumed, jam jar empty and spoon licked, a marsh harrier went past, dramatically close – perhaps naively so. I suspect that the bird wanted to get a good look at us, to gain more knowledge about the world. What are the creatures that sit on benches and eat beans from a jar? And drink golden fluids from a bottle? I got a good look myself and saw that the bird was still a trifle fluffy: all at once it was a moment of special rejoicing. It was dark, darker than either of the adult females, its gender yet to announce itself.

  Here was a young bird, then. Here was a member of this year’s crop. There had been success: there were more marsh harriers in the world than there had been a few weeks ago, and these few acres had played a small part in that process.

  It was a moment of achievement: perhaps the year’s greatest moment of achievement. The top predator, as we have seen, is the most vulnerable species in every ecosystem: very many things have to be right before a big bird of prey can survive, prosper and make more of its kind. When such a bird can do just that, it shows one or two good things about the environment. That it could be worse.

  If the marsh had been a cricketer, it would have been entitled to remove its helmet and allow the world to admire its features, then to raise its bat to the pavilion and to the crowd, and to allow the applause to wash all around. The century of birds, with the appearance of the waxwing, was a great moment: but it was not the year’s great achievement. The arrival of the singing Savi’s warbler was wonderful and worth boasting about again and again, every time I had a conversation with a birder, but it wasn’t the summit of the year. This was: time to look skywards in thanks, to receive the hug of the batting partner, to know the commentators are pouring praise down from on high, to know that in the press-box the journalists will be searching for the mot juste to encapsulate a small triumph.

  Swashbuckling, they might say. Or battling. Meticulously compiled. Defiant. Effortless. Faultless. Full of murderous certainty. Chancy. Riding his luck. Inevitable. Glorious. Unforgettable. Masterful. Match-changing. Life-changing. Heroic. Reckless. Scrupulous. Filled with the perfect joy of futile heroism. Perfect for the day: knowing that other days will follow, days of ever-greater uncertainty.

  So let’s mix metaphors. What are metaphors for, if not for mixing together? Suddenly the marsh is no longer a cricketer, but an orchestra, and I’m the Mad Conductor. When I was in my teens I bought a conductor’s baton an
d, alone in my room, I would conduct Beethoven’s Ninth symphony from first note to last. I would bring in the flute with a wave of my little finger, silence the strings with the flat of my palm, and then, come the last movement, I would bring in the entire choir with a full swooping swish of the baton that was more Errol Flynn than Sir Malcolm Sargent, and at my express bidding, those hidden voices would sing out together just as the morning stars sang together in the great painting by Blake, and I would lead them all in a voice that attempted, in both volume and expression, to make up for its lack of tunefulness, and the choir, taking a lead from their master, would sing out from the single plastic speaker of my reel-to-reel tape recorder:

  Freude! Freude!

  Freude schöner götterfunken . . .

  Joy! Joy!

  Joy, beautiful radiance of the gods . . .

  I would lead the orchestra and the choir and the four soloists to the conclusion and then I would silence them all with a final drastic razor-fighter’s slash of my baton, and the world would shudder in a great seismic roar of silent applause . . .

  And I, bloody fool that I was, would bow deep and take every scruple of credit for the vast and glorious din that I and our neighbours had just enjoyed. I remember going to the Proms and standing almost in the orchestra as Colin Davis conducted the Ninth, and when it was all gloriously done, he, like me, soaked up the applause as a dry land sucks in the storm. And he had done nothing: he had made not a sound all night; the glorious din was made by people other than him, and yet he was the one who bowed.

  So as the young harrier finished his inspection of the two crouching creatures below and sailed off, wobbling slightly as he sought to master the harrier’s art, I received the silent applause of the world, as if I had created that bird myself, as if I had brought the two parent harriers together, Wing-tag and Dusky, or maybe Pale and Untag, as if I had personally given them food and shelter, as if I had allowed their offspring to make the extraordinary transfiguration from fluffy dinosaur to grown-up, glorious, not-quite-adult bird. And it’s all true: I played as much part in the making of a marsh harrier as I did in the making of a symphony – after all, I switched on the tape recorder, did I not? And threaded the tape through the play-heads and into the take-up spool? And pressed start? Yes, I did all those things: and on the marsh, did I not press the start button, did I not raise my baton, did I not sing along with all my might? Sure, sure, I did all those things.