Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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How nests and eggs are good things to think about when considering matters of individuality, and the concepts of same, and different, and series. How the form of a nest is part of the phenotype of a particular bird species, but how local conditions foster beautiful idiosyncrasies. How we humans are intrigued when birds make nests out of things that belong to us: house finches lining their nests with cigarette butts, nests of Bullock’s orioles fashioned from twine, kites decorating their tree platforms with underwear stolen from washing lines. A friend of mine found a ferruginous hawk’s nest wrought almost entirely from lengths of wire. It’s satisfying to consider the incorporation of human detritus into the creations of birds, but it is troubling, too. What have they made out of what we have made of this world? Our world intersects with theirs and our habitations are strangely shared. We have long rejoiced at birds building nests in unusual places. We love the robin rearing chicks in an old teapot, a hen blackbird sitting tightly on a nest tucked above the stop bulb on a traffic light: these are nests that gesture towards hope, as birds use our things for their own ends, making our technologies redundant, slowed down, static, full of meaning that is no longer entirely our own.
But that is what nests are. Their meaning is always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human, and as the cup or wall of a nest is raised, it raises, too, questions about our own lives. Do birds plan like us, or think like us, or really know how to make knots, or slap beaks full of mud in series, or is this merely instinct? Does the structure they’re making begin with some abstract form, a mental image, to which the bird plans, rather than thinking, step by step, There, that is where that goes? These are questions that pull on us. We make things according to plans, but all of us also have that sense of where things should go. We feel it when we arrange objects on mantelpieces, or furniture in rooms. Artists feel it when they construct collages, when they sculpt, when they bring pigment to bear on a surface, knowing that the dark smear of paint just here provides or provokes a sense of balance or conflict when viewed in relation to the other marks upon the scene. What is it in us? We are fascinated by the difference between skill and instinct, just as we police the differences between art and craft. If pigment is smeared on to a guillemot’s eggshell as it rotates before being laid in drip-splashes that resemble in their exuberance and finesse the paintings of Abstract Expressionists, what is our delight in those patterns saying about us? I think of that need to collect that sometimes is billionaires hoarding de Koonings and Pollocks and sometimes tradesmen hiding plastic margarine tubs full of exquisitely marked red-backed shrike eggs beneath beds and floorboards.
We see our own notions of home and family in the creatures around us; we process and consider and judge, and prove the truth of our own assumptions back to us from a hall of twigs and mud and shells and feathered mirrors. In science, too, the questions we ask are commonly woven this way. I think of Niko Tinbergen’s eminence in the field of ethology – and remember, too, his patient attention to the way ritualised gestures appeased aggression in colonies of nesting gulls, and how they related to his anxieties about the relationship between overcrowded cities and human violence. I think of the young Julian Huxley, full of all the sexual confusion of youth, spending one spring watching the courtship of great crested grebes, speculating on mutual sexual selection and ritualised behaviour. And I see interwar anxieties about marriage in Henry Eliot Howard’s work on bird behaviour; he puzzles over the concept of territory, of nest building, of extra-pair copulations, and is desperately keen to understand the reasons behind the sexual attractiveness of particular females who lure males from their established mates. And, in literature, too, everywhere. Nesting birds naturalising the English class system in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where seabird-nesting cliffs of auks and kittiwakes make ‘an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world’, exclaiming phrases like ‘Is me hat on straight?’ and ‘Crikey, this isn’t ’arf a do!’ while White’s skeins of aristocratic pink-footed geese pass high over the slum, singing Scandinavian goose-themed sagas as they fly north.
Friends of mine who grew up in marginal rural communities mostly have little truck with the mainstream rules of nature appreciation and the laws that enforce them. Most of them hunt with longdogs. Some of them are poachers. Some have collected eggs. Some of them probably still do, though I don’t get to hear about that. Most have limited financial or social capital, and their claim on the landscape around them is through local field knowledge, rather than literal possession. Egg collecting in this tradition makes me wonder about the terms of ownership, investment and access to pleasure that economically deprived communities are allowed to have in the natural world. I think of Billy, the boy in Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, who refuses to play football, refuses to work down the mine, rejects all the models of masculinity he’s given. What opportunities for tenderness does he have? He strokes the backs of baby thrushes in their nest. He keeps a kestrel that he loves. What kinds of beauties can be possessed? If you are a landowner, you get the whole compass of the watered-silk sky and the hedges and the livestock and everything in it. But if you’re a factory worker? There’s the rub. Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world. It can become an obsession for minds gripped with stilled beauty. It is a practice that halts time. The collectors grant themselves the power to withhold new lives and new generations. And egg collecting is also, at the same time, one in the eye for the elite and all their rules about what is and what is not an acceptable way to relate to nature.
Egg collecting was especially derided in the cultures of natural history operating during and after the Second World War. At that time, British birds were laden with new significance. They were what the nation was made of, what we were fighting for. In this milieu, species with a perilous foothold on British soil, such as avocets, little ringed plovers and ospreys, had their rarity bound up with imperilled nationhood. Thus, the theft of their eggs was seen as an act akin to treason. And protecting the birds from the depredations of collectors seemed analogous to military service. Again and again, in books and films of this period, injured servicemen who have proved their bravery on the field of battle now show their love for their country by protecting rare birds trying to raise families. 1949’s The Awl Birds by J. K. Stanford, for example, where the threatened nest belongs to avocets, or Kenneth Allsop’s Adventure Lit Their Star, published the same year, where it belongs to little ringed plovers. The historian of science Sophia Davis has written on how the villains of these books are egg collectors, routinely described as ‘vermin’ and ‘a menace to England’, and how the nests in their pages are guarded by heroes with the fate of the nation close to their heart. Indeed, gangs of egg protectors guarding the nests of rare birds were a true-life legacy of the war. After years in a German POW camp, the ornithologist George Waterston sat with his colleagues by the first Scottish osprey nest for fifty years and kept it under observation through the telescopic sights of rifles. And in the 1950s, J. K. Stanford wrote of his own experiences guarding avocets. ‘Keyed up by the general air of secrecy,’ he reminisced, ‘we sat till long after dusk, prepared for anything, even an amphibious raid by armed oologists.’ Egg collectors today tend to be seen as beings in the grip of hopeless addiction, simultaneously suffering from great moral failings. These characterisations were firmly codified in the cultures of post-war ornithology as threats to the body politic.
Eggs and war; possession and hope and home. In the 1990s, years after my natural historical collection was disassembled and my childhood home was gone, I worked at a falcon-breeding centre in Wales. In one room were banks of expensive incubators containing falcon eggs. Through the glass, their shells were the mottled browns of walnut, of tea-stains, of onion skins. This was before the advent of newer incubators that mimic the press of a brood patch through hot air-filled plastic pouches. These were forced-air incubators with eggs on wire racks. We weighed them each day, and as the embryo moved towards hatching, we’d candle them: place them on a light and scribe the outline of the shadow against the bright air-cell with a soft graphite pencil, so that as the days passed the eggshell was ringed with repeated lines that resembled tides or wide-grained wood. But I always left the incubation room feeling unaccountably upset, with a vague, disquieting sense of vertigo. It was a familiar emotion I couldn’t quite name. I finally worked out what it was one rainy Sunday afternoon. Leafing through my parents’ albums I found a photograph of me a few days after my birth, a frail and skinny thing, one arm ringed with a medical bracelet and bathed in stark electric light. I was in an incubator, for I was exceedingly premature. My twin