tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-164203582024-03-13T04:00:30.528+00:00fretmarksThe Troad is a fine field for conjecture and snipe-shooting, and a good scholar may exercise their feet and faculties to great advantage upon the spotPluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.comBlogger437125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-86512689517483739792014-06-23T17:29:00.000+01:002014-10-22T10:33:08.659+01:00H is for Hawk events<br />
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Upcoming talks and events for <a href="http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/helen+macdonald/h+is+for+hawk/10136020/">H is for Hawk</a>. Come and say hello!<br />
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October 27th: <a href="http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/helen-macdonald/">Toppings & Company, Bath </a><br />
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November 1st: <a href="http://llpp.ms11.net/etruscan/blackhuts2.html">Black Huts Festival, Hastings</a>, with Patrick McGuinness<br />
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November 3rd: <i><a href="http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/all-the-best-stories-are-true">All The Best Stories Are True</a> </i>at the RSA, London (Samuel Johnson Prize event)<br />
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November 9th: <a href="http://www.bridlit.com/day1.html">Bridport Literary Festival</a><br />
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November 15th: <a href="http://www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/events.htm">New Networks for Nature, Stamford </a><br />
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November 19th: <a href="https://www.wegottickets.com/event/291357">Caught by the River Social Club</a>, London<br />
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November 20th: <a href="http://www.burghhouse.org.uk/whats-on/events/helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk/calendar/11-2014/start-date/17-11-2014/end-date/23-11-2014">Burgh House, Hampstead </a><br />
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November 30th: <a href="http://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/of-hawks-meadows/">Cambridge Literary Festival</a>, with Dave Goulson<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mabel! </td></tr>
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<br />Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-23171458750708313712014-02-16T20:24:00.001+00:002014-02-16T20:24:28.546+00:00Book newsWell, it's done, and in, and it'll be <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/H-Hawk-Helen-Macdonald/dp/0224097008">published this summer</a>! Much excitement and a sense that I don't quite know what to do with myself now I'm not stuck at my desk all hours. Spring's coming, and there are lapwings in the flooded fields...<br />
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And Chris Wormell has come up with the most exquisite cover ever.<br />
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<br />Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-59307085053443850152012-08-15T21:34:00.002+01:002014-07-14T13:31:48.426+01:00Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-58526886370966049652011-07-22T13:38:00.007+01:002011-07-22T13:50:48.728+01:00Probably the best book index everThis work of genius is the author's index from Samuel Butler's <span style="font-style: italic;">Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino</span> (1881).<br /><br />Click for big.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnSr9ErdLhkufy-HiVdiBZDMAGr4HfRUInyHVslW74zgBLqEFI-y-wvhNn8YpJErnGusA8bZ3sThOE3AiA3TmaWLbalsI24IvTPpyT3_P-Ll1NwWfZfaPF4qc4Jwa8Sd-M2dxt/s1600/indexAC.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 327px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnSr9ErdLhkufy-HiVdiBZDMAGr4HfRUInyHVslW74zgBLqEFI-y-wvhNn8YpJErnGusA8bZ3sThOE3AiA3TmaWLbalsI24IvTPpyT3_P-Ll1NwWfZfaPF4qc4Jwa8Sd-M2dxt/s400/indexAC.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632157936429492066" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrgGqRs5Ad0PiTb7WdLreDYJUBCY24TRGqeockBfod9gmfVURmCjy5P3zjI8Jqa3Ee_IcV4qqW16cxxsGiGtoljekX4t6kthfoXt8uoSVUvlDNuxnxRigNdpza-9rPL2PiZyF/s1600/indexCF.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 316px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrgGqRs5Ad0PiTb7WdLreDYJUBCY24TRGqeockBfod9gmfVURmCjy5P3zjI8Jqa3Ee_IcV4qqW16cxxsGiGtoljekX4t6kthfoXt8uoSVUvlDNuxnxRigNdpza-9rPL2PiZyF/s400/indexCF.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632157645028546706" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXJHxJh8ThW_ZqzSKylbbG1xF7kj8DVVJUU99r90OXVNXwniPFm4R8GmciZufEt9gdLtjMr58HfH5Q01r-XUGcgQry6S5p5EhYXRAtKFIltQ_Yyp_9JEqdcPG2zynWgT9DJ2Q4/s1600/indexFM.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 318px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXJHxJh8ThW_ZqzSKylbbG1xF7kj8DVVJUU99r90OXVNXwniPFm4R8GmciZufEt9gdLtjMr58HfH5Q01r-XUGcgQry6S5p5EhYXRAtKFIltQ_Yyp_9JEqdcPG2zynWgT9DJ2Q4/s400/indexFM.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632157359164632050" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAkCkEdcolKwOkC65f6sFxZPUKyANlRm4MCEngD7IUKpS8uv-TvsCEhSgs7bSl3GVJ3NtMwXpWPhkqoBd2l9YdTui8GT2J03rCcDGXU-uMjEFeICB26jNcbIhcLnj-a1Mxczk/s1600/indexMZ.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 327px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAkCkEdcolKwOkC65f6sFxZPUKyANlRm4MCEngD7IUKpS8uv-TvsCEhSgs7bSl3GVJ3NtMwXpWPhkqoBd2l9YdTui8GT2J03rCcDGXU-uMjEFeICB26jNcbIhcLnj-a1Mxczk/s400/indexMZ.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632157062882800914" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbBTBEjnnPVG5nPihUiSxKAsW8zi3nTUmj2wnAOPfPx0fBAy2Ae4k12o6rt2rWGXDdWVMlBcORdQwQQGUC7U47cm-fTpB5VP9wBpS6-aym8wUB3I1bytm1g9ldaCoeKI5Ltt6u/s1600/indexSZ.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbBTBEjnnPVG5nPihUiSxKAsW8zi3nTUmj2wnAOPfPx0fBAy2Ae4k12o6rt2rWGXDdWVMlBcORdQwQQGUC7U47cm-fTpB5VP9wBpS6-aym8wUB3I1bytm1g9ldaCoeKI5Ltt6u/s400/indexSZ.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632156536897323522" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-53000128588304649332011-04-17T23:56:00.003+01:002014-04-07T17:50:01.878+01:00HereYesterday 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.<br />
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Elms! There are <span style="font-style: italic;">elms</span> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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I l<i>ove this city</i>. 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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I’ve seen hipster children in fedoras. 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 <i>mean</i> 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."<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>The Ladykillers</i>, 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.<br />
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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.</div>
Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-82779839446403871222010-09-06T16:23:00.006+01:002010-09-06T16:43:52.827+01:00Walden, feat. Gainsborough<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPwAPvR3EoKta2rbY0K9s5ex5IQPm67kOTsuv7jEAim-JSa3cip-WKU0JSDp_xdJrJX9vLNHtqr5-Q_ChMjhPT9qL9T92aJCTuyeHFVHjSMiEdvXeXmSDlHGLdVYdFsAxBXDCD/s1600/84.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 382px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPwAPvR3EoKta2rbY0K9s5ex5IQPm67kOTsuv7jEAim-JSa3cip-WKU0JSDp_xdJrJX9vLNHtqr5-Q_ChMjhPT9qL9T92aJCTuyeHFVHjSMiEdvXeXmSDlHGLdVYdFsAxBXDCD/s400/84.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5513823211615200146" border="0" /></a><br />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. <i style="">Red</i> 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />But up here is different. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />These are the landscapes of Kingsley’s <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/42/656.html"><i style="font-style: italic;">Ode to the North East </i><span style="font-style: italic;">Wind</span></a> (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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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: <span style="font-weight: bold;">wild boar</span>. Which are not, I was astonished to find, <span style="font-style: italic;">anything</span> like pigs. More on that, and on them, next post...Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-31997249141243798932010-06-23T18:07:00.006+01:002010-06-23T18:22:04.810+01:00Apes and Woodpeckers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWQ9YNW3027_I5dQ0LSY_axfOd3GMmqHU2O3GLekF-ldHETDOGU9eaC9qrc2bH1aYEqXvuxhXm1WjzRYjMQcov8ki_voJt72vkgxEqpHOlEa9vMDCDJiLCr08Fo2NB8GYKGVUx/s1600/p82886-Gibraltar-The_Barbary_Apes.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 387px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWQ9YNW3027_I5dQ0LSY_axfOd3GMmqHU2O3GLekF-ldHETDOGU9eaC9qrc2bH1aYEqXvuxhXm1WjzRYjMQcov8ki_voJt72vkgxEqpHOlEa9vMDCDJiLCr08Fo2NB8GYKGVUx/s400/p82886-Gibraltar-The_Barbary_Apes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5486019028298226818" border="0" /></a><br />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.<br /><br />First, a belated and thankful heads up to <a href="http://www.patrickwright.net/2009/10/25/the-the-monkeys-of-gibraltar-osbert-sitwell-on-the-case-for-a-cull/">Patrick Wright</a> for this snippet from Osbert Sitwell:<br /><blockquote>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. </blockquote><p>And second, intense raptor photo of the year. Full account <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7793472/Woodpecker-plays-dead-to-escape-bird-of-prey.html">here</a>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_5DWyUl_vmPQNz06RnCVT4DMob6_mwKoA8qxzGNAdmKIOqExOYwqCq9pSA-YRlFtOA0-pPZq9L6qgR1CCA-yYEOPACkN9IcSF85aXHGEdnAmGul2uBmncMFyDMh5Pd-h8Qadb/s1600/article-0-09D708FB000005DC-495_468x1787.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 143px; height: 544px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_5DWyUl_vmPQNz06RnCVT4DMob6_mwKoA8qxzGNAdmKIOqExOYwqCq9pSA-YRlFtOA0-pPZq9L6qgR1CCA-yYEOPACkN9IcSF85aXHGEdnAmGul2uBmncMFyDMh5Pd-h8Qadb/s400/article-0-09D708FB000005DC-495_468x1787.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5486018714013232962" border="0" /></a><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-17281869247473882932010-06-22T19:42:00.004+01:002010-06-22T20:02:56.216+01:00ImpressedOur 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 <a href="http://www.vespa-crabro.de/hornet_vespa_crabro_vexator.htm">hornet</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-11678100556422295772010-06-15T14:58:00.002+01:002010-06-15T15:09:59.555+01:00Beeside<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOnvVQ5AGu-kPD4ogr0BU151CrIDE9GSKc76I88-srE14R_so_NvlsuIQOOa2wzagRmya5luD7yEBXwkbEgR0i1PFI2IsRUR7EcEbVEci9KZ4ZwDGdr4JE3uNyDR7VnGUVq01d/s1600/143616151_1b4ac22ad8_o.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOnvVQ5AGu-kPD4ogr0BU151CrIDE9GSKc76I88-srE14R_so_NvlsuIQOOa2wzagRmya5luD7yEBXwkbEgR0i1PFI2IsRUR7EcEbVEci9KZ4ZwDGdr4JE3uNyDR7VnGUVq01d/s400/143616151_1b4ac22ad8_o.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483002353760967762" border="0" /></a><br />This glorious snippet from P. L. Travers' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140194665?ie=UTF8&tag=artandlies-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140194665"><span style="font-style: italic;">What the Bee Knows</span></a> comes courtesy of my friend James P., who found it on the <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/blog/">Bookslut blog</a>:<br /><blockquote>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.<br />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."</blockquote>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-70623682695447789122010-06-15T11:20:00.002+01:002010-06-15T11:24:50.173+01:00DiamondDid you read this story last week? <blockquote>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."</blockquote><br />To which I can only respond:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/r7xgiO_NdkQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/r7xgiO_NdkQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-14005467184598580672010-06-14T11:32:00.000+01:002010-06-14T11:33:49.330+01:00SurveillanceI have become addicted to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/springwatch/webcams/">this</a>.Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-20030347496780921122010-06-13T23:04:00.006+01:002010-06-13T23:23:34.144+01:00Why the hellI have been examining and refereeing like a <span style="font-style:italic;">bastard</span> 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />But courtesy of Blogger's brand-new and <span style="font-style:italic;">delightfully</span> cheesy blogger templates (check the flying starlings, there!) I thought: what the hell. A change is as good as, right? <br /><br />Plus, I have to do something to preserve me from the World Cup. <br /><br />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...Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-6332157507508382292010-04-24T09:38:00.001+01:002010-04-24T09:42:41.444+01:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQFqLxRdzpxA893xkGiEk8jNqqW12oSWT44EloYb1qbYw0p4M-J6lsp0JIA90wZPyR-jkW36c4g69YiiesM62dJHjgcKNdG_D9AJW0GysQZOcFUM2Rlk6ENlxb6dZPJ-mykaog/s1600/e0533cdd37fe22f2e136db3e2b8c3c96+copy.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQFqLxRdzpxA893xkGiEk8jNqqW12oSWT44EloYb1qbYw0p4M-J6lsp0JIA90wZPyR-jkW36c4g69YiiesM62dJHjgcKNdG_D9AJW0GysQZOcFUM2Rlk6ENlxb6dZPJ-mykaog/s400/e0533cdd37fe22f2e136db3e2b8c3c96+copy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463621639333029826" /></a><br />Rightmove delight!Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-26352135428608874932010-04-24T09:29:00.002+01:002010-04-24T09:33:29.241+01:00FeverBy 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.Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-33519717583531533552010-04-20T10:38:00.000+01:002010-04-20T10:39:10.695+01:00Housecall<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TPtJqDg43DK5nD-VJ4-45FeZOJ-9rIbE-xIt99OQU2_GSJYoL7X2YHUVhBl9G8144DxKduekfqRDpjskU3IhAjSSLmI0LzDFA2CcpEtKjy276dK5pwRsZFvy4JHW-KsWTr3F/s1600/pheasantcalls.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 294px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TPtJqDg43DK5nD-VJ4-45FeZOJ-9rIbE-xIt99OQU2_GSJYoL7X2YHUVhBl9G8144DxKduekfqRDpjskU3IhAjSSLmI0LzDFA2CcpEtKjy276dK5pwRsZFvy4JHW-KsWTr3F/s400/pheasantcalls.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5462151877859068002" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-23800157571895526182010-04-19T10:10:00.001+01:002010-04-19T10:13:52.284+01:00AshFrankly, I’m a bit hacked off. This Saturday I had a plane booked to go to Iceland to <span style="font-style:italic;">see the volcano</span>. And in a manoeuvre of some irony, the volcano came here and has likely enough grounded me. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />And there are no planes, so no contrails. The sky is a blank, steady, slightly rouged blue. <br /><br />Meanwhile there is much talk about the <span style="font-style:italic;">lack of roses</span> and the <span style="font-style:italic;">lack of miniature vegetables</span>. “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. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style:italic;">Idlewild</span>, too?Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-25010397304922918082010-02-22T10:50:00.002+00:002010-02-22T10:51:42.998+00:00I love this town<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUrDWi2GsNHs4T8eFIfDSgnypIcQCDE_HqIfqjnYhVPI6WafdV_nmlBjKelzTrRWPTw84TG5H5saGRopF1c5ulUFu5x6qNWIQVgAJk0ihlr-gvznR1vqKiC5Rg7A5JR5HniNE-/s1600-h/cambrdgegraffiti.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 294px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUrDWi2GsNHs4T8eFIfDSgnypIcQCDE_HqIfqjnYhVPI6WafdV_nmlBjKelzTrRWPTw84TG5H5saGRopF1c5ulUFu5x6qNWIQVgAJk0ihlr-gvznR1vqKiC5Rg7A5JR5HniNE-/s400/cambrdgegraffiti.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441018537045989858" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibKXi02TGeuqDsafS9fZqHXi1vQc6tCtp3ktsnlu9T1jrvv_UEaP3Pe-M_0pOe46SXI1fux-egTL1G-HfKUrb14Kj5VVnO7BTha8XUq-V_7UkWJFZhMe0zsq9wkNpufLa1vef7/s1600-h/cambgraffiti.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibKXi02TGeuqDsafS9fZqHXi1vQc6tCtp3ktsnlu9T1jrvv_UEaP3Pe-M_0pOe46SXI1fux-egTL1G-HfKUrb14Kj5VVnO7BTha8XUq-V_7UkWJFZhMe0zsq9wkNpufLa1vef7/s400/cambgraffiti.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441018641311328914" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-48209694357514341412009-11-06T12:53:00.000+00:002009-11-06T12:54:04.372+00:00Gossss<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkZERmfTx3JBCTGo477DMuHylrGoTb7J6z_kg4uao85Fu1Hjo1V-ph0w5HJhimZdoQ4HioLzUctszucxdNoHkCCwFZhk2OxXWa-7lKVIvUv2DbjBoCFjxOP1vuYPrXLTa5QQr/s1600-h/gosversion28bit.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkZERmfTx3JBCTGo477DMuHylrGoTb7J6z_kg4uao85Fu1Hjo1V-ph0w5HJhimZdoQ4HioLzUctszucxdNoHkCCwFZhk2OxXWa-7lKVIvUv2DbjBoCFjxOP1vuYPrXLTa5QQr/s400/gosversion28bit.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400973074908068466" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-14563936652570000432009-11-03T16:30:00.003+00:002009-11-03T16:34:25.421+00:00An ex-cep-tional afternoon's haul...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiusOYihSPRNjlfuNJX0OoaOAz1zep0DtujzIgyl_l7RgaQTLJZoJuRAxI05SwVIarnDsWsESJcPS8L1FsDHBD8HpXjTV7W7BGXw_iqy4_8U4eVH8D4K7qmXK2C8-4Y-GBSfHxu/s1600-h/shrooms.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiusOYihSPRNjlfuNJX0OoaOAz1zep0DtujzIgyl_l7RgaQTLJZoJuRAxI05SwVIarnDsWsESJcPS8L1FsDHBD8HpXjTV7W7BGXw_iqy4_8U4eVH8D4K7qmXK2C8-4Y-GBSfHxu/s400/shrooms.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399916586076857394" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWANkXDLeH5vIBV-27Rx9k_R6_RV4jfoyV65suufNWdw60LTaLJk2v5bpxZgxvoAhbPqfrnimsKyx_hdww5-ZEHuMX55T64VhbJgnaBDqtEOBpP1Uc4RPJW5XNYdQupKQNRsr1/s1600-h/shrooms2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWANkXDLeH5vIBV-27Rx9k_R6_RV4jfoyV65suufNWdw60LTaLJk2v5bpxZgxvoAhbPqfrnimsKyx_hdww5-ZEHuMX55T64VhbJgnaBDqtEOBpP1Uc4RPJW5XNYdQupKQNRsr1/s400/shrooms2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399916458689173650" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-38365777455829966772009-11-03T16:19:00.002+00:002009-11-03T16:22:57.704+00:00The following postIs 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?Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-76862643782649751872009-11-03T15:55:00.007+00:002009-11-03T16:25:32.424+00:00Covert Naturalists<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Covert (n).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">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.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">3. A place which gives shelter to wild animals or game; esp. a thicket;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">4. The technical term for a flock or ‘company’ of coots. Obs.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">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.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">6 trans. (legal) authority, jurisdiction. Obs. </span><br /></blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. Introduction<br /><br /></span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span>’. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">field-practices</span> that are effaced from ethological papers, or, if present, are passed over as self-evident or as mere commonsense.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Anxieties of influence</span><br /><br />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’.<br /><br />Rejecting the generalisable, universal and ‘placeless’ guarantees of objectivity offered by laboratory science, ethologists embraced <span style="font-style: italic;">place</span> 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.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCiLPtmS_2GjuTHcJqlYa04ck_uH2EUlAWS4FAyTGNPk6gzGI8DNkwqETF1QMkFFw06fNJiCB-OQo3Fdo8RxjQ3GzfiPUvC35RROWIGSloEPMIRehq8r6QG8lM3Cqb0QoTYt9X/s1600-h/Picture+2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 262px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCiLPtmS_2GjuTHcJqlYa04ck_uH2EUlAWS4FAyTGNPk6gzGI8DNkwqETF1QMkFFw06fNJiCB-OQo3Fdo8RxjQ3GzfiPUvC35RROWIGSloEPMIRehq8r6QG8lM3Cqb0QoTYt9X/s400/Picture+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399909814034794386" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"> Figure 1. Ethologists hiding in the field</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">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</span>.<br /><br />Lacking dedicated instruments, subjects and scenes of enquiry, ethologists assumed objectivity, crucially, through strategies of <span style="font-style: italic;">observational practice</span>: 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Self-effacing scientists</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">1. Effacement through invisibility</span><br /><br />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).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRoFjoRvgy5uhuCE2d7TSyqoj9XRrzw18C45MM0KB-sRMN00lmjRpbteKAq4FKWXQTf3mWfcAzXuAZx2AaZiKtvrZucwKg5uT4S2cJuDR9UpKVlRjbdFCE4EqMqnD7ejGoYvgK/s1600-h/Picture+3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 335px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRoFjoRvgy5uhuCE2d7TSyqoj9XRrzw18C45MM0KB-sRMN00lmjRpbteKAq4FKWXQTf3mWfcAzXuAZx2AaZiKtvrZucwKg5uT4S2cJuDR9UpKVlRjbdFCE4EqMqnD7ejGoYvgK/s400/Picture+3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399910030966522082" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"> Figure 2. “Examples of observation hides” (from Pettingill, 1970, <span style="font-style: italic;">Ornithology in Laboratory and Field</span>, reprinted in Lehner, p. 67) </span><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">trust</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">2. Objectivity through interchangeability </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>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,<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">3. Heroic effacement of the body </span><br /><br />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. <span style="font-style: italic;">The evolution of behaviour</span>, 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<br /><blockquote><br />‘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.'<br /></blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOe50vr_NhJlz1FdZ_tIZjHWt00kgODVSBqY82M0WVuifVJQ9-2XGbe38BTMsE6kAAexBBvYcW1mlQaIeGEkYtAGYQds0WxLxd6dfk3w_wrlAvG3RKivR1W0hVSUrkJzwXY3oe/s1600-h/Picture+4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 278px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOe50vr_NhJlz1FdZ_tIZjHWt00kgODVSBqY82M0WVuifVJQ9-2XGbe38BTMsE6kAAexBBvYcW1mlQaIeGEkYtAGYQds0WxLxd6dfk3w_wrlAvG3RKivR1W0hVSUrkJzwXY3oe/s400/Picture+4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399910276812205874" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Figure 3: Niko Tinbergen building a hide for reconnaissance observation in the late 1920s</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">4. Photographic objectivity</span><br /><br />All this self-effacement recalls Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s point in their paper ‘<span style="font-style: italic;">The Image of Objectivity</span>’ 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.<br /><br />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’.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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’.<br /><br />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:<br /><blockquote><br />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. </blockquote><br />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’.<br /><br />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’<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Delight and love</span><br /><br />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.<br /><blockquote><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;">The foundations of ecology</span>, p. 47)</blockquote><br /><br />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?<br /><br />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’<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Lorenz also offers analogies between hunters and ethologists in his popular work, <span style="font-style: italic;">Man and Dog</span>, 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).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOSzTACL3cK9pL0BttYgP34gvB8un6wfe-bTysFI-lD0XFE7wZp3VyzXqCKBJ6n7mQzOmdtYV-H9ZHlYU3kTmShhXXhZc3x9GzOskoiaeukBDcmioyHRDXALz6QTeT8qsYDFg5/s1600-h/Picture+5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOSzTACL3cK9pL0BttYgP34gvB8un6wfe-bTysFI-lD0XFE7wZp3VyzXqCKBJ6n7mQzOmdtYV-H9ZHlYU3kTmShhXXhZc3x9GzOskoiaeukBDcmioyHRDXALz6QTeT8qsYDFg5/s400/Picture+5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399910527616581186" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Figure 4. Lorenz, literally effacing his body, with two greylag goslings.</span><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">legitimate</span> empathy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Negative Capability </span><br /><br />In their paper <span style="font-style: italic;">The Image of Objectivity</span>, 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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Umwelt</span>. 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.<br /><br />The ethologist seeks to understand, as the title of Tinbergen’s collection of essays, the animal and its world – the animal’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Umwelten</span>. ‘The ethologist must’ wrote Dyer and Brockman, view the animal as the subject of its <span style="font-style: italic;">Umwelt</span>, and … imagine what it would be like to be the one at the centre of that world’. They continue:<br /><blockquote><br />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.<br /></blockquote><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Umwelt</span>, 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">am</span> the animal’.<br /><br /><br />(For refs and bibliography ask me if you're in need. I have <span style="font-style: italic;">most</span> of them here)<br /><br /><br /></div>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-49064713301989139292009-10-30T15:22:00.004+00:002009-10-30T15:40:05.154+00:00Apes and PeacocksThe end of October is by far the best time to be in Cambridge. You get flat and delicate mists in the morning that burn away to a sky of candescent seawater over the spires by afternoon. And the streets are thick with yellow leaves and yelling cyclists.<br /><br />Which makes me sad that I'm leaving it. Only for a few months, mind. I don't have enough money coming in to continue living here. Not right now. So back to my mum's in Hampshire for what is half a rest-cure (open wood fire, warmth, food, good company, walks) and half a work-fest (big desk, broadband, a working telephone). With a once-a-week jaunt back up here to teach and see my friends.<br /><br />So I'm finally packing up the house and hmm. But I am sure my mother will be delighted by the cased pike, the red deer antlers, the sets of gos feathers, piles of paper, book boxes, bags of frozen venison and computer cables that'll accompany my passage.Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-26347368817442974942009-10-29T10:10:00.010+00:002009-10-29T11:03:32.437+00:00Just desertSo last Friday mum and I are doing the Lawrence of Arabia thing. Oh yes. We're curled up in sleeping bags under a thick desert sky. It's 2am and what wakes me is light. A lot of it. It's strobing off the cliffs opposite.<br /><br />Ah. Some part of my mind can't help counting, then; one two three four five six and a deep surge of thunder rolls up the desert and over our sleeping bags.<br /><br />Oh not again, I’m thinking.<br /><br />I have this ability to conjure storms in deserts. It's happened twice before. And it's happening again.<br /><br />Four hundred yards from camp, then, are two little horizontal figures in the sand, one asleep, on her side, and the other lying on her back watching the dark slowly swallow the constellations, left to right, and knowing that the rain would come. It always does.<br /><br />So we dragged ourselves back to the camp, where the rest of our tourist brethren slept, and waited. And it is sufficient to record that the rest of the night involved being rained-upon inside goatskin tents, then poured upon, as Ibrahim and his workers dragged huge tarpaulins across the roof, wicking gallons of desert rainwater upon scores of horrified tourists. Hahaha. The ngiht ended in damp exhausted sleep, most of us in a pile in the middle of the tent, competing for scraps of dry floor, snoring and flapping like walruses.<br /><br />It was very funny. It also pissed a lot of people off.<br />.<br />Which pissed me off.<br /><br />Anyway, birds of course. So. Wadi Rum is familiar to anyone who’s watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Lawrence of Arabia</span>. It looks like this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBbmHK3GwFzu1kP4CoVsdhoDSvFLKZ7AlM8k-Qkd1weXH-UHLyVma6kJ6kY9ybaxcLKlSNlhVw_4mEWoQUCGcfECBOw3clZ405lvvTL3cwtkU0p10U96-2X7R1-ZyAwoPm_l8/s1600-h/Wadi_rum.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBbmHK3GwFzu1kP4CoVsdhoDSvFLKZ7AlM8k-Qkd1weXH-UHLyVma6kJ6kY9ybaxcLKlSNlhVw_4mEWoQUCGcfECBOw3clZ405lvvTL3cwtkU0p10U96-2X7R1-ZyAwoPm_l8/s400/Wadi_rum.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397963574639738546" border="0" /></a><br />i.e. vast seas of trout-pink and scorched orange sand, from which rise massifs that resemble in places aerated milk chocolate and in other places lungs of cold tar. And the sand is full and readable. Nocturnal lizards' dinted footfalls to their holes. Jerboa pads. The sinuous little canyons of snake trails. Desert lark feet thickly stitched over the sand. I'm horribly ignorant about mammals: these prints could be foxes. Or cats. Or caracals.<br /><br />The noise of this desert is disconcerting. It’s either silence so deep the blood thumps in your ears, or, suddenly, it's full of noise. A noise like someone tuning a short-wave radio at top volume. Or making drunken wolf-whistles that echo exuberance between cliffs. And then the flock of birds shouting and whistling wheels round the corner and lights on a crag. Tristram’s grackles. Slim black starlings with a purple sheen, a fluting flight and deep orange primary patch that matches the evening cliff-face so precisely in colour that for a space of a few minutes near sunset it’s as if they fly with a hole cut out of their wings.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTuhvsfFoSThuad-ij8UB-7b4hiQu3pgPv1LkKB4aetpyv0ZSLd-472MFJfYCFDWakP2Px75wj0p7RJd1-NgNCwdBR-4T-RfwBZ3Fd7856hYuQl52HpaC2UlcFZbSowmfM5mCK/s1600-h/tristrams-grackle-israel-spring-2009.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 350px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTuhvsfFoSThuad-ij8UB-7b4hiQu3pgPv1LkKB4aetpyv0ZSLd-472MFJfYCFDWakP2Px75wj0p7RJd1-NgNCwdBR-4T-RfwBZ3Fd7856hYuQl52HpaC2UlcFZbSowmfM5mCK/s400/tristrams-grackle-israel-spring-2009.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397971300764824002" border="0" /></a><br />And there are rosefinches, too. Scores of them. Some feed on seeds on the lee side of the cliff. Others hop about eating the dry scraps of flatbread the Bedouin guides scattered on the roof of the kitchen tent. They’re blank little birds, constantly calling. Cream-paper coloured females, and males carmine-red with silver crowns. They are beautiful and unaccountably boring.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi962C_kYfrgMaPRtRwHOFLmV9JhJQEEYwIYSA1l1ip2MpJ9aNlt8wJaLkSOSoBOuxihme3aUdJAhoZmy3SdQM7vY2EEf3PRlxO09jJkz4GHluoeAXnpQWtgugqMPdEfIUPS5aX/s1600-h/SinaiRosefinch.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi962C_kYfrgMaPRtRwHOFLmV9JhJQEEYwIYSA1l1ip2MpJ9aNlt8wJaLkSOSoBOuxihme3aUdJAhoZmy3SdQM7vY2EEf3PRlxO09jJkz4GHluoeAXnpQWtgugqMPdEfIUPS5aX/s400/SinaiRosefinch.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397971160037653698" border="0" /></a><br />Oh, and there was a sooty falcon, too, the next morning, cleaving its way through a milky sky on its way somewhere fast. And brown-necked ravens. And hooded wheatears and and and.<br /><br />But the best desert bird of the trip wasn’t big and glamorous at all. It was down among the white rock rubbish deep in the trails around Petra. I'd gone down there at dawn with my mum to miss the crowds. She'd wandered up to the far end of the site. I was dawdling. I looked up, looked down: and there was a bird on the rocks. It was whiskery and grey. At first I thought it was a female wheatear of some species or other. It had that stance. And as I got closer I noticed first that it wasn't. And second, its demeanor. It was hunting.<br /><br />Some passerines hunt so purposively you almost have to hold your breath watching them. This was one of them. It was hunting ants. It had a bold black eye, a sharp insectivore's beak, and the rest of it mouse-grey except for an astonishing, rather long thrush-like tail of shiny, obsidian black. Every time it hurled itself down to snap up an ant, and bobbed back up to its hunting rock, it fanned and dipped the tail, a species-specific tic of surprising beauty.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwCTuV-BQvnBHqfKkRe2fHcxopDXgJgcgIdj2_mWhb3JOev8MONjGpB3rylOhF_-8bwdaJ3lpFo40L4BhtiAROe_rti2skPhNiiaQFYJ9jv3ZkTbmQSFnZjP5-mhnSvneKY7w5/s1600-h/blackstart-israel-2006.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 334px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwCTuV-BQvnBHqfKkRe2fHcxopDXgJgcgIdj2_mWhb3JOev8MONjGpB3rylOhF_-8bwdaJ3lpFo40L4BhtiAROe_rti2skPhNiiaQFYJ9jv3ZkTbmQSFnZjP5-mhnSvneKY7w5/s400/blackstart-israel-2006.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397968996647091490" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Because I had never seen a bird as matte and soft which suddenly flashed a tail so glass-shiny that the bird hunting became rather like watching a ball of wool with a mirror somehow incorporated; every time the tail spread the sun caught it and flamed. Anyway, that was my first blackstart. And I left it snacking on ants. Nom.<br /><br />One other notable bird was sufficient to pull my heart halfway out of my chest, though. And it wasn't a desert bird at all. We were on a coach somewhere on the long, dry, King’s Way between Amman and Karak. The land here was brown. For mileseverywhere you looked was nothing but brown. Thousands of acres of dry earth and broken rock. This went on, and on, and on. No trees, no plants, no fences. Not even a cloud to cast a shadow on the scene. Your eyes start to hurt in their search for novelty. And then, on a low slope just by the road, a small concrete house. In the garden, one palm tree, a scruffy oleander, and a chain-link fence. The eye fastens greedily on the two spots of green as the bus went past and away back into the brown desert. But not before seeing a bird: perched inside one of the links, his breast facing the bus, was a stunning cock redstart.<br /><br />A few months ago this bird would have been nesting in wet woodlands in northern Europe. He was on his way to Africa to winter. And now, in October heat and in the middle of nothing, he had come down in the only patch of green for miles. And miles. And miles. The bus drove on. And all the long way to Karak and for several days afterwards, that redstart, with his bright forehead and his celluloid toes grasping plastic-coated wire in the middle of nowhere, burned in my mind, pushing away at me, as if I’d dropped something very precious from home behind, and was worried I might never again find it.Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-74277511729722449262009-07-02T11:35:00.002+01:002009-07-02T11:38:52.931+01:00Flat Hawk DownPlans to moult Mabel out in an aviary fell through this year -- if anyone has a spare pen, pleeeease get in touch -- but so far, she seems to be quite happy to renew her feathers on her bow. It's been bitterly hot the last few days, so rather than put her on the lawn, she's been loafing inside, with a bath to keep her company. And every morning, as the sun hits the floor, she engages in a spot of luxuriant sunbathing. Bless.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzO4Qnji3EYZ54i_lUIDM5ghtSpBEWuoWf1NqYT_oQCR1m6Ak2W9yL9ByG9y2ORB_gBpQ00Mefx3j2GQ-Kgn8PvTrqDa2ViuTLJk-lu2VTLV0ln65es3JAmlq2rjPCA16Zy6md/s1600-h/mabelflat2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzO4Qnji3EYZ54i_lUIDM5ghtSpBEWuoWf1NqYT_oQCR1m6Ak2W9yL9ByG9y2ORB_gBpQ00Mefx3j2GQ-Kgn8PvTrqDa2ViuTLJk-lu2VTLV0ln65es3JAmlq2rjPCA16Zy6md/s400/mabelflat2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353809952317747410" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuXfe0Fk_Obq6UPV-Akp9Xue8J3I7WxM0M8KcnQc1TbIJ6gUk90BPtg7xZFPb1Q1OjUsWB-jzdHAHyeLo53QeAN26pu0SK-EjqBRIJGSUe4gJGQ2kyE6C1bVkS6Cp8XgIRg8X/s1600-h/flatmabel1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuXfe0Fk_Obq6UPV-Akp9Xue8J3I7WxM0M8KcnQc1TbIJ6gUk90BPtg7xZFPb1Q1OjUsWB-jzdHAHyeLo53QeAN26pu0SK-EjqBRIJGSUe4gJGQ2kyE6C1bVkS6Cp8XgIRg8X/s400/flatmabel1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353809798808515058" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16420358.post-34523235776517267312009-05-16T09:39:00.007+01:002009-05-16T09:59:27.124+01:00Hazel, Peacock, Little Shop<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh45b2vLrQNV4rM8Yueurq8AZySQPDAQ0CGP1RwRi1KaV0ANxjmERCo6b0mNF8CTPuFh359uFOhxq-6Uz0To-yzex4wg-P2kDHx73341ecOtEPN4JZLTFql7cbOQIi-CLGXkLXR/s1600-h/hazel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh45b2vLrQNV4rM8Yueurq8AZySQPDAQ0CGP1RwRi1KaV0ANxjmERCo6b0mNF8CTPuFh359uFOhxq-6Uz0To-yzex4wg-P2kDHx73341ecOtEPN4JZLTFql7cbOQIi-CLGXkLXR/s400/hazel.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336343656335616658" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuU1ahU_SdSl4uTp96Rpa6XAjn4lNe4Zeo8I6FMpRlWdkz7nwGJmVgwD5nIF-7NOBc1urv9zOHR5ORsMI7RDgszOn7yYpfGNJ8w9sxp89SuWPjynfyaA41zldndLB4Ss1__5vA/s1600-h/sign.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuU1ahU_SdSl4uTp96Rpa6XAjn4lNe4Zeo8I6FMpRlWdkz7nwGJmVgwD5nIF-7NOBc1urv9zOHR5ORsMI7RDgszOn7yYpfGNJ8w9sxp89SuWPjynfyaA41zldndLB4Ss1__5vA/s400/sign.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336342034225145634" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgnqBKArh4Tt9ylBXebhG7fmD4_RojCXA4YO4xN6pzTa7pLbbjyiPo9U9QfVgoYkuvz84LYvXncfbAM1UgaF8-GgUQXeiwDZODv-4s39FTk7yfkCibDqNgogdqj-LRfU5Ox7M6/s1600-h/b3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgnqBKArh4Tt9ylBXebhG7fmD4_RojCXA4YO4xN6pzTa7pLbbjyiPo9U9QfVgoYkuvz84LYvXncfbAM1UgaF8-GgUQXeiwDZODv-4s39FTk7yfkCibDqNgogdqj-LRfU5Ox7M6/s400/b3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336341721132963410" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7exSAHbfq_oKVNdPCpweRC4TdKTkCjHSVo5EZqGc9W8PJE07GkxlLmehlHDWAFW1nmW_ZkkuDN6I-Kel5nnDT874GnYw6sMvdlYvTg7VZnlw78KWm81IDD1sL4hCM8y5q4O3Z/s1600-h/b2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7exSAHbfq_oKVNdPCpweRC4TdKTkCjHSVo5EZqGc9W8PJE07GkxlLmehlHDWAFW1nmW_ZkkuDN6I-Kel5nnDT874GnYw6sMvdlYvTg7VZnlw78KWm81IDD1sL4hCM8y5q4O3Z/s400/b2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336341550106317634" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPm62Q0w-ZIF069uF8Yk_S3OFpaHC13yYIn_5zvOufK5e_IRb030JpgKhiXLO8EZIKDNomjD-rYQWjnghCBa1u-mjajHHn7RvjU9lOvSsRxC6uUi0VaqbWkupW4oMUcXNxumz/s1600-h/b01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPm62Q0w-ZIF069uF8Yk_S3OFpaHC13yYIn_5zvOufK5e_IRb030JpgKhiXLO8EZIKDNomjD-rYQWjnghCBa1u-mjajHHn7RvjU9lOvSsRxC6uUi0VaqbWkupW4oMUcXNxumz/s400/b01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336339333021851794" border="0" /></a>Pluvialishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13215485499944146575noreply@blogger.com0