Bird notes
Sometimes at a body of water at dusk I have been reminded of the times that, when I was younger, I stayed out until I had found someone to go home with.
Earlier this year I was asked to contribute to a pamphlet about birds – not about birds themselves, that is, but about the ways humans make meaning from them. I started by sending over a document made up of dreams I’d had about birds. I dream of birds a lot. A common dream is of seeing turtledoves, which I have not yet seen in the UK. Often they are in a tree in South London somewhere, perhaps close to where I live or somewhere very ordinary, and I realise I could have seen them all along, I just hadn’t been paying attention. Always the edge of self-reproach. That’s the meaning I make from birds, at least some of the time.
Other dreams are about seeing a new bird and going to put it on a list but then finding out I can’t, for some technical reason I have overlooked. Sometimes the reason is that I’m not where I think I am. In the dreams this is more dramatic: I think I am in England but I am in France, for instance. But this happens in real life, too. I think I am in London but realise that I have just stepped into Hertfordshire, and so the flycatcher I have just seen will not count towards my total for London. There was a point where I kept a garden list as part of a citizen science project. But I work from home a lot and it became a minute by minute obsession. That list had to be abandoned, but I dreamt of it for a long time after.
Right now, I’m spending ten days in the French countryside to finish a piece of writing. In freeing myself from the temptations and demands of London I have put myself in the way of the compulsion to look for birds. I have taken to resting my phone by the open window with the Merlin app running as I write – as if I could outsource distraction.
I want to write about birds, but not to communicate facts about them, in the manner of nature writing. Not because I dislike it, but because I am a bad naturalist and know very little. To offer facts authoritatively would feel inauthentic. When asked to describe the difference between a kestrel and a peregrine it turns out that I can. And I enjoy it – I’m a teacher after all, but these are exactly the urges I don’t want to indulge.
I can barely tell the difference between a peregrine and a pigeon. The spectacles of wishful thinking. I was pre-occupied by peregrines until recently because I’d not yet seen one this year, and this seemed to reflect badly on me in some way. I wasn’t paying enough attention; I wasn’t dedicated enough, I was too much indoors, I spent too much time writing. I had begun to think that it was not that they were there all along, like the turtledoves in the dream, waiting to be seen; rather, that they were hiding from me, deliberately, because I did not deserve them.
I do write about birds, but in forms where I don’t have to explain them. Where it’s more acceptable to let people look them up, or for them to stand for some kind of mystery. I often dream of phalaropes, because I think I will never see one, and because I find their name attractive. In my dreams the phalaropes are frilled, in bright colours, and fly past at eye level, impossibly slowly.
I think I can ‘treat myself’ to a specific bird. Sometimes it does work like that. I went to Mull and walked along a path where people often see white-tailed eagles. I looked up, and there they were, a pair. That felt undeserved, too easy. Something actually revolting almost, to go somewhere with lots of new birds, gorging on them. What I want from them is for them to elude me. No, I want their indifference. I go to them for their indifference.
The videos that are suggested to me on Instagram make clear that birds are not indifferent. In the videos, birds are loving and friendly and close. I like corvids and used to have a thing about jays, but have come to find them too obviously in relation to me – like when, the other day, I disturbed a jay crossing a footpath and it looked at me as it flapped away, tutting and resentful.
But the indifference of gannets, say, or kestrels. I got to know kestrels when I was flat-sitting in Berlin in an apartment on the fifth floor. The kestrels perched on the gutter above the balcony and then hunted just below, up and down the median of the boulevard. Once one perched on the balcony, but flew off when I came out. Flew off without seeming much to care, unlike the squirrel that found its way into the flat, leaping from room to room. (For the first time I really understood how much faster and more agile red squirrels are than grey, and why pine martens cannot catch them.)
There are so many kestrels in Berlin. On Tempelhofer Feld, when I was there, there were usually twelve or more, each with their own patch of grassland, hovering then moving on in an irregular rhythm repeated across the park, some of them only metres away from the path. They nest in the church towers and domes. I watched them, the sky pink, flying back and forth from the gutter above my head to the church across the street. And feeling as if it was their world I was in – that all along I had been wrong to imagine these structures mine.
Via Liam Shaw’s piece on the Great Auk in the LRB and the accompanying podcast I discovered that the notorious egg thief Daniel Lingham had been caught again this year. He is 71. When I first heard of such men, through a film by Andy and Peter Holden, I was shocked at the squalor and cruelty of modern egg collecting. This time my first reaction was envy at his knowledge, commitment and skill. The report said that he was recognised by his distinctive walking stick, and at first I understood this to mean a mobility aid. But then I realised they meant the kind of stick or pole people use when walking across rough terrain.
In Lancaster the other week I saw my first peregrines of the year. First on the marshes by the Lune, lapwing diving and tumbling haphazardly, the peregrine chasing through the flock then disappearing below the level of the marsh, into the gully of the Lune, and I didn’t pick it up again. And then two days later, at Silverdale station, crossing the tracks as night fell, pigeons scattering in advance.
In the end the excitement of seeing a new bird is often a little empty, because it is still essentially unknown. What I want is familiarity. Marvellous to walk somewhere and every sound, every movement is identifiable. Like knowing the way each of your housemates’ cooking smells. Mastery but of a loving sort, I hope.