Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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birdwatching following the First World War, when the morality of killing birds was increasingly questioned and the advent of inexpensive binoculars brought birds into visual range, such details were of limited use. A new way to identify birds was needed.
The first of the modern field guides was Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 Field Guide to the Birds. It was inspired partly by a chapter in the popular 1903 children’s book Two Little Savages, written by Ernest Thompson Seton, first chief scout of the Boy Scouts of America. In it, a nature-minded boy despairs of learning the birds from books that require you to hold them dead in your hands. He decides instead to make ‘far-sketches’ of the ducks he sees in the distance and arrange them into a ‘duck chart’ that shows the characteristic ‘blots and streaks that are their labels . . . like the uniforms of soldiers’. Peterson’s paintings, like Seton’s charts, tabulated and simplified birds, and he went further, adding small black lines on the page that pointed to distinctive characteristics that were most easily visible: the black band on the end of a crested caracara’s tail, the ‘ink-dipped’ wings of the flying kittiwake.
When he was a young man in the 1920s, Peterson was a member of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group of competitive, iconoclastic young naturalists. In the days before portable guides, field identification aids could take unusual forms: one club founder carried around an envelope containing coloured plates cut from a copy of E. H. Eaton’s lavish but unwieldy ornithological guide Birds of New York that he had found in a trash can. The group was mentored by Ludlow Griscom, a stern, exacting teacher who became renowned for inventing the technique of identifying a bird instantly in the field, even when flying. ‘All the thousands of fragments we know about birds – locality, season, habitat, voice, actions, field marks and likelihood of occurrence – flash across the mirrors of the mind and fall into place – and we have the name of the bird,’ Peterson later explained of Griscom’s method. This split-second, gestalt ability to recognise a species built from combining book knowledge with long field experience became the mark of ornithological expertise, and was at the heart of a growing culture of competitive bird-spotting that lives on today. For there’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless grey and green.
Today, electronic field guides are becoming increasingly popular, and photo-recognition apps like Leafsnap and Merlin Bird ID let you identify species without the skills required to use field guides. They can do what print guides cannot: play animal sounds and songs, for example. But they also make it harder to learn those things we unconsciously absorb from field guides: family resemblances among species, or their places in the taxonomic order. When I was growing up, the materiality of these guides, their weight and beauty, was part of their attraction. I spent hours staring at their coloured plates of butterflies and birds, distinguishing each from each and fixing the painted images in my mind. The first time I saw a silver-spotted skipper butterfly basking on bare chalk on high downland pasture, I instantly knew the name of this dusty-golden dart with pale, ragged patches on its wings. Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.
Back in my hotel room, I pull two Australian field guides from the bottom of my suitcase, eager to find out what it was that I had seen. Flicking through the first, I find a page of honeyeaters: nine birds arranged on a pale green background. That striking pattern of white and yellow and black is found in two species, but those round silver eyes are distinctive. I check against the distribution maps and the short description on the facing page. What I saw was a New Holland honeyeater. And turning to the plant guide, which describes only a few hundred of the thirty thousand different plant species found in Australia, I decide, tentatively, that the shrub it sat on was probably a waratah, and the banksias I saw by the path were hairpin banksias, with their ‘protruding, wiry, hooked styles’. These species are well known here, but for me they are small triumphs. Now I know three things. A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.
I shouldn’t do the thing I do, because motorway driving requires you to keep your eyes on the road. I shouldn’t do it also because pulling at your heart on purpose is a compulsion as particular and disconcerting as pressing on a healing bruise. But I do it anyway, and it’s safer to do it these days, because this stretch is being transformed into a smart motorway so the long slope of the M3 as it falls towards Camberley is packed with speed cameras and 50 mph signs, and when I’m driving there on my way somewhere else I can slide my car into the outside lane to bring me closer and slower to the section of fence I’m searching for, running west and high under skies white as old ice.
Perhaps a hundred thousand vehicles pass this place each day. Back in the mid 1970s I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams. But like snow, traffic noise thickens with time. By the time I was ten I could stand by Europe’s second largest waterfall, listen to it roar, and think, simply, it sounds like the motorway when it’s raining.
I shouldn’t look. I always look. My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space, because I know exactly all the land around those trees, or at least what it was like thirty years ago. And then the place has passed, and I drive on, letting out the breath I’d been holding for the last thousand feet or so, as if by not breathing I could still everything – movement, time, all of the dust and feet that rise and fall in a life.
Here’s an early memory. A ridiculous one, but true. I learned to speed-read by trying to decipher military warning signs that bordered the roadside on my way to primary school. keep out was simple, but danger – unexploded ordnance took me months. I needed to read the words all at once, because my mother’s car was moving and the signs were very close. Each weekday morning I’d stare out of the window as the army land approached and wait for the words to appear so I’d have another chance at them. And the feeling I had then, of wanting to apprehend something important that was passing by me very fast: that’s the feeling I have now when I look for the place behind the motorway fence where I grew up.
I was five in my first summer in the Park. It was 1976. Cape daisies bloomed and died in the flowerbeds, and pine cones in the trees behind the house crackled and split through endless indigo afternoons. Standpipes, orange squash, dry lawns, and a conversation in which the matter of drought was explained to me. That’s when I realised for the first time that not every year was the same, or perhaps that there were such things as years at all. My parents had bought this little white house in Camberley, Surrey, on a 50-acre walled estate owned by the Theosophical Society. They knew nothing about Theosophy but they liked the house, and they liked the estate too. There’d been a castle here once, or Squire Tekel’s early nineteenth-century approximation of one, all faux-gothic battlements and arrow slits, peacocks and carriages. After it burned down the Theosophists bought the grounds in 1929 for £2,600 and set about turning it into a place for them to live and work. Residing here was a privilege, the residents were told. A privilege for service. Members built their own houses, bought tents for a campsite and a second-hand Nissen hut from the Army to put there too. They grew food in the walled kitchen garden; opened a vegetarian guesthouse. In the 1960s, after leaseholders were granted the right to purchase the freeholds of their properties, outsiders like us slowly began to populate the place.
Theosophy had been banned in Nazi Germany, so many of our neighbours were refugees from the war, and others were the black sheep of good families: elderly women, mostly, who had refused the roles society had reserved for them: the quiet Lolly Willowes of Surrey Heath. One wore ancient Egyptian jewellery she’d been given by Howard Carter; another kept a great auk egg in a drawer. Spies, scientists, concert pianists, members of the Esoteric Society, the Round Table, the Liberal Catholic Church, the Co-Masonic Order. One former resident sent his beard clippings back from Nepal to be