fretmarks

Probably the best book index ever

2011-07-22T13:38:00.007+01:00

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

2011-04-17T23:56:00.003+01:00

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

2010-09-07T15:13:00.006+01:00

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

2010-09-06T16:23:00.006+01:00

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

2010-06-23T18:07:00.006+01:00

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

2010-06-22T19:42:00.004+01:00

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

2010-06-15T14:58:00.002+01:00

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

2010-06-15T11:20:00.002+01:00

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

2010-06-14T11:32:00.000+01:00

I have become addicted to this.

Why the hell

2010-06-13T23:04:00.006+01:00

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...

2010-04-24T09:38:00.001+01:00

Rightmove delight!

Fever

2010-04-24T09:29:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-20T10:43:00.014+01:00

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

2010-04-20T10:38:00.000+01:00

Ash

2010-04-19T10:10:00.001+01:00

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

2010-02-22T10:50:00.002Z

Gossss

2009-11-06T12:53:00.000Z

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

2009-11-03T16:30:00.003Z

The following post

2009-11-03T16:19:00.002Z

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

2009-11-03T15:55:00.007Z

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)

Apes and Peacocks

2009-10-30T15:22:00.004Z

The 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.

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.

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.

Just desert

2009-10-29T10:10:00.010Z

So 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.

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.

Oh not again, I’m thinking.

I have this ability to conjure storms in deserts. It's happened twice before. And it's happening again.

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.

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.

It was very funny. It also pissed a lot of people off.
.
Which pissed me off.

Anyway, birds of course. So. Wadi Rum is familiar to anyone who’s watched Lawrence of Arabia. It looks like this:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flat Hawk Down

2009-07-02T11:35:00.002+01:00

Plans 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.

Inspector Calls

2009-05-19T10:52:00.002+01:00

I’ve a territorial, defensive soul. There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot and then some. 8am came, finally, and I was spilling with contagious rage. I'd seriously considered burning the bastard house to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol table.

I put Mabel back in her transformed, super-clean room. She jumped onto her perch, and then looked and was like whaaat? Blue masking tape? Aaaaargh! and bated. Onto the lining paper, and her talons punched through the paper, and she stared down and was like whaaaaaaat? What is THIS? Where is my carpet? Bate bate bate bate. Meanwhile upstairs The Birdoole is making his special noise over and over again, half starling churr, half white noise, which is the most annoying noise he can make and well he knows it.

It is at this point I wish – and I swear, fretmarketeers, that I have never thought this before, which may seem strange, but there you are – in the midst of this crescendo of hawk bells and paper tearing and beating remiges and yelling parrot – I wish for a VERY LARGE DRINK. Gin-based. Or gin, solely.

By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk, though fractiously. It’s soothing air; the window opens onto cool grey. A red Ford draws up. A man and woman get out.

The prospective tenants have a son, and he is autistic. I know this from my landlord. He must be, what, eight? No sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the imperceptible restraint of manner that is born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out of the car, my heart folds and falls because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper and is grasping in each hand a model sea-lion.

Downstairs the grown-ups are talking, and the boy is bouncing about in the semi-darkness of the hall. He is totally bored. I look down at his hands. Each of the sea-lions has chips of missing paint about its nose where it has interacted with the other, or with something hard, and I ask him if he wants to see the parrot. His eyebrows rise and he waits. A brief, wordless ok from his parents, and we ascend the stairs. He counts each step out loud. And we stop in front of the cage. The bird and the boy stare at each other.

They love each other. The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement at the bird. The boy just loves the bird because he is a bird. And the birdoole does that chops-fluffed-little-flirting twitch of the head, and the boy does it back. And soon the bird and the boy are both swaying sideways backwards and forwards dancing at each other, although the boy has to shift his grip on the plastic sea lions to cover both ears with his palms, because the bird is so delighted he’s screeching at the top of his lungs.

It is loud says the boy,
That’s because he's happy – he likes dancing with you I say.
And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.

He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect, and says, ‘lots of people think they are…’ he pauses contemptuously ‘…seals’.

But of course they are sea lions! I say.
Yes, he says.
We glory in the importance of accurate classification.

**

His parents are here in the room. One look at my tiny lawn was enough; far too small for their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.

His mother looks anxious. Come on Tomas! We are going now.

There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human-animal interaction I have ever seen. Tomas nods his head gravely at the birdoole, and the birdoole does a deep, courteous bow in return.

A minute later I hear the front door open, and just before they cross the threshold, I can hear clicking that I suspect might be the collision of sea lion’s noses, and then Tomas makes an announcement. “I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here’, he says. Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty, in the hall.

Hazel, Peacock, Little Shop

2009-05-16T09:39:00.007+01:00

Advertising Fail

2009-05-15T19:45:00.004+01:00

Whenever life gets you down, just turn to the internet. Today's offering is a British site offering free adverts for people who wish to buy and sell birds. And what a rich pageant of life is evidenced there.

Today's pick ranges from the astonishingly vague and succinct:

I want to buy a hawk, about half year age.

to the simply baffling:

I am looking for a pair of inprinted Very young Barn Owls in the wales area if possible

Why? Seriously. I'm tempted to ring the premium rate number to tell him that barn owls are less fun than anything else in the world. You know me, folks; I'm here to teach.

There are adverts from the hopeful:

hi there my name is kevin i rescue peregrins & harris hawks off people that buy them and dont realize the dedication involved in keeping them if this is you and you find yourself unable to care for your raptor then get in touch with me and i will pick the bird up from you we do not buy birds all birds must be free to us where a good home is waiting for them over 20 years experience with raptors

To the increasingly desperate:

right I'll be honest - I'm going 2 prison on 25th so everything needs 2 go. 2 male finish gossis 08 bird 650 1999 bird 500 bonded pair harris 500 male gyr pere and block and hoodtelemetry marshall trx 2 transmitters 600. if someone takes the lot 2000 they have the aviaries free charge.

Anyway – moving on – I dreadfully misinterpreted an advert, just now. This one:

I have an Alutek aviary for sale. It measures 6ft long, 6 ft high and 3ft wide with a door to the front. The mesh is 14 guage, 1 mesh. It is entirely made from aluminium. It has been disassembled for ease of transportation and consists of 7 panels.
The aviary is only six months old and housed two POWs for a couple of months.
£100 ovno

POWs?

I stopped reading like I'd hit a brick wall with my face.
Read it again, Helen.

TWO of them?

It's very Guantanamo. Is this some guy's private prison for ... but no, what? what the....backgarden prisoner of war camp? what? wtf?

But it was fine. All was fine. I had forgotten that acronyms may mean more than one thing.

I also have a male Princess of Wales cock bird in lovely condition and ready to breed. £35 ono

Relieved.

Wynges, fete, and tethe

2009-05-15T10:41:00.002+01:00

I expect there’s no-one out there any more, but hello anyway. I’ve been in a state of clear and present danger of late – my landlord is bringing some prospective tenants to look at my house tomorrow. I can’t afford to keep this house on, and am looking for somewhere smaller, and possible more remote. In the sense of being outside town. Anyway, thus: the last week has been purgatory. Clean, sweep, wipe, clean. Goshawk mutes off carpet (how?) (repaint walls) (where on earth did this come from, what is it, and where should I put it?) shit, look at the stains on this curtain. What on earth even are they? Etc.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I. and it’s not been making my teaching particularly inspired. Retaining the house-cleaning mindset in a practical criticism supervision is alarming. That’s what the faces of my students appeared to suggest.

So I’ve papered the floor of Mabel’s room with extravagant swags of lining paper and I’ve masking-taped them to the skirting boards. I’m going to stuff her with food, and hood her, and wait for the inevitable bate as the tenants are shown ‘her’ room, and that mix of worry, bewilderment, and rising anger in the landlord and his mother that having her in the house will surely provoke.

Enough of my polished panic. I wanted to tell you this: found a book the other day on EEBO (Early English books online, that is) which is already embroidered on my heart. It’s a book called:

The noble lyfe and natures of man of bestes serpentys fowles and fishes that be moste knoweu.

The writer is Laurence Andrew, who sounds very like a languid painter and ne’er do well in a village murder mystery, but no. this Laurence Andrew published hisbook in 1527, and it is glorious.

It does, as they say, what it says on the tin. The title is accurate; after every species, Andrew gives the ‘operacion’, or uses of the beste or serpent or fowle or fish in question; medical, epicural, spiritual.

So as I go off to hide the last few goshawk mute stains under judiciously-placed rugs, here are a few selections. I’ve done the most minor of tinkerings to them; expanding the contractions in the original and leaving out the operacions. I am preaching to the converted I expect but if one comes up against a particularly baffling spelling, try reading the offending word/s out loud. ‘Moche’ for much, or ‘fete and tethe’ as feet and teeth.

Reading too many books like this palys merry hell with your normal spellinges, btw.

Wild dog
CHama is lyke a wolfe / But it is full of whyte spottes ouer all his body / & it is in Ethyope / he is vnderstanded moche lyke a dogge / & lyke a dogge may be lerned to all maner of games.

Hedgehog
CIrogrillus & erinatius is all one & it is a lytelle beste lyke a pigge & his skynne is rownde aboute full of sharpe pinnes saue only onder his bely that no man may come nygh hym & it is moche lyke an vrchen / but whan it is layde in luke warme water than it is so glad that it stretcheth hym selfe a brode

Ant
ANtees or pismers be very lytell wormes and they be very wyse / they make their holes in the grounde ande bere the erth out / and they make a narowe entre into their hole & make grete prouision to leue vpon all ye yere after / the ante deuideth euery corne or or grayn that he geteth in thre partis that he caryeth into his hole / because it sholde nat shote and waxe grene in his hole or demesne / these antes cary eche other out of their holes whan they be dede / and bury them.

Hare
THe hare is a beste that is swift in ronnynge & alwaye full of feare & drede & exchewinge / it hathe longe eares / & his hinder legges be longer than his fore legges / & it hath bothe membres for as now it is the male and as than it is the female / & alwayes the lippes be waggynge vp and downe.

Mouse
A Lytelle beste is the Mows and eteth gladly bred or othere thynges made of corne or such as man eteth and it is veri diligent to gete his levinge wherfore it biteth many an harde thing asonder to passe through to gete his mete / and it is veri moyste of nature / therfore yf it drinke moche it dyeth therof. In Orient be myse as great as foxes / and they be of that nature that they will kyll a man In Arabia be great myse also / & theyr fore fete be as brode as the palme of a mannes hande and theyr hinder fete be as smale as a finger ende·

Goshawk and sparrowhawk
ANcipiter is a goshawke / and he is of foure maners. The first is this / great of body and wyll be sone tamed / and hathe a lusty countenauce wt great fete and longe talentis / and it fereth nat to set agaynst no byrde. The seconde is smaller & hathe great iyen & shorte talentis / & is nat lightely tamed / the fyrst & seconde yere he is but lytell worth / but the thirde yere he is gode & dothe very well and is named Alietum. or in Englysshe a Tassell goshawke. The third is named nisus or a sparow hawke & is yet smaller / it is swift and sone tamed & made to the game. The fourth is the smalest of them & is named a musket / and they be all lyke. The goshawke is of that property yt yf he take a birde ouer night whan he brauncheth himselfe to rest / that kepeth he in his talentis all the night / & on the morning he letteth it fle agayn / and though he met wt the same birde agayn himselfe hauinge gret hunger yet of all yt daye he wyl nat touche him / & of all ye birdes that he taketh he covyteth the harte.

Goose
THe Goose is a birde as great as an egle & the wilde gese flee lyke as the cranes dothe all in ordre / and like as the wynde bloweth so they flee eastwaerde. and they rest very selden excepte it be whan they do eat / & they reioyce so sore in their fleynge yt they slepe but seldem. And contrary that nature be the tame gese for thei be heuy in fleinge gredi at their mete & diligent to theyr rest / & they crye the houres of yt night & therwith they fere ye thieues In the hillis of alpis be gese as great nere hande as an ostriche they be so heuy of body that they can nat flee & some take them with theyr hande

Bee
THe Bee is a lytell byrde yt hathe bothe wynges fete and tethe / bothe and they be gladly in swete ayres. and they be very diligent in theyr operacions. and amonge them all they chose a kinge / but nat to be subiect to him / but they dare nat flee tyll yt theyr kyng flee before theim as a leder or a gouernour And the bees haue eche a different operacion / and theyr operacion hathe no certentye / some souke the flores / some gader the dewe / of this they make hony and waxe wherewith is serued both god & man / & they be euer redy to worke in season of the yere whan it is fayre weder

Raven
THe Rauen is a cryenge byrde yt maketh moche noyse but he can crye no thynge but crascras. The female bredeth out the egges alone and he fetchet her mete & the yonges be vij. dayes olde or they ete and vpon the seuenth day begine they to be black The [...] in the [...] partyes yt feghteth against the asses & whan they put out the iyen of ye bestes to thentente that the people sholde fleye them for the skynne / & that they sholde haue the carkas and flesshe / and often tymes so geteth he his mete / and he bildeth moche about toures and steples. and he warneth of […] comyng weder bothe fayre and fowle & eche in a different maner wt his crye and he lerneth very gladly for to stele.

Pheasant
FAscian{us} is a wyld cocke or a fesant cocke that byde in the forestes & it is a fayre byrde with goodly feders. but he hath no combe as other cockes haue / and they be alway alone except whane they wylle be by the henne. and they that will take this bird / and in many places the byrders doth thus they paynte the figure of this fayre byrde in a cloth & holdeth it before hym / & whan this birde seeth so fayr a figure of hym selfe / he goeth nother forward nor bacwarde / but he standeth still staringe vpon his figure / & sodenly commeth another and casteth a nette ouer his hede and taketh hym Thys byrde morneth sore in fowle weder & hideth hym from the rayne vnder ye busshes Towarde ye morninge and towardes night than co~meth he out of the busshe and is oftentimes so taken / & he putteth his hede in the ground & he weneth that all his bddy is hyden / and his flessh is very light and good to disiest

Gyrfalcon
THe birde Gyrfalco commeth ouer the see in company of many wilde geese. and at the nyght he taketh one in his talantys to thentent yt she shold kepe hym warm / & in ye mornyng he letteth her flee agayn wtoute any harme & in the daye he taketh one fore his repast

Bat
VEspertilio / a backe is a birde wt foure fete / and hathe a mouth & tethe lyke a mowse and no tayle / and it hath no feders / but it hath .ij. winges on the which be no feders / but thin skinnes facioned lyke a dragons winge / & therwt they flee / and it geteth his mete by night like the owle. and it bringeth forth her yonges lyke a beste with iiij. fete and it layth none egges· The blode of it is good to be enoyted vpon maydens brestes for than they shall nat waxe very grete. The braynes tempered wt hony helpeth the iyen of the water yt descendeth into them Ther be in Ynde some as moche as doues and they flye by euyn tide. they haue tethe like a man. and these be so bolde whan thei fle that they festen in the face of a man and byte the nose or eres of and shend a mannes visage.

Wasp
AWaspe seketh her mete of stikin gecarion / they haue stinges like the scorpion withinforth / and the fetche theyr mete also frome the floures and frutes of the trees / they take flies and byte of their hedes and than carie them to their holes in therthe / but the moste parte of them leue by caryon flesshe.

Hoopoe
VPapa is a birde that cryeth hop hop. & it hath a crowne of feders on his hede / but he is very onclenly. he is moche be the ordure or fylth of man and he eteth stinkinge erth. he that is enoynted with his blode and than gothe to slepe he shal thinke that the deuyll woryeth him. Phisiologus sayth that whan the hoppes be foolde yt they can fle nomore / than the yonge ones be so kynde to theyr dames that they let them laye in their neste for than their sight fayleth them also / and they plucke of their syres & dammes feders & they ouerstryke their iyen wt an herbe that they fynde be nature wherwith they se agayn / & than they sit ouer them & kepe them warme & fede them tyll yt they be fully flgged & can flye at their wyll.

Dolphin
DElphin{us} is a monster of the see & it hath no voyce but it singheth lyke a man / and towarde a tempest it playeth vpon the water Some say whan they be taken that they wepe The delphin hath none eares for to here / nor no nose for to smelle / yet it smelleth very well & sharpe. and it slepeth vpon the water very hartely that thei be hard ronke a farre of / and thei leue C.xl. yere. & they here gladly playnge on instrumentes as lutes / harpes / ta / bours / and pypes They loue their yonges very well and they fede them longe with the mylke of their pappes / & they haue many yonges & amonge them all be .ij. olde ones that yf it fortuned one of ye yonges to dye than these olde ones wyll burye them depe in the gorwnd of the see / because othere fisshes sholde nat ete thys dede delphyn so well they loue theyr yonges. There was ones a kinge yt had taken a delphin / whyche he caused to be bounde wt chaynes fast at a hauen where as the shippes come in at / & there was alway the pyteoust wepynge / and lamentynge that the kynge coude nat for pyte / but let hym go agayne

Sea lion
LEo marin{us} / the see lyon is lyke the lyon of the londe / but the lyon on the londe is full of pryde / & the lyon of the see is very meke / & ellis they be lyke of all condicyons and strengthe / wherfore I wryte nomore of him.

Startling

2009-03-23T09:41:00.002Z

Artist: Marcus Coates

Peregrine (1999)

Watercolour on Starling

Beach Trapping, LIFE style

2009-03-15T19:34:00.006Z

Way back when, on Assateague....boy, I am so delighted to see these again. They are photos of the early days of tundrius peregrine trapping on barrier beach flats, and show a world disappeared. I love them.

I wrote a paper on beach-trapping years ago, a history of science paper. Never published it: that winning combination (for winning, read losing) of insecurity and laziness conspired. Also, it's dry as hell, except the fantastic quotes from folks like Al Nye. I'm excerpting a passage below, though, if you're interested in why grown men buried themselves in sand with a box on their head, holding live pigeons...

***

In the late 1930s Assateague ran horizontally along the coast of Maryland and Virginia for approximately 37 miles. Attempts to colonise the island had been foiled by hurricanes; it was littered with the detritus of civilization; abandoned beach houses and wrecked hotels. Only three miles wide at its widest point, its broad expanses of open beach led back to rolling dunes with vast wash flats of sand on their lee sides, the largest of which, Fox Hill Levels, was astonishingly featureless; at least a mile wide and six or seven miles long, on a bright sunny day you could stand at one end and hardly see the other.

In late September 1938 falconers Al Nye and Bill Turner were treated to an extraordinary discovery account. Turner’s father and his friend Roddy Gascoyne had returned from a poor day’s surf-fishing on Fox Hill Levels and to relieve their boredom they had cruised up and down the flats with a .22 Hornet shooting the ‘great number of duck hawks’ that were sitting around on pieces of driftwood and on the sand itself. Nye was incredulous:

We, naturally, didn’t believe them at first and thought that they must be confusing these hawks with some other kind. Who had ever heard of seeing 40-50 Duck Hawks on the sand on an island! But they persisted in claiming that they were actually Duck Hawks, in light of the fact that they had seen several tame falcons of Bills, and had actually killed several on the island. So Bill and I finally made up our minds to visit the island to see just what was there.

They did, and were astonished. These birds utterly failed to meet previous conceptions of the species; these peregrines were far from the solitary inhabitants of sites of natural sublimity that Nye’s diary entry describes:

The habits of the Duck hawk on Assateague are amazing! Duck hawks in my mind have always been associated with high cliffs, either in mountainous areas or on high, rocky promontories overlooking river valleys. Then, too, I have seen them sailing majestically over Hawk Mountain, and also at Cape May. […] But at Assateague, they forsake all elevated perches, and really prefer to sit on bits of driftwood right on the sand. They actually look like terns or gulls in this respect. As a result, it is quite a shock to see the lordly Peregrine of inland lofty cliffs sitting like a gull on the sand next to the ocean .

They were shockingly anomalous. Almost every attribution previously accorded the peregrine was reversed. While the ‘rock’ peregrines were large and dark, these ‘beach’ or ‘blond’ birds, as they were quickly termed, were small and usually pale. While rock birds were found inland, and were largely sedentary, solitary and very territorial, fiercely defending the cliff sites that were their home, these blond birds were coastal, found in groups of up to 80 birds and transitory, appearing in unpredictable numbers sitting on the beaches and wash flats for a couple of weeks each fall. Whereas ‘rock’ birds were shy and unapproachable, blond birds were sometimes so tame that they allowed falconers to walk up and touch them. They looked like, and flew like, peregrines. But they were behaving in utterly alien ways, resisting previous readings and significations.

Nye and his friends immediately set about trying to trap these birds. They were initially unsuccessful, for their first attempts used technologies designed to secure sedentary birds in predictable spaces. Sitting in a blind watching a pigeon-baited net was frustrating because the peregrines on Assateague were unpredictably distributed across a vast area of relatively homogenous space. Instead, falconers actively searched for falcons along nearly 40 miles of beach from vehicles transported over by barge, their tyres let down for driving on sand. A trapping method was required that took cognizance of the free-floating relationship between falcons and place on Assateague. The trapper had to be as mobile as the falcon—traversing space, locating targets and then setting about securing them. Nye hit upon the ‘dig-in’ or ‘headset’ method on his second visit. On sighting a falcon, he buried himself in a shallow trench in the sand with only his head exposed, his half-buried hands holding a live pigeon as bait. A headset of loosely woven grass, or an up-ended crate, completed the disguise.

The results were immediate and astonishingly rewarding to the trapper. Nye’s account of the first peregrine he trapped using this method demonstrates both the emotional charge of the event and makes plain that the competitiveness of east-coast falconry culture was as highly-charged on Assateague as on the river cliffs of the Susquehanna. With one flutter of the pigeon, Nye wrote:

that peregrine took off and headed right straight in like a homesick angel and (snap) just like that. Came right straight to the pigeon. No dilly-dallying, no stooping, right straight to the pigeon. Here I was with very close to a heart-attack, looking through this grass. We had a peregrine, a wild peregrine sitting on my fist two feet away. And I want you to know in all sincerity my heart was pumping like I have never had it pumped before. […] I slipped my hand under until I felt the leg of the hawk. Boy, at that point, it’s a wonder I didn’t squeeze it in half. I held on so tight. But I grabbed that leg and then I reached with my fingers over and I got the other leg. Then I took the headset up and came up out of the sand. And…there I was with an immature falcon caught in less than ten minutes after I left Turner and his bow net down the beach. My god. Here I was with this beautiful thing, you know […] Then I made my first big mistake. What’s that? I turned around and went back down the beach and told Turner and his buddies about it. Oh Lord.

The ‘dig-in’ method was later mostly replaced by the ‘noose pigeon’, a pigeon wearing a leather ‘jacket’ covered with nooses attached to a long string that was tossed out toward falcons. The suspense, excitement and strategic planning of falcon trapping was addictive: ‘Trapping in itself became a very important and intricate part of my falconry activities’ recalls Brian McDonald, who trapped for a week every year on Assateague between 1945 and 1969. ‘I enjoyed the going to the beach and the trapping almost as much as I did having the birds and flying them at that particular time’ A code of tacit trapping ethics developed throughout the 1940s and 1950s concerned directly with the ownership of birds. S. Kent Carnie recalls:

if you’re driving along, and here’s a guy up in front of you, and he’s got a peregrine down on a pigeon, and he’s working it, the deal was that he would turn on the four-way flashers on the car, so that the lights were flashing, and the unspoken rule was you did not go anywhere near it. That was sacrosanct. That was his bird. You didn’t try and get that bird off of him; uh, I do know of […] some guy was down there who was not at all accepted by the group. And the guy had barged in and tried to trap somebody else’s bird and they, they simply roared in, bumped it off the pigeon and ran him off the beach, whatever […] So, there was, as I say, there was an ethical standard there; you didn’t mess with another guy’s bird…the birds were in the boathouse at the old coastguard’s station, or in the old hotel before it burned down, and they were commonly kept in sort of a big, common mews, and that was the guy’s bird and the bird was in there, that was his, and you know…mostly you didn’t mess with it.

Nye and three or four other falconers began trapping in earnest in 1939, when 22 falcons were secured . Despite the predictable secrecy surrounding the discovery of a source of falcons, the word spread among east coast falconers. Heinz Meng recalls how George Goodwin, falconer and curator of mammology at the New York Museum of Natural History kept ‘the island’ secret from him. In 1942-3, Steve Gatti and Brian McDonald, unofficial falconry apprentices of Nye, heard of ‘an island’ where falcons could be caught and asked Nye about it. He refused to discuss it. McDonald recalls ‘he even made phone calls to all the then DC falconry group telling them to avoid Steve and I because we were trying to find out about the island and he did not want us to go there and trap’. Nye’s anxieties were prescient: Assateague rapidly became the source of most peregrines flown in the eastern US.

From the 1940s onwards, Assateague became a yearly pilgrimage for six to eight groups of falconers, mostly from the Philadelphia area, some from the Washington DC area. They met on Assateague, driving cars or ex-military jeeps over the beaches and wash flats, some staying for a day or two or over a weekend, others, such as Jim Rice, Halter Cunningham and Brian McDonald, staying for a week or more. Throughout these years, numbers of beach birds showed no obvious decline, although numbers fluctuated greatly in relation to weather conditions during their migration. The sedentary rock birds, however, whose local prey-base was heavily contaminated by pesticides, began dying off in the 1940s—just as falconers turned their attention almost entirely to beach birds. Early trappers required no licenses, as peregrines were unprotected in Maryland and Virginia; later, falconry legislation allowed the taking of birds by registered falconry permit. Increasing property development on Assateague led to decreases in the areas on which falconers could trap, and in the late 1960s licenses to trap for falconry were revoked as a result of territorial conflicts with the National Park Service warden and the Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge manager over perceived over-trapping of an threatened species on what had become a National Seashore. By 1969, when the DDT-induced extinction of the inland race of the peregrine placed both beach (tundrius) and rock (anatum) subspecies on the Endangered Species List, trapping of peregrines for any reason other than scientific investigation was forbidden.

(With great thanks to Kent Carnie for his help and hospitality during my stint researching at the Archives of Falconry in Boise)

Writing, chernobyl-style

2009-03-01T19:58:00.004Z

What's four months in the world of blogging, eh? Well, I'm not entirely back. I'm finishing off a load of radio talks for recording at the BBC in Bristol this Tuesday. That's "finishing off" in a rather broad sense, yanow.

I can't believe it's come to this. I've had over a year to write them. Maybe I just enjoy the fear. Others get it from base jumping. I get it from staring down deadlines.

Ah well, they'll come good. Right now I'm wired on coffee, chocolate and cigarettes and my fingers ache from typing. In the meantime, here's who I've been sharing my bedroom with for a while. Matilda the merlin. She's destined for an aviary that's not quite finished, so I'm looking after her on behalf of my boy. She's a feisty little sod. Living with an imprint parrot and a mellow goshawk makes you forget some rather important things about merlins. Like, they bite. Try cleaning this one's beak after she's eaten and you remember it. Noli me tangere, dude!

Here she is having a good old preen and oil. She prefers the bow, before you ask. And before you even think of asking, those bags are full of old clothes destined for a charity shop. I don't keep the rubbish in my room.

The Birdoole

2008-10-23T01:32:00.005+01:00

Yes, it's time to redress the Mabelcentric blog!

The Birdoole is a parrot. That’s what I tell people, though in fact he’s a cinnamon green-cheeked conure, a colour variant of a spry little South American species the colour of a child’s paintbox. Bright green, with blue wings and a blood-red tail, and just the right size to enjoy lying upside down in my palm to have his tummy tickled, little nubby tongue waggling and eyes blinking in pleasure.

It took me a long while to realise that parrots like to cuddle, to be groomed. Little, clambering avian monkeys. We have a routine. In the morning he’ll whistle and puff softly, and I’ll get out of bed and let him out. He stretches his wings, flies down onto my bed and then sidles up, crabwise, with his little pinkish feet, to nestle right under my chin. He’ll murmur away in parrot Esperanto; exactly the same chunter of half-formed syllables and tones of a year-old child, then purr softly, preening my chin and neck with very soft nibbles that still make me grit my teeth; he can’t help it. Birds have feathers, humans have skin. Skin has more nerve-endings. Ow, yes, birdoole, I say. I love you too.

The birdoole was an impulse buy: I’m embarrassed to admit it, but he’s come to stand for the kind of unexpected event that seems small at the time but becomes lifechanging in retrospect I wa sitting down in the bowels of Starbucks six years ago with Xtin, who then shared my house, and considering. “You know, I think I’m going to get a bird” I said. “I really need a bird around the house. A couple of canaries, or something. Want to come and buy one?” Half an hour later, I’ve checked the yellow pages and Xtin and I are driving out into the lawless fenland countryside. We find the sign; it’s a numberplate-style affair, half-buried in nettles by the side of an endless, thin road that sinks and rises across dark arable fields. We turn down it, and pass burned out cars and anonymous farms. There is no-one. The road narrows, and turns, and we find ourself driving deep through a tunnel of six-foot high nettles, over a humpback-bridge so tiny and steep I’m worried the car will be grounded, and finally turn into a paddock full of portakabins, aviaries, and livestock. A couple of Dobermans; a sheep. A goat. Ducks. Wire on the windows of the cabins, and cabins full of birds. Big poffy canaries that look like they’re made of yellow foam and polystyrene. Tiny zebra finches, bouncing from perch to perch like hyperactive insects. Others. Bengalese finches, java sparrows. Christina considers them. “Can you … connect with these things? I mean, have a relationship with them?” I’m not sure what she means. They’re birds.

We wander about a bit more, and fate is set when we walk into the hand-reared parrot room. It’s got an airlock door, and faded posters of parrots on the walls, and there are a couple already in there, trying to interact with a beautiful sun conure who is not too friendly. And there’s a glorious green ecletctus parrot, and we stroll about. Right at the back of the room is a twilweld mesh door, and hanging onto it is a tiny, scruffy, bird. Both his feet grip the mesh and his tail is spread against it for balance. He is the smallest and ugliest parrot imaginable. And we walk in, and he flies to us immediately. He sits on my hand and nibbles and bites my fingers; not from ire, but because he’s bored, and he’s a baby, and I can see his little bright green cycling shorts and the irrepressible confidence of the thing. Christina has never held a bird, so we get the bird onto her hand, and it nibbles her too. Ow, she says, but her face is bright with amazement. I have a bird on my hand, she says.

And about twenty minutes later, we’re driving back to Cambridge with a cage and a bird in it. He's hanging onto the wire, bug-eyed and amazed by it all. "Widget!" he says. "Widget! Widget!" and makes little prrrrp! noises at things of interest: clouds, houses, other cars. And that's how the Birdoole arrived.

Birdoole has a very small English vocabulary. He can say "hewo" and "whatchadoing?" and "Birdle!" but his overall vocabulary is as rich as a sixteenth-century playwright. There're noises that mean everything from 'hello!' (a double whistle) to 'black-headed gull!' (admiring purr) to 'sparrowhawk' (eeeeeeep!). There are bath noises and happy eating noises. There are I'm sleepy noises, and noises that mean: I'm enjoying this piece of crumpled paper. Apple noises. Raisin noises. A double-kritch noise that means "running water!". The static burr hzzzzz! that means 'bugger off!' And of course, the high-pitched trill that means 'good night'.

Xtin and I joke (but only just, because it's true) that we've learned far more parrot from The Birdoole than he's learned English. There's a moral to that somewhere. Possibly.

Falconry

2008-10-22T21:41:00.001+01:00

I'll have the Birdoole catching pheasants in no time....

Birthday Bunny

2008-10-17T12:28:00.003+01:00

Best birthday card ever. Ever.

2008-10-16T12:55:00.004+01:00

Click for big. Aimee's drawing looks more like Mabel than Mabel does. Thank you Aimee!

Water monster

2008-10-13T14:52:00.002+01:00

I've told you all about collecting the goshawk last year. The endless, endless drive. The terrifying hotel. The appalling fried breakfast. The peat-coloured bathwater. The long wait on the quayside, fending off teenage heroin addicts and watching gulls pick bits of marine matter from the water. I forgot to tell you about the strange occurrence on our way back.

Nothing had changed in the car. Yes, I was poorer to the tune of several hundred pounds than the day before. The car had hundreds more miles on the clock. The weather was slightly different. It was morning. And in a box on the back seat was a goshawk.

There is a scene in that great Russian schlock-fantasy novel Nightwatch in which a group of otherworldly policemen, bored in a car, start changing the weather conditions. So rather than freezing on a winter night drive, they can conjure the experience of a night in more southerly climes, smell the breeze and the soft warmth of a different night, a different place.

Something like that happened in the car. Something thin and initially hardly there at all leaked from the box, from the goshawk. It was an intangible disposition of the air. It was the feeling of water. Water and some of those aromatic terpenes that you smell when you crush pine needles. A deep, watery sense. It wasn’t a smell. No: the car smelt of upholstery and hawk mutes and a whiff of red bull from the can on the floor. It was a feeling, not a smell. Aquaria and woodland ponds and liminology. Dripping conifers and stones and crushed wet woods.

I was driving south along the A1 on a hot August day, and my mind was full of water. I remember thinking, for no good reason, of Chinese zodiacal animals. Water pig. Metal dog. Fire horse. Elemental natural history.

Then I realised why. The atmosphere in the car had gone to water. And it was most definitely coming from the soft-plumaged, wobbly goshawk in the box on the back seat. Which (in one of those leaps of intuition found in dreams, made me remember how sparhawks and goshawks were described as being moist, of having moist humours, in sixteenth and seventeenth century falconry books. How you should avoid overdrying foods; how you should order their diet to suit their moist nature).

And then I thought, decidedly, yes. Goshawks are water. Falcons are air and hot stone. Goshawks are water and wood.

The feeling got more and more pervasive. Finally, intrigued, I swallowed the worry that I was going mad, and turned to Xtin, loafing in the passenger seat.

“Hmm" I said. "You know, this goshawk is making the car atmosphere strange”

“Oh yes” she said. “I know”.

“It’s like water and…”

“Pine needles and water” she said. With a voice that was as sure of the fact as if she'd pointed out a passing car.

We sat for a while, staring fixedly at the road.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh”

Dinos!

2008-10-12T15:56:00.006+01:00

Jake and Dinos Chapman? I love them so much. And now I love them even more. Driving down towards the Jesus College carpark with Xtin the other day, under the crisping horse chestnuts, I came across...

I laughed out loud. With real, real, deep delight.

They are here, on loan, for six months. And the installation is called:

The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth (But Not The Mineral Rights)

Raaaah!

Frankly, they are the best reason for anyone to visit Cambridge.

Back I Am

2008-10-06T19:42:00.008+01:00

Mabel's downstairs, in the dark. Her tail bell rings every time she rouses, and the sound comes sweetly up the stairs.

She's hungry. I can feel the hunger in her bones. I can feel it also in mine. Hungry and bored and frustrated, she bounced off my upper arm yesterday leaving two puncture-marks and a half-bracelet of bruise that aches and aches. It's the weather. It's been ghastly. Rain and wind, and she's been ready to fly free for a week. I've been keeping her weight screwed down, and every fibre of my being wants to feed her a huge, bloody crop of quail or pigeon. And also is praying that tomorrow the weather will clear, and we can go kill something.

The forecast is, of course, for showers or possibly heavy rain. A friend has told me I should be jumping her up to the fist over and over again to condition her and keep her from being bored, and I know he is right, but ... maybe it won't rain tomorrow...

She looks wonderful, of course. She's all grown up. And as calm and lovely as ever. This is her the evening she came out of a moulting pen. She'd not seen a soul for six months. Can you tell?

And here she is, special guest appearance at my niece's fifth birthday party, three days later...

Aimee loves birds. She loves, particularly, my parrot, The Birdoole. And she was keen to see Mabel. But faced with Mabel, all milk-glass chest and sinew, and burning eye and wicked claws, she cows at the last minute and hides behind her aunt. I don't blame her. Mabel's much....scarier this year. She's more solid somehow. Self-possessed. No shit. No messing about. Steadier in the face of the world.

Me too, methinks?

Oh, also: this was fun:

Ah, the best way to get around the hunting with dogs ban. "But officer....it's a CAT".

Sorry I've been away so long. No particular reason. Back I am.

Svalbard!

2008-08-08T20:18:00.007+01:00

As yet they're all pretty much untitled, but they're up anyway. Here.

More later, but for now, let it just be said that WALRUSES ARE NOW MY FAVOURITE MAMMAL!

Hello old friends

2008-07-18T18:51:00.007+01:00

Am still alive, and all is well. I've been giggling at Steve's post on Querencia, here.

Here's my response: an image from a greetings card. I love it to bits.

And...I have new additions to the menagerie. Can you tell from my slightly worried smile that I'm rather lost for words to find myself suddenly in possession of a pair of jill ferrets?

They'll be highly useful for bolting rabbits for Mabel and I think they're really ridiculously cute. Despite their being ... a bit bitey at the moment.

And courtesy of my brother, a picture of Aimee in her new school hat, which makes her look almost indistinguishable from Jay (from Jay and Silent Bob). Ha!

Guess who's going to Svalbard in a week? Oh yes. Arctic here I come....

Apologies

2008-06-04T23:46:00.002+01:00

For being such a poor blogger. I'm apologising right now.

I'm writing this goshawk book, and it's taking up all the parts of my brain that do words.
I'll be back. Really.

So: when did bowperches get crap?

2008-06-03T18:47:00.011+01:00

I don't know. I really don't.

They used to be awesome. But something went wrong, and I'm not sure why.

Pluvialis' guide to what you need in a bowperch (apart from it 'not breaking' of course):

Smooth bow-shape allowing the ring to travel smoothly across to the other side should the hawk bate.
Padding that will neither hurt the hawk's feet, nor impede the passage of the ring.
In indoor bows, a ring that falls to floor level when the hawk bates. Tail feathers always get broken by a leash that travels at an angle up through the train to an attachment point higher than floor level.

That is all.
It's only three things.
Why can no-one get it right?
Seriously, pretty much everything out there fails to fulfil at least one of these.

Broken tail feathers!

Ring won't travel freely when the bird bates: too high an arc

I just have no idea what this is.

It's as if as soon as falconers start designing hardware, they've forgotten about the bird. None of them seem to have watched a hawk on a bow for very long:

Is it that we're all flying Harris' hawks these days? Oh no, it can't be. Or is it? Is it? Is it that Harris's never bate, so no-one worries about these things?

No, it can't be. Can't be. For starters, American perches seem to be better. Mike's falconry supplies do a nice one:

See? Harris' hawk!
Northwoods' one is a good shape, though it's let down massively by the wrapping. Now, where did that talon go? Also, has anyone any experience of this kind of strange double bow? It might work. It might not, but it might. What happens when the bird jumps down on the wrong side of the bow? Do you have to make the leash extra-long to stop it getting brought up short?

No, the more I look at this the more I'm just confused.

The best bowperches I've come across in the UK are Martin Jones' ones. They are bloody expensive, but worth saving up for. Which is what I'm doing, right now.

The coolest goshawk perch I've ever seen involved the bird being able to fly down the length of a steel cable between perches about twenty feet apart. One of the perches was under cover. That goshawk was muscly as a pitbull and in perfect feather. I wish my tiny town garden was big enough for a perch like that...

Rant over. Anyone any theories, though? Why and when did they get so crap?

Update: my god, I have never, ever sounded so self-satisfied and snotty as in this post, have I. Sheesh.

Cognitive dissonance

2008-06-03T14:59:00.004+01:00

So we've all seen this, right? What I didn't notice until my brother pointed it out is that the photographer running his hands through his hair, far left, about six seconds in, is my dad. Ha!

Doodles

2008-05-30T18:29:00.002+01:00

Partridges

the parlous cost of lists. It were all a joke
from top to tip, belittle it for mercy. Stamp.
Wicker. All its legs.
The bottle fury.
& all that begging his superior
For all that

tippling and the onduline grim
carry-on magnificence with all those shining leaves
hood mistaken for plastic in the gloom, those weeks
serving clouds and the inspire glittering.
The traction is no tableaux.
Forgiveable, and soaking.

And she wanted to look beneath whatever the carry-on clued
snapped at hearthstones, stippled the paving with the print
of two brute heels. Never mind that the field started at her feet
in inch-thick plate that raised above her head to star the weald's
dark clouds with glass in glass. And it was impossible to walk.
Between ploughlines, two soft backs and lowered heads.
the pair whose little legs tucked and grains adhered to down.

Believing a skyline then particular was a way of moving
believing the blink after chat of whitened stones. Believing
chaff drawn down the line of the road accidental, and the
sileage mown. Believing fondly. Lone, and whispering
her parliamentary hides. Speak body. Welt combe. New
Halt. You can whisper birds for as many times as you like
but they are mute et svelte, et primaries wet as palms

alulas wet as thumbs, lovers of beets and ground.
How many those walked alfalfa. Toadflax and hairy bees
weak foci for the dispossessed. If I could plant plovers
in the sky. Or shake a westerly with landrails down.
And all its invented ghosts. And for all its clouds.
They run along the lines as tiny soldiers
all wintry & humane.

Colonel John Blashford-Snell, movie critic

2008-05-29T18:34:00.008+01:00

This is inspiredradio. The BBC World Service's Rajan Datar decided to ask Colonel John Blashford-Snell what he thought of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

In case you had forgotten, here is Indy:

And here is Blashford-Snell.Photo: Nick Wilcox-Brown www.nickwb.com

I think that's the right way around.

Anyway, I loved the interview so much, I had to transcribe it. They may remove the link, but for now, you can listen to it here.

To gauge whether, as some critics suggest, both Indy and Harrison are far too old to be tearing around pre-Mayan cities and Amazonian waterfalls, we thought rather than getting a film critic, we’d get the views of a real-life professional explorer. Colonel John Blashford-Snell is famous for many of his pioneering expeditions, like leading a team down the Blue Nile at the request of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1968, and navigating the entire course of the Congo in 1974. Today John is still active, and setting up future projects.

I asked him first if he actually enjoyed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Yes. It’s a fantastic sort of fantasy; it’s action-packed; it’s an adult fairy story. It’s a blend of … E.T. and science fiction and more modern sort of Cold War scenes, and the good old battle of Good versus Evil, of course, that comes into it. Once or twice it was a little difficult to follow the scenes because they move so fast—and a little bit short on jokes—but maybe that’s because it’s so fast-moving and there’s not a sort of boring second in it. And the stunts are absolutely amazing. I was much reminded of some of our own scientific exploration society quests that we’ve done in South America over the last few years.

We’ll come to that in a second. Some people have talked about the brand, the Indiana Jones brand, as being perhaps a little bit old and dated, and that goes for Harrison Ford too, I mean, has his ‘permascowl’ if you like, become a little bit wearing? Do you however, still exploring, still going on these big adventures—do you think he’s cracking the whip for Grey Power?

Oh definitely. I mean, a man at 64, 65, who can perform as he did was quite remarkable, I mean, his physical fitness and agility are quite something: outstanding.

In any way, do you have assignments that are as hairy, in a sense, as some of the scenes that you see in films like the Crystal Skull?

Well, yes, er, I mean, some of the, on the—a few years ago we did an expedition in Bolivia and, ah, Brazil; and that was actually looking for a lost city. It was Paititi in this case, the great city of gold. But Akator came into it, because we found—

—which is in the present film—the current film—

—yes, it’s in the present film–and I thought: golly, where did they get this story from? They must have read our book. One of the things about it was that we were faced with a bunch of neo-Nazis. They were real. And we were followed about by chaps with red armbands with swastikas on and that sort of thing. And this was in 2001. And so they created a lot of difficulties for us. And luckily the Bolivians equipped us with a wonderful Bolivian colonel, Hugo Cornejo, who was, um, built like Rambo, and his nickname was Rambo, and he dealt with the opposition..very effectively.

Well this is amazing because you’d think that films like this are in the realms of fantasy and bear no relation to real life. But what you’re suggesting is that actually real life can be like that…

Oh yes—I mean there were lots of scenes in it. The red ants. I remember being attacked by red ants. They weren’t as big as the ones in the film, but by God they can sting. I know, I was going to a dance a few weeks later after I’d been bitten and I was still scratching; and the girl I was dancing with said, ‘are you alright? Are you fit? Have you got a nasty disease?’ wondering why I was still scratching…

Did she hang around with you to the end of the evening?

No….she didn’t; she thought she might catch something from me.

But the snake was my only criticism. Because when he’s hauled out of the swamp by somebody throwing a snake … it was too rubbery and too long to be an anaconda. And if it was a real anaconda, two or three people wouldn’t be able to hold it, I can tell you; I’ve tried, and they are enormously strong. That was the only fault I would say, on the stunts.

I want to ask you about the authenticity of the archaeological references, you know; they talk about Mayan history; language and culture; hieroglyphics; and the geological references as well, to crystal and gold. I mean, how close are they to reality?

Well they have found crystal skulls; there’s a very famous one, which is Mayan, and the Mayan and Tiwanaku and Inca civilisations are still being uncovered to this day. I was involved in an expedition last year where we were actually looking for a meteorite that had crashed into the jungles of the Amazon. It wasn’t difficult to find, because it made a hole five miles across. And when we were digging, we kept coming across pottery. And we realised that this was pottery that had been from an earlier civilisation that had probably been wiped out by the meteorite, and I’m going back again next year to do another one like that. So there are a lot of references to archaeology which came though.

Now it does strike me that action films like this, ‘boy’s own’ action films, you it can either buy into it, and love it, or it can leave you cold. Can you accept that, can you see that there are two ways of looking at this film?

Yes, there are. I thought they were very clever in bringing in Shia LaBeouf, the young man, the mixture of the Hell’s Angel-cum-punk rocker; because obviously that brought in the younger generation, and made it more plausible. I felt rather sorry that they didn’t provide him with a sort of Incan Princess, because he didn’t seem to have a love life. And I think he provided a sort of degree of reality to balance all the old ones who were there; I’m sure the older generation like me loved seeing them all coming back.

Now, one very important character in the film is the hat, which is symbolic in many ways, and I know that you have actually designed a hat for explorers. Are hats that important?

Yes! Very much! I mean I designed one….It’s not quite the same as Harrison Ford’s hat, but: it was a small, folding hat, that contains a mosquito net that can be rolled down your neck to keep all the bugs and beetles off; it’s got a gore-tex material to keep out the water; and it has a brim that is filled with a chemical that which, when it gets wet from your sweat, goes cool. It cools your fevered brow. And it can pack up and go in your pocket. And I use it all the time. I used to use a pith helmet in the old days, but the trouble was I found so many South Americans were wearing pith helmets that occasionally, when I was saying to an aircraft doing parachute drops, “Drop it to me! I’m wearing a pith helmet!” they’d drop it to the wrong chap, because there was someone else wearing a pith helmet…

Which scene or moment in the film was for you the most gripping?

Oh I think the chase through the jungle along the cliff and then over the waterfalls with the Soviet amphibious jeep. That hasn’t quite happened to me, but I have had adventures on cliffs in South America, and I have lowered boats—not cars—boats over waterfalls in the Blue Nile. But I think that whole sequence, you gritted your teeth throughout and you didn’t quite know what was going to happen—the sword fencing, the great bulldozer crashing into the vehicle, the RPG7 fired by Harrison Ford—he seems to be a very talented chap—he’s a crack shot with everything he picked up! Whether it’s his whip or his pistol!

It’s called a film, John.

Yes!

The notion of defying death so often — was that for you constantly credible?

Well it gave me ideas, I suppose, for the future. Um, yes, I suppose, when you … things don’t go wrong, at, um, on an expedition, with quite the same rate. But they can go wrong very suddenly, and very quickly, and you need to react fast. Um, mentally fast, anyway. And of course nowadays we have the use of modern technology—satellite phones and all sorts of things to help you. But over the years films like that have inspired me, because it does actually — when you’re in the middle of the…you’re “Oooh! I remember Harrison Ford did this. We can do something like that” So let’s face it, it was good clean fun, and it was fantasy of course, but it’s entertainment in the classic Hollywood style.

Ah

2008-05-18T12:07:00.002+01:00

Dr Hypercube reminds me that Charles Stross is the master of the first sentence:

The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd.

Quiz!

2008-05-17T15:00:00.002+01:00

While we're talking of engineering, does anyone know what this is?

Clue: I took the photo in Idaho....

Downey!

2008-05-17T14:21:00.005+01:00

It's cool again, thank god; cool and rainy and green. I'm wandering about the house in a snuggly knee-length white scottish wool sweater and a pair of dark green tights: I feel like an extra in The Animals of Farthing Wood, coffee in one hand, parrot preening on my shoulder.

Let me tell you about Iron Man. The movie, not the other stuff. I was bewitched by this movie. Its political intuitions are of course daft, and its special effects, of course, glorious. And Robert Downey Jr is perfect, perfect, perfect. What made me most happy wasn't the screwball dialogue between him and Gwyneth Paltrow, nor the cut-out cartoon fundamentalists, nor even the dogfight between two F-22s and a man in a supersonic gold-titanium exoskeleton with a HUD. Though — dude! Both great.

What I loved most of all were the scenes where Downey, as Tony Stark, was working. Building. Soldering. Tinkering with metal and wires and irons and components and 3-D cadcam displays. You've all seen movies where actors have to paint? Like Kirk in the Van Gogh movie? And it always looks fake and forced? Downey manages to articulate with his fingers the concentrated addicted brilliance of the genius engineer, and I have to stifle a giggle thinking that perhaps part of his facility with this kind of thing might be due to his long experience with the paraphernalia involved in taking an absolute shed-load of drugs.

There's a sweet Suicide Girls interview with him and Paltrow here

First steps

2008-05-17T13:43:00.003+01:00

The erstwhile Kodak falcons are now Rochester falcons, and there seems to have been a concomitant lessening in quality of their webcam: it's always horribly overexposed. But they're still a treat to watch. Five eyasses this year. This, this morning, made me come over all soppy. Cropped with increased contrast from the Rochester Falconcam

Content-free!

2008-05-17T13:30:00.002+01:00

Tom puts it characteristically succinctly, in his peerless Skills-bills:

More dumb ignorant shit this week, from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

Jenkins' conclusion? "Keep raptors in their place"

I literally have no idea what this means. Anyone?

Scribbles

2008-05-16T09:28:00.004+01:00

The other day I came across a few pieces of folded paper. Bloody hell! Childhood drawings by yours truly. They are seriously troubling. So troubling, they're very funny. One is of a striped felt-tipped sea dragon with huge claws, rampaging across the page in a riot of frills and crests and teeth. Another is a hawk carrying a mouse, the tentativeness of baby Pluvialis' messy pencil attempt at childhood draughtsmanship quite outstripped by the bloodiness of the scene. There are even blood drips falling from the mouse's tail. Eww! And last, a picture of a battle. Thirty or so knights and archers, and appallingly-rendered Arthurian horses in black ink, with severed heads and arrows sprouting from eyes and shoulderblades, and big swords brandished high in an A4 sky.

I looked at them for a long while. I actually remember drawing them, and the memory of moving the pen is clear. What isn't clear is who the hell I was then. Now they seem to me to be the psychodramas of a very disturbed child. A child with tight lips, icy eyes and some kind of battle to settle. Anger problems? Hello?

I don't think I was this child, but it gives me pause. At this age, Viking longships and volcanos and dragons and dinosaurs and hawks and battles were my entire repertoire. But later there came pictures of girls with long dresses and animals on their shoulders—squirrels, perhaps — and birds sitting on their wonky heads, or hovering around them. That’s called growing up, right?

Drawing is magic, though. Really it is. I find myself skating bored over discussions of rock art's religio-mythical purposes. Drawing is magic. When it works, you bring all sorts of airy or chthonic things into the moving line without being in control of it, but still, being fierce with it. It's that half-in control, half-not-in-control delight where you and the subject of the drawing compete for existence. It's like hunting in all sorts of ways.

People who know me know that I draw birds all the time; while I'm on the phone, while I'm talking in cafés, sitting in seminars, on paper napkins in restaurants. Bits of paper, the edges of newspapers; receipt-backs. And it's true that most often, after completing these shorthand animals, I scribble them out so furiously that the paper tears.

I do all this quite unconsciously. When you draw an animal and it works, you conjure it into existence. Once you've finished the drawing, you have to let go of it once it's alive, and you don't want it to turn on you. You don't want the drawing to be your enemy. Sometimes it won't be -- sometimes the drawings remain decorative and never rise into life; they are merely the printed half-tone of a bird. These are safe and boring and discardable.

Sometimes the drawings are indubitably alive. I can’t explain this, bar to say that some birds become alive and some are never alive. The alive birds are the ones that make me happy, as if I’ve found them by accident; or they have found their own way into the world.

The ones I scribble out, furiously, are the ones in the uncanny valley. The ones that are monstrously not quite alive, but not quite dead, which makes them horrifying. I need to kill them before bad things happen.

My life is littered with pieces of paper with little birds on, and little scribbles where I've destroyed the ones that didn't quite make it.

This is why, if I do have a tattoo, it can't be by me. Also why it has to be a stylised depiction of a hawk, rather than anything attempting to be real. I don't know if this makes sense, but having a live animal on your back seems a very scary thing to have. Having a depiction, a design -- and from a different time and cultural milieu -- that seems safe.

I have probably just convinced everyone who's read this that I'm mad as the sea and wind. Not all of me; just my pen hand, right?

Ink?

2008-05-14T10:56:00.005+01:00

So I was thinking this is the perfect basic design for my first foray into evil tattooery. Shall be working it up into a colour version. Ooo I am bad.

Before you ask: left shoulder.

Question: blue/indigo back and tail. Yellow or orange eyes and feet? Red leash? Oh, decisions, decisions. Help me out, fretmarketeers!

Hippies

2008-05-10T22:01:00.002+01:00

The long-lost underrated sitcom.
Alex is of course my dream man...

The Professor and The Cameraman

2008-05-05T23:34:00.003+01:00

Soft but thrilling weather at the end of last week, here. Afternoon sun and shadow trounced by fenland light and fog into furry baize. En route to Wicken, great folds of pigeon-feather clouds coming in, and as Xtin and I opened the car doors when we arrived, the smell of sedge and mud and warbler-song and rain filled the vehicle from footwell to roof. Heavy rain, getting heavier. So we went straight to the cafe.

Wicken cafe is expensive, but by god, I love it. It's a shed, near enough, with a counter and melanine surfaces and thickets of tables and chairs and odd shelves with National Trust cookery books; and on a cold winter's day it fills with steam and fug from walkers and their afternoon mugs of tea. A few years ago it was run by a smashing Turkish chap, but no longer. I think he's in charge of the hangar-like full-on restaurant at a different National Turst property: at least, I saw him there a while back, and he enquired, somewhat mournfully, how Wicken was these days. "You must miss it" I said. "This" he said, gesturing into the cavernous cedar cathedral of coach parties and cream teas, "this is amazing, I love it. But I miss Wicken"

I do too, if I'm away for long. Xtin and I go there whenever we can. It's a creepy, wonderful place. Britain's oldest nature reserve, bought by some nutty posh etymologists a century or so ago. I've written about it before, so won't harp on. But it's a sprawling mess of reeds and dykes and pools and paths, with acres of carr forest and new grasslands being returned to their wetland glory. It's not pretty. It's flat, muddy, and featureless, and packed with wildfowl in the winter, and warblers and woodcock and hobbies in the summer, and is bristling with dragonflies; it's a treasure of a place.

Every so often, at Wicken, I bump into parties of student biologists from the Department next to mine. And sometimes I bump into Professor D, because he also uses the fen for fieldwork. He is often carrying a stuffed stoat in a wire cage to freak out the reed warblers, and he always carries a pair of binoculars. Of course. He is a behavioural ecologist, a fellow of the Royal Society, an astoundingly big brain, a Very Important Scientist, and also an absolutely lovely, lovely man. A chance meeting with Professor D. always leaves one feeling inordinately well-disposed to the world. He's just that kind of chap.

So when Xtin and I walked in as the rain began to pattern the ponds outside, I was especially happy to see him sitting at the near table in the empty cafe. And there was someone else with him. A chap in a realtree fleece tucking into a nosh of baked potato and beans.

Ah! I knew this person! He is a now-eminent wildlife cameraman; I met him about ten years ago back in Wales when he came to film peregrines for a documentary. And Xtin and I joined the Professor and The Cameraman for a natter, which included several cups of tea, two icecreams, and on Xtin's part, a toasted tea cake. He was there to film cuckoos, which are, in fact, Professor D's species of expertise, and they'd been there since four in the morning doing just that.

This meeting has FREAKED ME OUT. Because as we sat there and talked about jobs The Cameraman has done, and how he's just back from exotic location A filming this species, and is about to go off to exotic location B, to film a different speices, and how much his life is sitting in hides or going out looking for things, planning things, arranging everything around weather and season and oh how goddamn happy he seemed to be about what he was doing, I remembered something.

It was back in Gloucestershire. The summer before I came back to University. I was working for Jemima Parry Jones. My boyfriend of nigh-on three years had left me for a swedish intern a month before — how clichéd is that?! — and was a mess. I was also getting bored. Isn't that awful? Every day I flew display birds—everything from burrowing owls to tiny African peregrines to bloody great eagles — which was fun; and I worked with a lovely bunch of people — Jemima is an absolute treasure, btw — but my brain had gone to sleep and I wasn't happy.

It was an idyllic spring. Every other day we'd take parties of people out into the May countryside of the Forest of Dean and hunt rabbits with Harris hawks. That afternoon I was sitting with three 'pupils' on a sunny bank under an craggy singleton oak. The pasture far below us was bright with tiny wild daffodils, and the hawks were slope-soaring in a warm breeze that held them up just above and before us, white-tipped tails spread, eagley heads prospecting for bunnies. It was the lusty month of May, and it was a glorious, treasurable day. if Elgar had been there, he'd have got out some manuscript pages and a pencil. If Auden had been there, he'd have started composing on the spot.

I was miserable. Ya de ya. It's hard to countenance this, now, but I was. I was bored. I watched the hawks, keeping an eye on what was going on. But I was stuck. I was counting time. I was coming back to Cambridge to start a Masters in four months, and I couldn't wait. Bah bah another day's display, another day's hunting.

I was brought up short. I'd turned to check on the punters and saw that the chap sitting next to me was in tears. They'd made slick trails down his cheeks, and his eyes were swimmy and bright.
"Are you all right?" I asked him cautiously.
"I am" he said, with a catch in his voice. I thought the moment had passed; he turned back to watch the hawks.
But then he started speaking again. In a low, urgent voice. "You have the best job in the world" he said. "I've worked in my job for thirty years, and I've never liked it. I always wanted to do something else. But it's too late now. You come out here, you fly these birds, and you're out in the sun and rain and you're doing something you really LOVE. You are so lucky. I wish I could have done something like this when I was your age. My life would have been very different"

"Excuse me" he said, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

Right then, I swore never to stop being mindful of the moment. I'd forgotten, though, it seems to me. I've spent the last seven years in libraries, in offices, in cafes, drinking coffee and trying to write a PhD. Talking with Professor D and The Cameraman made me realise how much time that has been.

Yes there have been good things; great things! Great friendships, rewarding research; books published; a home; of course. But I am not an academic, I know now, and happily.

What I hadn't fully realised is that I've been hanging on to a whole pile of assumptions about the way to conduct one's life that I've kind of passively soaked up from my university surroundings. I think an awful lot of them are wrong. I know they are.

Xtin and I had our walk, free of rain. We heard a bittern booming, found dredged freshwater mussels, watched marigold-eyed tufted duck drakes being monstered by coots on the mere. It was a good, long walk. I've spent a Bank Holiday weekend back at my mum's house being a grumpy bugger. Partly because I'm freaked the hell out by the vision of inertia my sorry recent life has been.

So: time to start grasping for the things that don't just make life good, but make the good life. Goshawk's one of 'em. Roll on the next.

Wild at Home

2008-04-13T16:38:00.013+01:00

One of the pieces of work I give my students is an excerpt from The Stone Horse, an essay by Barry Lopez. It recounts the finding of an intaglio horse drawn in stone upon the Californian desert. It's as beautiful and glacial as his writing usually is, wresting the usual Lopez observations, bare-armed, into convincing moral curves and uprights. I'm not being snarky saying this; it's good to read sermons when they're written by a masterly hand.

It's a very good piece to give students. They generally meet it with bewilderment and some indignation. It's not a novel. It's not a poem. What is it? A piece of art criticism? Why does the speakers' voice slip from this ecstatic register so suddenly to science? How does the mixed lineage of the horse make it American? Or not American? What does American mean? How does this piece negotiate questions of identity...and so on. Bald questions. But the piece gets more interesting the more you pick away at it. Yes, identity, and a sly dig at myths of origin, and a parse at the point of art, and on what is looking. And more.

The Stone Horse is very, very good. Which is to say, it is beautiful, and convincing, and also slightly irritating. Sufficiently irritating that it gives you room, like two fingers under a cuff, to work out your own view of all these Lopezian dictats. No matter how beautifully they are couched, and no matter how magisterially, the pronouncements of the nature writer must give you enough room to turn on them. So you can think on the matter for yourself. I'm not good with authority, trust me.

Lopez ends his essay:

A few generations ago, cowboys, cavalry quartermasters, and draymen would have taken this horse before me under consideration and not let up their scrutiny until they had its heritage fixed to their satisfaction. Today, the distinction between draft and harness horses is arcane knowledge, and no image may come to mind for a blue roan or a claybank horse. The loss of such refinement in everyday conversation leaves me unsettled. People praise the Eskimo’s ability to distinguish among forty types of snow but forget the skills of others who routinely differentiate between overo and tobiano pintos. Such distinctions are made for the same reason. You have to do it to be able to talk about the world.

It's a killer last line, isn't it; and I've had all sorts of fantastically fun and sometimes excrutiating discussions with students about what is going on here. Some of the students kick back and tell me that this myth about forty types of snow is nonsense; others frown and get that intimation of importance, that just-about-to-sneeze gist of a truth-well-told.

What is interesting to me right now is what Lopez is saying here, because for the last few months, everywhere you look are books on The Wild. I'm not complaining about these books! One of the very finest was written by a very dear friend of mine, and I love it very much. And all the others, in their various ways, are honest and fine works. (Actually, one is unreadable, but hey ho). Wild is the watchword of nature-writing in the UK at the moment.

(Of course we never had the debate on wilderness: we don't have any according to the American model, and we're all-too-aware that our own wild landscapes — deer forest and crag and heather moor — were burned and cleared and painted into existence by Victorian lairds and courtly Scotsanistas)

And it would be too easy to say that this is just a publishers' bandwagon—that a best-seller on wildness brings more in its wake, pace the innumerable Da Vinci Code knock-offs that came and went after Dan Brown. And it would be too easy, I think, to say that there's something about today's climate and culture that has brought us back to the themes of the 1950s; of rurality, of lost ways, of stories of companion animals and of how we should revivify ourselves by identifying with nature, rather than some urban utopia.

I was looking at one particular book this morning, Simon Barnes' How to be Wild. Barnes is a sports writer, and naturalist, and has the capacity to irritate me so much I splutter. But I sat in a café and turned the pages and decided I liked this book. It does some interesting things. It's not afflicted by the manners of most nature writing — manners I share, of course. As soon as I think what I'm writing is "writing", I come over all high-priestess. It's ghastly. Like David Gessner's Sick of Nature, Barnes' book refuses the meditative. And it happily fronts the naturalists' pose; while making grand claims about wildness, it catches enough of the personality of the writer to make the claims human and personal. In this way it's an even-handed read. It's not a text on how to live, but a text on how one man thinks we should live, which is much easier to deal with than the moral certainties of an absent personality, however magisterial. And he cusses and swears and comes across as a slightly over-enthusiastic, occasionally bombastic soul; prey to arrogance but aren't we all.

I love that Barnes decides that wildness is like homosexuality; or at least, is amused that his argument works along those lines. There's a sweet story here about his attempted seduction by a gay musican, who explained to Barnes over long conversations that he was clearly gay, but just didn't realise it. And went on to explain that the world is divided into those who are gay and realise it, and those who are gay, but don't. "It is my belief" says Barnes, in response, "that we are all wild: but frequently we seek to express our wildness in strange ways. This is no doubt a result of repression; a result of an unwillingness to incur the censure of society and the strange looks of our neighbours. And this, thinks Barnes, is why we walk our dogs, feed the birds, go fishing, play golf, go swimming, go sunbathing."

Now this is hilarious—but I kind of love him for it. What comes across so much in these books, in all of them, is a strange and baffling need to present Wild as a monolithic concept; a single thing that's either repressed, or is motoring its way out or through you, and is found out there, somewhere.

It's not good enough. It's just not enough words.

I've written before on how hunting is like marriage. There are different kinds, and it does no good to try and write about hunting as if it is one thing. Hare coursing is not fox hunting is not fishing is not running down an antelope or shooting a snipe in an Irish Bog.

The wild is the same. The best books on wildness interrogate what the wild is, and find the concept wanting. Not complicated enough. But we need to go further. We need forty different words for forty different kinds of wildness, and we need to stop thinking of it as something transcendent or Other, as if it were God.

Let's pray for a little polytheism, as far as the wild goes. It's wilds, not wild. Lares, not Lare. Gods, not God.

My goshawk is a kind of wild. She is precisely the kind of wild that is my household god. There are other bits of wild are in my home; souvenirs of place and thing. Stones and stuffed animals and bits of driftwood. They're tokens of other places and other types of wild, and a little bit stolen.

But the goshawk is different. She is not really a god, of course—although something of the hieratic hangs about her. She's taught me that tameness and wildness aren't necessarily antagonistic. While the stones and taxidermy are frozen souvenirs, the goshawk is truly wildness at home. She makes my home wild while being tame herself, and it's the particular kind of wild I need.

An altar to the household gods, Pompeii

When I play with her in the evenings, even when she fluffs up like a happy kitten as she jumps around the room catching balls of paper, she's a particular kind of wild. And when I fly her out on the hill, it makes the hill home.

It makes the hill home not only because you get to know it so well, from crossing it so many times. And not only because she's flying across it — because, of course, when you're a falconer, you can't help but identify with your hawk, extend your consciousness out to imagine you are flying with it. But that's a large part of it. There's something about flying a hawk that makes you less than yourself, more than human. It's part of what lets this kind of wild be home.

What I am trying to say, and being confused in the attempt, is that for me, having wild at home is more important than travelling out there to find it. Yes, I want to be at home in the wild, but not the wild that everyone talks about. I need more words. Curses!

Which reminds me: I must go downstairs to offer a quail to my household god.

Two blogs

2008-04-11T14:35:00.001+01:00

The preponderance of the small
The preponderance of the awesome

This month's theme is...corvids

2008-04-10T21:02:00.003+01:00

The crow drawings are finished. And now, my friend Bill — you remember him — has just finished making an absolutely splendid new friend: a glove puppet made of felt and wire which is more crow-ish than any of my drawings. Genuflections to you, Bill: this crow rocks!

Vanity case

2008-04-10T18:00:00.003+01:00

But I can't help it. The locks are gone! Shorn for spring...and my efforts to erase the messy bathroom mirror background shows even better exactly how Pluvialis now has.....sci-fi hair!

Agony Aunt

2008-04-03T22:03:00.002+01:00

Oh yes! Today, in the Guardian's Agony Aunt page, a letter to which we, as readers, are invited to respond:

We have been married for six years and don't have children. My husband has a business that isn't doing well but he doesn't try to improve its performance, while I work extremely hard to support us. We've had many problems communicating about family and money — he resents that I call him lazy and irresponsible.

About a year ago, he changed the way he dresses, started to work out, and staying late at the office. I caught him watching internet pornography again — when this happened a couple of years ago, we almost divorced. Recently, I suspected that something was going on with a secretary at his workplace, but he denied it. One day, I planted a recording device in his office, and sure enough, she flirted with him shamelessly and he responded with enthusiasm. I demanded he fire her the next day, which he reluctantly did. He still denied having an affair and was resentful of my criticisms of her behaviour. Afterwards, I sent him articles on how hurtful an "emotional" affair can be, and he tried to justify his actions by attributing it to his need for attention. He said he is attracted to her because she is sweet, non-judgmental, and he needs somebody to talk to without worrying about being right.

My dilemma is whether to get divorced. I want to forgive him and start our life together again, but don't know if I can forgive him knowing that he was using me and willing to hurt me for the sake of his own happiness.

Agony aunt Pluvialis says: PLEASE, PLEASE divorce this poor, poor man, you complete and utter nightmare of a human being.

Number one in New York City! Number one in ... Memphis!

2008-04-03T17:40:00.004+01:00

Ah, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Back in the day. And I'd forgotten how downright dirty and fabulous and funny JSBX were. Or are.

I'd completely forgotten about this video, too. Winona Ryder does a Jon Spencer impersonation that might just be her finest performance ever. Check out Giovanni Ribisi and John Reilly as Russell Simins and Judah Bauer.

I promise never to write about music again. But it made me so DANG happy finding this on youtube last night....

I've had a few

2008-04-02T01:39:00.004+01:00

Regrets. Right now, I regret turning the heating off this morning, and drinking that cup of coffee at just before midnight. It's getting on for 2am; I have to do some examining tomorrow (no doctor jokes per-lease) and need my wits about me, thusly. And am wide awake, and very cold. Pah.

But it's all fine, because I'm FTP-ing up a storm. Off go the crow pics to the Big Publisher people. Luckily so; because I don't know if my poor CNS could manage another night of three hours sleep.

Being hugely tired is cheaper than getting drunk, though! Had to walk into town to get more art supplies today. Enjoyed the bottom-of-the-swimming pool feeling of disorientation. Not so keen on the headache and the grains-of-ash-in-the-blood feeling, though. Nor the half cup of coffee I spilt over myself in a sudden loss of motor ability shortly afterwards.

Lord, I am tired. Here's a broody rook.

Meeeep!

2008-04-01T17:46:00.001+01:00

Seriously, who are these people?

2008-04-01T15:48:00.007+01:00

Harry Hutton's perfect response to this ghastly, ghastly article.

I only go out with guys who read Mycenaean potsherds in the original Linear B. For me, Attic Greek's a real deal-breaker.

Dear Fretmarketeers

2008-03-18T14:43:00.006Z

I read, with delight, a leaflet on magickal tours the other day. You know: Rosicrucian sites, Cathar sites, Knights bloody Templar. An all-roads-lead-to-Rosslyn Chapel kind of a thing, with a nice pentagram at the bottom. The kind of thing to which Dan Brown has given a bad name.

What I loved most about this leaflet was the small print. For purposes of anonymity, we'll call the tour guide John Smith. I read this:

Tour guide: John Smith, BA (Hons), (Reading for History) MA.

Aaah! I love this. Made me want to go on the tour.

Yours sincerely,
Pluvialis, BA (Hons) MA (cantab), MPhil, (didn’t finish) PhD

Lost, but catching up

2008-03-18T10:09:00.005Z

I can’t hunt. Fate saw fit to make me allergic to horses, dogs, and foxes.

I discovered my dog allergy early: we had a dog. I discovered my horse allergy during riding lessons, and my fox allergy while skinning a fox to turn into a rug. Which, I realised, I couldn’t have in my house.

Allergies never fail to make life new. Three days ago I discovered I was allergic to reindeer. (Thankfully, these allergies are only to living, not cooked animals: reindeer venison is yum).

Indeed, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that most quadrupeds make me ill.

Though I can ride, I can’t ride for long. Twenty minutes on a horse, and my eyes are closed, my hands mottled with nettle rash and I’ve lost the ability to concentrate on anything other than fighting for breath.

So it’s not surprising that I’ve never ridden to hounds. And so, I guess, I’ve never really understood foxhunting. I’ve never been part of that rural crowd, and even though the Hampshire Hunt met often outside my parents’ house, by the grain drier at the top of the hill, ready to take in miles of good country, I never really got what it was all about. It wasn’t a kind of hunting I understood. Because I only ever saw the pink coats and the horses and the hounds clustering and the fence-menders and the police and the saboteurs. And that just didn’t seem very interesting to me.

Last Saturday I was back at the Hampshire house. It was a day of heavy rain and wind, and I was tired, and sad, and distracted. It’s a year Thursday since dad died. And while lots of times, talking to mum or my brother helps share the pain, sometimes the words won’t come, and the loneliness stoppers me up, and I can’t talk at all. So much pressure was building up inside me that by mid-afternoon I had to hide. I’d left the house to have a cigarette out on the porch. And standing in the murky light by the drive, I heard the music of hounds.

Even with my sporting ignorance, it seemed clear that the hunt was drawing the covert at Ham Farm, that thick copse of coppiced hazel, sweet chestnut and bluebells just across the road and away. I pulled up the collar of my coat and walked out into the near-sleet. Sure enough, a succession of muddied, battered 4x4s passed where I stood at the edge of the drive, windows steamed on the inside. They all turned left down the track to Wadgetts Copse.

After they’d gone, a long silence but for the hounds in the distance. A giddy, wet, rainy echo of a cry. My hair was wet and my cigarette damped to extinction. The asphalt at my toes was running with water, and shallow pools were slowly being born in the waterlogged paddock across the road.

And I heard a light pattering of footfalls, growing louder; a pattering of nails and pads through water to tarmac. Coming along the road towards me on his way to the covert, his head high, his body smeared all breast-deep in clay that stained the lower half of him copper-ochre, came a foxhound. A pale hound. He was alone, which was wrong. But being alone made him the type of all hounds that ever existed. He was running as if he’d been running all day, and he was running as if he would never stop, tongue out and eyes fixed. He was running to be with the rest of the hounds, and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads as if he were underwater and swimming up to the light to breathe. I was transfixed. I’d never seen a hound be a hound before. He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing, and he was tired but joyful. He was late, but getting there. Lost, but catching up.

I warned you

2008-03-18T00:04:00.002Z

click for big!

Gastronomy Domine

2008-03-17T10:24:00.002Z

I did some baking with niece Aimee this weekend, at my mum's house in Hampshire. Rather than the normal baking, I'd come over all retro. Cake mix! I'd seen, and fallen in love with, a box of ‘farmyard cupcake mix’ sighted in the aisles of a supermarket a couple of days before. The box showed beautiful little green cupcakes dotted with sugar farm animals. Aaah.

We made the cakes. Aimee sifted. I mixed. I turned on the oven. Mum’s super-duper new oven, in which the fan is so silent I hadn’t realised it was operating at all. Spooned cake mix into cake-paper cups. Aimee and I arranged nascent cakes on tray. Put tray into oven.

After five minutes, horror. I looked in the oven. Something primeval was taking place; an experiment. Not cooking as we know it. The tops of all the cakes were dark, dark, brown. Some kind of matter had spewed forth from most of them, and puddled and grown up the frilled sides of the cake-cases. As I watched, horrified, a hole appeared in the cake nearest to me and something white and fizzy came out, volcano-style, before drying and hardening into a kind of secondary vent; a horrible pyroclastic flow of hot chemical sponge and hot chemical sponge-gases.

“Argh, Aimee, the oven is too hot. I’ll turn it down. Our cakes have gone really weird.
She peered in.
They are weird, she pronounced, decidedly.

We took the cakes out. Aimee’s brown eyes went very wide.
“I don’t know what happened, there, Aimee. Cakes aren’t supposed to look like that, are they?” She shakes her head, staring at the weird buttons with tongues of pale sponge arrayed in front of us.

“Let’s get them to cool and then we’ll ice them” I said.

So we get the pack marked “ICING” which is a pale, minty green, and seems to be nought but icing sugar with colour in it. And Aimee mixes, and as the first drop of water hits the icing sugar she yells with pleasure. “It’s gone REALLY GREEN!” And it had. And as I drip water in, suddenly there’s too much water, and we have bright green icing which I already know will never set, let alone cover the cakes properly.

“Oh dear” I say.
She looks at me expectantly.
“You mixed really well, Aimee” I say, “But I put too much water in. Shall we ice the cakes anyway?”

Cake-caulking. It’s horrendous, because after the icing is applied, it simply runs off the burned top of the cakes, leaving them stained a shiny green, and rests in a thick, wet green puddle around the outside of the cakes. It looks like the Grimpen Mire.

Aimee is diplomatic in the extreme. She looks at the cakes, and then at me. “Can I put the animals on?”

“Yes, lets do that” I say, hoping that the addition of tiny sugar sheep and cows and horses will at least deflect attention from the appalling sight of their soggy sugar pasture.

“Oooh!” says Aimee. It’s sunk! She’s dropped a sugar dog into one cake, and it’s upended, titanic-style. She’s half horrified, half full of hilarity. We put a sheep on one and it slips backwards. Righted, the white sugar sheep is running horribly with green slime. “The sheep's green!” she says.

We top all the cakes with animals, including one horse with all-broken legs. Then we stand back and look at the cakes.

There is a long pause.

“Aimee” I say. “Do you know what we have made, here?”
“Cakes” she says.
“Yes, but special cakes. Do you know why they are special?”
She shakes her head.
I enunciate very carefully and seriously, frowning.
“Because, Aimee, these are The …Worst … Cakes…In …. The … World!”
For a second she’s not sure whether this is a disaster. And then I twitch my mouth, and she looks at these sorry puddles of burned sugar and wet green paste. And she starts laughing uncontrollably. “They are the worst cakes in the world!” she yells.
“They are,” I say. "They are a real triumph. No-one but you and me can make cakes this bad!"

She is so delighted.

And then later, around the table, because it is the anniversary of the last time the family all saw dad, at his last Birthday weekend, we all sit, and there are candles, and we have eaten, and we have a bottle of 1997 Chateau D’Yquem that has been sitting waiting for this very moment, and I mess up the toast to dad in stupid ways, because I am choked up, but we all drink this exquisite, exquisite nectar, and toast dad, and send our love into the ether.

And then Aimee says, “Aunty Helen, you have to eat one of our cakes”.

I can’t bring myself to do it, but James takes a photograph of The Worst Cakes in the World next to a glass and a half-drunk bottle of glowing, bewitching, D’Yquem.

It may well be the Best Food Photograph in the World.

Here’s to you, pops. Clink.

And the award goes to...

2008-03-11T16:43:00.002Z

Not the class I took last week, trying to teach Heaney and Muldoon while my head was increasingly gripped by migraine. That wasn't the most embarrassing moment of my life, although the increasing pain and a concomitant absence of any thought processes worth their salt. did make it the most most humiliating supervision ever. I swear they looked at me, with my random, fumbling attempts at exposition, with real pity. And some alarm. "Is this woman actually meant to outrank us, intellectually? She just said "Hughes" instead of "Heaney" twice, and she hasn't finished any sentences she's started for the last ten minutes". Christ, it was awful. I paid them off with apologies and a promise of chocolate cake and tea at the next class.

No, the award for my most embarrassing moment goes to: The Tesco Incident. Tescos, Camberley. The largest Tescos in the world, as the checkout assistant at Tescos Carmarthen once breathed to me, with awe in her voice. "You've been there?" she said, with disbelief. "Oh, I wish I worked there".

I had a basket of groceries and stood in the straggly checkout line for 'baskets only'. Idly looking about, my gaze fell to the basket held by the chap in front. He was thirty-odd; besuited in a middle-managery kind of way. And in his basket? Five packets of FONDUE CHEESE, and about eight baguettes. I thought this was sweet. He looked at me. I smiled. And said, "Well, I can see what you're doing tonight!" in a bright, friendly fashion.

Silence descended. Not just me, but the entire queue. Even the checkout girl stopped bleeping her goods past the laser and everyone listened as he said, in a strange, strained voice,

"I assume you're referring to the Fondue?"

And I looked again and — oh Christ. Beneath the packs of FONDUE CHEESE, and the BAGUETTES, were several HUGE PACKS OF CONDOMS. We're talking a LOT of contraceptives, here, guys.

Everyone in the queue started trying to stifle sniggers. I didn't know what to do, but my mouth broke into a rictus of embarrassed smiling that lasted the entire wait to the checkout, and then all the way back to the car, where my mother sat. My mouth ached for days.

No mere hackwork, this

2008-03-05T22:30:00.002Z

Which might be the greatest sentence ever to have appeared on the BBC news website:

Mr Weston-Webb, who supplies flooring to hit BBC show Strictly Come Dancing, said he will also use a cannon, which once shot his wife Mary across the River Avon in a circus show, to fire a railway sleeper at intruders.

It is poetry. Full story, which of course you now want to read, here.

Huukaja! Huukaja!

2008-03-05T21:56:00.004Z

I'm likely to never post on football again. But this is the most heartwarming game ever.

Apparently a pair of eagle owls live and nest in this Finnish stadium, hence this eared-chap's extreme lack of concern. And what makes this so delightful is the joy everyone has in its antics. "Isn't it beautiful!" says the commentator, and the crowd, as one, start chanting "Huuh-kaja, Huuh-kaja" ("Eagle-Owl! Eagle-Owl!) as the English referee casts about for some solution. Note: no-one tries to scare the owl or 'move it on'. I love this.

New Goshawk Game

2008-03-05T19:10:00.002Z

1. Scrunch up a piece of softish paper into a ball the size of a cherry.
2. Toss it gently towards goshawk's head (she sits there with her foot up)
3. Goshawk catches it in her mouth.
4. Goshawk throws it over her back and watches where it lands. Or chucks it across the room with a flick of her head.
5. I pick it up.
6. I throw it to her again.
7. She catches it in her beak....etc. etc.

Sometimes she misses, and cranes her head right round to see where it's gone. Sometimes she throws it straight away; sometimes she holds it in her beak for ages before dropping it. Sometimes she holds it in her beak and makes tiny scrunching preening movements before dropping it. Sometimes she squeaks. After seven or eight throws, she gets so excited by this game she stands on both feet and leans forward to catch her paper ball.

No, I don't think she's a cat. Or a baby. Really I don't.

On Peter Fleming's Rook Rifle

2008-03-02T23:40:00.001Z

"Mr. Money-Coutts writes from Berkhamsted and can perhaps be forgiven for his ignorance of the armaments market in North China"

Thank you, Patrick Wright, for mining the archives of the Times for this exceptional correspondence...

Not Cambridge

2008-03-01T21:12:00.005Z

Photo by Jon Miceler

Robert Macfarlane's account of his Minya Konka trip is up on the Guardian website. Glorious stuff!

Japanese goshawk....mmmmmm....

2008-02-29T19:08:00.001Z

Garfield minus Garfield

2008-02-26T22:46:00.003Z

How did I not know about this before now?

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Thank you so much, JP for bringing this to my attention...

Baby magenpeep

2008-02-25T21:48:00.002Z

Oh lord, a meme. Tagged!

2008-02-25T21:20:00.003Z

I've been tagged with this virtuous meme, via Steve.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people

Oh lord. Here goes...and this is the nearest book...

'But then the Moon is an even smaller target and one of 'em has just hit the Moon!'
'But what would happen if...?'
'If one hit us?'

Yes, we're talking about gobbets of superheated gas expelled by a superintelligent gaseous lifeform! Of course! Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, which I'm teaching tomorrow. Old-school science fiction; with a thinly-disguised Hoyle as protagonist.

Hoyle's tendency to write thinly-disguised Hoyle protagonists is a special joy: in The Fifth Planet he finds—to his delight—that the mind of his unintelligent, errant, yet beautiful wife has been taken over by an intellectual extra-terrestrial presence. In October the First Is Too Late, physics dictates that he finds himself in an alternate timeverse where he is worshipped as a god by naked women.

See, I said old school!

Time to tag. Meme. Come on, Xtin, Matt, Indigoglyph, Rebecca and Katie.

I don't get out much

2008-02-20T22:56:00.001Z

Afghanistan

2008-02-19T17:19:00.004Z

Thanks to my colleague Sarah for pointing to these images of Afghanistan by Simon Norfolk. The full set of images — and not one a duffer — can be seen on Simon Norfolk's website. Go to "Afghanistan: Chronotopia" and click on "pictures."

A BLDGBLOG interview with Norfolk can be found here.

2008-02-19T13:10:00.001Z

More pangolin

2008-02-15T15:30:00.001Z

Oops

2008-02-13T18:59:00.002Z

From the BBC webpage just now. Sub-editors!

Homesickness is misunderstood

2008-02-11T19:44:00.001Z

This Wired article is really very good. From Talking Pictures; which I can't link to, alas, because it keeps crashing my rickety Mac. (There's a link to her from Querencia)

Here's an excerpt.

Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They're getting sad.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Frogs!

2008-02-11T14:37:00.001Z

My friend Ben, who I've not seen for an age, has returned from fieldwork in Ghana with some fantastic photos -- waiting for the snake pictures, Ben! Check out the frogs! Here.

Happy falconer

2008-02-10T17:57:00.001Z

Wish I knew where this came from. Emirates? Qatar? By the way, male falconers out there, you are so lucky. No-one ever calls you a "falconess" or, worse, "falconeress"

I can't help making a face like I'm sucking a lemon when I hear that. Rebecca, do you get it too?

2008-02-10T17:40:00.001Z

Looking for a good proverbial expression for the brevity of life? May I suggest this gem?

Verily I do fear the stupid death of the moth.

Aelian, On Animals xii. 8, Zenobius, Proverbs v. 79

Mabel contemplating as her moult begins

2008-02-09T15:19:00.001Z

(click for big!)
That next year she'll look like this:

Only nicer.

Ye Olde Update

2008-02-09T15:08:00.000Z

Ah, fretmarketeers. Spring is here. Mabel's sitting in her bath, cooling her boots, with a crop full of prime quail. I'm gardening — gardening! — pulling long worms of white bindweed roots from the loam of my new flowerbeds, in a little, sunny break from work. Lots of it. Bindweed and work, both. Teaching, proofreading, working on illustrations for a book (not mine), and in between, writing the goshawk book. Still fretting about a title (suggestions welcome) but am astonished to discover that I've already (if you count blog posts and my lackadaisical diary) 40,000 words or so. Now I just have to write the clever bits.

Cambridge is beautiful in this weather. It's hard, this spring, though. For some reason the change in season has made me miss my father, suddenly, very much indeed. I'm broke, too, which is a bit tricky; my stock of Mabel-caught quarry has disappeared from the freezer, and I've raided all the jars of small coins already. But there are good things coming. My brother and his long term partner are getting married on Midsummer's Day, which is just thrilling and wonderful. I am so happy for them, I could burst. I'm doing the goshawk talks on the radio. And in July, my mother and I are off on a ship to Svalbard, via northern Norway, to witness a total eclipse. I shall be Ahabing from deck, trying to see white whales. Belugas are one of my special animals, and the thought of seeing them spy-hopping and carolling in arctic waters is like the feeling of Christmas coming for a five-year old. Crossing my fingers. Beep!

Back to book-writing and essay-marking....

Lanius excubitor

2008-02-01T10:52:00.000Z

Went for a walk the other day. The first hawkless walk in a long time, with Xtin, to Wicken Fen. Aka: rewilding, with a teashop. Billions of wigeon, oodles of shovelers, and so on and so forth. A very cold evening, so we've turned our collars up and hunch our shoulders as we trudge back to the carpark via the hides. I hesitate outside the last one. I can hear voices in the hide, and I confess here and now that I hate, in a painfully British way, walking into occupied bird hides.

But we go in, and it isn't a scary experience; there's a boy of about six sitting on the bench, looking out of the observation window, and his father, too, and they are clearly loving their afternoon out in the fens.

“Someone showed me.." says the father to Xtin and me, "the great grey shrike up there" — and with the there, he points at a speck right at the tip of a tall dead tree in the patchwork of lagoons reflecting the evening sky upwards to burr everything dusty orange and rose. "Apparently they’re really rare.”

They are. I am delighted. I knew the shrike had been wintering here; indeed, that it had been here for a couple of winters. But I'd not seen it before. And I was surprised because I expected it to be lower. It must be a good fifty, sixty feet up. I’d only seen shrikes in hot places, shrikes with their toes around low thorn bushes in baking garrigue, hunting in hot air sizzling with crickets. Never perched crows-nest high. Up there, this bird is plump and round with a stubby tail, all near-sillhouette; you can’t see its head. It looks like a malevolent blue tit.

Of course, it wouldn't look malevolent unless you know what shrikes do.

“Shrikes, Daniel” says the man, turning to the small boy, “catch birds and frogs and then they …. “ he considers, briefly, “impale them on thorns on thorn bushes”
“So they die?” says Daniel
“Yes. And then they come back and eat them.”
“Coooool!” says Daniel, with infinite relish.

24 January, 2008

2008-01-29T12:50:00.000Z

My thumb is pouring with blood. I’m pressing it against the steering wheel of the car in an attempt to staunch the flow, but rivulets course down the rim and drip onto the footwell. Mabel is perched on the passenger seat, and I’m driving like an ambulance on an emergency to my goshawk guru’s house, swearing continuously. Right now, right now, I should be sitting in an oak-panelled College room, watching the late-winter sun that floods the road in front of me illuminating the faces of four new students. They are probably sitting in that room right now. Getting angry that I’m not there. No, young students; your new teacher is bleeding, in her car, swearing under her breath, and driving in the opposite direction. Ah, Christ, this has been a nightmare.

M opens her door, takes one look at my face, and mirrors it with a horrified expression of her own. “What’s happened, Helen?”
“Mabel!” I say, weakly.
“Did you lose her?”
“No, no” shaking my head. “She’s in the car”. And the three requests: “M … can you help? I cut my thumb. Can I use your phone? I need a cigarette.”

Bless this woman. Her and S are just wonderful. I collapse into a kitchen chair with the feeling of sudden access to safety. My knees hurt. Brambles? My thumb is still bleeding. M hands me iodine wash, fixes the tear with steri-strips and bandages, makes me a coffee, pushes Golden Virginia and cigarette papers across the table. I call the College and stammer out apologies to everyone from the Porters to the Queen. Then I tell my sorry story.

I’d like to blame the weather. Over the last week or so I’ve seen signs. The season is turning. I’ve been trying to ignore them, I think. Falconers’ denial; a bluebottle in the garden; torpid purple crocus on my lawn. Dots of cherry blossom falling outside St Johns. And one evening last week, a host of cock blackbirds carrolling into the deepening sky from perches all over the gable ends and the gothic spires of this bad old town. Spring is coming. And usually I’d rejoice at that curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days. But not this year. Spring means no more goshawk. Spring means putting her away from me for months and months, to grow wild and grow new feathers in an aviary far from here. My heart hurts just thinking of it.

So I’m not thinking it. And that was part of the problem. Something was stirring in Mabel’s accipitrine heart, and perhaps it was Spring. I had an hour to fly her today. I was cutting it fine. So I decided to go back to the Donkey Field, where the rabbits are. Her weight seemed right, so there was nothing less complicated, I thought, than showing her a rabbit, watching her chase and possibly catch a rabbit, and then returning to the house to ready the sheaf of poetry I’m teaching and run down the road to teach it.

Life has a way of teaching me things, however. And what this particular day teaches me is that the best laid plans of girls and goshawks gang aft agley. She didn’t seem to be that interested in the rabbits I showed her. She chased, but didn’t crash into cover after them. Instead, she lit upon a hedgeline and looked about. And then took her time coming back to the fist. The warning signs, already, and I chose to ignore them. One more flight I told myself.

“One more flight” has a kind of parity with the DIY-ers “Oh, that’ll do”. The kind of statement you hear yourself saying, and know as you say it that it’s absolute nonsense.

What Mabel seems to be doing is reveling in the weight of the sun on her back, and in the little intimations that warm air is rising into this steady, grey-blue sky. She courses another rabbit, and sails onward, away from me, pitching high up in bare trees, and at last I realize she’s fast losing interest in me. I kick myself. After the last debacle here, I swore I’d be more careful, coming to the Donkey Field. There’s something about the tall, bare chestnuts, the unsettling proximity of moving cars and trucks and tractors: she simply doesn’t like it here any more. She crosses the road into a belt of trees and graveled drives. I follow her. Rabbits break all around me and the “PRIVATE: KEEP OUT” signs. She ignores them. And me. She’s taken stand in a tree a good twenty-five feet above me, and looks out at the prospect all around. I’m waving my glove and whistling, but it’s a lost cause. She fluffs her tummy and shakes her tail: goshawk’s signs of happiness and contentment. But on an inaccessible branch, with the seconds ticking past, these lovely signs of relaxation and calm bring a sinking feeling. And I realise I failed to bring my telephone. Or my cigarettes. And the radiotracking receiver is in the car.

*

After a minute or so, she slips away, out the back of the wood and away into land I know nothing about. It turns out there’s a lovely, soft field of burnt-butter coloured grasses here, with a thick grey wood about three hundred yards distant. And no goshawk anywhere. Back to the car, then, to pick up my radio receiver.

*

And I spend ages tracking her down. The signal is all over the place. Beep. Beep. Beep. That direction, 5. Here, 7.5. But then — 2? Triangulate! Triangulate! I angle the Yagi and spin in circles. Is she moving? She must be. And over the distant wood I see … my goshawk, on the soar. She’s letting the rising air carry her, spilling over the wood in rich circles of sun-warmed flight. Another hawk comes up, and the two slip and rival each other for a second. I run, of course. By the time I reach the wood, there’s no sign of either of them. Though I hear a buzzard mewing some way off.

*

Then, suddenly, bells. Somewhere in there. I dive into the wood. The signs aren’t good. It’s not a thick wood. It’s not a wild wood. It’s a habited wood. It’s a pheasant release wood, to be sure. Just what I needed, eh? Oh lord, this goshawk is making me a criminal.

I spot her. She’s poised on a low branch of an ivied oak, staring fascinated into a tangle of old feed sacks and bins in an inch of water walk up. She’s making those snaky-necked prospecting parallax movements of her head that mean she’s locked onto something. She’s going to ignore me until she’s established to her satisfaction that it’s gone. Perhaps it has. I edge my way through to where she’s looking, and before I know what is happening, a wet cock pheasant breaks from my feet, showering me with water. In slow motion, I see the sun through its primaries, splintering into bars and abrupt shadows, and watch Mabel do a smart wingover and her left foot flash out, with its two and a half-inch back talons and crayon-yellow hand just miss him. He rises over — oh horror, I hadn’t seen it — a ten-foot chickenwire fence — and buries himself in a huge stand of laurel and yew on the other side. She dives in after him. I can’t get to them. They’re in a bloody pheasant release pen! Shit! This is like taking a ferret into a fancy rabbit show. Not good. Not good. I can hear wings beating, bells ringing, the sounds of a struggle. I run like a rat around the perimeter of the pen, trying to find a way in. This is not what I had wanted to happen. Oh god. Oh god.

There’s a door. It’s open. I dump the receiver on a blue feeder bin and run in. She’s no longer in the laurel. She’s on top of it, looking a little unsteady. She turns to face away from me, and before I can take another breath, she is off again through the sun-filtered branches, fast and determined. Shit! Shit! I start running, over branches, past little corrugated shelters, over earth compacted by hundreds of pheasanty toes. Any minute now, I think, I am going to hear the “OI!” of an incredibly angry keeper.

Perhaps he will have a shotgun, I think, as I watch Mabel pile into a hen pheasant at the far corner of the pen, in a little leafy explosion of buff and cappuccino feathers, and beating wings. I run right up to her. She is sitting in a leafy, black puddle of acid woodland water, mantling over the body of a hen pheasant. And as I walk up, suddenly another hen pheasant emerges from under her wing, and she grabs that too. She has a pheasant in each foot. Oh my god. Carnage. Her tail is spread into the puddle, her feet are buried in feathers, and her whole being seems to be vibrating at some unlikely, scary frequency.

*

The pheasants are dead. One is in my waistcoat pocket, and the other is being plumed by my errant goshawk in lifting puffs of soft contour feathers that float and catch in the wire behind her. She keeps rousing her feathers and shaking her head. I can’t work out why. Is it the water? I carefully encourage her to eat a little — she rouses, again, and wobbles — and then injure myself horribly. Nothing to do with the goshawk. It was simply inept knifework. While cutting through dead pehasant leg sinews, I took a wide, shallow strip of skin from my thumb.

Putting it in words doesn’t quite work. For one thing, it doesn’t manage to get across how instantaneously everything is covered in blood. My new knife from the trading post in Kittery, NH, was exceedingly sharp. And as I lift Mabel from her illicit prize, I’m actually worried about the amount of blood I’m losing. I start pressing the injury into the cordura of my hawking jacket. No matter how pathogen-rich the jacket is, must stop bleeding. Must stop bleeding. And it bleeds all the long way back to the car, and all the way to S’s house, and Mabel. Poor Mabel.

*

I wasn’t the only wounded. Mabel, it turned out, had a nasty spur-wound. It is a ragged gash running for an inch from her cere to right above her eye, and her nictitating membrane is bloody and bruised. She has another wound the other side of her beak. That cock pheasant in the laurel beat the living daylights out of her: no wonder she was a little wobbly.

(Administrations of lots of delicious food, F10 barrier cream (carefully, with a piece of twisted-up kitchen towel) and a spot of F10 disinfectant in her bathwater — the wound has healed fine)

As for my illicit booty? I put one cold, heavy pheasant into a plastic carrier bag and carried it around the corner to my academic colleagues’ house. No-one was in, so I hung it from the doorknob. Is this going to be considered a menacing act? Check this is the right house. Yes. My colleague M cooked it, it later turned out, with chanterelles, to much familial approval.

I poached (ha ha — double poached pheasant) the breasts of the other bird and added them to a gloriously extravagant Pad Thai. But most of this pheasant ended up in Mabel. Thank you, she says. I approve of game-rearing.

I can never go back there, now. Ever.

Gumshoe

2008-01-28T10:07:00.000Z

From BLDGBLOG.

Mabel

2008-01-28T09:44:00.001Z

Because there's no time to do anything other than photoblog...

What's that?

My goshawk is a sock puppet...

Bless....

Bless....

2008-01-23T15:08:00.000Z

"Our primary concern is passenger safety. It could be dangerous for the couple and other passengers if a driver had to brake sharply while Miss Maltby was wearing the lead."

Driven to distraction

2008-01-21T14:27:00.000Z

My goshawk has a hood. A brown and red hood with Gore-Tex braces made by the Prada of falconry equipment makers, Doug Pineo. My goshawk guru lent it to me. I still have it, because it's the only hood that works.

When you're an accipiter neophyte like me, who is used to hooding docile old falcons, trying to hood an intelligent, snake-necked goshawk is difficult. Now, Mabel's not bad to the hood. But she's definitely not good. When she's full of food, there's no problem. On it goes. But otherwise, no. Quite reasonably, my goshawk knows that she has a much better chance of a) flying to my fist for food, or b) chasing and killing and eating something if she can see.

Preparation games. I thought that repetition would bring her to the point where she'd understand that being hooded was a preliminary activity to her favourite thing — flying and getting fed.

I should have thought more about this. Because despite her knowing this very well, she still doesn't really like being hooded. And until we're out in the field and I take the hood off, she won't sit still. She lunges on tiptoe, leaning forward, making snickery lip-licking little bites in the air. Come on, I want to fly! Sigh.

As I said, this beautiful Pineo hood is the only one that works. All the other hoods I've tried are either expertly flicked off before the braces can be tightened, or are hooked off with a talon once on. She’s never managed to get this hood off.

Ever.

So as I drove back to my mum's house on Saturday morning, I was confident she’d sit on the Astroturf on top of the passenger seat in hunched, hooded quietitude for the entire journey. Her swivel was attached to the top of the seat, and all was well. Occasionally I’d steal glances at her; fluffed and relaxed, asleep, leaning into the corners.

It is a measure of Mabel’s evil genius that the only time she’s ever managed to get this hood off was as I was accelerating down the sliproad to join the M25 motorway in a rainstorm. Shit! There I was, calculating whether I could zip in between two eighteen-wheelers and then out in front of the BMW in the next lane, the noise of rainspray and the thump of the windscreen wipers, and I'm making those split-second decisions one has to make at seventy miles an hour, and two things happened almost instantaneously. One was the sound of my goshawk bating madly, filling the car with a maelstrom of wingbeats and a hurricane of bits of paper and dust up from the dashboard. The other was her hood hitting me sharply on my left cheek.

I didn’t die. Surprisingly. I slipped between the trucks and pulled out behind the BMW and stared grimly down the road. My goshawk had got her hood off. She was freaking out. I was freaking out. I glanced in the rear view mirror, and saw in that backwards, aquarium light, a pair of freaked-out goshawk eyes the size of dinner plates. The air smelt of terror, tension and goshawk mutes. What do I do? I thought. Well, I think what I’ll do is drive very fast.

Partly because I thought it would be better to pass cars than have them come up behind the gos with their beady headlight eyes. And partly because I was sweating adrenalin like a dog with a firecracker tied to its tail. Run! Run!

Both worked, kind of. I calmed down a little. So did the gos. She stopped bating, at least. She sat, tight feathered, eyes bugging out of her head, and watched each car pass on her left. She didn’t like cars in front of her, nor behind her neither. So I did have to drive very fast, to avoid her bating like crazy. I may have broken the speed limit.

She did bate occasionally and with gusto. Once when we crawled past a vast yellow truck as the traffic slowed. Another time when a bright turquoise Fiesta pushed us into the middle lane by flashing its lights. It bombed past, doing about a hundred. But slowly we both calmed ourselves. Her little goshawky beard started to bristle, and she rearranged her alulas. She wasn't relaxed, but she wasn't terrified either. She started to examine the traffic we passed with interest. And, more interestingly, watched the countryside as it sped past. I guess goshawks are rather good at reading landscape at high speed, so I could see, through the smoke and rain, blurry hillsides and woods, that goshawk was watching things out there.

We did half the M25 like that, and then a good long stretch at the M3. And then the fun really began. We struck out cross country, right through Hampshire's finest sporting estates. Mabel! She was so excited. Pheasants, partridges, looming out of the rain, flying across the road; she must have thought she was driving through Elysium.

On the Lasham road, before the turn down by the airfield, a peacock crossed the rainy road in front of us, heavy, lacy tail brushing wet leaves on the tarmac as he ran.

Mabel was utterly astonished. She made as if to bate at it, but just couldn't. JHC WTF! That is the biggest pheasant I have EVER SEEN.

Heheh.

Skills bills

2008-01-16T18:50:00.000Z

Tom shows us all what a proper birding diary should look like. I don't know what he's thinking with this gentleman amateur stuff: he should be writing for the Scottish Tourist Board. And inventing new souvenirs for gift-shops. He could single-handedly increase the Scottish GDP by millions.

Holy moly, this is amazing

2008-01-16T18:16:00.001Z

Sorry about the silence. I've been moving house again, and have been entirely without an internet connection. Am stealing wifi on street corners. All is well.

I saw this bit of nature footage the other day, sent to me by a biologist friend. It might take a while to load, so be patient. It's a scary nature-red-in-beak-and-talon thing, so don't open if you're of a nervous disposition.

Actually, if you're of nervous disposition, what the hell are you doing reading my blog?

Pictures up!

2007-12-31T17:08:00.000Z

Here: Christmas in Maine.

They range from cheerful cheesy shots

to gory, gory nature red in beak and talon shots..

to the documentation of vastly stupid activities (deciding to burn the Christmas tree out on the lawn: fantastically fun)

Enjoy! I'm busy cleaning the house and dying of jetlag, but will be up and posting soon. It's hateful being back. I feel more at home there than I do here, which seems odd. Maybe I should move out there. What the hell.

Happy New Year, fretmarketeers! x

Last week

2007-12-25T04:02:00.000Z

I look like death warmed up (courtesy of a bout of oh-so-delightful norovirus: look, I can hardly keep my eyes open) but ah, isn't my goshawk adorable? Photo courtesy of Xtin's iphone...

Yule

2007-12-24T16:00:00.000Z

Looking out of my bedroom window onto an icy tidal river is not something I do in Cambridge. I'm doing it here. It's good. Goldeneye, buffleheads on the denim-blue water; a bald eagle sitting like a lump of clay high in a bare oak; a great northern diver doing its submarine-profile cruise along down to the sea. Snow and snow and snow. Damn, it's been a while since I saw a white Christmas. I'm stuffed with pancakes and American bacon, and my legs still ache from a day hawking grey squirrels in deep snow. I love this place, and I love my friends here. Soul-stoking goodness. And there are cookies too. And the promise of a day fishing for smelt out on the ice. I shall wear my new hunting trousers: heavyweight grey wool with a fine, Rupert-Bear red check line. I tested them out on the frozen marsh the other day flying Pete's gyr x peregrine at ducks. Lay down on the ice, and luxuriated in not feeling even a twinge of cold. I am going to die of overheating when I wear them in England, but boy, I need a new pair of hunting trousers. I've killed four pairs out with the gos. These ones will last forever! Mwa ha ha!

Happy Christmas to everyone! Happy happy Christmas! x

PS

2007-12-14T22:40:00.001Z

Thank you to everyone who's sent immensely thought-provoking and valuable thoughts on goshawk-flying business. Will write back. Currently in another agony of house-moving. Off to Maine in a few days for Christmas. Ameriky-blogging will follow! And then back to this bad old town, to a new house. All will be revealed...

Flying weight!

2007-12-14T21:26:00.000Z

Cold yesterday. Cold so that great saucers of thick ice lay across the mud, as white and crazed as Chinese porcelain. Cold so that the hawthorns were thick with Baltic blackbirds pushed eastward by winter to a Cambridgeshire hedgeline, mostly male, eating haws with sour gold beaks exhaling smoke. Fieldfares, greenfinches, yellowhammers, linnets. Cold so that each breath hung like a tiny cloud of seafog in the air. Cold so that the blue sky rang with it, and the beryllium bell on Mabel’s left leg dimmed with condensation. Cold, cold, cold.

Ah, cod Dickens.

It was a cold day though. My feet crackled the ice in the mud as I trudged uphill. And the squeaks and tinny, grinding harmonics of fracturing ice sound, to gos, like a wounded animal, so every footfall is met with a convulsive clench of her toes. Where the world isn’t white with frost, it’s striped green and brown in strong sunlight, so the land is particoloured and snapping backwards to dawn and forwards to dusk. The days, now, are a bare six hours long.

It’s my first day out with Mabel since I’ve been interviewing would-be undergraduates. Endless hours facing worried faces. The delight in the heart when a candidate suddenly relaxes, like a hawk rousing its feathers, settling into a growing realisation that an interview is, after all, a conversation, and that we are not bogeymen, but people eager to listen.

I’m musing on this as I walk up the hill. I hate interviews. I can’t bear the faces of the adjudicators, nor the suspicion that whatever I say is being marked and parsed. I understand the fear. Perhaps that makes me a better interviewer. I don’t know. What I do know is that interviewing is like skating on a slew of fragile emotional ice. You can’t scratch too deep, or try and turn too fast. You just have to trust the process, and while you ask searching questions of the candidate, you must positively radiate goodwill. This isn’t hard. Every single student that walks into the room, dumps their bag and coat on the desk, and sits in the hotseat, is the recipient of so much goodwill I’m surprised it doesn’t make them dizzy. Goodwill and care hangs in the air, urgent and anxious, like a small bird cupped in your hand as you rescue it from where it’s been trapped in a room.

Yet again I’ve been seduced by the weather. It is such a beautiful, fiery day, burning with ice and fine prospects, that I cannot imagine not being on the hill. I know my hawk is too fat. I also know that after four days of enforced rest, she will be wanting to hunt very much indeed. And the see-saw of control will be all upset. I already know that she’s in that mindset that makes a proffered fist far less interesting than the prospect of sitting at the top of a tree and looking for her own quarry. But I’ve got a plan. I’m going to go up to the top field, where the hares are. If she leaves the fist there, she’ll swing round, and come back. Because it’s easier for her to fly towards the perch of my fist, close at hand, than away to a distant tree.

This works. But as we cross the field, the likelihood of bumping a hare or a pheasant recedes, and I can see Mabel eyeing the low hedge in front of us. I can’t see beyond it. Mabel knows there are pheasants in there; woodpigeons in the sticks, and rabbit-holes along the ditch. She does a strange, accipitrine autocue parallax-bob of her head, and makes as if to go. And I just let her. Just like that. I know it’s daft, but I do. And she does.

She gets to the hedge, and two pheasants whirr up from the rapeleaves, right next to me, chosing their moment wisely. She doesn’t see them. Damn. This is why I need a dog. I curse my allergies.

She drops out out of sight behind the hedge. I am strangely calm. I don’t even run. I walk in a stupidly leisurely manner to the hedge, and realise, heart thumping that I have no idea where she is. Plus, this hedge is bloody thick. Where on earth do I – and I run up and down looking for passage. There. A hole the size of a porthole, between two sturdy blackthorn branches. I squirm through it, pretending I’m an eel. I’m not. There’s blood on my hands from the thorns on the ground, and the shoulder-strap of my hawking waistcoat hooks around a stubby branch. I’m caught. I try with all my might to keep going. No time to do human things and look see where it’s caught. Just brute force. And the branch snaps, and I ping forwards through the gap to land on my knees and the heels of my hands deep in a wet field of sprouting spring wheat. Mabel is nowhere.

I can’t see my hawk. I run into the middle of the field and look about. The wheat is pale and rich in the spectacular glare of the winter sun. Downhill is a hedge, and behind that half an acre of rough pastrure with a horse. No Mabel. I stand and listen, hard. No bells. Nothing. I whistle and call. Nothing. I get out the telemetry receiver for the first time. Blip, blip, blip. The signal is strong in all directions. That’s what happens when you hawk on hillsides. Radiowaves propagate and bounce and confuse. I run around for ages trying to get a fix, and eventually conclude that she’s sort of in that direction.

Down by the horse field, the ground is still frosted. White dust on hard black earth. And I am sure I’ve lost my goshawk. I feel terribly alone. It’s not that I am worried about her. She’ll be fine. She’ll rocket around this landscape in high spirits, could live here for years. And just as I think that, a shotgun retort, very loud, echoes. Oh Christ. No she wouldn’t.

And it is then, in the silence of the gunshot, that I hear the crows. Thank God. And I follow the noise, and of course, there is Mabel. She’s sitting, all sun-washed, on top of a hedge at the crest of the next hill. She’s blazing with intent. She’s not come back because she’s put something into cover. She saw a pheasant on the next rise and followed it here. I peer through the hedge, to see what she's looking at, and my heart sinks. Where she’s looking is no kindly triangle of gamecrop. It’s a sharp jungle of saplings as tall as my shoulders woven together with briars and brambles. Thorns, thorns, thorns. There is no way I’ll be able to get the pheasant out of that.

Meanwhile, Mabel is making little prospecting flights out over the brush. She leaves her wobbling branch, forays out in slow flight, and then returns to her branch, craning her neck behind her. It’s in there, she’s thinking. I am going to find it. I stand, panting, watching her for a while. I try and get through the hedge into the sapling field, but it’s a physical impossibility. And so, as her predatory fire cools, she looks down, and sees me again. Here I am with a quail in my fist. And so she comes down, and I feel the indescribable relief of having a hawk I’d thought lost back home on my hand. Cold and hot all at once.