Probably the best book index ever

This work of genius is the author's index from Samuel Butler's Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881).

Click for big.

Here

Yesterday morning I shut the black front door, squinted into the mothy spring light, and wandered off down the hill towards coffee. On my way to the café is a hillside park full of elms.

Elms! There are elms here: fifteen thousand of them. Gone from the rest of the country; found nowhere else in England but here. And because it’s spring, the elms’ black branches are flocked with luminous green winged seeds, clumped and packed and confused, as if the trees were hastily made in a props factory by people who’d never seen leaves, but wanted to have a go.

Yesterday morning the T’ai Chi people were doing their thing under the flowering elms, just in front of the playground. There they were, with their little tapedeck, and their blanket. Only three? What a disappointment. I love walking past these people at the weekend: here be plangent strains of classical Chinese music and a man in a tracksuit on one leg.

I love this city. I’ve been trying to work out why, but it was a first-sight love, and you can’t put first-sight love in words, ever. I came here in February to flat-sit for my friend Olivia, and now I can’t bear to leave.

What city? BRIGHTON. Hah! It’s a glittering, scabrous pile teetering on the edge of the channel, a city that squares bolshily up to an onshore wind that pushes scraps of paper and moulted feathers around streets that are London forty years ago. Filthy stucco and sparrows in the hedges, ocean-liner white villas and streets full of dog poo.

I’ve seen hipster children in fedoras. I’ve seen unconvincing transvestites working as bank tellers. I’ve seen street litter comprised mainly of olives and condoms. I’ve seen herring gulls trying to break into porsches. In Sainsburys, day one, I heard the woman behind the cheese counter exclaim, disbelievingly to a customer, ‘What do you mean you’ve never tried Manchego?” It’s all hipsters and new meejia and gangsters and students and dealers and what Steven Wells (via Alexis Petrides) memorably described as "crusty-wusty, hippy-dippy, twat-hatted, ning-nang-nongers."

I’m inured to eccentricity. Oddly enough, it’s not the years living in Cambridge that did this. My university town is an eccentric place. But its eccentricity isn’t kindly. It has its own rules. You can wear holey tweed and shoes with flapping soles; you can sit in cafés discussing latin syntax and be so absent-minded you forget your name, but if your eccentricity isn’t of this particular strain, goodbye. Cambridge is a cold place. If you smile at someone in the street their expression will register one part alarm, one part suspicion, one part embarrassment. And then they’ll walk on by.

I was inured to eccentricity way before Cambridge. Oh yes. When I was five years old, all knees and plasters and a fierce expression under a straight-cut fringe, my parents moved to a house in Camberley that happened to be on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society. I don’t know if you know much about the TS; perhaps that Yeats was a fan, and that Krishnamurti was involved, and that its driving light was the redoubtable Madame Blavatsky. We’re talking good old-fashioned old-school esoteric spiritualism. Our new house wasn’t connected to the TS: my mum and dad were not only agnostic, but journalists and agnostic; but growing up there, bathed in the faded light of Empire nuttiness, was an education.

One estate resident spent a lot of time in Nepal, but sent his beard clippings back in an envelope to be burned on the estate bonfire. People wandered around in their pyjamas. There were meetings, and fires, and all sorts of spiritual goings on. There was an ‘esoteric society’ somewhere on the estate, though I’m still not sure where or what that was all about. There were Italianate gardens, huge, climbable cedars, ginko trees, parkland and ponds - across which I went feral - and a summerhouse across the road beloved of Arthur Conan Doyle which had original prints of the Cottingley Fairies on the wall. Our neighbours all resembled Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers, or Joan Hickson’s Marple. One told my mother that if we ever wanted to try collecting edible mushrooms we should test them on her, because she was old and, well, it wouldn’t matter so much. She gave me a sheaf of pastel landscapes she’d drawn in Italy as a girl, and a box of watercolours I still treasure; though the paint is tacky and ancient, it’s a pleasure to take a brush and draw a thin line of cerulean blue last employed to limn in the edge of a Venetian lagoon. One wore egyptian jewellery she’d been given by Howard Carter; another had a Great Auk egg in a drawer. Everyone had pasts of such luminous weirdness and aristocratic eccentricity that my notion of what was, and wasn’t normal took a battering from which it’s never recovered. And, as in Brighton, people didn’t set much store by the normal thing, anyway.

They’re all dead now, all these lovely people. I’d not realised how much I missed this particular kind of nuttiness until I got here. I’d got all inured to that icy Cambridge eccentricity, that one that would see T’ai Chi, or a shop selling vegetarian shoes as really rather sad and embarrassing indicators of social suicide. Sod that. This place is much, much more like home. I’m going to up sticks and live here. As soon as I bloody can.

Nothing like a pig

So we’re standing up against a short barbed-wire fence. I’m baffled. It’s sunny, but we’re shaded by sweet chestnut leaves. Woods are quiet in autumn: just the sifting hush of a small wind above and a robin making dripping-water noises from a holly bush.

I’m not quite sure what to expect, because I’m not sure why I’m here. The boy said he’d show me something cool in the woods, which could of course be any number of things, ha. But here we are. He whistles and calls, whistles again. Nothing happens. Then it happens.

I’ve seen pictures of boars all my life. Slipware razor-backed beasts on greek pottery, sixteenth-century woodcuts, trophy photos of twenty-first century men with rifles. Ink drawings of the Erymanthian boar in my Roger Lancelyn Green. Like the various kinds of dinosaurs, I know their shape intimately. Like dinosaurs, I’ve never seen an actual one.

After the boy whistles, there’s a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away a sow walks fast between trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.
When I went to see Jurassic Park back in the early 1990s something odd happened when the first dinosaur came on screen. An huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes spilling water. It was miraculous. The thing I’d seen representations of all my life was, magically, alive.

And the same thing happened when I saw the boar. It was greatly affecting, because I’d seen this animal in ink all my life, and here it was, called into the real world.

And it was not what I expected, despite this slap of familiarity. For boar are not — I repeat — not like pigs. As the boar trotted up to us, a miracle of muscle and bristle and heft, I turned to the boy and said: They’re not like pigs. He replied, with great satisfaction, ‘no. They’re not like pigs”.

My brain did flips trying to place the parts of the beast. First I thought it was a little like a bear. Then like a big male baboon. There was the same forward-menacing shoulders, the brute strength and black hide of a bear. But there was a thing that was neither pig nor bear nor baboon. It struck me that what was most strong about this encounter wasn’t just the calling-forth of an animal icon into flesh, but the realisation that there in the world is a particular form of intelligence that is boar-intelligence; boar-sentience.

The boy waxed lyrical about the things that boars impress upon boys. The self-whetting, cutlass-curved, razor-sharp tusks. The small legs and hindquarters that work to steer the huge muscular bulk of the front end of the beast. As he did this, the boar pressed itself up against the fence and sniffed loudly through his wet boar nostrils, ‘ffff. ‘fffff. ‘fffff’. I rashly put my hand towards him. He looked up at it, flat-faced, with red boar eyes, considering. More sniffing.

I drew my hand back, because it seemed boar wasn’t quite sure. Then, after a while, both boar and I considering, I lowered it again. The boar stood. He allowed me to push my fingers into the bristles of his arched black back. And yes, it was like feeling a hairbrush, only a hairbrush with too, too many bristles, and a backed with thick muscle, rather than beech. There was wool underneath.

“He’ll be getting his winter coat soon” said the boy. “Six-inch guard hairs.” I scratched the beast’s broad hump and felt, as the seconds passed, that some tiny skein of aggression in his heart was starting to thrum. I have learned not to distrust intuitions like this. Suddenly we both decided that this was enough, my heart skipping, he grunting and feinting.

Wandering off, he sank onto his knees, nose to the ground, then with infinite luxury, sat and rolled onto his side, snuffling the humus. Ripples ran down his hide. I was entranced.

There are animals which are mythological by virtue of being imaginary. Basilisks, dragons, unicorns. There are animals which were once just as mythologically rich, have had so much exposure to us now that their earlier meanings are swamped with new ones: lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, bears, la. They’ve been given new stories.

I don’t think boars have new stories. Boars are familiar to me only from older stories, and their meaning has carried through intact. Boars are still emblematic. These are beasts of venery and woods. They are impressive not only in their boarishness, but in their resolute refusal of modern stories about animals.
Here is a boar. But beware: it is nothing like a pig, and it is much more than this picture pretends.

Walden, feat. Gainsborough

Autumn’s very sudden this year. Two weeks ago was summer. Now the flowers are dead, the sky is the curious burnished blue of the inside of a limpet shell, and the fields have turned to plough. Red plough. I’m further north than usual. I’ve been visiting the boy, who lives in a part of the country renowned for food and foxhunting.

The quickest way to represent Fenland topography is to draw a pen along a ruler. For detail, colour above the line grey, and below the line green, tan, or black, depending on the season. Often, there, the only rounded feature of the wide scape that meets your eyes is cloud.

But up here is different.

First, this is not a world arranged around water, but arranged for livestock and leisure. You know those delightful watercolours by Gainsborough? Of watered silk and breeches and spaniels? Here is the landowner and his wife, or sister, or family, sitting before their estate. The farmed acres behind them are a paradise for social capital and hunterly, bloody delights. That’s what the country is like here.

These are the landscapes of Kingsley’s Ode to the North East Wind (I still giggle uncontrollably at all the bits about softening the pen"). And in the late eighteenth century this landscape, up here, where the boy lives, was THE place to be, in the right season.

Second difference: the soil here isn’t that black cake-crumb of the fens.It’s rust and clinker, friable and not sticky at all, and it stains your boots with iron. At every field’s edge are hedges precisely the right height for a hunter to jump, or a little more, and I’ve never seen so few crows. Not a single magpie in a day’s walking.

But that one day last week I must have seen a good ten thousand pheasants. They were in every place we went: jumping up spring-heeled to snap beetles from mustard flowers, wandering across the roads, hundreds of them in each bosky fragment along the rides. In early September the pheasants are particoloured and short-tailed, still adolescent and silly, and half can hardly fly.

Walking in a landscape this full of game soaks into some deep part of the mind, perhaps that part concerned with miracles; for long nights after, my dreams have been full of pheasants. Pheasants ducking and running through sheepfence, squeezing under brambles, through nettles, into hedgebottoms and ultimately into the huge sheafs of purposely-planted cover. In that hot afternoon the whole field of maize on top of the far hill crackled with partridges and pheasants as if it were charged.

Needless to say, this is not a public landscape. The boy and I walked down a tiny, private, muddy track for a couple of miles, and at the end of the track was a vast lake hemmed by pines. Here the track got less muddy and became a lawn. It wasn't edged by hazel scrub either, but with ancient lilacs.

It was a very strong and strange place. By the dam we stopped and sat. Part-gilded by the September light a buzzard swung across the sky above, mewing angrily. There was a dead jack pike rotting on the outflow. The water was gauzy, white under the trees. This was Walden Pond, feat. Gainsborough.

This world of private lakes and follies and neo-classical houses and foxhunting hedges and brakes and copses and holes is so peculiar and so reeking of mythical Englishness that I would not have been surprised, at that lakeside, if a small, muddy unicorn had trotted out from the shallows and wandered away, briskly, into the woods.

There was no unicorn. This was mildly disappointing. But my new need for figures from medieval romances was fulfilled fabulously by what I saw later: wild boar. Which are not, I was astonished to find, anything like pigs. More on that, and on them, next post...

Apes and Woodpeckers

A bit of blog thievery today, while I work on a piece of writing for Professor X's retirement do. Oh: and I have a (non-academic, but smashing) job interview next week, too. Busy busy.

First, a belated and thankful heads up to Patrick Wright for this snippet from Osbert Sitwell:

And then downstairs in the hall stood a large cage, with a monkey in it. Alas, I was frightened of this capering creature, and, indeed, in those days hated the whole simian tribe, though latterly, since being informed of the events that led up to the massacre of the majority of the monkeys in Gibraltar - only a very few were allowed to survive - my heart had warmed to them. . . The streets of the fortress town are so narrow that the monkeys could easily swing from any window-sill in it to another opposite. One summer they took, suddenly, to stealing photographs, the glinting silver frames of which no doubt caught there attention, and to placing them in the rooms across the way. The havoc these tricks created was immense; Colonel A would find that a photograph of his wife (”the Missus”) had disappeared, and would eventually locate it, either through his own initiative or the employment of detectives, in Commander B’s bedroom: and vice versa. As a result so many altercations took place, so many scandals occured, so many divorce proceedings were pending, that in the end, when the true criminals were discovered, it was felt that, for the honour of the Services, the monkeys of Gibraltar had better be suppressed, kept down to the minimum.

And second, intense raptor photo of the year. Full account here:

Impressed

Our garden pond here is covered in duckweed. I stood with mum today, looking at it idly. I suppose we should clear it, a bit. It's not too dense, but there is a lot of it, bubbling and shaking underneath from tadpoles drinking air. Water measurers tiptoe their way across it. Small black flies do squiggly little courtship dances over it. Damselflies inch their abdomens down into it to lay eggs. And today, a hornet came down to drink. I am sure it was a queen, though it seems the wrong time of year. It was a good one and a half inches long. Big.

This was not like the measured drinking of wasps. I've seen wasps drinking here loads of times. They land delicately on the side of the pond, on the scratched black liner, or on a lilypad. They walk down the edge, bring their scything mandibles to the water , the surface tension sucks it up to their jaws and they drink deeply before ungluing themselves and walking back up to fly away.

This hornet appeared with the distant sound of chinook rotorblades. And she didn't land at the side of the pond. She flew down to about a foot above the water. Rotated slowly about her horizontal axis, then dropped BLOOF straight down onto the duckweed. No messing. No creeping about. This huge, huge, huge wasp — so big it resembled Edwardian jewellery cut with some weird steampunk vespid vibe — just landed in the middle of the pond, sat there drinking with the relish of a man at a bar, then perked up her wings and took off, legs trailing. And off she went. I've never seen a hornet in the garden. It was bloody awesome.

Beeside

This glorious snippet from P. L. Travers' What the Bee Knows comes courtesy of my friend James P., who found it on the Bookslut blog:

This apprising of bees, telling them, for all one knows, what they already know, is not the business merely of great ones. The bees are constantly being told. No beekeeper would fail to do it. For if they are not courteously kept informed of everything that happens, they will take umbrage, swarm, and fly away, or die of grief or resentment.
In the British Isles and all over Europe, the folk continually keep the bees abreast of the news, at national as well as local level: decking the hives with crepe or ribbon, whichever fits the case. On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a head-dress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. "But surely you don't need a hat, Aunt Jane! They're only at the end of the garden." "It is the custom," she said, grandly. "Put a scarf over your head." Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then — "I have to tell you," she said formally, "that King George V is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides," she added -- as though the bees needed telling! — "everyone has to die."

Diamond

Did you read this story last week?

Three conmen tried to sell the Ritz Hotel for £250m in an elaborate scam that was simply "too good to be true", a London court was told yesterday. Anthony Lee, an unemployed lorry driver, pulled off the con which involved "one great big lie", convincing potential buyers that he was a "close friend and associate" of the billionaire Barclay brothers, who own the hotel in Piccadilly, London. Anuja Dhir QC, for the prosecution, said: "The deal that sounded too good to be true was a complete fantasy."

To which I can only respond:

Surveillance

I have become addicted to this.

Why the hell

I have been examining and refereeing like a bastard for the last few weeks. And tonight I'm sitting in a colleague's rather beautiful flat in Pembroke College while she attends some fantastically glamorous wedding in Delaware or Manhattan or somewhere. It's been raining, and cool air is pouring in through the window to slide along under the desk and chill my toes, and I'm thinking about why the hell I haven't blogged for such a very long time.

Well, fretmarketeers, should there be any of you left out there, it is because — as you gathered, I am sure — I wrote a lot about bereavement and sadness here a few years back. And for a long time after, I had a rather spooky disinclination to blog anything at all. Because, you know, this was where that other person wrote. That very, very sad one.

But courtesy of Blogger's brand-new and delightfully cheesy blogger templates (check the flying starlings, there!) I thought: what the hell. A change is as good as, right?

Plus, I have to do something to preserve me from the World Cup.

And if you're asking, The Birdoole is fine, and currently snoozing in his nestbox. And Mabel? She's moulting in my goshawk guru's aviary in a village not far from here. She laid three eggs this year - mateless, alas, but we are working on that...

Rightmove delight!

Fever

By way of an apology for the strident-and-self-righteous tone of that last post. In my defence, I was coming down with a fever. Which seemed to make me into an arse.

Birdfairs

The strangest thing about the Bird Fair is that there are no birds at the Bird Fair. But everyone attending wears binoculars.

I pointed this out to mum last year, in the queue to get in. The man in front spun around and glared at us. “Yes there are birds” he hissed. “There are ospreys.”

Well yes. There are ospreys at Rutland Water. Also, they are released birds at an artificial lake, which is kind of lovely, considering. But there are still no birds at the Bird Fair.

What is at the Bird Fair: many marquees in which are: touts for bird tours to every part of the earth. Binoculars and spotting scopes. An art tent. And that, my friends, is it. Apart from the ‘talks’ tent where lots of slightly awkward bird events and lectures take place.

(My favourite moment of last year was watching Johnny Kingdom telling someone “I’m Johnny Kingdom”. Which is only funny if you a) know who Johnny Kingdom is, and b) know his position in the pantheon of wildlife celebrities. And c) care)

Every year I tell myself I won't go to the BirdFair. Every year I do. Every year I come away with a thudding headache, a sense of lost time, and a teensy desire to kill myself after reading for the nth time that this is The Birdwatchers' Glastonbury.

Let me tell you about a different Bird Fair. I went to it a couple of months ago with the boy. No marquees. A couple of giant sheds in the midlands. Metal ribbed sectioned livestock sheds. Monster-truck pens, small aircraft hangars.

Men traipsed back and forth from carpark to door, setting up, carrying birds in boxes, birds in cages. These were a different breed from BirdFair men. The latter wear the birders' uniform of cotton fishing waistcoats, hiking boots and technical trousers. These men were clad in rugby shirts, padded lumberjack shirts, loose grey hooded tracksuits. There were many baseball hats. Many cigarettes.

This Birdfair was a bird-keepers’ show. Trestle-tables ran the length of the sheds, stacked high with individual exhibitors’ wares.



Hooped wire cages resembling miniature Victorian aviaries holding giant poffy canaries.


Vertical stacks of wooden cages with the tiniest gauge wire fronts for minute owl-finches and waxbills. Bigger cages for pigeons, for chickens, for quail.





There were breeding pairs for sale of amazon parrots, parakeets, barbets. A few tables of show budgerigars that looked far less realistic than the plastic trays in their cages. And it was noisy of course. An amiable shouting to and fro from people setting-up stalls; the roar of gas-burners heating the space, and of course the calls and songs of thousands of birds. All for sale.

I was impressed by a pair of white pigeons the size of babies. They were very, very impressive. They were Hungarian Giant House Pigeons.



Over all this noise, non-stop tannoy announcements telling the stallholders to be very, very attentive to the welfare of the birds on their stand. And you know, I shouldn’t have taken pictures. Partly because birdkeepers are wary in today's political climate — and partly because my camera was not up to the conditions. I took lots of blurry pictures, because it was dark, and because I didn’t want to offend anyone. Or get shouted at.



What was most interesting about this fair to me was what bird people call British. You know: Crossbills. Goldfinches. Linnets. Redpolls. Bullfinches. They are shown in cages painted racing green. There were many travellers at this fair, because the traveller community go nuts for singing finches, particularly goldfinch or linnet mules, for example. Rare colours or particularly good singers can go for a fortune – a lovely example of conspicuous consumption, for these birds can’t be bred from; they’re sterile. This aberrant goldfinch was the subject of a bidding war.



There’s a long history of British Birdkeeping in marginalised communities: east-end birdkeepers; miner birdkeepers; immigrant bird-keepers; traveller bird-keepers.

The RSPB went all-out anti birdkeeping early on in its history. Of course, some other forms of birdkeeping and bird-collecting — wildfowling, waterfowl keeping, pheasant-rearing and so on — escaped censure. These ways of relating to birds were restricted to the well-bred; high status bird activities. From Lord Lilford to Peter Scott, this sort of thing hasn't been an issue for conservation bodies. One needs money and land to keep geese and diving ducks.

So our distaste for birdkeeping has a dubious social history; it seems founded on a sense that these fragments of a soundly middle-class notion of nature: of freedom, of rural idyll and threatened countryside, are cruelly imprisoned in tiny cages for the delight of the working-classes. And interestingly, I think there's another strand here: the great cage-bird campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s were partly driven by organisations whose heads had spent years in German POW camps.

There are problems with birdkeeping, of course there are. But in comparison to battery farming, or keeping African Greys in cages on darkened stairwells? The mass importation of birds for aviculture - that was a problem. But the small-scale keeping of british finches? What harm is there, really - really - in that?

So it's easy to see the marginalisation of birdkeeping as an interesting political and social phenomenon. But more depressingly, doesn't it seem to be another example of the steady attenuation of the kinds of understandings we have of animals? For birdwatchers, goldfinches are gaudy seedeaters clinging to thistles, nyger feeders or teasels. For birdkeepers, they are individual personalities; fascinating challenges for the breeder; rare songsters; actual animals.

I guess the difference between the two birdfairs is what I'm coming back to here, and it's why the first depresses me. Because ya, we know much more about birds than we used to. Biology, breeding chronology, habitat preference, migration....

But we know a lot less about what they are like in any other way. I'd never have known that redpolls are a thousand times more charismatic and full of personality than goldfinches had I not seen them in breeding cages, nibbling on broccoli tips and rattling their feathers wetly in clip-on cage-front water baths.

Oooh that was a rant. Sorry. Have you seen this?

Housecall

Ash

Frankly, I’m a bit hacked off. This Saturday I had a plane booked to go to Iceland to see the volcano. And in a manoeuvre of some irony, the volcano came here and has likely enough grounded me.

It’s fun to write VOLCANO in huge letters through the ash on the roof of my car. It’s fun to look at the little glittering mites of grey glass on ones fingertips. It’s also extravagantly apocalyptic and cold-war-ish to drive along the M25 on a hot, clear morning under signs saying HEATHROW CLOSED. It’s the invisibility of the falling dust and the headlines BRITAIN CUT OFF FROM WORLD and the false-colour satellite-track maps of the threat as it slowly morphs and falls about Europe. It’s all a bit grand and alternative-history, a bit Charles Stross.

And there are no planes, so no contrails. The sky is a blank, steady, slightly rouged blue.

Meanwhile there is much talk about the lack of roses and the lack of miniature vegetables. “No we can’t just give mange-tout to the Kenyans; they don’t eat that kind of thing” was my favourite radio quote this morning. The plane companies are complaining of bad science, like there’s a tang of conspiracy in the air too, and our governmental national emergency committee springs into action. It’s called COBRA, which is so bloody Marvel Comics it makes me giggle. Their last meeting was, I think, on the occasion a dead swan was found in Fife.

On the radio yesterday, talking about the possibility of punctuated, yet regular eruptions from this volcano, it was mooted that we might just junk jets and go back to turboprops. The thought that flights to New York would make refuelling stops at Gander just gives me goosebumps of generation-x’y pleasure. Gander! And can we fly to Idlewild, too?

I love this town

Gossss

An ex-cep-tional afternoon's haul...

The following post

Is that most irritating thing, an academic paper I never published because I couldn't for the life of me track down some of the missing references. It is hard going in places. I was still attempting to sound clever, rather than just say things clearly. Wrote it five or six years ago for a workshop on objectivity in the sciences at the LSE. It's been sitting on my hard drive (and circulating as photocopies) for so long I thought: I'll just publish it here. Peer-reviewed journals be damned. Please feel free to completely ignore it. It's just better out here than in there, yanow?

Covert Naturalists

Covert (n).

c. by covert: under cover, covertly. in (into) covert: in concealment; in hiding, or disguise, secretly; rarely, in safety. in (the) covert of: in the shelter of; rarely, in shelter from…under covert: under cover, in shelter; in concealment, under a disguise.
3. A place which gives shelter to wild animals or game; esp. a thicket;
4. The technical term for a flock or ‘company’ of coots. Obs.
5. Ornith. in pl. Feathers that cover the bases of the larger feathers on some particular part of the body, e.g. tail-coverts, wing-coverts, esp. the latter.
6 trans. (legal) authority, jurisdiction. Obs.

1. Introduction

This paper investigates some aspects of objectivity in ethology. It does so by exploring aspects of the culture and field-practices of ethologists. I take as read Clifford Geertz’s statement that to understand a science one must examine neither its theories nor its findings, but ‘what its practitioners do’. And while fascinating problems relating to objectivity might be tackled by examining arguments over the selection of units of behaviour, or focusing on the quantitative analysis of ethological data, here I concentrate on those field-practices that are effaced from ethological papers, or, if present, are passed over as self-evident or as mere commonsense.

Importantly, I want to stress that I do not look here at the forms of “unobtrusive” manipulative experiment that ethologists carried out in the field. Ethologists were adamant that such experiments were only to be carried out after long and arduous ‘reconnaissance observation’ of the species in question: and it’s the ways in which objectivity was sought through the field practices of reconnaissance observation that are the subject of this paper.

Using various dictionary definitions of the word ‘covert’ to trace the different senses in which ethologists could be said to be ‘covert naturalists’ is a surprisingly rewarding way of grappling with aspects of objectivity in ethology. I want to concentrate on two aspects of the hunt for objectivity in particular. First, the various forms of objectivity promoted by the use of hides to observe animals. Secondly, taking as my cue Niko Tinbergen’s assurance that observation is itself a scientific procedure, I want to engage with the forms of objectivity promoted through ethologists’ strategies of observation and visual perception. And I end on a speculative note, discussing how ethologists could understand an imaginative empathy with animals to be a credible method of obtaining scientific data, rather than an anthropomorphic and subjective movement.


Anxieties of influence

Before launching into an examination of ethology’s field-practices, I want to set the scene. And to this end, an obsolete, legal sense of the term ‘covert’ meaning ‘under jurisdiction or authority’ is pertinent. For wider questions relating to forms of subjectivity and objectivity in ethology are clearly related to the history of the discipline. Attempting to assume jurisdiction over the field of animal behaviour, early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz sought to assume the authority to define which questions should be asked of animals and how they should be asked. Ethology was presented as a necessary corrective to and a reaction against the manipulative experimental practices and laboratory-based methodologies of experimental psychology. Psychologists’ experimental testing of behavioural theories on animals, they argued, led to invalid conclusions, for animals could not exhibit true behaviours in such depauperate and artificial experimental conditions. They also challenged the expertise of experimental psychologists; individuals such as de Haan and Skinner were derided as failing to possess that knowledge of and ‘intimacy’ with animals that ethologists considered an epistemological and moral requisite for understanding animal behaviour. Lacking personal knowledge of the animal’s natural behavioural repertoire, the scientists' experimental results could not be adequately judged and were therefore invalid. Lorenz described experimental psychologists as ‘intelligent’ but ‘eyeless’.

Rejecting the generalisable, universal and ‘placeless’ guarantees of objectivity offered by laboratory science, ethologists embraced place to obtain valid data. This is the second meaning of covert I want to raise—that is, ‘covert’ meaning a place where wild animals live. Ethologists are truly covert naturalists: their methodological ideal to assure the accuracy of their observations on animal behaviour by investigating it in a milieu in which the animals behave ‘naturally’ Taking science into the field in this way inevitably generated anxieties over its jurisdiction over a territory whose boundaries cannot be effectively policed. Figure 1, of an ethological field of inquiry, contains cows, for example, and weekend campers, not ethologists, might be in those tents. Clearly, farmers, walkers, birdwatchers, botanists, egg-collectors all have access to this landscape; it’s not restricted to scientists alone.



Figure 1. Ethologists hiding in the field

The restriction of social access to laboratories is a powerful symbolic guarantee of credibility, and Rob Kohler, among others, has explored how the social diversity of the field deprives field scientists of this automatic credit. Ambiguous identity and anxieties about credibility literally come with the territory.

These problems were particularly problematic in the early years of the discipline. Establishing ethology’s scientific credentials through demarcating it from cognate field-activities such as birdwatching and casual nature appreciation was a particularly crucial task, for ethology arose from the social milieu, moral economies, and field practices of these activities. It was crucial for early ethologists to convince their audiences that ethology was a scientific discipline and that their observations were credibly objective.

Yet because both the spaces, the subjects, and the technologies of ethology—the use of hides, binoculars, and so on—were shared with the avowedly ‘non-scientific’ activities of photography, hunting and birdwatching, scientific credibility was necessarily assumed by displacing objectivity away from instrumentation, away from dedicated research subjects and laboratory spaces restricted to ‘science’ and onto the expertise and professional identity of the individual ethologist.

Lacking dedicated instruments, subjects and scenes of enquiry, ethologists assumed objectivity, crucially, through strategies of observational practice: forms of looking, forms of attention—as well as forms of intimate knowledge of animals and, ultimately, I will argue, ethologists fostered interpretive strategies founded on professional, legitimate forms of empathy.

These strategies operate in intriguing counterpoint to another strategy crucial to ethology—the effacement of the scientist—and I shall discuss this later in the paper. First of all, I want to look at the forms of objectivity sought through the use of hides—how scientists made themselves disappear.

Self-effacing scientists

1. Effacement through invisibility

The first form of disappearance I want to discuss is a literal one. Covert naturalists are hidden naturalists. Covert means dissimulation, disguise, secrecy, and being covered or concealed, and all these senses irresistibly refer to the ethologist’s use of hides (figure 2).


Figure 2. “Examples of observation hides” (from Pettingill, 1970, Ornithology in Laboratory and Field, reprinted in Lehner, p. 67)

These self-effacing technologies are designed to absent the scientist from the phenomenal world of the animals investigated. Hides create a disembodied observer with no consequential presence. They are an architectural attempt to guarantee the epistemological reliability and truth of behavioural data through an assurance that the scientist in no way affects the behaviour of the animals observed. In a related sense, the hide literalises and concretises that ascetic withdrawal from the immediacy of the observed phenomena which is at the heart of the positivist-pragmatic ethos—translating a methodological, cognitive freeing from subjective involvement to a literal freeing from involvement. What trust is in participant observation, invisibility is in ethological observation; both strategies aim to prevent subjects from hiding or distorting information—in ethnography because the subjects do not trust the researcher or the ultimate purposes of the research—and in the ethology because the animal’s ‘true’ behaviour will be distorted if the observer is present.

2. Objectivity through interchangeability

The second form of disappearance promoted by hides is an effacement of individuality. Unlike participant observation, where trust is earned by individual fieldworkers through a dialogue with their subjects , the invisible hide-bound expert ethologist is in principle interchangeable; provided they possess sufficient expertise to judge, to paraphrase Niko Tinbergen, ‘when nature carries out experiments in front of one’, it does not matter which individual scientist sits behind the canvas blind. This form of ‘interchangeability’ clearly connotes an aperspectival objectivity. And indeed, a literal interchangeability is manifest in the way hides are used—before valid observations of animals can occur, they must be ‘tricked’ into thinking that there are no humans in the hide. G. K. Yeates explained that the typical ethologist’s strategy in works because, quote, ‘A bird’s ability to count is lamentable’. Thus, in a situation like that shown in figure 1, two or three people enter the hide at the same time, in full view of the animals—and then after a short period all but the actual observer leaves, assuring the animals the hide is empty. After all, it is the presence of the scientist’s body that would alarm the animal, and it is the scientist’s bodily presence which is effaced,

3. Heroic effacement of the body

A third form of effacement is more complex in nature. Ethological fieldwork begins with extended ‘reconnaissance observation’ the purpose of which is to familiarise the observer with the behaviour of the animal; this necessary groundwork results in an ‘ethogram’. This ‘set of comprehensive descriptions of the behavioural repertoire of the species’ (Brown, J. L. The evolution of behaviour, Norton, NY 1975) is considered both to be of scientific worth in itself, and as a crucial grounding for further research. Sustained reconnaissance observation is the method by which expertise is gained by the ethologist, and it is far from the casual strolls of amateur birdwatchers or nature enthusiasts. Ethologists sharply differentiated ‘watching’ animals from ‘observing’ them – the former the province of the amateur, the latter a professional activity and the mark of the ethologist’s eye. Observing was considered a rigorous, scientific activity. Marler describes it as ‘the most arduous and demanding aspect of behavioural study’. Lorenz, too, stressed how it makes ‘great demands upon the observational capacity of the investigator… the investigator must live with the animals, day after day’ . Lehner (1979) sees animal behaviour study as dependent on

‘weeks and months and years of careful stalking, hiding and painstaking observations…hours are spent in a hide under less than ideal conditions, with inclement weather making you physically uncomfortable and your view of the animals poor and the inactivity of the animals frustrating. Your binoculars get beaten about and rained and snowed upon, and the pages of your field notes become limp and stuck together.'

These extended observations are generally made from the isolation of a cramped, closed hide. Not only are valid observations guaranteed through the strategy of visually effacing the scientist’s body, but also by effacing the body physically, too—the weaknesses of the body must be transcended by the application of heroic self-discipline in the field.

In sum, hides supply the ethologist with other forms of effacement than mere invisibility. Field scientists have long incorporated the trope of the explorer-hero in their assurances of objectivity; a movement by which trust and credibility is attached to scientific witnesses by virtue of the courage, self-sacrifice or physical endurance they have undergone in the field. In sum, this heroically achieved moral authority is premised on a triumph over embodiment—a different form of effacement—ethologists transcend the limits of human endurance to obtain scientific truth, truth guaranteed by the suffering involved in obtaining it.


Figure 3: Niko Tinbergen building a hide for reconnaissance observation in the late 1920s

4. Photographic objectivity

All this self-effacement recalls Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s point in their paper ‘The Image of Objectivity’ that at the heart of mechanical objectivity lies non-intervention, rather than verisimilitude; they have discussed how the machine came to embody a morality of self-discipline and restraint, the producer of pure images, authentic images, images uncontaminated by interpretation.

I want to argue here that ethologists assumed forms of mechanical objectivity not solely through bodily effacement, but also through ‘borrowing’ mechanical authenticity from photographic discourse. Numerous ethological field methods, including the use of hides, were derived directly from early twentieth-century wildlife photography. Niko Tinbergen, was himself a keen photographer, like many early ethologists, and in the 1920s, he announced that wildlife photography was growing in scientific stature. No longer content with easily obtained images of birds on their nests, photographers were seeking new technical challenges; they were now attempting to capture representative animal behaviours on film. To do so, they had to sit for many hours in hides waiting for birds to show ‘interesting’ behaviours such as displays and other forms of interactions between individuals. Sustained observation and sustained critical attention had to be paid to the animals in order to obtain the ability to predict when such photogenic behaviours might occur. This is exactly the form of predictive capacity described as essential to the ethologist by Lehman in 1955, who explains that after considerable experience of watching animals, ‘the observer can get a feeling of what is going to happen next, which is compounded in different degrees of the intellectual experience of relationships that are involved on one hand, and, on the other, of building yourself into the situation’.

Now, photographic conventions clearly influenced the ways in which ethologists broke down sequences of behaviour into a series of gestural or postural units, but there is a much stronger point to be made here. Functional analogies between the eye of the ethologist and the camera lens are crucial, for they influenced the ways in which ethologists understood their own cognitive and experiential processes when they observed and interpreted animal behaviour. Put simply, the effacement of the ethologist in the hide, the strategies of non-intervention, the replacement of the camera lens with the eye—these all allowed ethologists to characterise themselves as functioning like scientific instruments, their ‘nervous machinery’, in principle free from the subjective temptations of aestheticising and theorizing, was able to supply as objective and accurate a portrayal of reality as of its functional cognate, the photograph.

Lorenz extolled the ability of the mechanical, unconscious processes of ethologist’s ‘nervous machinery’ to produce perceptions that were a valid source of knowledge. Blackboxing the unconscious processes by which these truths were obtained; he maintained that the ‘systematic intuition’ of the zoologist relies on a high degree of accuracy through processes which are unamenable to conscious examination, in which a large number of variables are unconsciously weighted and analysed’.

However, he agreed that this might ‘seem highly suspicious to some scientists’. And unsurprisingly he identified these scientists as ‘a school of orthodox American behaviourists who seriously attempt to exclude direct observation of animals from their methods. It is a worthwhile task to prove what we have seen’ he continued, ‘ in such a way that these and other ‘eyeless’ but intelligent people are bound to believe it’ Tinbergen wrote in a similar vein, stressing the normative aspects of using one’s nervous machinery as a means of credible witnessing. The ‘experienced observer’ of animal behaviour, he explained, can judge from the basis of ‘extensive previous observations’ when the ‘experiments’ nature is carrying out are valid ones, and that ‘in principle such a selective technique is no different from discarding a ‘jump’ of a barometer due to the slamming of a door’. He continues:

But we cannot be surprised if non-ethologists are not prepared to concede its validity […] though it may be regrettable that so many scientists are unduly impressed by the exactness of their mechanical measuring instruments, and insufficiently impressed of the potential performance of our own nervous ‘measuring equipment’, we must take account of this widespread attitude.

Lorenz, Tinbergen and others present manipulative experiments as the rhetorical underlining of truths that had already been obtained by the ‘nervous measuring equipment’ of the ‘expert’ or ‘clinical eye’. The capacity for accuracy of this ‘expert’ or ‘clinical eye’ was considered directly proportionate to the amount of time the ethologist had spent observing animals; in other words, the ethologist’s nervous machinery was calibrated through long exposure to the research subject. F. B. Kirkman’s description of his long-term study of black-headed gull colonies in the 1940s traces the ‘autobiography of the clinical eye’ succinctly. In the early days of his research Kirkman explained that he ‘filled about 60 pages of a notebook in four weeks’ while in later years he ‘covered the same number in two or three days’. Where once he had experienced ‘tedious intervals of many minutes…seeing nothing of interest and marvelling at the folly that had brought me there’, in later years ‘the problem was not to find something to pass the time but to find the time to note down all I wanted, for almost every bird had come to be significant. I saw, where formerly I looked; and the difference lay not in front of the eye, but behind’.

Using such nervous machinery necessitates a split in the cognitive duties of the ethologist. A recent ethological textbook reinforces this splitting of the ethologist into both a mechanical recording device and a self-conscious analyst of the data it offers. ‘Observers’ writes Lehner, ‘must be more than a visual recorder…one must be disciplined enough to know when to be a machine-like recorder of data and when to contemplate what is happening or has happened’. Ethologists metaphorise themselves as scientific instruments—transparent, reliable, calibrated through long exposure to the subject of investigation—but they also require themselves to be expert assessors of the data so provided through a process of critical self-analysis. Niko Tinbergen’s pioneering studies of behaviour in herring gull colonies contains clear descriptions of this process. If ‘nature carries out experiments in front of one’ he explains, the observer is required to ‘be alert, to appreciate the significance of what one has seen.’ Ethological understanding involves a gradual process of understanding the fine nuances of ‘a multitude of very slight movements’ which, to the novice observer, are noticed ‘unconsciously.’ The construction of the observer-proper, however, involves a ‘conscious analysis of his own perception’

Delight and love

Now, I’ve described how ethologists saw the accuracy of their ‘nervous machinery’ as guaranteed through those long hours of sustained and rigorous reconnaissance observation. The notion of the ethologist as a self-policing instrument calibrated by long exposure to animal behaviour seems to offer a view of the relationship between observer and observed as one of pure disinterest, freed from the taint of subjectivity. Ethologists, however, often stressed that no individual could possibly subject him or herself to the necessary rigours of observational practice without a strong emotional attachment with the animal observed. ‘I contend’ wrote Konrad Lorenz, that not even a person with the almost superhuman patience of a yogi could look at animals long enough to perceive the laws underlying their behaviour patterns’. ‘Only a person who looks with a gaze spellbound by…inexplicable pleasure’ can achieve such a feat, and thus generate valid knowledge. This gaze, writes Lorenz, is founded on ‘delight and love’ in the object.

A simply prodigious amount of time, spent in presuppositionless observation, is necessary in order to collect and store the factual material which the great computing apparatus needs in order to be able to lift the gestalt from the background. Even a Tibetan priest schooled in the practice of patience would not be able to remain stationary in front of an aquarium or adjacent to a duck pond or even in a blind constructed for observations in the open as long as is necessary to accumulate the data base for the perceiving apparatus. Such sustained endeavours can be accomplished only by those men whose gaze, through a wholly irrational delight in the beauty of the object, stays riveted to it. (Lorenz, The foundations of ecology, p. 47)

This seems thoroughly at odds with the disinterestedness commonly considered the hallmark of objective scientific inquiry. Yet it is far from unusual; reading ethological literature one repeatedly encounters similar statements. Tinbergen described ‘intent observation’ as leading to an experience of ‘imagining that I could feel what a wild animal must feel’. What form of scientific objectivity allows this form of empathy?

Returning to the dictionary one makes the happy discovery that an earlier, quite etymologically unrelated meaning of the term ‘ethologist’ means a ‘mimic’: ethology is the practice of mimicry. And with this in mind, I was delighted to find, in a recent textbook on ethological method by Philip N. Lehner, a series of imaginative and visual exercises designed to teach students the correct strategies of visual perception in ethological observation. Lehner instructs the student of ethology to to watch an animal intently for minutes at a time before shutting their eyes and tracing the animal’s outline in their mind’s eye. Lehner says that the desired result is a feeling that the student has become the animal he or she is observing. ‘It helps if the animal is not overly active’ explains Lehner. ‘You might find it better to begin with a stuffed animal…then go through the entire procedure with a live animal’

For centuries, hunters have described their ability to achieve a close identification with the hunted animal as leading to the experience of them feeling they were the hunted animal. Tinbergen, at least, saw the experiences of hunting and ethological observation as closely allied. ‘Knowing from personal experience how it feels to have killed, cleanly and without cruelty, one of those extremely alert Arctic seals after a long stalk over the fjord ice’ he wrote, ‘I can testify that the experience of the genuine hunt…is indistinguishable from that of watching, unseen, from a well-built hide, the natural behaviour of, say, a family of shy hawks’. Yet ethologists needed to make their own animal knowledges more credible than such non-scientific understandings.

Lorenz also offers analogies between hunters and ethologists in his popular work, Man and Dog, although here they are far more implicit. Lorenz theorises that ‘stone-age hunters’ had the ability to establish social contact with dogs because these hunters had ‘a finer perception of animal expressive movements than a present-day town dweller’ . It is hard to not immediately identify these ‘stone-age hunters’ as Lorenz in disguise: he was, after all, famed for his own social contact with animals (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Lorenz, literally effacing his body, with two greylag goslings.

Is Lorenz suggesting that the ethologist’s facility for perceiving animal expression is an innate capacity of the human species, one that is atavistically present in modern day ethologists? The reading is tempting, particularly since Tinbergen repeatedly refered to his own ‘innate’ love of landscape and his ‘congenital’ love of natural beauty as spurring him to study animals in the field. Yet such a conclusion would deny that the forms of empathy used by ethologists were founded on credible premises. Lorenz carefully explains that this facility for perceiving animal expression was, for the stone-age hunters, ‘part of their professional training, for a stone-age hunter who could not distinguish a peaceful from an angry mood in a cave bear would indeed have been a bungler. This faculty in man was not instinct but a feat of learning’ . Lorenz is at pains to present the interpretive ability of the stone-age hunter as a mark of professional expertise. It is crucial for the project of ethology that its understanding of animals is a professional understanding, a legitimate empathy.

Negative Capability

In their paper The Image of Objectivity, Daston and Galison quote Ernest Renan (1890) on the scientific virtue of strong ascetic self-discipline. Holding out against the temptations of theorizing, aestheticising and pouring evidence into preconceived molds: one should, Renan maintains, ‘deny oneself’ the headlong haste of human inclination to reach after a definitive solution; heroic scientists should ‘forbid themselves all premature philosophical thought’ . I want to set Renan’s statement against another nineteenth-century call for the abstention of subjectivity—that of John Keats, which is of considerable and unexpected facility in trying to understand how ethologists could view empathy as an objective interpretive ability.

In a letter to his brothers of 1817 Keats described the mysterious faculty of ‘Negative Capability’, the mark of the poet and artist; a state in which a person is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Negative Capability is founded on a form of ‘chameleon capacity’ , the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

This quality of attention, this capacity to exercise strong self-discipline to suspend theorizing is precisely the form of observational technique valorised in ethology. As Lehner describes it, observation is ‘as much a state of mind or awareness as it is a technique’. I suggest that we should read the observational strategies of ethologists in terms of a professional negative capability. Early ethologists were particularly keen to dismiss anthropomorphism, the attribution of human mentalities or motives to animals, as subjective and dangerous. However, they commonly described empathetic forms of emotional projection as necessary epistemological strategies for comprehending the alterity of another organism’s life-world, or Umwelt. Can empathy be objective? Apparently so. For this strategy of imaginative projection is not perceived as a subjective collapsing of animal into human or human into animal; it is presented as a measured, interpretive act based on strategies of effacement and forms of rigorous, precise observation. Empathy for the ethologist is an actor-oriented interpretive act founded on professional expertise.

The ethologist seeks to understand, as the title of Tinbergen’s collection of essays, the animal and its world – the animal’s Umwelten. ‘The ethologist must’ wrote Dyer and Brockman, view the animal as the subject of its Umwelt, and … imagine what it would be like to be the one at the centre of that world’. They continue:

Progress in understanding [processes that influence animal behaviour] come from imagining what it might be like to be the animal, not only possessing its sensory apparatus but also being attuned, both in perception and in response, to the objects and relationships in the outside world that are most relevant to its survival…freed from the anthropomorphic assumption that animals perceive the world in much the same way as we do, early ethologists uncovered sometimes astounding capacities of animals to detect and respond to environmental features that we can detect only with specially designed instruments.

This redefines the nature of ‘the field’ for the covert ethologist. For if ‘covert’ means a place where wild animals live, it ultimately relates to the animal’s own Umwelt, a concept of profound importance in ethology, premised on the concept that animals inhabit unique, species-specific perceptual worlds. Thus the term ‘covert’ refers ultimately not simply to ‘the field’ as a scene of inquiry to be contrasted with the laboratory, but to the perceptual world of the animal and its salient environmental features.

Ethologists are truly covert naturalists for this is the world they seek to bring forth, to comprehend an animal’s world – from the point of view of the animal. Through undergoing a variety of methods of effacement and through a gathering of professional expertise, the ethologist is thus credibly freed from the temptations to anthropomorphise and may legitimately use empathy as an interpretive method. It is a professional empathy in principle unobtainable by those who have not undergone the rigorous effacements of subjectivity discussed above. In this final effacement of subjectivity, the ethologist seeks to assure us that objectivity is indeed letting nature speaking for itself—through the ethologist. In this case, to conclude, credibility is thus assumed in the form ‘Trust me, I am the animal’.


(For refs and bibliography ask me if you're in need. I have most of them here)