Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.
When Henry Green started writing his autobiography in the late 1930s it was because he expected to die in the oncoming war, and felt he did not have the luxury of time to write a novel. ‘That is my excuse,’ he wrote: ‘that we who may not have time to write anything else must do what we now can.’ He said more. He said, ‘We should be taking stock.’ I take stock. During this sixth extinction we who may not have time to do anything else must write what we now can, to take stock. When I sat on the verge that day and wept I told myself over and over again that he was a nice man, that perhaps he had simply not known what was there. Had not known what was there. And I thought something that I was talking about with a friend just the other day: that the world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be, and burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.
A few years ago the Park was sold to a property developer. Today when I drive past the fence the pull on my heart is partly a wrench of recognition when I see those trees, knowing they are the standing ghosts of my childhood. But it’s also the knowledge that with care, attention, and a modicum of love and skill, the meadow could be incorporated into the site plan and turned into something very like it had been only a few years ago. The pull on my heart is also the pain of knowing that this is possible, but that it is very unlikely. Centuries of habitat loss and the slow attenuation of our lived, everyday knowledge of the natural world make it harder and harder to have faith that the way things are going can ever be reversed.
We so often think of the past as something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength. That messy stretches of species-rich vegetation with all their attendant invertebrate life are better, just better, than the eerie, impoverished silence of modern planting schemes and fields. I wonder how we might learn to align our aesthetic and moral landscapes to fit that intuition. I wonder. I think of the meadow. Those clouds of butterflies have met with local extinction, but held in that soil is a bank of seeds that will hang on. They will hang on for a very long time. And when I drive past the fence these days, staring out at 50 mph, I know that what I am looking for, beyond the fence, is a place that draws me because it exists neither wholly in the past, nor in the present, but is caught in a space in between, and that space is a place which gestures towards the future and whose little hurts are hope.
Dusk is falling over Midtown Manhattan on this chilly evening in early May. I’ve been googling the weather forecast all day, and pull out my phone to check it once again as I walk down Fifth Avenue. North-north-easterly winds and clear skies. Good.
At the Empire State Building the line snakes around the block, and because I’m the only person in it wearing a pair of binoculars around my neck, I feel a little self-conscious. I inch forward for the next hour, up escalators, through marble halls, past walls of soft gold wallpaper, before squeezing into a crowded elevator and emerging on the eighty-sixth floor. At over a thousand feet above the city, there’s a strong breeze and a spectacular sea of lights spilling far below.
Behind the tourists pressed against the perimeter fence there’s a man leaning back against the wall. Above him the Stars and Stripes flap languidly in the night air. I can’t see his face in the gloom, but I know this is the man I’ve come to meet because he’s holding a pair of binoculars that look far better than mine, and his face is upturned to sky. There’s an urgency to the way he stands that reminds me of people I’ve seen at skeet shoots waiting for the trap to fire the next target. He’s tense with anticipation.
This is Andrew Farnsworth, a soft-spoken researcher at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and I’m joining him here in hope of seeing a wildlife phenomenon that twice a year sweeps almost unseen above the city: the seasonal night flights of migrating birds. It’s an absurdly incongruous place for a nature-viewing expedition. Apart from the familiar exceptions – pigeons, rats, mice, sparrows – we tend to think of wild creatures as living far from the city’s margins, and nature as the city’s polar opposite. It’s easy to see why. The only natural things visible from this height are a faint scatter of stars above and the livid bruise of the Hudson running through the clutter of lights below. Everything else is us: the flash of aircraft, the tilt of bright smartphones, the illuminated grids of windows and streets.
Skyscrapers are at their most perfect at night, full-fledged dreams of modernity that erase nature and replace it with a new landscape wrought of artifice, a cartography of steel and glass and light. But people live in them for the same reason that they travel to wild places: to escape the city. The highest buildings raise you above the mess and chaos of life at street level; they also raise you into something else. The sky may seem like an empty place, just as we once thought the deep ocean to be a lifeless void. But like the ocean, this is a vast habitat full of life – bats and birds, flying insects, spiders, windblown seeds, microbes, drifting spores. The more I stare at the city across miles of dusty, uplit air, the more I begin to think of these super-tall buildings as machines that work like deep-sea submersibles, transporting us to inaccessible realms we cannot otherwise explore. Inside them, the air is calm and clean and temperate. Outside is a tumultuous world teeming with unexpected biological abundance, and we are standing in its midst.
Above us, LED bulbs around the base of the spire cast a soft halo of pale light up into the darkness. An incandescent blur of white skips across it. Through binoculars it resolves into a noctuid moth, wings flapping as it climbs vertically towards the tower. No one fully understands how moths like these orient themselves while migrating; there’s speculation that they might navigate by sensing Earth’s magnetic fields. This one is flying upward in search of the right airflow that will allow it to travel where it wants to go.
Wind-borne migration is an arthropod speciality, allowing creatures like aphids, wasps, lacewings, beetles, moths and tiny spiders hoisted on strands of electrostatically charged silk to travel distances ranging from tens to hundreds of miles. These drifting creatures are colonisers, pioneers looking for new places to live, and they’ll make a home wherever they find one. Place a rose bush out on the arid environment of a top-floor balcony and soon wind-borne sap-sucking aphids will cluster on its stems, followed by the tiny wasps that parasitise them.
Insects travel above us in extraordinary numbers. In Britain, the research scientist Jason Chapman uses radar systems aimed into the atmosphere to study their high-altitude movements. Over seven and a half billion can pass over a square mile of English farmland in a single month – about 5,500 pounds of biomass. Chapman thinks the number passing over New York City may be even higher, because this is a gateway to a continent, not a small island surrounded by cold seas, and summers here are generally hotter. Once you get above six hundred and fifty feet, he says, you’re lofted into a realm where the distinction between city and countryside has little or no meaning at all.
During the day, chimney swifts feast on these vast drifts of life; during the night, so do the city’s resident and migrating bats, and nighthawks with white-flagged wings. On days with north-west winds in late summer and early fall, birds, bats and migrant dragonflies all feed on rich concentrations of insects caused by powerful downdraughts and eddies around the city’s high-rise buildings, just as fish swarm to feed where currents congregate plankton in the ocean.
It’s not just insects up there. The tallest buildings, like the Empire State, One World Trade Center and other new super-towers, project into airspace that birds have used for millennia. The city lies on the Atlantic Flyway, the route used by hundreds of millions of birds to fly north every spring to their breeding grounds and back again in the fall. Most small songbirds tend to travel between three and four thousand feet from the ground, but they vary their altitude depending on the weather. Larger birds fly higher, and some, like shorebirds, may well pass over